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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-10-19 Daily Xml
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Renewable Energy

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (15:51): I rise on this matter of interest to make some comments regarding my disappointment at the minister for environment, natural resources and climate change in answering a question of my colleague, the Hon. Dennis Hood. Minister Hunter is becoming quite an embarrassment, I am sure, to the government and is being noticed by the public generally for continually attacking members of parliament when all they are doing is asking legitimate questions.

We see the minister spending 10 to 15 minutes filibustering and never, ever getting to the point. It does not matter how specific you are with your line of questioning to the minister. You rarely, if ever, get an actual answer to your question. Rather, you get the minister going to his briefing notes, reading something that may have some minor significance to the question.

It is disappointing because we have to put a government under scrutiny. Even a government that has been here for so long it thinks that there is no other government than the Labor government, has to work within the rules of the Westminster system, and that is why we have a question time. It is called 'questions without notice' so that we can get proper answers to our questions for our constituents. I am telling all of the constituents who ask me to ask questions in this house, when I send responses to them, exactly what is going on with the appalling way minister Hunter is refusing to be transparent to members of this chamber.

Family First is not opposed to renewable energy. In fact, I have not met a member of parliament anywhere, particularly in South Australia, who does not support renewable energy, but the problem is we have a government who has no power plan for South Australia and who is embarrassed by the fact, which is supported by today's report that there were 13 wind farms in South Australia, and nine of them went out in about 80 seconds which caused a cascade of problems for the whole power network. As a result of that, internationally now, we are known as the state that was entirely blacked out with approximately 1.7 million people in the dark, some of them for several days.

So, we do have legitimate reasons for asking the government what it did or did not do about base load power supplies. We now know that renewable energies did play a part in the crashing of this. Yes, we acknowledge—and we do not blame the government—the fact that it was a very catastrophic event and we do not blame the government for the powerlines coming down, but clearly the government has a responsibility, if it is going to promote renewable energy, to ensure that it integrates properly with the rest of the scheme.

On that, I see that minister Hunter attacked the Hon. Rob Lucas and myself. I have been here long enough and have broad enough shoulders to let that go over my head like water off a duck's back, but the fact was that, when it came to the privatisation of ETSA, that was to do with a number of reasons, not the least of which was a Labor prime minister who initiated the Professor Hilmer report, who wanted to set up a national grid, who wanted to break up the monopolies of privately-owned and government-owned power supplies. Yet, this minister never puts the facts on the table about that.

The reality is that the privatisation of ETSA had nothing to do with this statewide blackout. But as a result of this it has proven that in 2002, when I was a member of the last conservative government, we did know that another interconnector at some point in the next decade or thereabouts would have to be built, but it was this government that came in and got advice about having to put in an interconnector and they sat on their hands and did nothing, other than oppose, prior to that, the development of a gas-fired base load energy plant at Pelican Point, which they are now desperate to see cranked up 24/7.

So, it is time the government actually worked on interconnectors; it is time the government took responsibility for a power plant. I finish with this: businesses have been hit with huge financial losses; this will have a major dramatic effect on jobs and fallout over the next few months. As a person and a family who are irrigators and pay a lot for electricity now and as just one business example with my own family, I know that we cannot continue to pay these outrageous power prices, and this government must take responsibility for sustainable, reliable and affordable power, and I am going to continue to put pressure on the government to deliver for South Australia.

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