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The cost of living keeps getting worse

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Feel like the grocery and fuel bill has gone up? Working just as hard and feel like you’re going backwards?

It’s because you are. The major parties are the cause.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I speak to this matter of public importance—and it is a crucial and real matter of public importance. Well may a former assistant minister in the previous government debate the cost of living. This cost-of-living crisis now facing everyday Australian families and small businesses rests on the shoulders of both sides of this chamber. For more than two years, the Liberal and National government and the then Labor Party opposition were on a unity ticket to conjure money through electronic ledger entries and spend for short-term electoral benefit. They conjured up $500 billion and spent it on recurring government expenditure. These turned out to be handouts to Liberal, Labor and National party sponsors. Much of it went into corporate profits, not job support. Now we have runaway inflation. Who pays for the government’s mistakes, the Labor Party’s mistakes? The people, as always.

Let me be clear. It’s possible to conjure up money through electronic journal entries and not create inflation. It’s been done for centuries. In these cases, the spending must be on something that will grow the economy, grow our productive capacity and absorb the extra money—something like infrastructure. It’s impossible to get the tired old parties or the new climate mafia to talk about important infrastructure projects like the Bradfield Scheme, Copper String 2.0, Tully-Millstream hydro, Big Buffalo dam, the national rail circuit and the boomerang steel project, amongst other One Nation priorities. Meanwhile, the climate mafia are setting out to destroy our standard of living through many ill-conceived policies not based on science, contradicting the evidence.

Let me start with high electricity prices. Electricity prices are an input to business costs right through the production cycle, from the farmer running a cold room to the manufacturer running a factory to the wholesaler running a warehouse to supermarkets trying to keep their fridges cold and their lights on. When the cost of electricity rises, the cost of everything rises. Food, clothing, hardware, consumer goods, services, energy, and service sector examples such as optometrists, hairdressers, solicitors—pick a service, any service. All have electricity as a business expense. The cost of living is going up because the price of electricity is going up. Australian wholesale electricity prices are up 300 per cent in the last year. And what is the reason? It is unsustainable, unreliable wind and solar paying subsidies to billionaires in the Chinese Communist Party who are running these things. They’re the owners. The majority of large wind and solar complexes are owned by foreigners, including China and the Chinese Communist Party. Those who laugh are ignorant and condemned to suffer more.

This is combined with manipulation of the energy market by unscrupulous energy companies that should never have been allowed to buy important infrastructure. The National Electricity Market is actually a national electricity racket run by bureaucrats; it’s not a market at all.

The third element of higher electricity prices is the cost of transmission lines, poles and wires, to bring power from where the industrial solar and wind blight complexes are located to where the electricity is needed.

Our immigration rate affects prices. The more new Australians arrive, the more electricity, water, medical care and education they consume. These things are supply and demand. The more demand, the higher the price. Of course, governments can plan ahead and build out extra power generation, extra hospitals, extra dams and schools, but we don’t. Long-term planning in Australian politics means the next election, or nowadays, in the last decade or so, it means the next budget. This is no way to run a country. When One Nation talks about reducing immigration to net zero, we mean bringing in around 100,000 new arrivals each year to balance out the 100,000 who leave. Net zero is zero total immigration, easing the strain on infrastructure. This takes pressure off our economy, reducing demand and inflation, and making the essentials of life cheaper.

The climate mafia do not want to allow new dams and new electricity generation to be built, while at the same time wanting to bring in half the world as immigrants. Talk about inflation! You haven’t anything yet. Agriculture is under threat. A 43 per cent carbon dioxide reduction means culling livestock and shutting down cropping, returning that land to nature in a process called rewilding. What they call rewilding One Nation calls ‘starving people’. The less food that gets grown, the higher the price will be. One Nation will stop the madness and return Australia to good government.

We are one community, we are one nation.

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PM abandons promise to cut power bills by $275

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While PM Albanese wants electricity-grid wrecking net-zero, he will never be able to deliver his promised $275 cheaper power bills. That’s why he has had to walk away from his first election promise already.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support Senator Payne’s matter of public importance. Prime Minister Albanese’s promise to reduce electricity bills by $275 and his promise to reduce carbon dioxide output by 43 per cent are mutually exclusive. High energy prices will reduce energy usage and assist Australia to reach the 43 per cent figure. Lower prices will increase energy consumption, and that will work against the Albanese government’s target. That’s why the Albanese government so quickly ran away from his promise. The Prime Minister never intended to honour the promise, making his action cynical political expediency.

One Nation believes any attempt to implement a 43 per cent carbon dioxide reduction is a policy based on lies and distortions which do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Prime Minister Albanese has already signalled, across several issues, his government will be a government based on virtue signalling, not a sensible policy. For senators with no data on their side, the only option is to sell a policy on feelings. Feelings will not keep the lights on, supermarket freezers cold or hospitals open. Feelings will not warm Australians in winter or cool us in summer. Evidence based policy will. Energy deficits in several areas of Australia have already caused blackouts. The 43 per cent target will cause many more blackouts.

Rapidly increasing electricity costs will reduce consumption of electricity and buy the government time, while it asks around for a permanent solution, which is why the government is allowing this to happen. Closing down and sabotaging baseload coal has led to the national electricity racket—sorry market—showing unprecedented wholesale power prices. The average spot price of $264 per megawatt hour last quarter is more than triple the average spot price of $85 per megawatt hour this time last year. Prime Minister Albanese knew this when he made his promise, and clearly economics is not the Prime Minister’s strong suit. If the cost of an item is up 300 per cent, the chances of being able to make it cheaper without the government paying for it are zero.

Perhaps the Prime Minister can extend his employment talkfest to more aspects of government business. Let’s see if anyone knows how to use wind and solar to replace baseload coal and save Australia from electricity and energy Armageddon, because all I’m hearing so far is, ‘Build more wind and solar.’ Building more will simply add more capacity when we don’t need it, during the day, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Solar and wind will need to be paired with some form of battery technology to move that generated electricity from the day, when we don’t need it, to the evening, when we do.

Coal sitting in hoppers ready to generate power on demand is the battery we have used successfully for 120 years. Alternatives to coal are thin on the ground. Battery storage costs are staggering and unsustainable: $1.5 million per megawatt hour. We need around 60,000 megawatt hours of energy in storage to ensure any 24-hour period is not subject to blackouts, yet batteries need 20 per cent above rated capacity to achieve full charge due to heat loss, which is why they catch fire a lot. This means we need 72,000 megawatt-hours of storage, at a cost of $108 billion every 12 years, the life of a big Tesla battery. That is $9 billion every year. The Snowy 2 big hydro battery currently under construction will provide 1,000 megawatt-hours daily for 365 a year at a cost of $5 billion. This means that pumped hydro will cost $300 billion to carry enough power for just one day. Of course, adding electric vehicle charging to the mix means a whole lot more blackouts and a whole lot more electricity price increases.

Net zero is an unaffordable fairy tale that will destroy our standard of living and destroy our lifestyle. We are one community, we are one nation and we know what the hell is needed to get back to affordable, reliable, stable electricity.

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