Mr CONROY (Shortland) (15:54): What a pathetic effort by the member for Boothby. I have news for you: this is a national energy crisis, and you've been the national government for four years. This is a national crisis because we have generators leaving the market without sufficient replacements. We've lost 5,000 megawatts of base-load thermal power over the last decade. Guess how much has occurred under their government? Seventy per cent—twice as much has gone in their time in government in half the time; 3,500 megawatts of coal-fired power has been lost under their watch because they've been in chaos for four years. They don't have a national energy plan. They've given loads of uncertainty for generators, who are unable to make their investments. The truth is that we have a very old power fleet. In New South Wales, the average age is 35 years. In Victoria, it's 44 years. The real question is not: 'Can we survive with it?' It is: 'What replaces it?' Eventually, it has to retire. The members on the other side are obsessed with South Australia. I've got news for them. Not a single wind farm in South Australia would have been built without the bipartisan Renewable Energy Target. That is the only reason they're built. If there's any issue with wind, they own it! But the truth is that we have an ageing power fleet which is causing curtailment all over the place. On the 47 degree day in February in New South Wales, we didn't lose a couple of hundred megawatts like South Australia; we lost 1,000 megawatts of thermal base-load power—old power stations that were unable to perform. What happened? They were forced to curtail Tomago Aluminium smelter in the member for Paterson's great electorate, imperilling the jobs of over a 1,000 direct employees. They had no choice. If they didn't turn off Tomago, they would have had to load-shed 400,000 homes—four times what occurred in South Australia—because old base-load power couldn't deliver. So the debate here is about how we replace it. AEMO has belled the cat. If people had bothered to read the AEMO report released yesterday— Mr Giles: Or had it read to them! Mr CONROY: or had it read to them—thank you, member for Scullin—they would realise it is condemning this government's chaos. Let me read from it: Feedback from market participants and investors is that it is more financially secure to invest in renewable resources and that they are seeking greater market and policy certainty to be able to make investments in new dispatchable generation. That is code that investors can't invest in new dispatchable power because this mob don't have a policy they can invest on. We've had four years of uncertainty. The Energy Council, which is made up of the generators, not hippie-dippies or Greens, have said that their uncertainty is the equivalent of a $50-a-tonne carbon price. If we're serious about solving this energy crisis, we need a clean energy target and bipartisan consensus to drive investment—not for the next two years but for the next four decades. But we won't get it under this government because they are hopelessly divided. They're weak. The Prime Minister's in search of a backbone, and he won't find it. All he'll find is opposition from the member for Hughes, the member for Warringah and Senator Abetz, who are the real masters of that party room. The great tragedy of this is that the workers and communities in my area suffer the most. It's my workers and communities that suffer. I have the poorest town in all of New South Wales in my electorate: Windale. They're being hit with 20 to 30 per cent power rises. They're in the gun right now. It's my power station workers—just like the power station workers in the member for Hunter's electorate—who are being offered all this false hope, but it's all talk because the government have no plan. The easiest thing a politician can do is lie—is to agree with whoever they are talking to—but we owe them our honesty. We need to say that change is coming and we will work with them. We have a plan, just as the members for Hunter and Port Adelaide talked about previously. I will not be lectured to about supporting coal workers from this government. I will not be lectured to by them. My neighbours are coalminers. My mates at footy games are coalminers. The blow-ins on the other side have never met a coalminer. They don't care about solving this crisis. They just care about getting through the next week in this place. (Time expired)