When he became Prime Minister MrRudd said, ‘I want to live in a nation that produces things.’ That was his statement. But now we are seeing all these moralistic laws, one after another, that do nothing more than remove our capacity to be a nation that produces things. To be a strong, successful nation that produces things in its own right, the best thing that Australia can do is advance the ideal of maintaining industry and not losing jobs. We will prove nothing to the world if we come up with these wonderful schemes the only effect of which is to destroy jobs. That will prove to the world that, if you go down the environmental path, you will render yourself destitute. That is not smart. We have seen what has happened in California. They had this wonderful ideal of a green nirvana, but they are broke. That is not a good recommendation to do business that way. People have spoken about Germany, with its renewable energy component, but the price of electricity there has gone through the roof. These are the issues. We have one extremely strong advantage in our nation: we have cheap power. We have to keep that advantage. The benefit of cheap power is that you can pay people more. If you have expensive power, you end up having to employ fewer people or pay people less. The only other alternative is that the industry closes down and goes somewhere else. I do not think that is the alternative we want.

The Labor Party talk about the green economy and green jobs—it is just terminology. When you ask people in the community, ‘Do you know anybody who’s employed in a green job?’ the answer is generally, ‘No, we don’t.’ Yet we are told that there are going to be tens of thousands of these jobs that will just arrive. We are not quite sure what they will be, but they will just arrive.

This renewable energy target legislation would be an open door to wind power, which is fine. It is easy to construct heaps of wind turbines—all across the landscape, everywhere you look: wind turbines. Of course, after a while, they will start to be an annoyance to people. A debate we are having at the moment is that people do not like wind turbines and find them to be a blight on the landscape. Everything has its time and its tenor and things turn against it, but, if wind turbines are all the renewable energy we have, what happens to the geothermal energy in northern South Australia and western Queensland? We have to ensure the capacity to develop that industry as we move ahead.

Why do we want renewable energy? We want to be carbon efficient. One of the most carbon efficient forms of power is nuclear power. Last night and today, PaulHowes has been out there saying that it is madness that the Labor Party stick to this multiple position. They believe it is morally right to have uranium mines—first they choose an arbitrary number of mines that Australia should have and then all of a sudden they suggest we should have more uranium mines; we can export uranium to countries all around the world, even to countries that produce nuclear weapons—but we are not allowed to use uranium to produce power in our own nuclear power plants. When will this complete discrepancy in philosophical positions be put aside? It looks like a farce. How can you have your feet in both camps? You either believe that uranium mining and everything to do with uranium is abhorrent and therefore ban mining it and everything to do with it—I would not support that; I think that is crazy—or you say, ‘Let’s take our nation to the forefront of nuclear technology.’ I think that move would be generally supported everywhere. The winds are changing—people are changing their position on this. And it looks even more ridiculous now when the head of the Australian Workers Union, PaulHowes, is screaming at his own party to wake up and smell the roses. He says this is where Labor should be if they want to be relevant. He has even laid down the challenge that either the Labor Party change the agenda or the coalition will change it when we get back into government. When we do, we will have the support of the AWU—we will have the support of half your own side.

I welcome Paul Howes’s contribution to this debate and I look forward to the Labor Party having some form of epiphany, dealing with the nutty left, getting with the agenda and, if they are fair dinkum about reducing carbon emissions, developing a form of technology that will actually deliver that in spades rather than clinging to a 1954 Cold War mentality which the rest of the world has moved on from. In France, about 80 per cent of the power comes from nuclear power. Our neighbours—countries like Indonesia, India, China and Japan—are all using it, and Japan would have more reason than most not to. We had to get the technology for our latest reactor from Argentina. The United States, Britain, France and a myriad of European countries are all using it. Israel has it. The technology is developing around the world, yet the Labor Party insists that Australia be a world leader on climate policy. It is a crazy position. They talk about being world leaders, yet when the world is racing away from their archaic position they sit back and have internal party discussions about why we should stay mired in about 1954.

The challenge is there for the Labor Party. If they are really interested in reducing carbon emissions they have the potential to do it. There are people in their own party screaming at them to get with the program. Who is holding Australia back from this technology? As PaulHowes rightly pointed out, we can be the Middle East in our generation of wealth from nuclear energy. It would mean immense wealth coming into our nation. We could also embellish it and show how smart we can be as a nation by developing the technology to assist people around the world—to help those in surrounding countries to raise their standard of living by the development of technology from the product that we will most likely be exporting to them. But we cannot do it if we do not have a nuclear energy industry of our own. It is just lazy.

I see Minister Carr in the chamber. He is supposed to be the person leading the world down the enlightened path of doing clever things, but this is just ridiculous. Minister Carr knows in his heart that this is the way we have to go. We cannot just bog ourselves down.