Response to Federal Budget

I'd like to congratulate the Treasurer on his budget last night. There aren't many Treasurers who get to do four budgets in one parliament—and, yes, I know that last night's budget was focused on the upcoming election. That's not a criticism; that's just what parties of power do in a pre-budget election.

However, let's look at what the budget is really about. The budget is, first and foremost, about the financial underpinning of our economy. I just want to get on the record that our economy is facing some very significant challenges over the coming decades. Currently, our economy is underpinned by exports of iron ore, coal and natural gas—$138 billion in exports of iron ore, $90 billion in exports of coal and $92 billion in exports of natural gas. It makes up a huge part of our economy. Yet all those things are going to come under pressure, if not disappear altogether, as the world moves towards a low- or no-carbon future.

This doesn't even have to be an ideological argument. Our iron ore is low grade and, as steel furnace plants turn to electricity to be able to do direct reduction furnaces, they need the higher grade iron ores that are going to be available out of Latin America and Africa. To shore up some of these exports, we need to be looking at producing our own green metals, and particularly green iron. But to do that we're going to need to do a large number of things, and very few of them got mentioned in the budget last night.

It was heartening to hear that green metals did get a mention in the budget, under the Future Made in Australia program, which I happily support, although I would argue, and I have argued in this place, for more direct production credits for things such as green iron, green aluminium, low-carbon liquid fuels, sustainable aviation fuel. These are all things that are going to be incredibly necessary in our economy moving forward because to be able to produce all that green iron you need an awful lot of clean electricity. At the moment we can't even get the electricity generation for our own grid down to low or no carbon. We're barely removing any of the coal fleet, and yet we're spending billions of dollars on building more transmission to run that electricity from one coal-fired plant to another.

In the budget last night there was even more money for more transmission, and I think some of it is necessary, with the $10 million Accelerated Connection Fund. It's going to help some renewable generation connect to the grid, but it's a far cry from the $4 billion and $5 billion state interconnected projects that aren't going anywhere, are only going to go up in cost and don't generate one electron, don't store one kilowatt hour. These are not the things that are going to help us go to a clean energy, green metal future.

I applauded the government earlier this year in announcing $250 million for low-carbon liquid fuels, including sustainable aviation fuel. But what we need is production credits for those, and I moved an amendment on that in the last sitting. What we need is mandates. We need our Defence Force to agree to start using renewable diesel. We need to put mandates on our government fleets to start using it. These are the things that are going to make a difference to bringing on these clean fuels and clean energy for our future.

Even the Trump government is spending $70 billion on a renewable diesel or low-carbon fuel plant in Montana.