Media Release.
Mark Butler MP.
Shadow Minister for
Climate Change and Energy
In the last 24 hours, South Australia has been hit by a massive once in 50 year super storm.
Emergency workers continue to answer emergency
calls from people in distress and tens of thousands of South Australians
are still without power.
The thoughts of the entire Federal Labor Party
are with affected South Australians and emergency workers, who continue
to do their heroic work in the most difficult circumstances. In
addition, our prayers are with those Victorians who are today seeing the
same storm impact their communities.
While the storm still rages, emergency services
risk their lives and people across two states struggle with the impacts
of the storm, we have seen a disgraceful display from the Government.
The Turnbull Government is attempting to use the storm’s impact on the
South Australian electricity system to continue their ideological attack
on Australia’s renewable energy industry.
The facts are already clear; South Australia’s
strong renewable energy generation played no part in the state wide
outage experienced on Wednesday. This is the view of energy market
regulators and experts alike.
The Australian Energy Market Operator has released a statement saying:
“the root
cause of the event is likely to be the multiple loss of 275 kilovolt
(kV) power lines during severe storm activity in the state”.
Yet the Energy Minister, Mr Frydenberg, the
Agriculture Minister Mr Joyce and the Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull have
all stated that questions need to be asked about an “overreliance” on
renewable energy and its role in the South Australian outage.
Not only does this ignore the advice of experts
on the cause of the South Australian outage, it attempts to turn an
ongoing natural disaster that has impacted almost 2 million Australians
into a political stunt to propagate an ill-informed, ideological
anti-renewable energy agenda.
This is a disgraceful and shameful display from a Government that should know better.
Australians know that renewable energy is a key
part of Australia’s future and that a storm and a blackout, no matter
how severe, doesn’t change that reality.
Rather than giving the people of South Australia
political opportunism and misguided ideology, the Turnbull Government
should give them an apology.
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