Doorstop at Parliament House, Canberra

JOSH WILSON: Peter Dutton announced his nuclear plan, it doesn’t deserve to be called a nuclear plan, or even a policy. It is a joke, it’s a scam that he wants to inflict on the Australian community, and we don’t know anything about that plan other than seven locations that he’s already announced.

We don’t know how much they’ll cost. We don’t know what kind of reactor, we don’t know who’ll build them, we don’t know when they’ll be delivered. We don’t know how much power they’ll produce.

He shouldn’t have been able to get away with this nuclear joke for one week; he’s got away with it for eight weeks, and now we see the locations are starting to become a bit shifty.

He was in Western Australia last week for five days. He couldn’t bring himself to visit Collie and explain to that community about how he wants to inflict a nuclear reactor on their future.

He doesn’t come to Western Australia very often. I know from time to time when Gina Rinehart will ring the dinner bell he’ll jump on the private jet and shoot across, but other than that we hardly see him.

He does have questions to answer. People in Australia are doing it tough; they want support from a responsible and responsive government. That’s what we’re getting with the Albanese Labor Government – we’re delivering energy price relief right now, while we set Australia up for a cleaner and cheaper renewable energy future.

In my area that includes energy performance upgrades, energy efficiency upgrades for more than 2,000 small and medium enterprises across Australia who have the benefit of our program in that area. They’ll be able to take on measures that reduce their costs right now and reduce their emissions as we work as a nation to tackle climate change, a task that went completely neglected under the Coalition for nine years.

That’s what Australians deserve.

They deserve a government that focuses on their needs right now, reducing energy prices and costs and other kinds of price impacts in the economy, as we’re doing through our tax cuts for all Australians.

They deserve to know the truth about Peter Dutton’s nuclear scam, his nuclear con, but we’ve waited eight weeks, and now eight weeks and one day and, unfortunately, I won’t be holding my breath.