The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has taken aim at a proposed windfarm off the coast of the New South Wales Hunter region, describing the potential environmental impacts of the major project as “an absolute travesty”.
The opposition leader, flanked by shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, on Tuesday, told reporters the planned development was “fast growing into a national scandal” after backlash from some local groups.
The federal government announced in July an area stretching 1,800 square kilometres between Swansea and Port Stephens had been selected to become a renewable energy hub operating by 2030.
The large wind zone in the Hunter region is one of six areas identified around the country, along with Gippsland in Victoria.
The Labor government hopes the renewable energy hubs will contribute toward its target of an 82% renewable energy grid by the end of the decade.
Some local groups concerned with the project’s impact on tourism and fishing industries have opposed the wind turbine farm’s development, which will be a minimum of 20km from the shore.
Dutton said consultation should be redone and that if “local concerns are properly understood and acted on”, he would be surprised if the project still got the green light.
“We’re all in favour of renewable energy, but not at any cost, and not where you’re destroying jobs and livelihoods and the environment,” Dutton said.
“The government hasn’t done its homework. We don’t know about the environmental impacts on rare bird species. We don’t know the impact on the seabed. You know, there are so many elements to this.”
The energy minister, Chris Bowen, on Tuesday morning, alongside the Tasmanian energy minister, Nick Duigan, announced that consultation on an offshore wind zone for the Bass Strait had begun.
The minister took aim at the former Coalition governments for not beginning renewable projects years earlier.
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“We’ve been fiddling around for a decade or so in Australia with renewable energy. We’ve come in determined to get on with the job,” Bowen said.
Dutton’s Coalition has so far maintained its commitment to net zero emissions target by 2050 while in opposition, despite rumblings by some from within the party to ditch it.
Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce described the estimated cost of net zero as “utterly untenable” ahead of the party’s conference in September.
The current Nationals leader, David Littleproud, after a party motion to ditch the policy failed, said there were no plans to drop the emissions reduction target “unless there’s some other alternative”.
In opposition, Dutton and Littleproud have spruiked the possibility of bringing in nuclear energy purportedly to supply cheap, reliable and low-emissions electricity.
In a July speech to an event organised by conservative thinktank Institute of Public Affairs, Dutton said he saw nuclear “not as a competitor to renewables but as a companion”.
The opposition has proposed building small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) – which are not yet commercially available – on the site of retired coal generators to complement renewable energy in the grid.
It could cost as much as $387bn to replace Australia’s retiring coal-fired power stations with SMRs, federal government modelling released in September showed.
Bowen accused the opposition of trying to “continue the culture climate wars in Australia”, now “that outright denial is less fashionable”.
“Show the Australian people your verified nuclear costings and your detailed plans about where the nuclear power plants will go,” Bowen said earlier this month.