Mr. Peter Lefroy:

I could not agree more with the Senator's sentiments at the start. Historically, what we have seen is that the State has seen energy policy as a bit of black box. As I describe it, the State opened the box every couple of years, had a bit of a fiddle and then put it back in the corner of the office. What we have missed, and what events like the war in Ukraine, Covid and so on have brought to the fore, is how fundamental energy policy is to our economic future. That is starting to come to the table in terms of our thinking, and in particular, on the role of offshore wind. As Mr. Moran has said, there is a huge opportunity here to bring new investment off the back of the capacity and the natural resources that we have, and that that investment is not just focused on the eastern seaboard but on the western seaboard as well. There is a huge economic opportunity for those western rural communities that have - let us face it - been eviscerated more or less for the history of the State. A lot of that power is out there. That infrastructure can be built out there. That energy user can be based out there. That means jobs and infrastructure investment and everything else in communities.

There are kids growing up in those communities now who have the prospect, if we get this right, of having a long-term, sustainable, well-paid job for their lifetime in the community in which they are from. We have to get this right. The Senator made one comment about the State getting out of the way and, to a great extent, I agree. One thing it cannot do, however, is not make a plan, which was sort of implicit in his comments. We have got to plan this out and it has got to be a plan that is more than just the lifetime of this Government. This has got to be a 20- or 30-year economic plan encompassing: what we are going to do; what we want to achieve; how we are going to go about doing it; and what all of the supporting policy areas in which we need to make progress are, such as infrastructure, business and enterprise policies, jobs, education and all of those things. If all of that does not happen, none of this will happen and we will be wasting our time trying to build all of these projects. We have got to make a long-term strategic plan that we plan out and then make sure all of the State's agencies and arms are focused on delivering that.