Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question, and I do thank him for clearly engaging in a bit of choreography with the minister for climate change for the amusement of the House. On the quick look I had at that graph when it was held up, what it is showing is that the biggest bars of cost are things like the network charges. So I thank the member for holding up a chart that proves the government's case about electricity.

We have had the Leader of the Opposition, as part of his mendacious claim, out there saying that any dollar increase in electricity is about the carbon price, and for a long period of time he was absolutely denying that there was any other factor. Finally, he was shamed into admitting that yes, there are other things going on with electricity; and yes, there were things like 40, 50, 60, 70 per cent increases before carbon pricing even came into effect; and yes, a big factor in those increases is the so-called gold-plating of the network, shown I think by the blue bars on that chart there.

See this speech in context