Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is quite extraordinary that I am rising again to speak on another Labor government failure. It is the second matter of public importance they have put up in relation to our alleged failures when in fact, once again, it is their failure. The only failure here is of the federal Labor Party, those opposite, and of course, once again, the South Australian Wetherill Labor government.

I note that I cannot see, apart from the member for Port Adelaide, any South Australian members of parliament sitting opposite. I would like to know where they are to argue that, allegedly, we have failed when we have not. The South Australian Labor government has failed, and those opposite have failed, on power for my home state. You and the state Labor government have created this energy crisis and you are attempting to make it worse. That is the most extraordinary part of this.

In my home state of South Australia we do not have secure, reliable or affordable power. In my home state, in my electorate of Boothby, residents and businesses are paying more than 40 per cent more for their power than the rest of Australia. In my home state, residents and businesses do not have secure or reliable power and they live in fear of more blackouts. We have had blackout after blackout, starting last September when our entire state lost power. Apart from the member for Port Adelaide, none of you here in the chamber experienced that unless you were visiting my fine state at the time. It was a really scary experience: 1.7 million people did not have power that day. Businesses were without power and my residents were without power. They were very dangerous conditions. I want to make mention of our incredible police, who did a wonderful job that day getting everybody home in peak-hour traffic—in a storm and with no traffic lights—and our emergency services volunteers, who helped people who had trees and other things down around their houses. They helped residents in need.

Flinders public hospital, which is in my electorate of Boothby, lost power, and its generator did not work either. People in intensive care had to be transferred to Flinders Private Hospital, which thankfully still had power through its generator. It is a miracle that nobody died. This is what happens when you have a failed electricity policy, as the Labor government does in South Australia—and a complete inability to manage our hospitals, as it turns out, which I recently spoke about.

It was not just the hospital, though; it was a range of businesses, and I want to talk about some of them. One of my local McDonald's, for example, which operates 24 hours a day, lost power for some time and lost a lot of stock. They employ a lot of young people, who did not get their hours that day. It cost $7,000 to fix their air-conditioner. They have now bought a generator to protect themselves from this happening again. Their power bill, like those of so many other businesses, is set to rise by tens of thousands of dollars in the near future.

Ben, my wonderful local newsagent, in his first day of trading after the Christmas holiday period and public holidays, completely lost power at his businesses. He was unable to open his cafe, and his newsagency was closed for most of the day. He still had to pay his staff wages for 12 hours, even though he was not making any money. The increase in the cost of electricity to his business is something in the order of 20 per cent this year. His December trade went really well but he lost all of that because of his lost income on the day we had the blackout.

I want to talk about Premier Jay Weatherill and the way he described—

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