Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the micro level, increasing electricity bills are a growing burden on household budgets. At the macro level, the very future of our planet rests on our ability to reduce emissions from our energy sector to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Yet for the past four years, Australia has managed to have both increasing power bills and increasing carbon emissions. The Australian public desperately want this issue fixed. The good news is that there are solutions that are widely supported by business, energy companies, regulators and state governments. Indeed, an emissions intensity scheme—a market mechanism that would give investors in the electricity sector the certainty that they need to invest—has been estimated, by the government's own modelling, to reduce Australian power bills by up to $15 billion over the next decade. It would allow the investments that our ageing energy infrastructure needs, and it would do it in a way that will reduce our emissions and help us respond to the challenge of climate change.

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