Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member, fresh from South Australia, that triumph of energy policy, where you have got 100 per cent of your electricity from wind farms one minute and then zero—no storage, no planning, no engineering, no economics, just ideology. The reality is that the Labor governments failed to develop our gas resources on the east coast of Australia and in particular in the state of Victoria, where you have in many respects the largest demand for gas for industry and the largest resource and yet a government that is determined not to allow access. There are 40 years of gas under the ground in Victoria, and politics stops it coming out.

The reality is this: the gas price scandal—and that is what it is—is one that has been created by Labor governments, by a reckless lack of planning and awareness and by the calculations of people like the gentleman the honourable member referred to that you will find were all based on $4-a-gigajoule gas, which, regrettably, is very much a matter of the past. We are tackling that problem. We are sorting it out. It took a long time for the Labor Party to create this gas crisis, but we are sorting it out with our export regulation, with our determination to get more exploration and with our commitment to ensure that there is more transportation and more affordable, more reliable, more plentiful supplies of gas right across Australia, but especially here on the east coast, where so many jobs depend on it.

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