Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Listening to the member for Blair's contribution reminds me of the parallel universe that members of the Labor Party live in. They seem to think that money just grows on trees or that the government has a big printing press and that we can just keep borrowing money. They fail to realise that the gross incompetence of the glory years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments left the incoming government with an interest bill of over $1 billion every month. We are trying to pay it down. The bill that those opposite left us means that we have to find $1 billion every month. The Labor Party do not have the foggiest clue about this. They think you can just spend, spend, spend and that the coalition government will come in and clean up their mess. We cannot continue to borrow and spend in the way that the Labor Party want to.

Time after time we have heard the member for Blair perpetuating the myth about the cuts to education. I call on all Labor members of good conscience not to do what the member for Blair has just done in this debate and spread the myth that funding to schools is being cut. If the Labor Party want to borrow more money to give more money to schools, thereby increasing the debt, that is a fair enough argument. But do not go around to schools in your electorate and tell them the untruth that their funding is being cut. You are scaring children and their parents by telling complete untruths. Tell them the truth: the funds they are getting are going up. The coalition is increasing the money that they get. If you want to, say that you will borrow money and spend more, but for goodness sake do not tell them the untruth that their funding is being cut.

I turn to the specifics of the bill. It will provide a one-off energy assistance payment to recipients of the age pension, disability support pension and parenting payment single, together with recipients of various veterans' payments, who are payable and residing in Australia on 20 June 2017. Approximately 3.8 million people will receive a one-off energy assistance payment, including approximately 2.5 million age pensioners, 770,000 disability support pensioners, 260,000 parenting payment single recipients and 235,000 Veterans' Affairs clients. The total cost is $269 million. The rate of payments will be $75 for singles and $62.50 for a member of a couple. It is anticipated that most of those 3.8 million people will receive the payments by 30 June 2017.

Why is this necessary? Let us have a look at the increasing cost of electricity and where that has come from over recent years. We are having a transformation in our electricity sector. It is a transformation from one of the lowest cost and most reliable electricity sectors in the world to one of the highest cost and most unreliable energy sectors in the world—especially in South Australia. Let us have a look at what has happened over the last 20 years, and why this is necessary. Firstly, the data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics—the catalogue number is 6401.05—tells us that in the Howard government period, almost 12 years from March 1996 to December 2007, we had an increase of 34 per cent in electricity prices. That is less than three per cent a year.

Then we come to those glory years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments. What happened to electricity prices during those six sorry years? From December 2007 to September 2013 the increase was 118 per cent. How does any government, no matter how incompetent they are, allow electricity prices to increase by 118 per cent over a period of six years? This must be some type of record. If we look at the trophy cabinet of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, one of their greatest achievements must have been to increase electricity prices by 118 per cent over that period. That is some mean feat. The member for Blair talked about sad and tragic increases in electricity prices. It all happened under the government that he was part of.

What has happened since then? Again, from the official Australian Bureau of Statistics figures we see that from September 2013 to the latest figures of March 2017, in that four years there has been a 2.6 per cent increase. The coalition has been here for four years, and we have had a 2.6 per cent increase. The Labor Party, in the six years before that, had a 118 per cent increase. And Labor members come in here and whinge about increasing electricity prices. We had the largest increase in electricity prices in the nation's history under their watch, and possibly, I would say that you would be hard pressed to find any other country, during any other period of time in history, when electricity prices have increased as much as that.

Where are we going from here? I would like to think that we have capped electricity prices and we have been able to stop these terrible increases that we saw under the previous Labor government. But the sad reality is that, although we have succeeded for the last four years, there are very large and substantial electricity price increases coming down the track. Delta Energy has highlighted them. They estimate over the next 12 months increases in costs for consumers in South Australia of $1 billion; in Victoria $2.8 billion additional costs for electricity; in New South Wales they will be paying $4 billion.

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