Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government's paralysis on energy policy is astounding. While their members take to the airwaves decrying the state of our energy sector, power bills continue to rise while they do nothing because they're too busy arguing amongst themselves. Meanwhile, people in my electorate continue to face increasing power bills, which have continued to rise in the five years since this government was elected. On top of that, my most vulnerable constituents are losing access to the clean energy supplement. This means that, while power bills continue to increase, pensioners are losing the financial support to help them afford it. That double hit will put even more financial strain on the people who need it least. All the while, this government continues to focus on itself, deciding that a moment of crisis would be a great time to discuss the future of a 50-year-old coal-fired power station. If there isn't a policy supporting the plan, or any buyers interested in investing, it is impossible to think that a responsible government would keep such a plant operational. The mere fact is that the technology in these plants is so old they can't generate at optimum levels any longer without significant investment.

AGL is looking to the future, and that is exactly what this government should do. Focusing on one ageing plant does nothing to solve the immediate problems we face in solving systemic policy failures in the energy sector. If anything, even with this one issue, the government has somehow managed to make its approach to energy policy even less clear. What hope do we have of resolving this situation when they can't even agree to implement the recommendations of a review conducted with the express purpose of guaranteeing energy security and reliability? Instead of creating certainty, they've placed the energy sector inside a policy vacuum. This lack of direction and indecision has created a situation where energy companies have not invested due to uncertainty, starving the sector of vital investment. We are now entering summer with the Australian Energy Market Operator warning of deep-seated problems with our national electricity grid creating a scenario where many households will face blackouts and reliability issues. Given that the government made so much noise about how they were going to take action on power bills and create a more robust energy sector, people have the right to feel betrayed when the generation capacity available in our network now is 4,000 megawatts less than when this government took office, and nothing has been done to fix it.

It's extraordinary arrogance for those opposite to pretend they have anything to be proud of. Through their inaction and carelessness over the past four years, we have now reached a critical point and they seem content to continue to do nothing. Households in my electorate and across the country will continue to hurt under this absence of clarity of policy, particularly the continued prevarication around implementing a clean energy target, a measure that has been endorsed by key business figures and experts from the energy and finance sector as well as consumer groups.

While the government continues to avoid its job on making a decision, the market won't invest. Companies like AGL have real responsibilities to their shareholders, their board and AEMO. They have real governance requirements, and their businesses have decisions to make. Four years of policy paralysis has seen wholesale power prices double, reliability of electricity supply fall, and carbon pollution rise by 1.5 per cent in just the last quarter. Getting CEOs of power companies in for a chat about power prices and having them write to their customers to tell them about discounts that might be available on their bills is not a substitute for an energy policy As the wholesale price of power has doubled in the last four years, a small discount is not making any real difference to the lives of people in my electorate. Power bills are still more than $1,000 more than they were, and that is pretty hard to find when wages have stagnated and everything else is rising.

The evidence and the experience from around the world is clear: in order to ensure dispatchable power and reliability, we need to create policy certainty. We need to have bipartisan support. With policy certainty, businesses will invest, banks will finance and jobs will grow. Planning and market certainty will ensure that there are enough different types of generation options to provide for a reliable, safe and cheaper electricity grid. This is what the people of my electorate expect of their government. Stop pointscoring and actually govern.

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