Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I can tell the honourable member she has just made that number up. Where is your evidence? There is absolutely no evidence for that. What I can tell you is the evidence from the ACCC's report from 2015, which said: 'The Commonwealth Treasury’s estimated $550 cost saving to households is reasonable.' That is what came from the abolition of the carbon tax. Under the Labor Party, electricity prices increased by more than 100 per cent. That was the record of the Labor Party. Indeed, in your own election platform that you went to the last election with, you said: 'From 2007 to 2013, average retail electricity prices in Australia soared.' That's the Labor Party's own election platform. That is what you acknowledge happened on your watch.

On the Prime Minister's watch, what we have seen is an attempt across a whole range of areas to put downward pressure on prices such as the gas price. The spot price for gas has come down significantly from the beginning of this year, and every dollar a gigajoule that it comes down is worth $10 a megawatt hour to households in reduced prices. When it comes to the networks, under the Labor Party the rate of return for those investments was around 10 per cent. Today, it is just above six per cent. That leaves Australian consumers about $300 a year better off. In the state of Queensland, it was government-owned generators that were gaming the system and saw Queensland have the highest wholesale electricity prices in the National Electricity Market for the first five months of this year. Under pressure from the Commonwealth government, the Queensland Labor government had to give a direction to those operators to put more supply into the market and no longer game the system. This can be worth up to $100 a year to Queensland households.

So right across the board we're taking action, not to mention for retail customers. The actions by the Turnbull government can see Australian households save more than $1,000 a year by moving retailers or by changing contracts. We know that 50 per cent of households have not changed retailers or contracts in the last five years, even though there are these enormous savings to be found. So, whether it's the work we're doing with the networks, the work we're doing with the retailers or the work we're doing with the gas, we are driving electricity prisons down, whereas Labor's record was only higher prices, which more than doubled on the Leader of the Opposition's watch.

Mr Butler interjecting—

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