Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What's important in this is that, as a government, we are focused on improving our environment in a whole range of areas. There is far more to our environment than energy policy. My question to the minister in a little bit will be around energy policy because it is very important in that it affects the lives of everyday Australians—not just individual households but also businesses. We need to ensure that we have an energy policy that allows business to grow, prosper and employ Australians. That's what I see we are seeking to do with the energy policy that has been put forward.

Before I get to that, I want to touch on the issue of the environment more broadly because I haven't heard a single word from those opposite about the day-to-day lived experience of our local environment. The member for Leichhardt, in his contribution, showed how critically important that is on a day-to-day basis with what we're doing on the Great Barrier Reef. I would like to take this opportunity to ask the minister to speak more broadly about the portfolio and what we're doing to ensure that the lived environment that Australians live in every single day is being improved on a day-to-day basis. I look back at some of the stuff that my mother has done up at Mount Tamborine with rainforest regeneration and building riparian corridors on waterways to improve water quality and reduce erosion—practical, on-the-ground environmental measures that make a genuine difference to the lived and built environment that we all live in every single day.

My first question to the minister is: could he please update the House on what we're doing in that space? I think it's part of the discussion that we don't have regularly enough. As a government, we're doing some really good stuff in that space that would be very helpful. I've touched on the National Energy Guarantee already in terms of the importance of ensuring that we have affordable, reliable electricity—that we do not again see the situation that occurred in South Australia and that we do not see that occur in other parts of Australia. We know that to employ people and to be able to afford to provide services and products—not to just the Australian marketplace but to the global marketplace that we are now competing in—businesses need affordable and reliable energy. I ask the minister: with the National Energy Guarantee and the other measures that we've been taking over the last six or 12 months in the space of energy, what have we been doing to ensure that we drive down electricity and gas prices, on a wholesale basis, to ensure that business can compete? We look at the free trade agreements that we have successfully signed across the globe to create the opportunity for business to export. If I look at a large business such as Teys abattoirs, which employs 800 people in my electorate, the energy costs are a major impediment to their cost-competitiveness on the global marketplace. So, Minister, can you please share with the House how, through the National Energy Guarantee, we're seeking to ensure that energy prices are affordable and reliable to ensure that businesses and households can maintain and use the energy they need on a day-to-day basis?

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