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

The short answer is: absolutely not. The whole premise of the Leader of the Opposition's question is, as with so much of what he says here, completely bogus. The reality is that Labor has imposed higher and higher energy prices on Australian families. That is what Labor did. We are seeing now, thanks to our policies, retail prices coming down for the first time in a long time. We're starting to see—we are seeing, in fact—a halving of wholesale gas prices over 18 months, and we've seen wholesale generation prices come down by 30 per cent. Our policies are working. Labor wants to engage in an ideological war about one form of energy rather than another. That is how they created the problem in the first place.

Clearly, the focus must be on lower energy prices. People have been paying too much for electricity. Focus on getting prices down, ensuring power is reliable and the lights stay on, ensuring you've got dispatchable power—coal is always going to be a big part of that—and making sure that you have got lower prices, but let the market and technology determine what is the best, most cost-effective solution. Our policy, the National Energy Guarantee, is technology agnostic. It is designed to ensure that you have dispatchable power, reliable power and affordable power and that you meet your Paris emissions targets. That can be done with a variety of technologies. Coal is a big part of it now. I believe it will be a big part of it for a very long time, but let the market and the competing technologies work it out.

The reality is that Labor has declared a war on jobs, it's declared a war on business—

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