Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

I don't think anyone in this place would disagree that unsustainable rising energy prices are a critical top-of-mind concern right across the nation. That applies to residents and businesses, and also to gas and electricity. Of course, the two are connected. Many people may not be fully aware of the extent to which rising electricity prices are actually driven by rising gas prices, given the important role of gas in the production of electricity.

Australia has seen its worst-ever gas crisis in the last few years under the Turnbull government, with devastating pain for residential consumers, pensioners trying to heat their houses and families trying to make ends meet. The government will tell us, no doubt, through this debate and elsewhere through the week, that it's all somehow Labor's fault but 'Don't worry, it's all getting better.' I will quote at the outset Garbis Simonian, the managing director of New South Wales gas user and wholesaler Western Energy Services Corp., on 25 July in response to the latest interim report from the ACCC as part of their gas inquiry. With regard to the prospects of gas prices rising beyond $10 a gigajoule, he said, 'Get ready for mass job losses.'

It's a personal view, I will state at the outset, shared by many in the community that one of the greatest policy failures in recent years in this country is the failure of Australian governments—and I say that in plural—to set a sustainable energy policy and stick with it. And I might say that that is alongside housing—that is a debate for another time. By 'sustainable', I don't just mean environmentally sustainable but a set of long-term rules for the market. We have been trying to settle this with the Liberal Party for over 10 years.

The No. 1 reason for rising energy prices is policy uncertainty, and that is a government failure. We had the government elected on the promise to get rid of the carbon price and somehow that was going to fix everything. That was a lie, and Australians are onto that. Have prices gone down? Does anyone actually think that has caused prices to go down?

No. You love to blame Labor but also you are hoping that people forget that you have been the government for nearly five years. You're a rabble.

We've returned to Canberra, after the six-week break, for a debate about the National Energy Guarantee, and we see the government is again a circus. We've got the former Prime Minister and the former Deputy Prime Minister out there, on TV all weekend and today, threatening to cross the floor and bring down the government's energy policy. We've got the member for Hughes over there who, no doubt, will rant at us soon. He does have a special talent: I do admire him for his ability to bring any speech on any topic back to why we should burn more coal in this country. It is a special talent that many of us have to sit through.

I think we're up to policy No. 4 or No. 5. It's almost one per year. We heard about the trilemma last year: reliability, affordability and sustainability. Fair enough. We agree. We should be able to walk and chew gum—to do those three things at once. But the government has just given up. They're just trying now to get something—anything—through their party room. The Prime Minister, it's now clear, believes in nothing. For the last few weeks he was energy agnostic. Now, desperate to hold the rebels in line, we've had extraordinary talk this morning that the government will underwrite a coal-fired power station with taxpayer dollars, one that industry doesn't want and people in the community don't want but the blockheads over on the right of the Liberal Party want. The Prime Minister is surrendering, waving the white flag and caving in to the climate denialists.

It's an undeniable fact that renewable energy is the cheapest form of new power. The children at Silverton Primary School in my electorate know this, as they explained to me when I went to visit them.

The environment minister is absolutely perfect for this job. I went to uni with him. He's a lovely bloke. And he doesn't believe in anything. So he's got the best crack, I agree, at getting something through your party room.

We've entered the peculiar situation, the ridiculous situation—in policy terms I think we'd summarise it as WTF—where Australia is now the world's biggest exporter of gas but doesn't have enough for domestic use. The Prime Minister could have dealt with this last year. He had the option until November 2017 to pull the export trigger and put in place gas controls and stop this nonsense, where we're selling all the gas to the rest of the world and we don't have enough for Australian business. The impacts on consumers are profound, but we've seen, for business and manufacturers, tripling and quadrupling prices flowing through to electricity and jobs being lost. Once lost, manufacturing jobs will not come back to this country. It affects hundreds, potentially thousands, of workers in my electorate and it is no accident. It was a personal failure of the Prime Minister to act last year when he had the opportunity. Now he's hostage to his little handshake deal with big business in the corner: 'Please, please, we'll shake hands; we'll be nice to each other. Please don't raise prices.' That's not good enough.

I apologise, in closing, that I have to leave early. I had scheduled time to stay for all of the speakers, but this shambles of a government are so incompetent they couldn't even get someone in the chair to open the debate at 11.00 am.

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