Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Acknowledging the incredible passion around this topic, a topic that for 11 years has galvanised Australia like no other OECD economy, the debate between environment and energy, we are slowly getting to the point where experts have come together to design a structure that looks after three mutually exclusive fields: affordability, responsibility and reliability. You can toss a dime, and it's not going to land on an area that's going to cover those three areas adequately. I guess our great concern is that the Labor Party, until now, in their six years in government, simply watched energy prices double. The Labor Party, at federal and state level, continue to exacerbate the situation with their job-destroying bans and moratoria on exploration, and their unrealistic renewable targets—which at this point cannot be met in a way that allows pensioners to pay their power bills—and their open hostility to dispatchable, reliable baseload power. This is a real fatwa against these areas of power policy.

The Turnbull government just takes another approach to this. We are taking action to fix this mess to make sure that people can afford their power bills. We are focusing on just keeping the lights on before we start worrying about renewable targets for 10 and 20 years in advance, when I'm sure we'll be apologising for the actions of Labor governments right now. The National Energy Guarantee cuts electricity prices, ends subsidies, ends the picking of winners and ends the passing on of these costs directly to consumers. We're endeavouring now to create a level playing field, an agnostic energy source approach that means more supply and ultimately lower prices. It's about having all forms of energy competing equally in Australia's energy mix. That $300 a year that we are reliably informed can be saved—an average of $550 a year deep into the 2020s—under the NEG will make a real difference to families.

We're requiring power companies to cut better deals, to inform customers of the better arrangement and to secure gas supplies for Australia rather than exporting gas overseas and putting downward pressure on network costs. Labor's alternative indicates some scotoma—a blind spot—that they are unable to address. Our actions are already having some impact. Wholesale prices are already down, thanks to gas availability, by about 25 per cent. My state of Queensland has had an 8.5 per cent drop in small-business power prices, and around 5.4 per cent for households. Labor's alternative has primarily been one of blackouts and higher energy prices, which they get away with by offering small payouts to pensioners to keep them onside. We know that when Labor was last in office these prices doubled, and then we had a leader of the Labor Party with a 50 per cent renewable energy target and no idea of how we'll get there, no idea of what price will be paid by pensioners. We're going to put pensioners first, put low-income households first.

This new tax on electricity means that if Labor's back in office power bills could be $500 a year higher than they would otherwise need to be. That's way too much of a burden on Australians' shoulders. Let's put our shoulder to the wheel and do our part and allow others to do the same before reckless policies harm jobs—because once you lose a local job it often doesn't come back. This guarantee has been backed by the expert Energy Security Board. It's made of these two obligations. First of all, the thing you never hear Labor say, is the reliability obligation. It's set to deliver the right level of dispatchable energy from ready-to-use sources. That might be coal, gas, hydro or whatever, but it's got to be there, in the thousands of megawatts, to make sure that when wind and solar enters irregularly into the grid we can cope with it. This makes retailers responsible to have that base load available; otherwise, they can pay large penalties for failing to do so, and a price fall is the result.

People ask, 'How can the NEG reduce prices?' Well, it does so by reducing those spikes where power is inordinately expensive for very short periods of time. This allows Australians to have more money in their pockets. That's where they want the money. They don't want it going to energy retailers. Memo to Labor: we don't enjoy paying high power bills where we don't have to. When it comes to reliability, no longer should intermittent sources like wind and solar be surging into our grid, causing the risks of brownout and the inability to have base load go to go with it.

I want to thank a number of the groups that got behind the NEG: the BCA, ACCI, AiG, Manufacturing Australia, and all of the energy users—BHP, BlueScope, Rio, Santos, JBS, Origin, AGL, EnergyAustralia, Energy Networks—and all of the irrigators and the mineral councils, the forestry product producers, infrastructure partnerships, Grattan and energy consumers. They're all lined up against the Labor Party. They have this party in the crosshairs. Stand up for reliability and affordability and support the NEG.

Debate adjourned.

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