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

The parliament knows that, when the carbon tax was abolished, the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed there was the single biggest drop in electricity prices ever recorded. That is the fact of the matter. Yesterday, in the MPI debate, I read into Hansard an ACCC press release which said that the $550 reduction that was coming from the abolition of the carbon tax, and estimated by Treasury, was absolutely reasonable.

But what the member for Port Adelaide fails to tell this House is that, when Labor was last in office, electricity prices doubled. They went up each and every year. The member for Port Adelaide comes from a state where a Labor government completely wrecked the energy system, and South Australia was left with the highest prices in the country. In the member for Port Adelaide's own electorate, companies lost their power and lost jobs and lost millions of dollars as a result. What did the member for Port Adelaide call it? He called it a hiccup.

As the Prime Minister has made clear, everything's been revealed by LEAN Australia, who said, 'High prices are not a market failure; they are proof of the market working well.' What do you think the shadow minister for energy thinks about LEAN? He says:

In my nearly 30 years in the Party, I have not seen an organising effort on a policy issue like LEAN has delivered. It was phenomenal … It gave Bill, I, and the rest of the shadow cabinet the assurance that the Party was behind us as we stepped out to lead on climate change.

So LEAN speaks for the Labor Party. LEAN directs the shadow minister.

Just to finish, today there was a very revealing front page in The Australian Financial Review, which made it very clear that higher emissions reduction targets will mean higher prices for Australian consumers. The Grattan Institute said, on Labor's claims that prices would go down as a result of higher emissions reductions target, that this is 'unlikely to be sustainable', would 'accelerate plant closures', 'requires higher consumer prices' and would be 'inherently uncertain'. This is what the Labor Party is promising the Australian people: higher power prices, lower stability, reckless renewable energy targets and recklessly high emission reduction targets which the business community and the people of Australia reject.

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