Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

As a rural and regional member of parliament, who represents the people out there, not the people in here, I would like to bring some of those voices to this debate today, because it's very easy to the play games, which we see Labor indulge in, about 'What's the latest tweet?' and about 'Who is saying what to whom?' and about the gossip, the innuendo and the rhetoric. We're here for the people out there, and I want to bring their voices front and centre to this debate.

What we've heard from the shadow minister and what I know we will hear from the rest of the speakers is a combination of criticism and of frightening people with impending doom, without recognising that clear-sighted, sensible policy actually produces results in both the energy and the climate change space. If you fail to recognise the need to bring those together in a sensible way, you won't build the economic future that Australians deserve.

Here are some of those voices, my constituents. The Chairman of the West Corurgan Board of Management, which looks after water delivery and farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin, said:

Growers facing increased charges of more than 100 per cent. Exorbitant electricity costs will only hasten the demise of our small communities.

Ken Rebetzke in Griffith said:

How can a country like Australia with its vast natural resources allow people to sit in the dark and in the cold and not be able to pay for an essential service? How can any government allow this to happen?

Roger Conway from Tocumwal said:

I worked hard to keep my wife as a stay at home mum which we succeeded in doing, what is going on?

My electricity provider just put my weekly payment up from $52 pw to $91 pw. We are using less electricity now than we have done in the past, but paying more.

John, from a busy central Albury coffee shop and cafe, said:

These electricity charges are killing me—worse still they are stopping me putting on more staff.

In fact I have had to put some of our casuals off as a result.

If you go out and walk a mile in their shoes, members of the Labor Party, you will understand this too, and you will know that the policy parameters matter a great deal around energy and climate change. No-one is suggesting that there isn't a real issue for the globe to face on man-made climate change. Of course we have different views. Of course we understand that people in the community have different views. But where it lands, doing the hard yards, is working out a policy that makes sense. I can tell you that Labor's policy makes no sense.

We know that, to have an effective energy policy, you look at a reliability guarantee that provides for investment in dispatchable power and you look at an emissions guarantee that defines what your emissions target is. We've defined ours at 26 per cent by 2030, and we're on track, as the Prime Minister said in question time, to smash Kyoto 1, smash Kyoto 2 and meet our Paris obligations. Where Labor lands on this policy is in a place that has no regard for the cost of electricity, because with a 45 per cent emissions reduction target—and the member for Port Adelaide has even squibbed that with a couple of his greener audiences by saying, 'Of course, we want to increase that'—we know that electricity power prices will go up. When you look at all of the fact sheets that Labor's putting out now about its climate change policy, they don't mention power or the cost of power. Labor knows that its climate change policy is completely incompatible with keeping power prices down, but that is not its rhetoric. Here we have Labor's current policy on more renewable energy and cheaper power, and I'm quoting:

Australia is in an energy crisis … Power bills are out of control … Labor has a plan to deliver more renewable energy and cheaper power.

We know that those two elements in its policy are totally inconsistent. So Labor pays lip-service to cheaper power, but that's all it is, because in the real world its policy can't deliver that. Labor's policy continues:

Labor's Household Battery Program will provide a $2,000 rebate for … households …

So that's money much like the pink batts scheme. It continues:

Look at every Labor policy, and you find money for the unions. I know that's the way they operate, but how is this going to help? Then there's a curious policy:

somewhere else. But what Labor is not doing—in fact, it's making a mockery of our policy to do this—is taking a big stick to the power companies that would seek to gouge consumers. So they're saying, 'Let's look after the workers in these companies'—okay, fine; I get that—'but let's not do anything against the gouging that electricity companies are engaging in with consumers.' We're on the side of consumers.

See this speech in context