Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

What a shambles energy policy is under this government. We've been trying to keep count but we're pretty confident that we're now up to double digits in the number of energy policies this government has had since the last election in 2016. We had the emissions intensity scheme and the Clean Energy Target. We lost count of the number of versions of the National Energy Guarantee. My colleague the member for Charlton says there were four versions of the National Energy Guarantee in the final 14 days of Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership before he was defenestrated—four in 14 days. This week we've had two energy policies. It's 20 to four on Wednesday, so I'm not ruling out the possibility that there will be a third, at least, this week if the coalition party room ever meets to consider this. But this current policy has to take the cake. This is a Venezuelan-style neo-Marxist state intervention into an energy market, which this Liberal Party privatised. The experiment in privatising an essential service was not driven by the Labor Party. We opposed it every step of the way. This experiment in privatisation is now apparently an evil to be confronted by this Venezuelan-style state intervention. My colleague the shadow Treasurer has talked about that quite a deal.

But, of course, there is a second element to the policy of this new minister, this novice minister, and that is to throw billions and billions of taxpayer funds at building new coal-fired power stations, for which no investor other than Clive Palmer in Australia has indicated the slightest interest in cooperating. The Australian Industry Group—not Greenpeace, not the Labor Party, not anyone else—has estimated that this minister's plan to indemnify a new coal-fired power station—just one coal-fired power station—against future carbon risk could cost taxpayers $17 billion. We know that those opposite have a plan to build significantly more than one coal-fired power station. We read in The Australian newspaper, from government sources, they were planning to build a new coal-fired power station in my electorate of Port Adelaide on the Lefevre Peninsula. So, times $17 billion by several new coal-fired power stations and you are starting to talk real money that the taxpayers are lumping up to satisfy the ideological obsessions of this government.

It's not just the absolutely shambolic process of policy development under this government over the last few years; the substance of this bill is even worse. We heard the Prime Minister quote, rather selectively, I might say, from a recent report from the ACCC, the consumer watchdog—the statutory body with responsibility for looking after the interests of consumers—after its two-year inquiry into the operation of the electricity market. He didn't quote this particular part, when the ACCC dealt with the possibility of a divestiture mechanism in the electricity industry. What the ACCC said, after lengthy and exhaustive consideration of this possibility, is:

Requiring the divestiture of privately owned assets is an extreme measure to take in any market, including the electricity market.

…   …   …   

… the ACCC does not believe it would be appropriate to intervene to unwind the way in which the market has evolved across the National Electricity Market.

It was not something that the Prime Minister saw fit to quote in question time when he was selectively using the authority of the statutory consumer watchdog, the ACCC.

You would think, if the consumer watchdog, empowered by this parliament to look after the interests of electricity consumers, thought that divestiture would help them, would lower power prices, perhaps they would have included it in their 56 recommendations about what to do with this electricity market, and they didn't. Indeed, after the report was delivered and when this government first announced their so-called 'big stick', the ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, was giving evidence to a Senate estimates hearing and he confirmed:

I think I can confidently say Senator I found out about it when everybody else did, when I read about it—

the divestiture idea—

in the newspaper.

He confirmed in those hearings that he hadn't even been asked by the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, or the energy minister about the conclusions he came to in his report on the operation of the electricity inquiry. Such is the disdain this government has for good policymaking process, the idea of evidence based policy, informed by the views of experts like the ACCC or even by Ian Harper's earlier national competition policy review, which also considered and rejected the idea of divestiture. Other business groups—not the energy companies; of course, they oppose it—representing those that use energy oppose this because it is bad policy.

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