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

In Queensland we've got state owned power generation, making us quite unique. It also means that all the profits are basically captured by the state government. We know it was about $2 billion two years ago and $1.9 billion this year. This is a state government artificially keeping prices as high as possible for Queenslanders to make as much profit as possible out of Queenslanders. When we investigated through the ACCC, we found in some cases standing offers $369 a year more expensive for households than they need to be. Of course the federal government is going to step in in those circumstances. No-one deserves to be facing a state owned monopoly and paying those kinds of prices. That $2 billion a year profit is equivalent to $22 million in pumped up, inflated power bills in my city alone every year. It's the most vulnerable that pay it. This is not a progressive system. The poorest are paying the relatively greatest proportion of that amount of money.

So we have to have a default market offer. We have to have the legislation that's in parliament today. We need to remind the Labor Party, before we get a case of group-wise pants-wetting, that it is not necessarily privatisation here; it's divestment. You can divest into more than one state owned power entity. What you can do is—and we're not going to do it for Queensland—you can have two publicly owned entities and have power responsibly divested to more than one publicly owned entity. You don't have to privatise. Let's have a look at the states that did privatise. When you go to the ACCC analysis—

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