Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This coalition is a government of fakes and flakes, and this legislation proves it. There is no better example of fakes and flakes than what we're debating right now. Treasury Laws Amendment (Prohibiting Energy Market Misconduct) Bill is the official title but everyone refers to it as the big-stick legislation. Outside we get the government talking tough, saying that they'll use this to break up energy companies when they don't pass on drops in energy prices. Mind you, wholesale prices in this country have leapt nearly 160 per cent largely because there's no effective policy framework in the country. Inside here, with the media and all the people who rightly go, 'Hang on, is this the right step to take?' they go, 'No, no, this is a last resort.' Outside, they're tough; in here, they're timid and they don't want, they claim, to have to use this.

This legislation comes about because this is a government that haven't got their act together on energy because they fight amongst themselves. They've not been able to come up with some sort of coherent idea about how we'll generate energy in a much cleaner, more efficient way in this country. This is the big test for the nation—to do just that, to generate energy in a cleaner, efficient way. We'll sometimes have those opposite say, 'Well, look, we believe in climate change and we believe in the need to generate energy much better,' but they've got to come up with a practical idea, and what's their idea? The idea of those opposite is: 'Well, we're going to use taxpayer funds to generate power through coal. If the energy companies can't see our sense'—the coalition's sense of generating coal-fired energy—'then we're going to break them up and fund them with taxpayer funds. We'll generate it on our own.' What is practical about that? Nothing at all is practical about that at a time when renewables are going through the roof, and the government knows most energy players are going down this path.

The prime mover of reviews, the now Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, went through all these incarnations: he went with an emissions intensity target. That got dropped because the hardheads in the coalition party room didn't like anything that sounded like that. He then went to a clean energy target. That got dropped as well. And then he ended on the NEG, the National Energy Guarantee, which again, they couldn't get their heads around. At that point in time, we had the spectacle of those opposite say, 'We're only going to put the National Energy Guarantee to the floor of this parliament if we get bipartisan support,' which suggested we weren't in favour of getting a coherent, sensible energy policy in this country—garbage; absolute rubbish! Why? Because, while we agreed, as my colleague the member for Oxley just indicated, we didn't think it was perfect, we thought it was good, better than what was on offer at that moment. So when those opposite said, 'Well, we need bipartisan support,' it wasn't that they needed support from us—bipartisan, two parts; what they needed was in their own party room agreement. They had this split between the Neanderthals and the sensibles—the ones who knew that they needed to get a policy in place—but the Neanderthals said, 'We are not going to have this NEG because it sounds too green; it sounds too much like we're doing something fancy that we don't like,' and they fought amongst themselves. It wasn't bipartisan with us; it was within them. The problem with that side of politics at the moment is that they have regressed into this sort of Trumpian slump, where they just ape what they're seeing on the other side of the Pacific and they're continuing this long conflict on this policy.

We need to get this right. As I said, a 160 per cent increase in wholesale power prices means that people are getting whopping power bills in the mail, and they can't believe their eyes. Why? Because those opposite have not been able to work out how, as I said earlier, we can generate energy in a cleaner, more efficient way. And this is the classic case. This is the most commonsensical thing. If you haven't got supply, guess what? If demand is up and there is no supply then prices are going to go up and that is exactly what has happened.

So we get this type of legislation being put to us here as some sort of suggestion that this is a serious attempt to deal with it. No, it's not. This big stick is about breaking up energy companies because they won't go against their business sense and do what the coalition wants in an ideological sense, and that is what we've got here. There's no better test, too. Outside, the energy minister, Angus Taylor, says, 'We want drops in wholesale power prices to be passed onto consumers.' If they're saying that this legislation, this big stick, will be taken to those energy companies and they will be broken up if they're not passing on drops in wholesale power prices to consumers, the test for them is this: go and use it on the banks.

The big debate we're having in this country is that every time there's an interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank of Australia, it is never passed on properly to consumers, in particular, to those people who are balancing paying off a home, while their wages aren't going up, aren't getting the hours they need at work, are doing everything they can to meet the cost of living, while power prices—mind you—are going up. If the banks won't pass on the interest rates cuts, where's the big stick? We get a lot of tough talk out of the coalition but we don't get any of this type of proposal being put out in the public space—that they'll pick up this divestiture power and put it on the banks and break up the banks. The banks are profiting massively. They're raking in billions by not passing on interest rate cuts at a time when ordinary Australians need them or the economy needs that boost to get it out of the spluttering state that it's in at the moment, where the IMF has downgraded growth four times more than most other economies, and our growth is expected to be slower than Greece. The coalition won't do that. They will not do this to banks at all—mark my words. They'll not use their so-called big stick on the banks. They will use this big stick basically to hold up a sign that says, 'fake action here', because that's what this bill is about. The coalition know they will be in a world of pain if they do this.

Sometimes in this weird world of politics, you have to give people what they are hankering for. If those opposite are hankering for this bit of legislation, they'll get it, and then we'll test and see what they actually do. I don't think it's necessarily a smart idea to break up these energy companies, because they know they've got these ageing coal fired generators they're not willing to put money into, they know the game is about finding new ways to generate energy in a much cleaner, more efficient way, and that's where they want to put their money. Why would you load them up with costs that you know will get passed onto consumers at any rate? But the government wants to break those companies up. That's what the claim is outside, not in here, and the test will be: will that actually happen?

The bigger test, though, is: will power prices actually come down? I reckon those opposite will not meet that test at all. This will not lead to a drop in prices and it certainly won't lead to a drop in emissions. The rest of the world is saying, 'Come on, we've got to get our act together on this and see that actually occur.' We are not going to see that whatsoever out of this government.

We're debating this legislation. If they want this legislation, they're going to get it. We're going to see if they actually deliver—deliver not more hot air, not more slogans, not more political stunts, but deliver results for ordinary people who want to see a drop in their power prices and who expect us to take the issue of climate change seriously and to do the things that will reduce emissions in the longer term for the benefit of the nation. That's what we expect to see. That is the challenge. That is the real test of whether governments in this country will take this seriously, will recognise the challenge that we've got before us, will take the steps to reduce emissions, will do the things that we expect will see energy generated in a much cleaner and more efficient way, and will also leave a legacy of a better future for those who will follow us, as opposed to the scenario we've got now, where inaction is genuinely concerning people. Those opposite will deride young people for taking time out of school to protest about the inaction and inability of adults to actually take this seriously. They'll also dismiss the hundreds of thousands of people out in our streets, in our capital cities and across the globe, saying this stuff needs to be taken seriously. They'll dismiss all that. But that's what those people that are marching expect us to do. They expect this place to be able to come up with a regime and a suite of measures that will see emissions drop—not this kind of big stick stunt we're getting right now—and to be able to genuinely address climate change and genuinely find a way to do all the things that people expect and want to see happen.

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