Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Republic) Share this | Hansard source

That's not what households and small businesses that I talk to are telling me. For the last eight years, small businesses' and consumers' electricity costs have kept going up and up. Australia now has some of the highest electricity costs in the world. Couple that with the fact that, for households, wages aren't increasing, and there is pressure on family budgets associated with the cost of child care, health insurance and transport, particularly with all the tolls in New South Wales. Small businesses are struggling, with electricity costs being the major reason they are struggling.

Why is all this happening? It's happening because the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has no plan for the electricity industry. They've tried to develop one—they've tried on several occasions—but they keep getting knocked off. Remember the National Energy Guarantee or the big stick policies? All of those have hit the fence, like many of the prime ministers that tried to introduce them. Electricity assets are owned by the private sector, who have not been investing in new generation assets due to a lack of certainty from this government about the policy direction it was going to put in place for the nation.

In recent years the private sector has basically said: 'We're not going to wait for government anymore; they are completely hopeless. We're just going to invest ourselves.' They've started investing in renewable energy projects—in solar, in wind, in hydrogen and in batteries. Why are they doing this? Because the people that invest in these companies, that own these companies, know that fossil fuels are a bad investment. They know that fossil fuels are the way of the past and that the future is in technology and in renewables, to produce more energy more cheaply. And that is what is occurring. That's why you're seeing many more solar and wind farm projects getting up, but no-one is investing in fossil fuel technology, because it's becoming outdated technology. The private sector also knows that investing in fossil fuels is a very risky investment now. Firstly, financial institutions won't finance them, and, secondly, government regulation is reducing the use of fossil fuels, to meet international commitments to reduce carbon pollution. So governments are positioning themselves to take advantage of the shift to new technology and to renewable energy.

The question for this government is: How do we position Australia to take advantage of the shift in international energy markets that's occurring to renewables? How do we make a gradual shift to renewable energy to encourage investment in this new technology that is renewable to create jobs? This is why Labor has instituted a policy of new energy apprenticeships to provide a pathway for training in new skills and new technology that will be the jobs of the future. How do we reduce electricity and other energy costs? The way to do that is to invest in the cheapest technology possible, and that cheap technology is in renewables. But this government continues to ignore that trend internationally and swim against the tide. We've seen that with their recent announcement of an investment in a new gas-fired plant at Kurri Kurri. The government is going to build an asset that the private sector says there's no need for. If there were a need for this, don't you think that the private sector would build it? Of course they would. But they're not going to because there's no need for it. This is going to be a $600 million investment by this government that will be used two per cent of the time. And this government want to congratulate themselves for saying that they've reduced the electricity costs when their lack of a plan has, in reality, meant that electricity prices for small businesses in particular and for households have just kept going up and up and up. Because the government don't have a plan and because the government ignore the reality, Australians are continuing to pay too much for their electricity.

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