Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the motion moved by the member for Bass, because, personally, I find it a bit rich that the Morrison government is congratulating itself on its so-called strong action on electricity prices. In the past 12 months, energy consumption in Australian households rose 15 per cent to 20 per cent due to the pandemic. Australians were hit with a double-whammy of winter heating bills combined with higher energy usage due to spending more time at home. In June last year, the average household increased power use by 105 per cent. That effectively doubled power bills. The only choices for households are to dramatically reduce power, and that means less heating in a cold winter; spend less on other essentials in order to pay the higher power bill; or go into energy debt, effectively putting power bills on the credit card. The Australian Energy Regulator did in fact report a steep rise in energy debt over 2020. Residential debts to energy retailers rose 32 per cent, and, since March last year, small-business debt to retailers increased 22 per cent. Australians now owe almost $200 million to energy retailers as a result of power prices.

In Tasmania, the Economic Regulator's Energy in Tasmania 2019-20 report shows the proportion of residential and small-business customers repaying a power bill debt in Tasmania has doubled since the last reporting period. At the end of June 2020, 7,655 Tasmanian households and 404 small businesses were struggling to pay their electricity bills. In the 2019-20 financial year Tasmanian retailer Aurora Energy, a government business enterprise, had 500 customers enrolled in its hardship program. Inexplicably, $3.6 million of Aurora's $5 million COVID customer support fund to assist people with power bills during a pandemic remains unspent. So, the Morrison government's self-love and boasting about a fall in wholesale electricity prices does not mean much when you're still struggling to pay your bill every month. If things are so great, why is life still so hard for so many Australians: young families trying to keep ahead of mounting bills; pensioners literally scraping pennies together? And we know that the protections established to protect customers from disconnection are coming to an end, despite the pandemic still being with us.

Disconnection isn't just a matter of turning the lights off; poor people lose the food in their freezer, there is no warm shower for the kids before school and there is no hot meal at the end of the day. The fact that people can't afford to pay their power bill tells you what sort of financial stress they are already in. Disconnection makes life so much harder—harder to raise the kids, harder to get a job, harder to get to and from work. It's just not good enough for the member for Bass to boast about her government's record on electricity when for the past eight long years the Liberal government has hurt Tasmania's interests by delaying the inevitable move to renewable energy production and storage. After 22 attempts, this government still has no energy policy. All we have is a slogan about a big stick from a minister who is considered a running joke.

In December 2020 the Australian Energy Market Commission published its annual residential electricity price trends report. This report notes that 'residential electricity prices and bills are expected to decrease until 2021-22'. But what it also says, and what the member for Bass fails to mention in her motion, is that residential electricity prices and bills are expected to rise again in the 2022-23 reporting year, following the closure of the Liddell power station. That's because this government has failed to show leadership on energy policy. At the same time as the International Energy Agency is calling for an end to the construction of fossil fuel projects, this backward government is announcing it will spend $600 billion of Australian taxpayers' money building a fossil fuel fired plant to run two per cent of the time—a power plant that the private energy market won't touch.

Welcome to Scotty's soviet republic of 1974, where sound economics and expertise are considered politically incorrect. What's next? A factory to build Morrison's Moscovitch automobiles? The Prime Minister's hand-picked chair of the Energy Security Board says the gas-fired project does not stack up because it's expensive power. This nation demands leadership, and that means an acknowledgement that Australia's energy future is in renewable energy production and storage like Tasmania will provide.

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