Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I guess we could forgive members of the opposition. It's a Thursday afternoon. I guess we could forgive them for being simplistic creatures and getting hung up on this one little detail of what is a very comprehensive plan, because they are a group of politicians who don't realise that a comprehensive plan lasts for more than 10 weeks or for more than two days.

If they were worth their salt and had actually read the plan that Labor took to the last election and that we're now implementing—the Powering Australia plan—they would know that how we get to the money that Australians will get back on their power bills is by implementing the plan. We need to rewire the nation. We need to build more renewable energy. We need to build community batteries. We need to work with local and state governments, with ourselves and with industry. We need to work with all the community and business stakeholders that have come on board to back our plan to get our energy grid. We need to transition it to a grid that actually helps people power themselves. We are coming from a place of neglect where the previous government did nothing. In fact, they actually did worse than nothing. Environmental vandalism is what they did—the way in which they destroyed our energy security in this country. So I guess we should be a little bit forgiving of the fact that they are stuck on one sentence.

Australians, I can tell you, have a lot more faith in their government. They know it's going to take a lot of work to rebuild our grid. The previous government failed to do things like build the interconnector in Kerang in regional Victoria, which would allow all those renewable solar energy projects around Mildura and the north-west to be built—investment waiting to happen that didn't happen because of the previous government's complete inaction. Instead they were talking about the never-never of nuclear power. Instead they were talking about funding the building of coal-fired power stations. That's how out of date the previous government were.

We know and the Australian people know that through the action we've already taken and the work we've already started—building renewable energy projects that are in the pipeline and rewiring the grid—energy bills will be cheaper, and Australians will celebrate that day. But we're in a dark place right now because of the inability of the previous government to do anything. At the end of the day maybe it's because they are really upset about the results of the last election. It has been 10 weeks. They should know, because in 10 years they failed to do anything, that it actually takes more than 10 weeks to build an interconnector in Kerang. It takes more than 10 weeks to reverse the damage of a decade. That is the reality of where we're at. We will have cheaper bills. Maybe they've just played this hand a little bit too soon, because it has only been 10 weeks since the election.

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