Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Today is the day that the Labor Party's climate change policy comes to fruition and into legislation. They took this policy to the Australian people, a policy that included not one but two key targets. The first target was a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. The second target was a reduction in household power bills of $275. It was based on this climate policy that the new government came to power, looking the Australian people in the eye and promising them that they would not only reduce emissions more than the former coalition government but also reduce power prices more than the coalition government—the coalition government, by the way, that achieved an extraordinary performance on both counts; a coalition government that saw emissions reduce by over 20 per cent on 2005 levels and a coalition that ensured that power prices came down by 10 per cent over the last term of government, with power prices coming down for both households and businesses. But the Labor Party went to the Australian people and they said to them, 'We can do better.' Not only did they promise to get emissions down further; they also promised that prices would come down further.

But, as we are here today, with the Labor Party celebrating the Greens-Labor legislation, the Albanese-Bandt government's legislation, we have households throughout this country who are opening up their power bills, and what do they see? Higher prices—prices that are going through the roof. There are probably business owners, people who have invested their own money into their businesses, listening to this very debate and hearing the celebrations of the Labor Party, despite having told them that they will reduce their power prices, but their power prices are going up. We are talking to businesses today that might have to close their doors because of the power prices. And this Labor government have no solutions—none whatsoever. The only thing they bring into the House by way of this legislation today is the claim of 43 per cent—something they had already advised the United Nations on. We had the minister himself standing up—he had gone public before showing this bill to the House—and saying that the bill was not necessary, and yet in it comes.

We saw over the last month, through the Senate inquiry, the very concerns that we had raised in this House being confirmed. The department, under the minister, had done no work on modelling the impact of this bill, especially on rural and regional communities. For any regional and rural community, any resident of regional or rural Australia, this government, this minister and his department have not done their homework.

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