Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

Who signs it? I'll get to that, Member for McEwen. He's stealing my lines! The member for McEwen is always at least one step ahead of me.

An opposition member interjecting

It doesn't say much for me; no, it doesn't! This regulation does two things. It literally changes two sentences in the act. It omits '1 May' and substitutes 'the first business day after 25 May'. What happened just before 25 May? What was happening then? A tiny thing called a federal election. It omits '56 days' and substitutes '30 days'. And who signed it? I think the member for McEwen knows. Who signed it? Angus Taylor, the member for Hume, the minister for energy. But, no, he didn't cause the delay! That is the level of respect that the coalition has for the Australian people. They hid the 19 per cent power price rise that was occurring under their watch.

This energy policy chaos on the other side has been occurring at the same time as Putin's illegal war in Ukraine. His illegal invasion in Ukraine is driving up gas and coal prices. So families and businesses, unfortunately, have been hit with a double whammy of Vladimir Putin and Angus Taylor, and it's an awful double whammy. In contrast, we're being upfront. We're producing strong measures to put rigour into energy policy and to attack energy prices to provide some certainty for investors. We're reforming the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism. We've put in place new heads of agreement, but, ultimately, the key to reducing pressure on power prices is increasing renewable energy in the grid. Everyone knows the cheapest form of new energy is renewable energy.

I've heard 'It's not' from the member for New England—the gift that keeps on giving. We'll drive the renewable energy into the grid through the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation fund, through $200 million for community batteries, through $100 million for community solar banks and through $62 million of energy efficiency grants from small and medium-sized enterprises. That is our policy—to drive renewable energy into the grid to put downward pressure on energy prices.

That's our policy. What's the policy of those opposite? They are the alternative government, and I'm hoping the opposition leader speaks about this tonight in his budget reply. I hope he's going to be honest with the Australian people. What's their one energy policy? Nuclear power.

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