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

Context counts, and at the moment, throughout Australia, we are hearing three key concerns about the government's energy plan. No. 1 is prices. We know that households as well as businesses and industries as a whole are struggling due to skyrocketing prices. No. 2 is reliability in the grid, both in the short term due to the lack of gas and in the medium to long term because of the premature closure of baseload power stations. And the No. 3 concern is that the Labor government lack a social licence to roll out renewables at the speed and scale they plan to. Their plan includes 28,000 kilometres of new transmission lines; 22,000 solar panels every single day up to 2030; and 40 new wind turbines a month also through to 2030. The social licence is not there.

But as much as context counts, so too does history. History says that this story at the moment is a story between a decade of delivery and six months of motherhood statements. In that decade of delivery, if you look at the last term of government alone under the coalition, we saw prices come down by eight per cent for Australian households. We saw prices come down for businesses by 10 per cent, and for industry by 12 per cent. Yet, since Labor has come to office, we all know what has happened to power prices. They have only increased. This is despite every single member opposite on the government benches telling the Australian people—promising them—that they would deliver a reduction in power prices to households.

See this speech in context