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

By $275—a dollar figure that the government now refuse to come to the dispatch box and even talk about, because they know the truth: since coming to office not only have they failed to make any march towards that promise, but their budget revealed the fact that prices will continue to go up—over 50 per cent for electricity, over 40 per cent for gas.

You could argue, and I wouldn't blame people if they did argue it, that this is a new government and maybe they're just on their L-plates—L for Labor, L for learner—and they're struggling. However, if you go back further in history and look at the former Labor government it's the exact same story. Under the former Labor government, prices went up by over 100 per cent. Labor is back, and so are the high prices, and it should come as no surprise. So yes, context counts; yes, history counts. But so do today and tomorrow count, and they count the most. And as of today, we know that regardless of what colour political stripe the MPs in this place have, each of us has constituents that right now are in an enormous amount of pain. It doesn't matter if their MP is a Labor MP, a Green, a crossbencher or from the coalition: we have senior citizens who are struggling to pay their bills right now. Today, how many families are opening up that power bill and asking: 'How are we going to handle Christmas coming up? How can we pay for the kids' education next year?' Power bills are going up.

We also know that businesses are threatening to close. The Australian Workers Union say that up to 800,000 workers might lose their jobs—800,000. That's the AWU saying that; it's not the coalition saying that. Everybody in this place should be very concerned about where power prices are going. Yet this government has no plan—no plan at all—to address this. Now, they did have a plan, and that plan was called Powering Australia. What's happened to Powering Australia? Why is it that Labor are no longer talking about Powering Australia? I'll tell you why: because Powering Australia was based on economic modelling that has now been disproven. Who has disproven the economic modelling behind Labor's plan? Has it been the coalition? Industry? Has it been right-wing think tanks? No; it was the government's own budget. The government's own budget has proven that their policy is wrong, that the economic modelling is wrong.

The economic modelling of those opposite on the government benches said power prices would come down. Their own budget: Treasury says power prices are going up, not down. If that's not enough, how about the responsible department? Two weeks ago, with the budget—just last weekend—the very department responsible for climate change and energy removed the Powering Australia policy document from its website. So, not only is Treasury disassociating itself from this government's modelling and Powering Australia plan but the very department responsible for implementing it is now disassociating itself. It, too, does not believe anything that's come from this Labor government. When you have your own department leaving you, when you have Treasury leaving you, you know you have a problem, and the problem is that you just don't have a plan.

If you look at the reason the Prime Minister gave to the Australian Financial Review for not attending COP in Egypt, it was that he wasn't going to attend COP because it was merely about implementation—as if that pesky, annoying thing about having an implementation plan doesn't actually count. This is the Achilles heel of the Labor Party, of this government. They're big on the grant stuff. Give them a vision statement; they love it. Give them a mission statement; they love it. Give them motherhood statements; they love it. But they cannot deliver an implementation plans. And if you lack an implementation plan you have nothing to guide you other than that big visionary statement, and this is the problem.

It is only human nature: when you lack a plan, what do you fall back on? Your natural instinct. And we've seen that Labor's natural instinct is to demonise gas. We've seen it from the very beginning, with the now minister using crude expressions like 'BS', calling the coalition's plan to have more gas infrastructure a 'fraud'. This government ripped over $50 million from infrastructure for gas in their budget. At a time when the rest of Australia is saying, 'We need more supply in the market,' this government rips out infrastructure funding to ensure we can have that supply facilitated and transported across the country. This is the same government that went to the Australian people and said that renewables are the enemy of gas. Whenever we talk about gas, what do they talk about? It's renewables. In the game we heard in Senate estimates, the officials of the department talk about the fact that gas is a partner for the intermittency of renewables, yet government will argue that gas is the enemy, which is why they're ripping money out of gas. It's why they are not backing Cooper and they're not backing the Beetaloo basin. It's an absolute disgrace.

This is the same government, by the way, which is now saying, 'Well, maybe we do need more supply of gas in the market. 'They took gas out of the capacity mechanism. The minister stood at a press conference and made it very clear that the capacity mechanism, which was basically an insurance plan to ensure we had backup, should not include technologies such as gas. They are doing everything to demonise gas. The Kurri Kurri plant was meant to be gas. This government promised it would be 30 per cent hydrogen by day one. How is that going? Guess how much hydrogen will be there on day one of Kurri Kurri. Zero—not one percentage point. Of course, Paul Broad, who was CEO of Snowy Hydro, told the ministers this. He lost his job because he was straight with his advice. The budget vindicated this, because the government had no money to transfer it to hydrogen. Again, it is flawed, they have no plan and each and every member of the government is culpable in this distruth.

Government members interjecting—

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