Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

This bill is a con. What Australians were promised 97 times was that they would have lower power bills; $275 lower was what they were promised. But what the government has now brought forward, after more than six months of dithering and delay, is a bill that does not deliver on its promise. On its face, even if you take at face value what this bill claims to deliver, all it will do is mean that the big price increases in gas and electricity, which the government itself has projected in its budget papers—44 per cent increase in gas prices, 56 per cent increase in electricity prices—will be slightly less big. That's it. They promised—they took to the Australian people a promise—that power prices would go down. They put a specific number on it. They repeated it 97 times.

And now they bring forward a bill which doesn't say that power prices are going down. It doesn't say that power prices are going down at all. If you take it at face value, all it does is to say that the very big increases in power prices which this government has projected in its budget might be slightly less big. They promised $275 down, and now they say: 'Great news, Australian people. It's not going down; it's going up. But celebrate, rejoice, because it's going up by slightly less than the unbelievably big increase it would have gone up by otherwise, according to our own budget papers.' That is the great plan from this government.

But of course, embedded within this is a price cap mechanism which would win the Jim Cairns award for best economic policy—Jim Cairns, Treasurer in the Whitlam government. This is Whitlamite economics. It will harm investment. It will constrain supply. It will mean, over time, therefore, higher prices and lower supply. That is the great risk of what is being done here. Even if we take the government at face value, even if we assume that they genuinely want to deliver an outcome, the big problem here is that the policy tool, the policy mechanism, they are using is one that will have the opposite impact of what it is they want to achieve, because these measures, which will deter investment and raise concerns about sovereign risk, will mean, in the future, lower supply and, therefore, higher prices. The economics of this are very, very clear.

Of course, concerns about this are only compounded by the truly appalling process that has been used, with a bill—that, in its final form, was released to the opposition at 8.45 last night—being rammed through this House and a vote to be called on at midday. This is entirely at odds with good public policy making.

I saw the Minister for Industry and Science trying to draw an analogy with the news media bargaining code—a very successful piece of policy delivered by the previous government. But let me remind the House what exactly happened and the process we went through. We commissioned a detailed report from the ACCC, the digital platforms review. We accepted the recommendations at the end of 2019. We announced in 2020 that it would be a mandatory code. We released a detailed exposure draft in the second half of 2020. There was a parliamentary committee over the summer of 2020-21. And, only after that detailed and good process, legislation was introduced on 9 December 2020, and we had the parliamentary debate in February 2021, only after going through a proper process: an exposure draft; a bill introduced; a parliamentary committee. That is the way that a responsible government deals with significant interventions in the market. It is precisely the opposite of what this ramshackle mess of a government is doing today.

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