Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw. The Energy Regulator chair herself said,

… it's really good to see that all governments have intervened in both coal and gas markets and that has brought down the price expectations in the system, …

Dr Steven Kennedy, the Treasury secretary, has said that the intervention has reduced inflation by reducing power prices directly and clearly. And, perhaps most clearly of all, the governor of the Reserve Bank said, 'The regulation in the energy market has had a direct impact on electricity prices over the next year.' 'A direct impact on electricity prices' is what the governor said.

There has been another response—maybe not so much from an expert, but from the member for Fairfax. He has had something to say. He was interviewed on Sky News, and it was a rather difficult interview for the member for Fairfax on Sky News. He gets the tough questions: he was asked about the impact, and he conceded that energy prices were down. But he had a causality problem; he said, 'There's no evidence that the intervention itself was the thing that got prices down.' So he conceded that prices were down but he denied that—

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