Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just again remind those opposite that AUKUS nuclear powered submarines don't power your house. If you can't figure that out, you probably should wander back up to the back bench where you belong. You almost make your predecessor look intelligent. But I'll say this: when it comes to talking about the $275, they forget the second part: by 2025.

I'll give you a great little reminder of 10 years of neglect, delay and dithering. They had 22 energy policies and couldn't deliver one. This was a government that was in power for 10 years and couldn't deliver a pizza, let alone a simple energy policy. I'll go back to their first Prime Minister in the first part of the mess—a bloke by the name of Tony Abbott. You remember Tony Abbott; you voted for him. He was a champion. He stood up and said in 2013 that they were going to deliver a $550 cut to power prices. That was Tony Abbott. We all remember him—speedos and eating onions. But what did they deliver? He also said in 2014, when he was the minister for women—because they couldn't find a woman to be a minister for women, so they got him to do it, because old Tones is the most sensitive new-age guy you could think of—that cutting household power prices under their failed policy—No. 6, I think it was, on 22 December, so here's a Christmas present for all the women in Australia—would benefit women. He said women would benefit from their $550 power price decrease. But guess what? Like everything else, it was never delivered. Then on 17 August 2015—those over there like to talk about fact checks, so please go and check the date—there's sloppy Joe Hockey standing there with a big 'wrong'—no $550. But you never, ever hear them apologise. You never hear them say: 'Oh, we got it wrong. We made a blue—22 policies and we couldn't deliver anything. All we did was drive prices up.'

So it was left to us, when we came into government, to address this problem, and that's what we've been doing. Every single indicator has shown our intervention in the market is bringing prices down. Wholesale prices have come down, and retail prices have come down. You can even read people like Clare Savage. I know it's probably hard for you to read a full sentence, but she estimated that an increase between 35 and 50 per cent would be the number announced today if the government had not brought things down. It's all about what we're doing. Repowering the nation is about making sure that when power leaves the power station it gets to your house. Investing in clean, green energy is nothing short of just delivering cheaper power—reliable power that is not going to impact on the economy.

We all remember the time when they sat there—the frontbench—all nibbling on a piece of coal because that's all they could think of. They thought it was great fun. They made fun of the workers in the coal industry who are suffering with black lung. They thought it was funny to sit there and say, 'There's nothing wrong with coal.' They forget these things, but memory on our side is very strong. We know what we went through with nine years of mistakes, nine years of failure and nine years of neglect. This government came in with one single thing to do: fix up the mess that was delivered. We know what they did. Angus Taylor, the member for Hume—sorry, the shadowy Treasurer—was the one who deliberately and knowingly hid price rise increases from the Australian public—price rises that were coming, but they hid them until after the election because they didn't want Australians to know how much the price rises were. But we're fixing that mess. We're continuing to fix the mess that they've created, and we're continuing to clean the country.

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