Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

Prime Minister Albanese made several promises in the lead-up to the last election. One of course was the infamous promise to reduce household power bills by $275 during their first term. Fast-forward 18 months and today we are a country in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Instead of power prices going down, families are paying some of the highest prices in the developed world. Small businesses are being asked to do more with less and brought to their knees by the cost of energy. Eighteen months on and Labor's promise of cheaper power bills is in tatters, but on this side we have always known that this was an empty promise because misrepresentation and deception were at the very heart of this promise. Labor has always maintained that a balance of technologies isn't needed because renewables alone will deliver the cheapest energy for Australian businesses and households.

But this position by the minister and by the government is founded principally on one document: the CSIRO's GenCost report. This report evaluates the levelled cost of electricity for different energy-generating technologies. An independent analysis has exposed significant flaws in the way Labor is representing its claim to Australians. This is not what some may call a 'slip of the pen' error. Labor has deliberately excluded $60 billion of integration costs from its renewable energy calculations. This includes in excess of 10,000 kilometres of transmission lines that will be required; 15 gigawatts of storage capacity; Snowy hydro 2.0; and Tasmania's Battery of the Nation project. Tasmania, of course, has less than one per cent of Australia's land mass. However, we receive 9½ per cent of Australia's rainfall and we have 26½ per cent of Australia's fresh water in storage across 54 hydro dams. That's 54 hydro dams turning 30 power stations, some of which are more than 100 years old. These 30 power stations are producing around 9,000 gigawatt hours of clean electricity from hydro power created in Tasmania. That's enough to power 900,000 Australian homes and small businesses.

On this side, we firmly believe that in order to achieve our net zero target an all-of-the-above approach is needed—in fact, it is absolutely mandatory—where a mix of technologies is investigated rather than Labor's single-minded, ideological solution. We are led by economics on this side, and by engineering and science—not by bubbles and deception. I therefore call on this minister to reveal the true cost of Labor's energy transition plan and to admit to Australians—to look down the camera and tell them—that this can only be the result if every single household and business pays more for their electricity.

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