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

I thank the honourable member for his question. It's the last sitting week of this year, and the honourable member just rustled up his fourth question to me all year, so congratulations! It took you all year to get four questions, which is a great achievement! If the Treasurer's worried about productivity, he may want to have a look at the member for Fairfax!

The member for Fairfax asked me about the Capacity Investment Scheme, which is a very important scheme to ensure that we are getting reliable energy into the system, and it works as an auction. It is quite common practice in governments of all levels, when you are conducting an auction, to say that it is commercial in confidence, and that makes sense. That's why the New South Wales—

That's why the New South Wales Liberal government, when they introduced their equivalent scheme, kept the cost commercial in confidence. That's the way it works in Western Australia. We hear from the member for Hume. It's a concept he might be familiar with because, when he announced the UNGI scheme, underwriting new generation investments—which would have been better called 'unfortunately, no generation involved'; actually there was not one watt—he said, when he was asked, 'These discussions are commercial in confidence, and I'm not going to go into the details of them here and now.'

My old friend the former member for Flinders, Greg Hunt, when he was bringing down the Emissions Reduction Fund—remember that, Direct Action—one of the 26 failed energy policies he was asked to cost, said:

… the Clean Energy Regulator could run tender rounds to select eligible offers on a lowest-cost priority basis up to a benchmark price. This benchmark would be commercial-in-confidence to encourage businesses to submit their lowest price.

There's an even bigger example. The member for Cook—I'm not sure in which capacity the member for Cook was speaking on this occasion—

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