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

I thank the terrific member for Reid for her question. It was great to visit her electorate last week to talk about energy bill relief. As the honourable member knows, last week we saw the final default market offer announced, and that showed Ausgrid customers—for the member for Reid—small business bills falling by eight per cent and residential bills falling by up to 2.6 per cent. There's a lot more to do, we recognise, but that was a good step forward.

Of course, default market offers don't always go down; they sometimes got up, and the weekend was the second anniversary of the member for Hume hiding a 20 per cent increase in the default market offer.

We are also delivering $300 in bill relief to every single Australian who gets an electricity bill—no forms to fill out, no application, delivered directly to Australian households—and working in concert with state schemes including those of Queensland and Western Australia.

The honourable member also asked me: what policies would lead to higher electricity prices that the government has rejected? We also last week saw the release of a report which confirmed what policies would put energy prices up. That was a report by the CSIRO and AEMO called GenCost, which showed yet again that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, and nuclear is the most expensive form of energy.

It's a controversial point—not everyone agrees. Those opposite were falling over themselves to discredit the CSIRO. I won't have time to run through all those members opposite, and I may or may not get other opportunities during the week but, to be fair, I'll start with the most eloquent member of the opposition, who really crystallised the opposition's concerns about the CSIRO. The House, obviously, will not be surprised to know it was the member for New England. And his criticism was that the CSIRO is Australian. He said: 'The CSIRO is, of course, an Australian organisation. It's like getting Mongolia to write a report on tropical rainforests. They don't have them. We don't have nuclear power in Australia—so we do have a nuclear reactor, in fact. We've got one smack, bang in the middle of Sydney. No-one in Sydney seems to worry about it much, but the CSIRO if it is.' So that clears that up! It's very good to know.

The member for Fairfax, not to be outdone, said, 'No, GenCost is about the cost of building and not about the cost of energy.' Under 'Tedonomics', if it's expensive to build, it's okay—it's cheap to run. I'm glad he's not in charge of housing policy, because we'd be building multimillion-dollar mansions with cheap rent. That would be his policy! It doesn't matter how much it costs to build, they're just cheap to run! Then Senator Hume said, 'Well, I haven't seen GenCost, but I know it doesn't cost opposition policy.' I'll give her that, because we haven't seen opposition policy. The previous government was all announcement, no delivery. These guys can't even get to an announcement! The policy is dead before they even announce it. (Time expired)

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