Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for McEwen for moving this motion which acknowledges that Australians are experiencing a devastating cost-of-living crisis. While acknowledging the positive impact of the recent stage 3 tax cuts, I do want to speak to the other major driver of cost-of-living stress in my community.

Every day, members of the Kooyong community tell me that they are struggling with the cost of electricity and gas. They don't understand why the price of these necessities has increased so much and they ask me, 'What can we do to fix this?' I tell them this: Australians are paying too much for gas and electricity because of policy failures in our energy market. I tell my constituents that the wholesale price of electricity in Australia is three times less than what it was two years ago, because of increased rooftop solar and large-scale renewables, but that the retailers who are selling us this electricity are still increasing prices. They're doing that because we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on supporting ageing, unreliable coal-fuelled power stations. But then we're being slugged with huge prices during unplanned outages of those coal mines. This is because the spot price of electricity is set by the most expensive type of electricity needed to meet demand in the national electricity market, not the cheapest.

Gas is the most expensive form of electricity generation, and it is often the price setter. That drives up our power bills, massively. When we revert from renewables to power generated from coal or gas we can pay as much as 500 times more for the same electricity. Only 4.8 per cent of Australia's electricity comes from gas, but that electricity is so expensive that it drives our bills up and up and up. Australia is the world's second-largest exporter of coal and the fifth-largest exporter of gas. We do not have a shortage of gas. We use only 4.2 per cent of our gas production domestically, but Western Australia is the only state with a domestic gas reservation policy. So while the good people of WA enjoy the cheapest gas in the world, more than 80 per cent of the gas from the eastern seaboard of Australia is sold overseas by multinational companies. We pay more for that gas than the people who buy it overseas. Largely foreign owned companies are making windfall profits whilst price-gouging Australian customers for our own gas. This is a policy failure.

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