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

I thank my honourable friend the fantastic member for Swan for her question. As the member knows, this government is providing energy bill relief in a couple of ways. There's direct relief, which was in the last budget, which is already flowing to Australian households—anybody who has an energy bill. Of course that comes at a cost of around $5 billion, which was included in the $315 billion of spending that the shadow finance minister said yesterday she was against. That gives us a pretty good idea about what the opposition thinks about direct relief for Australian households.

In addition we have a plan to see the cheapest form of energy, renewables, backed up by transmission, backed up by gas peaking for reliability and backed up by batteries. Last week when I was in Gippsland, I was able to announce a big step forward for batteries in Australia when I announced the support, through the Capacity Investment Scheme, for six big batteries across South Australia and Victoria, including in Gippsland, which will support four hours of storage for a million houses across Victoria and South Australia.

Of course we were also in Perth, where we announced that the Western Australian Capacity Investment Scheme has been massively oversubscribed, which shows a strong pipeline of batteries in Western Australia, which builds on what's already happening. The Prime Minister and I saw this firsthand when we spent Father's Day together down in Collie seeing the progress that's already been made: two big batteries under construction, one of which is enough for 20 per cent of the energy needs of south-west Western Australia—just one battery. This is what's happening today. These batteries, the ones that are supported under the Capacity Investment Scheme, will be open by 2027 and the two Collie batteries will be open by 2025—not 2035, not 2050 but 2025.

There are alternative plans for Collie, which the Prime Minister and I also heard about—the first Prime Minister to visit Collie in 40 years, and the only candidate for Prime Minister in the upcoming election to visit Collie this term. We heard about the opposition's alternative plan as well. We don't know when it will happen. The member for Fairfax said, 'That'll be one of the early ones,' and Western Australian Senator Cash said, 'It'll be one of the late ones, around 2050.' So there are no details from the opposition.

We also know that the opposition has said that they won't use any more water than the existing coal-fired power stations already use.

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