Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to raise my concerns on behalf of the residents and businesses in the electorate of Hughes on the forecast increases in electricity prices in the coming months. The wholesale electricity prices are currently around $120 per megawatt hour. In the middle of last year, they were around $50 a megawatt hour, and it is the same in every other state. Industry simply cannot operate with electricity prices at this scale. Earlier this week, the CEO of Glencore warned:

We are beyond the tipping point in terms of industrial demand destruction.

He said:

Unless we make decisions really quickly, and I mean in the next 12 months, that re-establish base load capacity then we have no chance of sustaining the economy in the shape that it is in now.

For consumers, Delta Electricity have estimated that next financial year alone the additional price for consumers will be approximately $4 billion in New South Wales, $1 billion in South Australia, $2.8 billion in Victoria and $2 billion in Queensland. They said that these increases were a direct consequence of governments mandating and subsidising renewables by law, and the media and the education sector creating a renewables obsession as a populist cause. For those that have cheered on the Renewable Energy Target, we are about to reap what we have sown.