Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 28 January this year, constituents in a number of suburbs in my electorate experienced power outages on a day when the maximum temperature soared past 40 degrees and the minimum barely fell below 30. It sucked. It was uncomfortable, and it was dangerous for the elderly and the vulnerable in our community who are exposed to heat stress. I was angry and frustrated on behalf of my constituents. The cause of these outages was substation fuse faults in the local distribution network operated by private companies. I share Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews' frustration and his view that those outages were unacceptable and that those responsible should be held accountable. I was even angrier, though, to see insult added to injury when opportunistic conservative members of parliament started a cascade of patently false statements suggesting that these outages were a result of a lack of generation supply created by the Victorian state government.

As the Australian Energy Market Operator made clear on that day, while Victoria did experience its highest operational demand ever on the night of 28 January, the system still had 1,384 megawatts in reserve. Despite this, the Liberal opposition leader, Matthew Guy, tweeted:

Power out? 40,000 homes are now without power in 37 degree heat. Daniel Andrews Labor allowed a power station to close just to get Green preferences - politics over policy ...

Politics over policy indeed! Matthew Guy knows that 50 Hazelwoods wouldn't have made a difference to the outages that my constituents experienced on that day. Why did he make this knowingly false statement to the Victorian public and why did Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce back it up, even after the state government regulators and energy companies had all publicly made the cause of these outages clear? Conservatives have become used to misleading themselves and each other in the climate change debate and are now taking the same ideologically impervious approach to network regulation. Blind ideology won't help you run your electricity network. If conservatives can't even tell the difference between generation infrastructure and distribution infrastructure, how could they ever deliver network security, let alone lower prices and emissions? If they do know the difference and are deliberately misleading the public, how could anyone trust them to take anything but the most politically opportunistic response?

Labor know that energy policy is serious business with serious consequences. We know that the National Electricity Market is not working for Australian consumers. A Labor government will implement a plan to modernise Australia's electricity system that puts households and other energy users ahead of the big power companies and that puts downward pressure on prices and carbon emissions, and we'll be up-front and honest with the Australian public while we do it.