Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Power prices are going up and it's no coincidence that it is happening at the same time as the companies that run our electricity network, generate our electricity and sell it to us are making monster profits. According to the ABS, power bills went up 12.4 per cent from December 2016 to December 2017. It's no coincidence that the biggest power company in the country made a profit of $622 million for the six months ended 31 December 2017, an increase of 91 percent on the prior corresponding period.

We have taken a public good, electricity—which was built by the public and should be there as a basic public service—and we've handed it over to big companies, who are making monster profits and, as a result, consumers are getting fleeced. People are being conned. As big power companies make these monster profits it comes at the expense of not only higher power bills; in my state of Victoria, 30,000 Victorian households had their electricity switched off. How is it that a power company can make $622 million in six months while thousands of people had their power disconnected for not being able to afford to heat their homes in winter? Then there are the companies that own the poles and wires that distribute the electricity to us across the country. One of those companies, registered in the Cayman Islands, made $27½ billion profit over four years. That's 'billion' with a 'b'.

Why is this happening? I'll tell you why it's happening. It's happening because, over decades, Liberal and Labor have turned electricity from a public good into a market, and when you turn an essential service into a market and introduce the profit motive, people get fleeced. It's not as though you have a choice as to which sets of poles and wires you are going to use. It's not as though there is any difference between electrons as they flow down and power your home. It's the same product. When we allow big companies to make money out of ordinary people, ordinary people will suffer.

The Greens are standing up to privatisation. Earlier this month, we announced a policy to start bringing the grid back into public hands, to be run in the public interest. Last year, we called for the re-regulation of retail prices, where the price would rise with average wage growth. It is time to stand up to the big companies—and to Labor and Liberal who are backing them—and start to re-regulate electricity prices and start treating electricity as a public good again.

The Adani-Carmichael mine environmental impact statement says that it will produce over 200 million tonnes of CO2 over the 60-year life of the mine. That's from the gases that escape during the mining process and from the emissions created from mining and transporting the coal alone. According to Greenpeace, burning this coal will generate around 130 million tonnes of CO2 every year, equivalent to about one quarter of Australia's total emissions. But we know this. We know this about the Adani mine, too: it's a climate disaster and it will destroy the Great Barrier Reef. Even as the environment minister was forced to admit the other day, climate change is the biggest threat to the reef. Also, the Adani mine will not employ the tens of thousands of people that are referred to; it will employ 1,464, according to Adani's own figures. Why? Adani says that they want to automate it from pit to port. So the question is: if you seriously believe in climate change, how can you possibly back Adani? You can't say. 'I love to eat healthy food,' and then stuff yourself full of fairy floss. You have a choice: either the reef or Adani? We can't have both. Either a safe climate or Adani? We cannot have both. We have to stop Adani.

There's one way that Adani could be stopped now. We could have a Prime Minister and a government that had the courage to override a rogue Labor state government. But we know that the Liberals are beholden to the coal industry. What could we do instead? We could do what happened during the Franklin Dam campaign and hear a Labor opposition stand up once and for all and say, 'We will not allow the Adani mine to go ahead.' If Labor stood up now from the opposition benches and said that, the project would be killed stone-dead. But, so far, Labor has failed this test and is attempting to have a bet each way.

People will soon be able to pass judgement on that, because in Batman people have a choice. People have a choice between a party that has led the campaign in this parliament against this ticking climate time bomb and a party that is trying to have a bet both ways. Labor, it is time to get off the fence. Voting for the Greens and Alex Bhathal in the seat of Batman is the best way to send a message and stop the Adani coalmine.