Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Some half a million Victorian families and businesses will see their electricity bills rise from July. Yearly household bills will rise from $1,400 to over $1,800, and yearly small-business bills will jump from $5,600 to over $7,300 a year. Why did the Prime Minister break his promise that energy prices would fall by $275, and why do Australian families always pay more under Labor?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question, and I note that the energy regulator Clare Savage has released the information. A year ago there was an increase scheduled, as well, but was happened was that there was a special regulation introduced by the then minister for energy to stop there being transparency, to stop the information being out there.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Why did that occur?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm asked through an interjection why that would occur. It occurred because an election was coming up. Those opposite, who were then the government, chose to hide from the Australian people what was occurring. That's very different from what this government's approach has been, which is to be transparent and to acknowledge the issues relating to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that supply chains have had.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Where's the $275 saving?

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Deakin will cease interjecting.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The shadow finance minister acknowledged that on 8 March, but those opposite come in here and pretend that they didn't know anything about that. Here's what Clare Savage, the Chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, had to say on 15 March: we have seen 'unprecedented volatility in wholesale electricity markets' over the last couple of years. We have had very high coal and gas prices as a result of the war in Ukraine and the recovery from the pandemic. We've also seen a number of outages, in particular at our old coal plants. Of course, we know that's related, as well, to some of the natural disasters that were occurring.

The fact is that the proposed increase to the default market offer is much, much lower than it would otherwise have been, because of the government intervention. Here's what the Australian Energy Regulator had to say:

Forward contract prices for 2023-24 have fallen substantially since governments began discussing possible interventions in gas and coal markets in October 2022 …

They're the facts of the matter of what has occurred.

The fact is also that, when that intervention did occur to put a price cap on gas, when the New South Wales Liberal government intervened to put a price cap on coal and when the Queensland government regulated to put a price cap on coal, we voted for that; they voted against that. Then, when we had $1½ billion of energy price relief, we were for the energy price relief; they were for higher prices. (Time expired)