Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I suspect my answer on this would be the same as on other issues. The first point is on materiality. You have to be careful in suggesting that the entirety of an electricity price increase is as a result of the carbon price because self-evidently and demonstrably that is untrue. I have gone through that. Even Mr Turnbull and the opposition spokesperson have also recognised this, that the majority of price increases that people have experienced in the last few years have been as a result of network costs, not as a result of the carbon price.

The second point is that the government did assume that there would be costs passed through, that there would be an impact on the consumer price index of about 0.7 per cent. In fact, for food it was less. That has been factored into the Household Assistance Package. In response to Senator Birmingham, I went through the hundreds of thousands of South Australians who will get assistance under the government's clean energy future package, which is obviously relevant to the question the senator asks. If the senator does care about jobs, I would hope he recognises that under this government we have seen 810,000 jobs created. (Time expired)