Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by Senators O’Neill and Carr today relating to the final report of the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market.

I want to make some opening remarks and then will go to the detail of the questions that I asked, but I think I would have to characterise the senator's responses today as the sound of silence, an attempt to try to shut down debate to try to get out of this space as quickly as possible. They were the shortest answers that I can recall for a very long time. Matters of energy for Australia are not the focus of this government. They are focused entirely on themselves and they do not want Australians to pay attention. They do not want anybody to know that they are out of control and they are certainly not doing anything good for the electricity prices of Australians in business and in their residential properties across this country.

Indeed, they must be completely out of touch with reality. Have any of them over there paid an electricity bill recently? The fact is that, as every Australian knows—and people listening to this would absolutely be able to verify this from their own experience—power prices have doubled in the four years of this government. They have been going through the roof while this government has been on watch. Sadly, I can all too well remember the campaign where this government said that they were going to fix everybody's electricity prices. They were going to change the taxation of the country, and everybody would get $550 back. That is silence there. We are still waiting. Cheques must be in the mail, because Australians across this nation have not got any respite from increasing electricity prices.

While they have been doing this terrible job engaging in a paralysis of policy on the nature of energy in Australia, in addition to their policy failure they have absolutely deliberately gone out to target very vulnerable people with the cost of energy, most recently cutting the energy supplement of $360 per year so that any new person who goes on a pension is not going to get that. So here we are. They stand there and say: 'Oh, we've got it all in control. We will take decisive action.' That is the claim that Malcolm Turnbull is making. The decisive action we are seeing is action of no benefit to the Australian population; in fact, it is action that is devastating people's experiences of access to energy for their businesses and for their homes.

This week we saw the Finkel report come out, and this was supposed to be the line in the sand, the moment when we were actually able to start to see some redress of this policy vacuum that they have generated. With the arrival of the Finkel report, instead we have seen the chaos emerging at an extraordinary level within the government ranks. The Energy Council and other experts are all on the record as saying the greatest cause of increasing prices and threats to supply of electricity in Australia right now is policy paralysis. Indeed, the day before yesterday in their party room I understand Minister Frydenberg even admitted that that is the case.

My three questions today were to Senator Brandis. He did not answer any of them. When the Business Council of Australia, usually a pretty good friend, says:

Australia hasn't a moment to lose now that we have a comprehensive, independent blueprint to restore the security, reliability and affordability of our electricity system.

the decisive action and the fulsome report that we got from the Leader of the Government in the Senate was, I think, one or two words and a quick sit down. That was it. That was their version of decisive action. It was the shortest response that I have ever seen from the Attorney-General.

Then we had the question about Mark Collette, who said:

Doing nothing means higher prices and less reliable energy for all customers.

He could not answer a question about why the government cannot actually respond to this call from the energy sector itself. The head of Energy Australia is saying, 'It's time to sort it out, guys,' and the reason we did not get an answer is that the truth is this government is so internally divided, so out of touch that they are unable to have a conversation.