Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bernardi for his question and for the continued focus in the chamber today on energy reliability and affordability. As I have emphasised a couple of times already today, and said a number of times over the course of the week, the government is taking action across the different elements of the energy market—generation, transmission or networks, and retailers—to make sure that across all areas we work to enhance reliability as well as affordability. We see this as being critically important. This is not just something we've been doing over the last few months or even the last 12 months or so but something that since we came to office we've been working across the board on energy prices, affordability and reliability.

Under our political opponents, it is correct that electricity prices rose by some 101 per cent. They doubled over the space of six years. Under our government, at the time when you were a member, Senator Bernardi, we saw energy prices record the largest fall on record, through the elimination of Labor's carbon tax, through other reforms to network regulation, and through steps that were taken around the Renewable Energy Target, including putting in place more realistic targets that were more in keeping with the original ambition. We are now working on looking to the future in terms of more secure generation frameworks. As we've indicated, that means keeping operating, existing generation facilities for as long as they are reasonably viable, as well as looking at what types of new, cheap, viable and affordable options can come online to provide for that dispatchable base load energy that AEMO recognises as being so important. That is where projects such as Snowy Hydro 2.0 come in, which can provide significant additional generational capacity at the time that it's needed in the market, and that will put prices down at those moments. (Time expired)