Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the answers by Senator Brandis to the questions from Senator Moore and Senator Carr during question time today. Senator Seselja has got on that familiar high horse and is attempting to kick South Australia, but people really need to understand the situation in South Australia. In 1997, it was the Liberal Premier John Olsen who went to an election promising not to privatise the Electricity Trust of South Australia. He promised. He got elected, and in 1998 he privatised it. Straight in, breaking his election promise to the South Australian people, he privatised the Electricity Trust of South Australia. With 20-20 hindsight, we know it was an incredibly dud deal. To get the highest price he possibly could, he rejected Riverlink, which would have connected South Australia with New South Wales. He rejected that for short-term financial gain for his Liberal government, and that has cost South Australians $1 billion to $2 billion in increased prices. That's the reality of the situation in South Australia. The South Australian Liberal government promised not to privatise and then privatised and sold us a dud into the future, guaranteeing that the new owners would roll in cash and that we weren't properly connected to the National Electricity Market. Those are the actual facts of the matter.

There was a one-in-50-years storm which knocked over kilometres of lines and pylons and caused a lot of blackouts in South Australia. But what happened? What happened is that the National Electricity Market encourages major operators to sit out of the market so the price goes from $30 or $50 a megawatt-hour to $10,000. I can prove this. Snowy Hydro, the only supplier in the nation that has been fined by the regulator for sitting out of the market or failing to follow the instruction of the regulator, was fined $400,000 for breaching the rules. And guess what? It's owned by the federal government, the New South Wales government and the Victorian government. And it's quite clear: in its original statement of claim, the regulator stated Snowy Hydro deliberately ignored dispatch instructions so it could take advantage of an unforeseen and unforecast increase in demand. That's the electricity market that we have.

When there is a demand like was occasioned by this storm in South Australia, does the regulator come in and put everybody on the board? There are allegations that a gas power station in South Australia deliberately waited until there was a blackout so it could make more money. This is the market we have got. It's not about wind. It's not about solar. It's about a broken electricity market which encourages major operators to sit out of the market until there's an unforeseen event or an unforeseen demand and the price goes from $30 a megawatt-hour or $50 a megawatt-hour to $10,000. That great icon of Australia, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, sitting up there paid for by generations of taxpayers, works at 14 per cent of capacity. It has turbines that can connect to the grid in 90 seconds. Are they doing that on a regular basis? No, they're sitting there waiting for a spike in demand caused by an unfortunate event like a weather outage or a seasonal demand of electricity for air conditioning. They're not contributing in an even flow. Fourteen per cent of capacity—check their annual report. To add insult to injury, an entity owned by the federal government, New South Wales government and the Victorian government has been fined for not following the regulator's requirements.

So it's not fair for Senator Brandis to come in here and say: 'The South Australian government made wrong decisions about wind and solar. The South Australian government has made the wrong decisions about clean energy.' Have a look at the real problem: there is generating capacity in Australia that is not contributing on an even basis. You sit out of the market until there's an event and you profit as much as you can. And the Liberals brought it in. (Time expired)