Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back on 1 February, the Prime Minister stood up in the National Press Club and he said that energy would be the defining debate in this parliament. Well, it has been the defining debate, although, probably not quite in the way that Mr Turnbull might have hoped because it is, in fact, the debate around energy that has completely and, I suspect, fatally defined Mr Turnbull. It's defined him as a leader who has completely lost control of his party and is unable to act on rational policy advice, whether it is received from academics, from our professional scientists or from the business community. Mr Turnbull is paralysed in relation to the energy debate because he is beholden to the people in his party who are determined to act against all rationality. They are determined to continue to insist that the future of energy in this country lies in coal, when, in fact, what everybody tells us is that all that is required is a certain investment framework and industry will do the rest. But a policy that will do that, like the clean energy target that was proposed by Mr Finkel and that was until very recently endorsed by the Minister for Energy, can't stand up because in the coalition party room people have the gravity-defying belief that our future lies in new coal-fired power generation.

There hasn't been much action this year—no action on energy, despite the fact that this is a crisis that's engulfing business and it's engulfing households. What we have had are a lot of reports. We've had reports from the AEMC, we've had reports from AEMO and we've had a report from Mr Finkel. And today, of course, we had a report from the ACCC. Well, I've looked carefully at that report today and I'll tell you what it does contain: it contains a lot of stories about the impact that rising prices are having on businesses. Today, we asked the minister about BlueScope. The report says that BlueScope has achieved $300 million in cost savings across their Australian steel operations in the last couple of years, and that's an extraordinary result. But, despite that, they are faced with a near doubling of their electricity costs since 2016.

Now, all of the bluster in the world can't sheet that home to Labor. Last time I looked, in 2016 the coalition was in power. Companies like BlueScope are faced with a genuine crisis in the cost inputs to their businesses. What you also won't find in that report is the assertion made again and again by Senator Brandis that the drivers of these cost increases are environmental costs, because that's not what the report says at all. The report says that the drivers of these costs are network costs. It actually found that in terms of the entire cost of electricity, environmental related costs make up only seven per cent of the cost that people are paying. And, in that context, this argument that if we could only get rid of our environmental commitments we'd have cheap electricity is ludicrous. The key components of the cost increases have not been associated with environmental schemes.

We'd do much better, in fact, to rely on Mr Frydenberg, the Minister for the Environment and Energy—plagued of course by being constantly undermined by the hardliners in the coalition. Fairly recently, Mr Frydenberg made a presentation to the coalition party room and he indicated that he endorsed the Finkel review's conclusions that there would be a 10 per cent saving for households against business as usual if we implemented a clean energy target. He provided the other conclusion that Finkel came up with through his modelling, which was that there would be a 16 per cent reduction in costs against business as usual for business if we implemented a clean energy target.

The truth is that everybody in industry knows this to be true. All that is required is some policy certainty, a policy that links together our objectives around energy, our objectives around environment and our objectives around competition in that market. But we have been waiting for four years. This government is in its fifth year; there has been no action and it is principally because the Prime Minister has his hands tied behind his back. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.