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

I can. Indeed, the report released today by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission—their preliminary report into retail electricity pricing—demonstrates very clearly that the largest impacts in terms of household and business energy bills, and the largest growth impact on those bills over the last decade, have been related to network costs. I am very pleased that shortly before question time this chamber passed the Turnbull government's legislation to abolish the limited merits review process that the network operators had been gaming. They had been gaming it to the tune of some $6½ billion of extra costs that had been fed into the Australian electricity system because of the abuse of the limited merits review process. It was the Turnbull government which took the action—despite opposition from some states and despite delaying tactics by the Labor Party—to abolish this, which can have some of the most significant impacts on keeping prices down into the future.