Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment and Water (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

Today in the chamber, and today in all the halls of this parliament, our nation is, indeed, beset with the relentless negativity and dysfunction of our coalition government. We appear to have a government that has simply stopped governing, overtaken by division and chaos. But the division and chaos we see is, in large part, the symptom—and not the cause—of much, much, much deeper problems inside the coalition, problems which wreak a heavy cost on the Australian public and on the Australian nation.

Let's drill down to see why we find ourselves in this situation. It's not just chaos and dysfunction. There's an absolute, fundamental, ideological divide inside the coalition that makes it simply impossible for them to find consensus and to govern. If we look very carefully at energy bills, which are skyrocketing in our nation, we have from this government a supposed plan that has been changed any number of times. Make no mistake: the ideological division, the chaos and the dysfunction in the Liberal Party mean Australians will now pay even more on their power bills. The policy uncertainty, the tussling between Turnbull, Abbott and Dutton over many years now simply mean power bills in our nation going up and up. This nation has forgone billions of dollars of investment in energy, both renewable and non-renewable, simply because the government have failed to put any policy settings in place—policy settings to deal with our electricity market, to deal with the role of renewables, or to look reasonably at our international agreements. Whether you agree with the directions or the ideas behind any of those elements is one thing. But the real nub of this problem and this issue is the need—whether you're a fossil-fuel or renewable energy generator—for policy certainty. This question has been done and undone by those opposite, over and over again. This means that, because of the Liberal Party, Australians will pay more on their power bills.

The government's approach to the NEG has been farcical. With the so-called National Energy Guarantee—or the national energy grid—the kind of conduct they've been up to includes things like cancelling Labor's briefing on this policy without even bothering to reschedule it. Now we can't even get access to the legislation. We were called on to provide bipartisan support, to make progress on these critical issues, but they would have needed to actually talk to us about their policy approaches. Who knows what the government's policy approach is? The draft legislation we've seen already seems to be obsolete. Why? Because of the division and chaos inside the coalition. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dropped the emissions reductions target from being legislated in parliament. Why did he do this? He said it was because he didn't have the numbers. The government won't show us the legislation. Without seeing the legislation, it's hard for us to say whether we would be prepared to support it. Because of the chaos and dysfunction that completely preoccupies this government, we can't make progress on these critical issues to serve the best interests of electricity consumers in our nation.