Rex Patrick (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on today's MPI concerning the need to reduce electricity prices. Electricity and gas prices represent the fastest rising household expense behind tobacco. My home state of South Australia has the highest retail prices in the country. This is bad news for households and bad news for businesses. I have had business after business roll through my office, raising concerns with me about the price of electricity and describing how it puts their viability at risk.

Both households and businesses want to see energy prices lowered—that's obvious. But how? Coming from an engineering background, I advise the chamber that we must do this by first laying out the top-level requirements. The first requirement is reliability; the power must be there when we need it. We want to have clean power. We must move towards cleaner energy sources in a controlled and planned manner, making sure that Australia's emission targets are met. We need to make sure the price is affordable, that we remain competitive. We also need investment certainty so that businesses can invest. We've seen in South Australia what happens when you pursue one element—in their case, clean, renewable energy—without considering its effect on price and reliability.

How do we achieve meeting all of the requirements? Centre Alliance supported the research behind the NEG. It was a good compromise between reliability, price and the need to deal with climate change. There were other solutions. Former Senator Nick Xenophon and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in conjunction with Frontier Economics, came up with an EIS back in 2009. It wasn't liked by Labor at first, but they eventually adopted it—but by the time they did, unfortunately, the coalition had decided they didn't like it. Then we saw Finkel, then we saw the NEG and then we saw the NEG-plus with an ACCC report component to it. Now, after a leadership change, we go to something different that does not address all of the requirements, and that is problematic. There are many solutions to our power woes. We can make it work, but, before we can do that, we must first make the parliament work. Thank you.