Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Vice-President of the Executive Council) Share this | Hansard source

We don't agree that it does that. We actually take the view that this is an important component of a suite of measures designed to bring electricity prices down and to ensure that we can have more reliable supplies of energy. With the greatest respect to another important organisation, I say that there are a lot of vested interests in this sort of space—inevitably—and they will argue their own book. I don't criticise them for that; that is their job. But our job as a government and our job as a parliament is to make judgements about what is in the public interest, and in our judgement it is in the public interest for us to have the opportunity to pursue court-ordered divestitures in the circumstances where a corporation's conduct is fraudulent, dishonest or in bad faith for the purpose of manipulating prices and where the result is a net public benefit. You are entitled to take a different view, of course, but we, having considered all of the arguments, all of the different perspectives from different stakeholders, have come to the view that in the public interest— (Time expired)