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

I rise to indicate that Centre Alliance will support this bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Energy Assistance Payment) Bill 2019, but I think it's important to lay out a perspective that has not yet been put to the chamber—that is, a little bit of history around one-off energy payments. I ask people to reflect back to 2017, when we were dealing with the Treasury Laws Amendment (Enterprise Tax Plan No. 2) Bill 2017 to reduce the amount of tax of companies who had a turnover of less than $50 million—to try to reduce their tax burden. It was during negotiations in respect of that bill that then Senator Xenophon—I was an adviser at the time to Senator Xenophon—and I had a discussion with the government. They were trying to reduce the burden on business, yet the largest burden on business, the thing that everyone was coming to us and saying in the constituent office in Adelaide, was that energy prices were too high. Businesses were suffering because of high energy costs and some of them were facing closure.

As part of our negotiation to get a better outcome, we supported the tax breaks for the smaller businesses, but we also insisted on some changes that needed to be made and some additional things that needed to happen in order to assist businesses to deal with high energy prices. We did ask for a study to be done on the EIS arrangements. We asked for gas retention leases to be viewed from a use-it-or-lose-it perspective. We asked the government, and of course they agreed to do these things to develop what is now known as the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism, which is now in regulation and, I point out, has not been used—in my view, in error. That's a mechanism that allows the government to forecast what's going to happen with gas supplies in the next year, and if they feel that there's going to be a deficit of supply they can invoke this mechanism. This has the effect of cancelling all export licences, which then have to be renegotiated and need to be renegotiated in a way that ensures we have supply to the domestic market. In my view, this should have been invoked already, because we're now facing a situation—just through this poor management by the government—in respect of gas prices, and gas prices are now back on the rise.

We even had the ACCC doing a mea culpa in respect of some of the things that they'd suggested about gas. We were then facing a real issue with gas prices and electricity prices. A mechanism was introduced by the government, but unfortunately they haven't exercised it. They appear to be a little reluctant to do so on the basis that some of these big energy companies will no longer offer support to the Liberal-Nationals.

It was also during that negotiation that Centre Alliance, then the Nick Xenophon Team, negotiated a one-off energy assistance payment. It's interesting, because when I look through this bill it talks about a one-off payment. It's not actually a one-off payment; this is a repeat. It's a repeat because, over the last 24 months, the government was supposed to sort out the energy problem—the electricity problems that we have here in Australia—and we wanted to have a one-off payment that got people through those hard times while the government got on and fixed our energy issues.

Since that time, we've had an EIS proposed, and then we went to a clean energy target with Dr Finkel. We also had a NEG that was proposed—the National Energy Guarantee. Then we had NEG-plus and then, most recently, the big stick was proposed. But in every single one of these instances the government failed. One of the biggest policy failures of the Liberal-National government is that they simply have not dealt with rising energy costs. That is crippling Australian businesses and it's seeing some people making decisions to move offshore. Of course, it then results in the need for a bill like this which—once again—we will support, but we support it knowing that it's in fact probably the starkest evidence we've got that there is failed policy on the energy front and on energy prices here in Australia. I don't think there's any excuse that government can offer up—we walked through EIS, CET, NEG and NEG-plus to a big stick, none of which were implemented, and not because there would not have been support in this chamber; simply because there was significant infighting. I don't really want to play politics, but it has been a failure for the Australian people. Energy costs are too high in this country. That's why we need this bill: it should have been fixed and it hasn't been.