Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate:

(a) recognises that:

  (i) the recent storms in NSW have capped off a brutal summer of natural disasters for Australia,

  (ii) tens of thousands of people have been left without electricity, and residents have been forced to evacuate in areas across Sydney and the Central Coast,

  (iii) hardworking members of the United Services Union and Electrical Trades Union (ETU) are out across the State of NSW in risky conditions working hard to restore power and clean up following this catastrophic weather event, and

  (iv) residents in Mooney Mooney and Cheero Point of NSW have been without power for over 120 hours in the last 5 months, and recognises the hard work done by the members of the Mooney Cheero Progress Association;

(b) calls on the NSW Government to:

  (i) explicitly recognise the significant role that union members make in clean-up efforts,

  (ii) ensure that recovery efforts in future years are not hampered by shortages of workers,

  (iii) acknowledge that privatisation of electricity infrastructure has failed to deliver better, cheaper and more reliable services for Australians,

  (iv) invest in better publicly run and publicly funded services as promised by the NSW Government, and

(c) condemns the cuts to 5000 jobs since 2015 at electrical distribution businesses in NSW; and

(d) calls on the Federal Government to:

  (i) acknowledge that privatisation of electricity infrastructure has failed to deliver better, cheaper and more reliable services for Australians as promised by the Federal Liberal Government,

  (ii) urgently undertake the necessary reforms at the National Energy Market level to address the deficiencies in the regulatory framework which compromises adequate resourcing and staffing by distribution companies to reliably deliver power to residents and recover from the damage caused by storms of increasing severity on the electricity network, and

  (iii) invite the ETU to the upcoming COAG Energy Council to brief the Council on the lack of capacity of electricity network and distribution businesses to adequately address and recover from events like the recent NSW storms.

Question agreed to.