Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Energy Price Relief Plan) Bill 2022. The Greens recognise that cost-of-living relief is so desperately needed, and that's why we are supporting this bill. Unfortunately, though, despite the fuss and despite the dramatic resummoning of parliament, under Labor's plan, energy bills will still keep rising, albeit a little bit less than they would have otherwise. The government's own numbers illustrate that their plan is an inadequate solution. Without the plan, Treasury had forecast electricity bills would rise in the next financial year by 36 per cent. As a result of the legislation we are debating today, the increase next year will still be 23 per cent and there will be a combined increase of 47 per cent over the next two years. So of course this scheme, this plan, this legislation is not enough, and there is much, much more to do.

This legislation did, though, present the government with a really good opportunity to freeze power bills which at the moment they have missed. The government should really listen to the Greens and freeze power bills for two years. We will keep pushing for this freeze so people can have much more meaningful cost-of-living relief.

To provide further and more long-term cost-of-living relief and to move away from dirty and expensive gas, the Greens have secured a substantial package with the government that will help households and businesses to switch from gas to cleaner and cheaper energy. As part of this package, the government will focus on low- and middle-income earners, renters and those in public housing. This is definitely a win for households and also a win for the climate, and it is a big blow for greedy gas corporations.

I want to be crystal clear that we will not support a single cent of so-called compensation for coal corporations. Coal and gas corporations should in fact be compensating us for the massive climate damage that they have done which is cooking the planet, not the other way around. Governments should not be propping up coal and gas with public money. We should be ending it. Projects like the Pilliga Narrabri gas project in New South Wales and the Beetaloo basin project in the Northern Territory are climate crimes just waiting to happen. They must be scrapped. They destroy sovereign lands and forests while polluting water and air.

The Labor government really needs to show the leadership and courage that is needed to deliver the big, bold solutions that this energy price crisis demands. The reality is this: this isn't a short-term dilemma sparked by the war in Ukraine. This is a crisis caused by neoliberal policy perpetuated by both the major parties at a state and federal level over the past 30 years and fuelled by the greed of profit bloated, morally bankrupt fossil fuel corporations. Major parties take dirty donations and then give these corporations criminally cheap access to publicly owned resources. Some of these corporations pay no royalties or tax and then they get billions in subsidies handed to them on a platter. Meanwhile, these corporations, whose business model has been to fuel climate change denialism, purchase favourable government policy and profit off climate catastrophe, have been raking in record profits. Research shows that the gas sector has accrued a staggering $26 billion in profit due to price rises fuelled by the Ukraine war. That is absolutely disgraceful.

What we need urgently is a windfall profit tax to rein these corporations in. This should not be controversial. Even the Conservative UK government has introduced a windfall tax to fund cost-of-living relief, so what's stopping our allegedly progressive Labor government from—