Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise, too, to speak on the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. It's always a pleasure to follow Senator Ayres. There's always a bit of colour and light and movement in his speeches. Sadly, that was an insipid defence of what is a pretty insipid budget, particularly when it comes to taxing Australians and then sending a small part of that tax back to them in energy relief. At least Senator Ayres had the guts to actually say the words '$275', because we haven't heard that from the other side pretty much since the election. They promised electricity price reductions of $275, and, instead, we have seen absolutely skyrocketing energy prices right across Australia, particularly on the eastern states. I'll get to my home state of WA in a moment, but particularly on the eastern states those price rises are extraordinary. In Victoria, there was a 31 per cent increase in the new default market offer put out earlier this year. That represents an increase for residential customers of $426 in the next year alone. That's not including the price rises of last year, the first year of this Labor government, which everybody knows were absolutely extraordinary. In regional Queensland, there will be a $432 increase over the next year; in New South Wales, $463; in South Australia, $400; in South-East Queensland, $321. I remind those listening: this is not for the past year; this is for the year coming up. So the 'relief' that this Labor government has put into the budget is, quite frankly, a drop in the bucket when compared to those electricity price hikes that Australians have already seen and know are coming down the train tracks at them, at a very rapid rate. That is on top of the fastest, highest increase in interest rates in Australia's history, to the point where you are seeing average households' mortgages of $500,000 requiring an extra $1,000 extra a month. That is simply extraordinary. As I said in this place a number of times, there are other cost pressures, particularly in regional Australia, where you see the price of petrol and diesel regularly up around and exceeding $2 a litre right across the bush in Western Australia, so the pressure that families are under is simply extraordinary, and not just families but small businesses as well.

Those default market offers I was talking about for the 2023-24 year are worse for small business. Victorian small businesses are looking at a 33 per cent increase in the default market offer coming down the pipeline. For an average small business, that will mean an increase of over $1,700 when they are struggling with massive increases in the borrowings they face. Most small businesses are carrying debt, so they will have a massive increase in their cost of energy to keep that small business going. They will have increases, fuelled by inflation, in the cost of labour. They will have increases in all their input costs for their business; all their inputs have gone up. On top of that, we saw a government that did nothing, absolutely nothing, in the budget last night, to put any downward pressure on inflation. They have left all the heavy lifting to the Reserve Bank. In fact, they are pushing money into the economy, which Chris Richardson said late last night is potentially going to drive future interest rate rises.

So not only have the government done absolutely nothing to put downward pressure on inflation but they've also put upward pressure on inflation according to senior and respected economists in this country. That will, of course, flow into energy price rises, which is why transparency—sunlight—is the ultimate disinfectant. Transparency of the sort put forward in this bill by Senator Duniam is so important.

Information needs to be accessible. It needs to be consolidated in one place where people can understand electricity pricing and the amounts being generated across Australia. This bill would require the Productivity Commission to compile quarterly reports on retail electricity prices as well as the sources from which the electricity is being generated for each state and territory. The relevant minister would then be required to table these reports in parliament. Currently, there is no central repository of energy pricing in Australia. I know that, as Western Australians, we sit outside the national energy market and, as such, all the reporting we see from the national energy market, which I think is slightly ironically named. I have some in front of me and I read them out: Victoria, regional Queensland, New South Wales, South-East Queensland. Well, guess what part of Australia is not covered in that reporting? My home state, Western Australia. Western Australia has its own energy market. And I thank my lucky stars that we do, when I see what's been happening in the eastern states, because we have actually been lucky enough, through our development of a significant gas industry in the 1970s under Sir Charles Court, to provide long-term, low-cost energy to the industries, families and small businesses of Western Australia. That's something to be very proud of.

However, we have not been immune from the price rises in the energy sector. Through decisions by this government, such as the increase in the tax on gas out of Western Australia—Western Australia is the gas exporting state—and the increase in tax on gas producers in Western Australia, there will be a flow-on impact to increase prices in that state. We also saw that the policy decisions of late last year in the gas sector put a lot of uncertainty and volatility into that market, which, again, forced up costs and made future investment much more uncertain, which obviously also forces up the price of gas. Major energy buyers, our overseas markets, have been talking about the volatility that this government has put into not only the gas market but the energy sector overall through its heavy-handed regulatory approach.

So, in Western Australia we have been relatively lucky in terms of the sheer scale of energy price rises, because we are coming off a lower base, but it certainly hasn't protected us entirely. Again, when you talk to those families and small businesses in Western Australia—and my good friend Senator O'Sullivan would know this as well as I do—those families and small businesses in Western Australia say they are facing a massive increase in the cost of their borrowing, facing a massive increase in the cost of everything they have to buy to keep their businesses running and to keep their families going and are also facing massive increases in the cost of keeping the lights turned on.

The trouble for Labor is that they're really out of touch on this issue. They do not know the pressure that this is putting on those families. I'll give you a case in point.