Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I want to commend Senator Duniam on the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. What it's seeking to do is provide some transparency on the market prices that impact upon Australians' costs of living, indeed, in relation to their electricity bills. This is a critical and vital thing if we're going to actually drive down electricity prices, because Australians are paying through the nose right now. There is nothing that's occurring within the energy market that is actually driving costs down. Simply putting a cap on prices is only putting an artificial limit, and it's actually going to drive up prices further. On that side, they're even saying that the steps that this government has taken are going to cause a reduction in Australia's electricity prices. But what we know is that they're not having the effect that the government said they would. We know that that's true; people just need to look at their electricity bills. They're going up and up and up and up, and there's no prediction for them to go down in any noticeable way in the future.

This is a big problem because Australians are facing significant pressures when it comes to their costs of living. Of course, energy is a major driver of that. The cost of electricity is a major driver of the increased costs of living. Whether Australians are getting and paying their power bills every month, every second month or every three months, depending on which provider they're with, they are seeing an increase every time they open their bills. It also impacts business. It impacts, for example, our grocery chains, which have to run fridges to keep our food cool. That's then passed on to the price of groceries, which each of us pays when we get our grocery bill at the check-out.

We're seeing these increased costs of living every day, and Australians are struggling to make ends meet. I met just recently someone in the southern suburbs of Perth who earns $115,000 a year—and that's a reasonable salary; it's above the average salary—and they were saying that they are struggling. This person is a single mother with two children and a pretty reasonable, average mortgage—nothing extravagant. They are struggling to make ends meet. They said the only thing they could see in their budget every month that they could cut was their Netflix subscription.

This is a dramatic shift that's happening in people's lives. The cost of living is a major problem Australians are facing. This bill seeks to provide one measure that could be put in place to provide some transparency over the input costs that are impacting people's energy bills. It's one way that we could address the cost of living. I encourage the government to seriously look at this fantastic private senator's bill that Senator Duniam has put forward. It goes a long way, a not insignificant way, to helping to bring down the cost of living by providing some transparency to, by shedding some light on, an issue that Australians are facing, and that is of course the increased costs of energy.

We on this side know that nothing this government is doing—there was nothing in the bills it has brought forward already and there was certainly nothing in the budget—actually deals with the structural problems that we've got within our energy market right now. Just providing subsidies that go to certain households is not going to fix the issue in the years to come.