Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make my contribution on the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. As we have just heard, this is a very, very simple proposition. It's a very simple proposition that goes to providing Australians with information that is of importance to them right now. The government knows that this information is important to Australians. That's why the government promised Australians in the lead-up to the election that they would receive a $275 reduction in their energy bills. That is why they made that promise amongst a raft of promises that they made before the election. They, unfortunately, haven't kept the promises.

They said they would be a transparent government. This piece of legislation would actually assist them with that as well because this piece of legislation would bring together into a trusted organisation such as the Productivity Commission details and information about electricity prices across the country. Although the government will say that there are other mechanisms whereby you can receive that information, there is not one single source of truth. That is one thing that we learnt through the pandemic—ensuring that there was a single source of truth the public could trust as a part of the information that was being released by government was extremely important. It was one of the things that was important in helping us to get through the pandemic in the way that we did, which was better than most other countries in the world.

The government told us that they were going to be a transparent government, but, as we have seen so many times in this chamber when we debate orders for the production of documents or the government's refusal to provide information to this parliament, they are not a transparent government. Perhaps that's why they're not supporting this piece of legislation, because they know it will expose their promise to reduce electricity bills by $275—a number that you won't hear anyone on that side utter anymore.

It will expose that as a broken promise, and that's not what they want. The Treasurer might want to reimagine the economy and provide us with reports that talk about wellbeing and a range of other things, but it won't take away from the fact that they broke their promise to reduce energy bills by $275. This piece of legislation—this modest, simple reform that has been proposed in this piece of legislation—will bring together cost and price information on electricity nationally into a single place under an organisation that has provided a terrific service to Australia over a long period of time, even though the Treasurer also wants to reimagine the Productivity Commission so that it reflects his image of the economy. But current and up-to-date data is something that is important to Australians.

They're struggling to pay their power bills, and we have heard so many times about the increases and the level of increase—20 per cent and 30 per cent increases in their energy bills, when they were promised a reduction of $275 in their energy bills. Clearly the reason the government don't want to support this piece of legislation is that they don't want the transparency that they promised before the election. They're not the type of government that they said they were going to be before the election; they are going to be a government that resists transparency and resists Australians having the information that they might need to understand what is going on with things like their energy bills.

We know that there are some mechanisms that have been put in place to provide information, but there is no single source—no single source—where it all comes together in one place. I don't understand why the government continues to resist modest, simple and straightforward propositions that have been put forward in a constructive manner by the opposition to provide information to the Australian people, when that information would be of value and service to Australians. I really don't understand why they wouldn't be doing that. Australians deserve to see what is really happening in the energy market. They deserve to have that information, and yet what we see so often is that they obfuscate. We hear it in question time. We hear it all the time: we ask a question about the government's promise to reduce energy prices by $275 a year, and we hear back that, well, they're actually going to reduce the upward pressure on energy prices.

The only reduction that is occurring is how much your bill is going to go up by; it's not that it's going to go down, as was promised by the government before the election. We have this tricky language. Rather than the tricky language from the government, we should have available to us, as proposed by this piece of legislation, a trusted organisation such as the Productivity Commission, which would then compile this information nationally on a regular basis and report it to the Australian people. Australian people would then be able to go to that organisation for their transparency, rather than the government. The government promised they would be a transparent government before the election, and we know now that they are not going to be.

The importance of energy prices in a national economic sense is absolutely fundamental. We heard a moment ago about costs in the supply chain. If you think about the impact on inflation, the government before the election said it would keep inflation in check, and yet it is still running at over six per cent per annum—another broken promise from the government.

But think about the impact on our agricultural sector, which plays such an important part in our export economy, where energy is an extremely important element of the cost of the production of food and fibre to support the Australian community. Those farmers are suffering the same increases in energy costs that the rest of us are. The transport operators that move that produce down through the supply change are suffering the same increases in energy cost. The refrigeration companies that store all our food, as it works its way through the manufacturing process through cold storage into our supermarkets, are feeling that. The supermarkets are feeling exactly the same with all the refrigeration that supports the fresh product that we have, and that runs directly into the increased cost of living that the government promised would be less under them—another broken promise. Another broken promise: the cost of living will be lower under Labor.

I think another line is becoming truer and truer as we move through this period of government. I remember somebody saying 'life won't be easy under Albanese', and that is certainly coming true, because all the other promises we heard from the Labor Party aren't as they were. A $275 reduction in energy prices, lower cost of living, higher real wages, lower mortgage costs are all going in the opposite direction. The opposition presents a very simple piece of legislation that is about providing transparency—not spin, transparency—to Australians so they can see what the cost of their energy is, the trends over time via a trusted organisation like the Productivity Commission, and Labor doesn't want to support it. And you have to wonder why. You can only conclude they do not want you to know the real answer. They don't want a single place where you can go to find information out about your energy costs. They don't want the farmer to know. They don't want the transport operator to know or the cold storage facility. The supermarkets might be a bit different because they have the capacity to negotiate but they are still feeling the upward pressure on prices.

A fundamental element in the success of an economy is cost of energy. Going back to 2003, 2004, we had one of the lowest costs of energy in the world. It was a real strength of our economy. We are falling down the ladder at an alarming rate, and the government aren't prepared to provide us with the transparency that we deserve, but what we get from them is tricky language or putting downward pressure on the upward rise of interest rates—of energy prices; sorry, I have conflated my broken promises; it isn't difficult to do with this government—there are a lot of them.

It would be very easy for the government to simply support this, and provide the Productivity Commission with the appropriate resources to provide this information to the Australian people and allow Australians to understand simply, in one place, through a trusted organisation, the information they should have access to. Business can make decisions about the cost comparison of energy in different states. That isn't necessarily an easy thing for them to do. If a business has operations a number of different states they can easily make a comparison. But for other businesses it isn't that simple. Here we have a simple, sensible proposal to provide information to the Australian people around the cost of what is one of the fundamentals of the Australian economy: the price of electricity. You really have to ask yourself why the government won't support that. One conclusion is that they don't want you to know. They were happy to promise you a $275 reduction in energy prices before the election, very happy to do that. But they don't want you to know what the reality of it is afterwards. It's not the transparent government that we were promised. The government uses tricky language instead, to try and divert attention away from their promise to reduce energy prices by $275 a year, because they really don't want you to understand properly what's happening. Australians see it in their electricity bill but they don't have the capacity to understand the system as they could or they should. I would urge the government to reconsider their position and support this piece of legislation. It's very simple. It's not controversial. It doesn't need to be political, but the government really doesn't want you to know.