Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to start on the issue of the cost of living with energy. Energy really is the most important discussion to have when talking about the cost of living for Australian households because energy is needed for everything. Energy is needed to make almost any product. Energy is needed to transport those products to the shops, and, of course, often, when you buy products, you need energy to keep them cool and store them before you use them. So energy is vitally important to keep the cost of living down for Australians.

When the Australian people elected the Labor government two and a bit years ago now, almost 2½ years ago, they expected their energy bills to fall. The Prime Minister promised almost 100 times on the election trail in the months ahead of the election that he would, in fact, cut people's power bills by, in his words, $275 a year. He hasn't repeated that figure since the election, but that was the promise he made to the Australian people a few years ago. They put their faith and trust in him. He was elected. We lost government. And what has happened since? As I said, the Prime Minister hasn't repeated that number. You'd think, if he'd achieved that goal, he'd be crowing about it from the rooftops to all and sundry. But, no, he doesn't talk about it now because the Labor Party is embarrassed about what it's done to our once beautiful energy system in this country. We had some of the cheapest power prices in the world with all of these natural resources we're blessed with. Unlike other nations, we don't have to import most of our energy needs; we've got them all here.

But the Labor Party has pursued an obsessive, ideological, radical approach to just installing one type of energy—renewables energy; everyone hears about it all the time. It's dependent on the weather. It doesn't turn up all the time. It has broken our electricity system. The end result, when you look at the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics report that this motion refers to—the latest consumer price index—is that electricity prices have gone up 20 per cent since this government was elected. They haven't come down; they've gone up. That 20 per cent means, for most average households, around $500 a year on their power bills. That's a lot. That's a big impact for people.

But, as I said earlier, this is not just about the power bills. That's what you pay just for the electricity delivered to your household. The factories that are making your food are paying for electricity as well, and, when their electricity bills go up, they've got to pass that on to everybody at the check-out. One of the greatest shocks of inflation, I think, for most Australians now is when they go to the supermarket. It's just unbelievable how much things cost. I've seen situations where pensioners have had to put things back because they get to the check-out and realise they can't actually afford what they've put in their trolley. They don't have enough. It's a shocking feeling for our nation's pensioners to have to go through.

When you look at what has gone up in your local supermarket, the items that have gone up the most are the ones that use the most energy to make. The process to make them uses a lot of energy. They're things like milk. It's very energy intensive. There's refrigeration, of course, and processing. It's gone up 19 per cent, pretty much on a par with electricity. Milk's gone up 19 per cent while this government has been in power. Cheese has gone up 22 per cent—another dairy product that is made like that. Bread, another processed product, has gone up 23 per cent. Some of the fresh food items, fruit and vegetables, have actually gone down or up. They're not as dependent on the electricity system and are much more responsive to weather and climatic conditions in different growing areas of the country. But these processed goods that require electricity have all gone up.

The shame that this government has presided over in destroying our once world-beating electricity system doesn't just arrive in your mailbox every quarter. Every time you go to the shops, you're paying the price for the Prime Minister lying to—sorry, misleading—the Australian people and telling them that he would reduce their power bills, when he has done the exact opposite.

We need a government in this country that's going to prioritise people's cost of living, not climate targets. The Prime Minister set a cost-of-living target. He set an electricity target of $275. He never talks about it anymore. The only target he likes to talk about now are these climate carbon targets that we agreed to, apparently, overseas that nobody else follows. We need to get rid of those and just focus on a cost-of-living target for the Australian people. Bring down the cost of energy. Install nuclear, coal or gas—whatever it takes—to bring down people's cost of living.