Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum to the bill.

Leave granted.

I table an explanatory memorandum and I seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard and to continue my remarks.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

This Bill is based on two fairly simple principles.

Namely, that there has long been a lack of an easily accessible, nationally consolidated and regularly updated report on retail electricity prices across Australia—and that this state of affairs needs to change.

In short, if this Bill was to be passed, it would legislate for the Productivity Commission to compile a quarterly report containing statistics on electricity prices and generation in each State and Territory. It would also require the Commonwealth Government of the day to then table these reports in Parliament.

Plainly, energy generation and energy pricing are two of the most critical policy issues in contemporary Australia.

As a matter of basic principle, it is right that Australians should therefore be provided with clearer information and enhanced transparency about how much they are being charged for their electricity. They would also stand to benefit from the incorporation, within these new reports, of information that shows the respective percentages of the various sources from which Australia's energy is being derived.

Over recent years, a number of steps have been taken to improve the range of information, statistics and reporting on energy pricing, in particular.

That process has generally been successful, and it has led to the development of a variety of tools, products and forms of data relating to energy in Australia. These represent a vast improvement on what was available (or, more to the point, unavailable) in earlier years.

The most similar type of report that currently exists, for instance, is the Australian Energy Market Commission's (AEMC) 'Residential Electricity Price Trends' document.

Likewise, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) maintains an online dashboard bringing together various sets of information on electricity prices around the nation.

Some forms of comparative data for electricity prices charged by Australian energy companies are also presented on a range of websites. These include the Australian Energy Regulator's 'Energy Made Easy' site and the Victorian Government's 'Victorian Energy Compare' site, as well as web pages of organisations such as Canstar Blue, iSelect, Finder and Compare the Market.

However, none quite bridges the full divide.

The AEMC's 'Residential Electricity Price Trends' document, for instance, uses a number of projections for future years rather than reporting purely on actual past and current prices. It is also not a mandated publication—as was tellingly illustrated when the AEMC announced, on 1 December 2022, that it would not be producing an annual edition for 2022 and would simply defer the release of its next report to sometime around mid-2023 instead.

Similarly, the AEMO dashboard's analysis of pricing is concentrated on wholesale figures. It also does not provide composite information in the one place for all of the States and Territories.

The online comparison services have various limitations, too, including that none displays comprehensive data for every retailer across every State and Territory.

Accordingly, there still remains a need for relatively straightforward, overall, national breakdowns of data to be brought together all in the one place.

Indeed, if you enter a term like 'consolidated electricity price comparisons for Australia' into an online search engine, then it typically generates links to a range of sites that offer the user a selection of tools that allow them to compare the price of different energy plans for their own needs at a local, individual level.

When it comes to finding information at a broader level for all of the States and Territories, it's nowhere near as readily available, or easily accessible. Let alone easily understandable for most consumers.

That's a void that should be filled. Moreover, it's an even more glaring problem in a period in which millions of Australians are experiencing particularly acute cost of living pressures. Not to mention that millions of Australians were also distinctly promised by the Labor Party, each of 97 times before the 2022 Federal election, that they would receive a $275 annual reduction on their power bills if the Albanese Government was elected.

It is true that—in relation to the mix of sources used to generate electricity—the AEMO dashboard does already offer specialised, accurate and even historical reporting. However, it is the Coalition's view that the new Productivity Commission reports would still be enhanced by the inclusion of the same (or similar) information as well.

The Bill has also been drafted in such a way as to provide the Commission with some flexibility in the way that it presents the figures in relation to generation. This is because it mightn't always be easy for it to access every piece of information that it would need in every single quarter to be sure that its calculations were fully precise.

Rather than starting with just a single, isolated, one-off snapshot, what is also being stipulated in the Bill is that the first reports by the Productivity Commission will contain each of the relevant quarterly statistics dating back to, and including, the quarter commencing 1 July 2019.

The use of a period of around three years seems a reasonable and logical way, to us, of placing the initial, up-to-date set of figures into a fuller, more informative context.

In totality, the provisions of the new Bill will lead to better, more regular and more comprehensive reporting on energy issues for Australians.

In the process, the Bill will also appropriately demand greater transparency and accountability from not only the Albanese Government, but also all future Federal governments, in relation to their energy policy decisions and their consequences. That surely can only be a good thing, given that all of us in this Parliament should recognise that governments genuinely need to be held account for all of the policies that they implement, and the decisions that they take, that risk increasing the costs of living for ordinary Australians.

We know already that, in just ten months, the Albanese Government has embarked on a course of breaking various election promises, and making life harder and more costly for Australians.

As we found out in mid-March, there's also yet another massive power price rise—potentially of around another 30%—on the way from 1 July this year.

However, supporting this Bill surely shouldn't be a hard thing for the Labor Party to do.

After all, it was the Prime Minister himself who said, on 7 May 2022, that "you have to treat the Australian people with respect" and, on 16 August 2022, that "the Australian people deserve accountability and transparency, not secrecy".

Indeed, if the Prime Minister (and his Ministers) are true to many of their words from the past, supporting this Bill should really be a formality.

I therefore look forward to the backing of the Government, as well as of the crossbench parties and independents, for this legislation.

In the meantime, I commend the Bill to the Senate.

Debate adjourned.