Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023 should be a no-brainer. It really should be a no-brainer and it should actually receive support from all sides of the chamber. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why Australian customers should not be able to access a single point of truth with respect to electricity prices in the current environment. There is absolutely no reason.

The Productivity Commission is well placed to undertake this task. Something very similar is done with respect to petrol prices, and I commend all those at the ACCC who undertake that work with respect to petrol prices. The Productivity Commission also looks at petrol prices. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why the Productivity Commission can't undertake this task to make sure there's a single point of truth with respect to electricity prices. We should make it as simple as possible for Australians to access key information with respect to one of their major cost-of-living items. We should make it as simple as possible for them, and that's what this bill does.

I want to provide some commentary with respect to the context of this debate. It appears that every time you open a newspaper you see more and more bad news with respect to the cost of electricity. I want to walk through a number of articles that have appeared in my home state's lead newspaper the Courier Mail. On 25 May 2023 Matthew Killoran and Madura McCormack wrote an article entitled 'Price shock: QLDers hit with even higher power bill increases than expected', which reads:

Electricity prices in Queensland are set to rise by an average of $350, with a 21.5 per cent hike kicking off on July 1.

Queenslanders are set to cop an average of a $350 power price rise within weeks—almost $30 more than forecast just two months ago.

…   …   …

A Queenslander in the southeast on the default market offer, the maximum retail electricity fee, will be paying $1969 a year for their electricity—

nearly $2,000 for their electricity bill each year. It's astonishing that a country such as ours is in this place. With the abundance of energy resources available to governments at all levels, how did we get to the place where an average household is paying nearly $2,000 a year for electricity? It's astonishing.

The article said:

The AER said increased coal and gas prices, lower reliability of coal generators—

that particularly pertains to my home state of Queensland, where the Callide C generator is still in the process of being repaired—

and the closure of Liddell Power Station in NSW in April were among the reasons for the price rise.

When the coal-fired power stations are shut down, the prices go up. The prices are going up, and average Australians, average working families in Australia, are suffering as a result. It's nearly $2,000 for a household to pay their electricity bill. It's astonishing. How did we get here? How did we get to this position?

Then there is the position of small businesses. The article said:

Small businesses in southeast Queensland will be looking at an average price rise of $756, taking their annual bill to $4202.

That's over $4,000, approaching $5,000, for an average small business in south-east Queensland, an increase of $756. How much do you have to sell in terms of goods and services to make up that additional cost? How many coffees do you have to sell? How many meals do you have to sell? How many goods do you have to sell? This is at the same time as small businesses are being hit with inflationary pressures. They are copping it from every which way. Every which way they are copping it. The retail electricity customers in my home state of Queensland, in the south-east corner, are paying nearly $2,000 a year for household electricity prices. So they have less money in their pockets to spend with those small businesses that are battling the average price rise of $756. It is actually a pending disaster for the Australian economy and the wellbeing of many Australian families.

I visited a wonderful not-for-profit organisation in Ipswich, which is in the federal seat of Blair, where my office is located. I spoke to the wonderful team there at Ipswich Assist, one of the two food banks in that area. Their clear message to me was that they have been seeing a cost-of-living crisis reflected in the people coming through their door seeking access to food, toiletries and all the basic necessities of life. They are seeing people who they have never seen before, including families where there is someone in employment but they are struggling to pay the bills due to higher interest rates, higher rents, higher electricity prices and higher grocery prices. This is the cost-of-living reality at the coalface in Australian suburbs. I want to take the opportunity to congratulate Jason Budden and his team at Ipswich Assist. They're a wonderful group of volunteers and they do amazing work in our community.

But we in this place need to do our bit to do everything we can do to address this cost-of-living crisis. One of the ways in which we can do that is by considering this bill and what it seeks to do. With transparency, with the sharing of knowledge with respect to what is happening with electricity prices, comes accountability. You need the information to hold people to account. Every Australian retail electricity consumer has the right to a single point of truth with respect to what is happening with respect to prices.

I want to make a few points with respect to the bill. Before I do that, I genuinely want to compliment Senator Duniam for putting forward this private member's bill. This is what we as senators should all be doing: considering how each and every one of us can take advantage of every opportunity at our disposal to try to make the lives of the people we represent easier, not harder. I think this bill does exactly that.

At the moment there are a disparate range of sources people can access to try to find out what is happening in terms of their electricity prices. But the problem is that there isn't a single point of truth. There are the AEMC's residential electricity price trends document and AEMO's online dashboard. There are also the Australian Energy Regulator's Energy Made Easy site and the Victorian government's Victorian Energy Compare site as well as various webpages and products of organisations such as Canstar Blue, iSelect, Finder and Compare the Market. But there isn't a single source of truth—a single place where all Australian retail electricity customers can go to find out what is actually happening with respect to electricity prices. That information needs to be provided, and the Productivity Commission is the perfect vehicle to actually deliver that information and provide it in an efficient and effective way.

As I've said, this is about access to information and this is about transparency, but it's also about accountability. Before the last federal election, the then opposition leader, Mr Albanese, made the promise 97 times that Australian households' power bills would be reduced by $275 annually. That promise was made 97 times in the lead-up to the last federal election.

I come back to that article in the Courier Mail from 25 May 2023—just about the first anniversary of the election of the Albanese government—'Price shock: QLDers hit with even higher power bill increases than expected':

Queenslanders are set to cop an average of a $350 power price rise within weeks …

Instead of going down $275, it's going up $350. That's just in one year. The same is actually happening in regional Queensland. I quote an article from the Courier on 9 June 2023:

Regional Queenslanders will bear the brunt of the nation's soaring power prices following a ruling that will hike their bills almost 30 per cent. The jump follows increases of up to 25 per cent in the state's southeast …

… The rise from July 1 will add $429 a year, or 28.7 per cent for Ergon Energy customers, taking the average annual household bill to $1926 …

That's $350 a year in the south-east and $429 a year in regional Queensland. Instead of going down by $275, as was promised by the now Albanese government when Mr Albanese was in opposition, the bills are actually going up. They're going the wrong way, and this is after just one year.

I commend Senator Duniam with respect to this private senator's bill. We need to provide a single source of truth to electricity consumers. There needs to be transparency and there needs to be accountability—accountability which should be linked back to the promise that was made by Mr Albanese 97 times when he was in opposition to reduce household energy bills by $275 a year. That was the promise made. There should be a vehicle to hold the government to account with respect to its broken promise, and this private senator's bill provides exactly that.

David Van (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Transparency, accountability and better outcomes for Australians are what Senator Duniam's private senator's bill promises to deliver. Undoubtedly the cost of living is going through the roof, and a large part of that is the increase in our energy prices, particularly for electricity. In fact, to say that they're going through the roof is an understatement. That is how bad things are getting, and they're only going to get worse. Despite the now Albanese Labor government promising 97 times before the 2022 federal election that they would reduce power bills by $275, we've seen the exact opposite. Under Anthony Albanese's leadership, power bills have gone through the roof. But this is really no surprise, is it, when their key energy policies under a best-case scenario will increase power bills and under a worst-case scenario will destroy Australia's energy security. Take, for example, their disastrous Rewiring the Nation plan, which seeks to run poles and wires across the country for which they are currently providing under the budget measure—the non-budget measure, I should say—$20 billion in concessional loans. Not only will it fail to help Australia reduce energy emissions, but it will burden taxpayers for decades to come with significantly higher unnecessary debt, it will weaken supply and system security, and it will increase energy prices. On top of that, to make the cost-of-living disaster that Australians are feeling right now worse, those prices also flow through in the cost of all goods that are made with that energy.

We saw yesterday, with the farmers who were here in Parliament House, that new transmission projects are facing increased opposition from communities in regional Victoria and other areas. For example, the VNI West project, currently planned at $3.3 billion, has already encountered local protests. A KPMG report suggests that a lack of social licence could cause transmission projects to rise by as much as 40 per cent. And here I will commend the great work of Professor Simon Bartlett and Professor Bruce Mountain, who are arguing that not only are the projected costs wrong, but that the routes they are taking are still not nailed down.

In recent years major transmission projects in Australia have experienced significant cost blowouts, raising concerns about the effectiveness of large-scale transmission projects in decarbonising the energy sector. For example, and as I said before, the cost of VNI West, which was initially estimated at $1.6 billion four years ago, this year has risen to $3.3 billion, and the previous estimate, which was only two months prior to that, was $2.9 billion—an increase of 10 per cent. It is unclear what the final cost of the project will be, especially given the potential for construction contingencies over the next decade.

Unfortunately, VNI West is not alone in experiencing cost overloads. Other major transmission projects, including Project EnergyConnect, HumeLink and Marinus Link, have seen significant increases in cost estimates since 2018. These projects have experienced cost increases of 50 per cent, 190 per cent and 250 per cent respectively. Collectively, the cost of these projects, according to Professor Bartlett, has increased by 140 per cent in just four years, with an average annual increase of 25 per cent.

Now, voters are waking up to the fact that a large portion of their electricity bill is made up by what is called a supply charge. Any of you listening at home, turn over your electricity bill and, on the back, you'll see that line 'supply charge'. I know on my bill it's currently $1.60 a day. That is only going to go up significantly over the life of the projects. Sometimes that supply charge is overlooked by consumers, despite the fact that a significant portion of that bill goes towards funding the transmission and distribution infrastructure that transports electricity from generators to the market.

Now, a quick history lesson from my great home state of Victoria. Sir John Monash built the State Electricity Commission. When he designed that, being the great engineer he was, he realised that the fuel needed to generate electricity in Victoria was coal down in the Latrobe Valley. He decided to build the generation there and transmit it up to Melbourne, where the load or the demand was. We don't need to do that anymore. The fuel is everywhere. Sunshine is everywhere. Rooftop solar is dominating the market and is only going to increase and can increase a lot further. So the business case for running poles and wires across our country is disappearing day by day.

Certainly, in Victoria, to build the VNI West purely to save the investments of foreign investors who built the 'rhombus of regret' is unconscionable. Why are people building this? Companies like Transgrid that are building VNI West get a regulated return on their assets because they're monopolies, and they're regulated by the Australian Energy Regulator, the AER, which sets a rate of return on that asset base that is for the life of those projects—20, 30, 40 years. So not only is the taxpayer underwriting this, with the government planning to invest $20 billion in the construction of tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines; the total asset base of these companies is likely to range between $100 billion and $200 billion extra. Some transmission is cheaper than others, but the generally accepted cost is $9 million per kilometre for a 550 kVA transmission line. Just imagine tens of thousands of kilometres times $9 million. That's going to be on the back of your energy bill or on your grocery bill.

If the government plans to go ahead with these ludicrous projects, Australians deserve, at the very least, transparency, accountability and basic information about what's going to be on their power bills. Accountability and transparency are lacking right now in Victoria, with Premier Andrews and Minister D'Ambrosio ramming through VNI West—no transparency, no accountability. That is what Senator Duniam's sensible private senator's bill promises to deliver, with more information more regularly. It will also allow governments to better respond to changes in the energy market, and, in the current economic environment, that is more important than ever.

A recent report in the journal Nature Energy showed that up to 140 million extra people could be tipped into extreme poverty worldwide by an energy crisis that has sent prices soaring. The authors of the report said higher energy costs flow through to virtually all other goods and services people required because energy was an essential input for most economic activities and that the indirect costs tended to be even higher in overall terms. I raise this to highlight how important energy price policy is and to show why we must have better reporting mechanisms.

The core objective underpinning this bill is that it would require the Productivity Commission to compile quarterly reports on retail electricity prices, as well as the sources from which electricity is being generated, for each state and territory, and would require the relevant minister to table these reports in parliament. This is hardly new or controversial. The NDIS provides quarterly reports to the disability ministers, with information including statistics about participants in each jurisdiction and the funding or provision of supports by the NDIA in each jurisdiction. Approved aged-care providers are required to submit a quarterly financial report to the Department of Health and Aged Care to enable the department to track, monitor and benchmark the sector. It also provides information for the star rating system, to help senior Australians make informed choices, and it helps with policy, planning and development. The Clean Energy Regulator provides quarterly reports on Australia's carbon market. So we see that, in almost every space of government, agencies and departments provide quarterly reports on a range of different areas to improve policymaking, increase transparency and support Australians through greater access to information.

There is clearly a glaring gap that exists in Australia when it comes to reporting and transparency on energy, and that void is exactly what this bill aims to fill. It makes no sense that we would require departments and agencies to compile reports in almost every aspect of Australian life but not energy prices. While a substantially broader variety of data about energy generation, pricing and usage has been made available to Australians over the past decade or so, through projects like Dr Dylan McConnell's Open-NEM, there still isn't a single source or a single report that Australians can see regularly at a glance. This is something as simple as a full national snapshot of current and past retail electricity prices.

The Australian Energy Regulator has revealed draft electricity price increases of between 20 and 22 per cent over the coming financial year, while Victorian consumers can expect a 30 per cent price surge. This is all despite, as I said earlier, the Albanese Labor government's promise to reduce power bills by $275. We know now that the Prime Minister either lied about that or made up the modelling due to a lack of reporting data, and still isn't being held to account. If this bill is passed—and I commend it to the Senate—it is not just the Albanese Labor government that will be held to account for broken promises and lies to the Australian people; all future governments will be as well. I think senators in this chamber will agree with me that this is a positive outcome.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, I speak to the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. Anthony Albanese, when opposition leader, promised to save households $275 a year on their electricity bills. That was a lie, as the now Prime Minister now shows in changing his promise from an actual saving to simply reducing the rate of increase by $275—very subtle. It means he doesn't give a damn about people paying extra prices. Of course, there is no talk of this saving because electricity bills are out of control anyway.

People can't afford to turn on the heater, and the information the Senate needs to review the government's performance is literally all over the place, scattered to the wind. The Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO—another alphabet soup—maintains an online dashboard with retail pricing in there somewhere, although not in an easily understandable summary form—so, for many people, it's not useful. The Australian Energy Market Commission, AEMC, maintain their residential electricity price trends—again, not in summary form. The Australian Energy Regulator maintains some data called Energy Made Easy—really? Private companies like Canstar put out data. It is all different, scattered.

This tells us two things. Firstly, we have way too many government agencies, each a product of a market failure that was fixed by adding—wait for it—another agency. The government agencies were causing the problems, and the solution, according to the government, was another agency. That in turn caused another market failure which was fixed with another agency, then another agency. You see what I'm saying. Who funds at all? We, the taxpayers, fund it all.

What's the effect of all this bureaucracy and poor decisions on our electricity prices? When electricity generation used reliable base load coal, we only needed a fraction of this bureaucracy because coal was responsive to demand peaks and troughs. It was cheap, affordable, reliable, secure, synchronous and stable. And it was environmentally responsible, and it still remains environmentally responsible. Now, thanks to the Liberal-Nationals and the Labor-Greens, we have the miracle of renewable power, and we have all these alphabet agencies working away making electricity so dear that nobody can afford it. It is a complete failure of governance for the last three decades—actually, since 1996, with the Howard-Anderson Liberal-National government.

Secondly, the data is all over the place. Assembling an accurate picture of how much more everyday Australians have to pay for their electricity bills requires a data gathering exercise of a type the Australian Bureau of Statistics would probably need 18 months to complete. This is not a flaw in the system; it's a design feature, as I'll explain with another example on cost in a minute. The more agencies, the more fractured the data and the less chance the Senate—the Senate is the house of review—or the people will be able to work out just how bad things are, and things are very, very bad. Constituents are sending my staff their electricity bills and quotes, phoning my office in tears.

We're seeing 30 and 40 per cent increases in electricity bills. That's horrific, but it's even worse when you consider the trebling of electricity prices in the last two or three decades. It's 30 and 40 per cent on top of a huge bill that's been inflated in the last two or three decades. So where's that $275 saving the Prime Minister used in a cynical vote-buying exercise? It's a lie. It's nowhere. The Prime Minister and his carpetbagger mates in the disposable energy market conned the Australia public.

Disposables—I call solar panels and wind turbines disposables, because these monstrous things only last 12 years at most. Then they have to be disposed of and replaced, with no recycling because recycling solar panels and wind turbines requires too much energy—it's not cost effective, it's not energy effective. Not one element of the electricity generation needed to meet the United Nations 2050 net zero target, which the Liberal-National government signed us up for and the Labor Greens pushed, and not one panel that the politicians volunteered us for is installed in Australia right now in 2023. What do I mean by that? Not one panel that we will need in 2050 is installed now. Every solar panel and wind turbine in place now will be replaced four times—four times!—in the lead-up to 2050. Every last solar panel and every last wind turbine we have now installed will be ripped out and sent off to the tip before 2050, all of it to be replaced four times.

You think power prices are a scandal now? They are. Yet this nightmare is only getting started. Most people would think one solution would be encouraging gas stoves and discouraging electric cars. That would take pressure off electricity generation. The disposable ideologues on both sides of this chamber are doing the complete opposite. They're banning gas stoves and encouraging electric cars, which need more electricity. It will increase electricity demand and further increase prices. It will actually increase gas usage, because, right now, you can turn on a switch at your home and get abundant gas. Without a gas stove, you'll have to rely upon a gas-fired power station to send electricity to your home with transmission losses along the way. So there'll be more gas used to generate the same amount of energy that you could generate right now in a gas stove.

The average Australian street of 20 homes can only afford to have three homes with electric cars before the draw on the power heats up the power lines and causes a blackout. It's almost as if the inhuman Greens, teals and Chris Bowen's energy vandals want things to be miserable for everyday Australians. That's what they're doing—they're destroying lifestyles and livelihoods for Australians.

The reason behind this energy vandalism is simply power. I don't mean the type we used to be able to afford—electric power. I mean political power and control over people's lives through the restriction and control of electricity. The idea behind removing coal power from the grid is that it creates an artificial scarcity that these electricity vandals can use to bring in controls on everyday Australians' power usage. Control is the objective.

Smart metres are already being introduced. They'll be set to allow each household a limited amount of power and will switch off when the limit is reached. Control. They will control when we use our electricity, how we use it and what we use it for. Only the wealthiest Australians who can afford to pay for their energy will have air-conditioners. Everyday Australians will not.

We know this from the Prime Minister's housing bill, which will build a few thousand new homes at a cost per unit that is so low there can't possibly be room for air-conditioning. We know that the sustainable housing guidelines the Greens tried very hard to make mandatory on this housing bill only allow for homes to be built with ceiling fans, not air-conditioners. No wonder Bob Brown was run out of town in Clermont, in central Queensland, when he brought his climate and energy rationing alarmism to rural Queensland. Try not having air-conditioning in Queensland's rural bush.

Senator Duniam's bill will help the debate. This bill will give the public, the media and the politicians the data we need to prove that climate crazies and their energy vandalism are making life miserable for everyday Australians for no damn reason other than control of people—for no environmental benefit. Indeed, it will damage the environment catastrophically, as people desperate for warmth will return to wood fires, as they have been in Victoria. One Nation will support this bill because One Nation likes and spreads truth, because One Nation likes to empower people, because One Nation likes to free people to make informed choices, which they can't do at the moment.

I want to talk about a few other points. The primacy of energy: energy multiplies itself right throughout the whole of our economy. Everything depends upon electricity. It is a primary aspect of our society, modern society. The evils and anomalies of solar and wind are becoming apparent. I was at the property rights of Australia conference in Gympie last Friday. The anger amongst farmers and townspeople in rural Queensland is palpable. The people are coming for you, Greens, Labor, and also the wet Liberals and Nationals, with pitchforks. They want to know what the effect is on prices. It's a very harsh awakening, now, for people in the bush, because they're waking to the realities of solar and wind—paving huge acreages with glass panels, destroying rainforests for wind turbines and blighting the visual pollution on the landscape.

Alan Moran, the noted economist, prepared an independent study for me entitled The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewablesbasically, the hidden cost of climate policies and solar and wind. He refers to solar and wind as 'parasitic malinvestments'. He's an independent researcher and independent economist with an international reputation and is highly respected. He compiled the cost data from many state and federal government departments from government data and budgets and reports. It cannot sensibly be refuted. It's very three years old, but the figures are shocking because they haven't been updated. So imagine the figures now. Let's go through some of those figures. His executive summary says:

Australia's excessively high electricity prices are undermining our economic resilience and competitiveness and cutting our standards of living. Since 2002 Australian governments, in a misguided quest to reduce carbon dioxide, have introduced climate policies at the expense of cheap coal and gas power. Our electricity prices, once the lowest in the world, have become one of the most expensive.

That seriously affects our security, seriously affects our competitiveness. He goes on:

Australians will be shocked to know the true financial burden of these policies on households and industry. These hidden costs drive up all costs of living, including electricity, food, water and transport.

In summary, in 2019, he said solar and wind and climate policies cost households at least $13 billion annually, or around $1,300 per household. That is on top of the electricity bill. That's an additional cost beyond the increases in electricity costs. It goes across the economy for $19 billion. That was four years ago. Solar and wind and climate policies account for 39 per cent of household electricity bills, not the 6½ per cent that the then Liberal and National government was typically quoting. It causes a net loss of jobs in the economy; with every so-called solar and wind subsidised job created, 2.2 jobs are lost. There are market distortions involved in destroying the coal sector that are subsidising solar and wind. These market distortions increase the wholesale prices of electricity to $92.50 per megawatt hour, up from $45.40 per megawatt hour. It more than doubled because of the policies of the Liberal-National government and the Labor-Greens government.

These are Moran's words: 'Investment in supposedly Green energy is a malinvestment'—a parasitic malinvestment that destroys the host, the Australian economy. The parasites are destroying the host. He goes on:

It defies all sense that Australia's average price per kwh for electricity is three times that of India and China when they are using our coal. All Australians have a right to benefit from our rich natural resources and governments have an obligation to foster high growth environments for Australian industry, and support high standards of living for all of us. The parasitic and hapless renewables industry will provide neither.

The parasitic and hapless solar and wind industry will provide neither high standards of living nor support for industry.

What's the effect on prices of all these policies? It's catastrophic. We've gone from having the cheapest electricity in the world to having the most expensive, and yet we are the world's biggest exporters of energy—absolutely bloody ridiculous.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to be up here today to speak to such a fantastic bill—the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. Let me tell you: there is no greater truism than the one that says that what gets measured gets improved. I came from the private sector and worked in the finance field, and every good business out there—or any good business who wants to stay profitable—knows that you've got to do your month-end reporting every month. You have to track your costs. You have to track your revenue. You need to be able to measure your data to work out whether you're improving or going backwards.

That's exactly what this bill does. This is asking for centralised quarterly reporting of the cost of electricity, and that matters because, right now, electricity prices are going through the roof because of this insane renewable energy ideology being pushed by those on the other side, who are driving households into poverty. They are driving businesses into bankruptcy. They are sending jobs offshore. They are sending wealth offshore. It is an absolute disgrace.

It exposes the hypocrisy of the Albanese Labor government and of the Greens, who, for the last three years have been talking about greater accountability and greater transparency and yet intend to oppose this bill. What a disgrace. If they were really serious about the cost of living, they would support this bill so that we know exactly how much energy costs and what the break-up of those costs is. That includes not just the split between coal powered energy and renewable energy but also the amount of subsidies being put into the energy market.

We saw that yesterday with this ridiculous spending by the Queensland Labor government, where they're going to actually try and shut down Queensland coal-fired power stations, whilst at the same time raking in a huge surplus thanks to the foresight and vision of the great Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who built those coalmines 50 years ago. He got them built, built the railway lines, built the ports that created all the royalties, created all the freight revenue from the trains and all the demurrage charges from the ports.

All that money is going into Queensland, and yet for some reason we want to actually sell that beautiful black coal offshore and not use it here. Then they're going to turn around and rob Peter to pay Paul to offset the ridiculous energy costs spent as we import billions and billions of dollars of renewables from offshore. That money is going offshore on top of all the money that goes offshore because of these ridiculous carbon offsets. It is completely absurd that, when we have the lowest carbon footprint per capita in the world when you take in our natural carbon offsets, we pay other countries to offset their carbon emissions. Australia has a huge land mass. We have only 26 million people living here. We have got lots and lots of natural environment—our soil, our trees and our offshore waterways. We have phytoplankton—and I give a big shout-out to all the little phytoplankton out there sucking up the CO2; good stuff, guys! And yet we don't count it.

I come back to being accurate in measuring stuff because the reason why this bill is so important is that we do need to measure the horrendous costs of renewables. The crazy thing is that this is all based on the fallacy that somehow we can measure CO2. That was exposed in estimates, by none other than yours truly here, when the head of the CSIRO admitted that there are actually 40 different models to calculate net zero, to calculate carbon offsets. We've got to stop relying on models.

There's a difference between that side of the chamber and this side of the chamber. This side of the chamber believes in facts and real world data, whereas that side of the chamber wants to believe in fantasies and fairytales and to make up stories that are ultimately always disproved. We saw that happen in the last 12 months. I can well remember Senator Wong standing up here and going, 'Renewables are cheaper.' Guess what? They're not. If they were cheaper, the price of energy would be going down. But the price of energy isn't going down. It's going up. Everyone knows that, if you want to improve performance, you should start measuring this data.

Just last week we found out that the energy retailers are going to increase the cost of retail energy by 28 per cent. Can someone explain to me how that is going to help with the cost of living? I'm not hearing any interjections from the other side—of course not, because they have no answers. Yet right here in front of them is the answer that will at least start tracking the data and give us greater insight into how to bring the cost of energy down. Do the other side actually want to support it? No. They're the so-called party of greater accountability and greater transparency, and we've already seen that on display this week when people wanted to change. At first it was, 'There's no data and we know nothing about it,' but it turned out to be: 'No. Actually I was given information four days earlier.'

This is the thing. The lies from the other side about the cost of energy and how they're going to have transparency on national cabinet have been totally exposed. These people aren't interested in helping the people; they only want to control the people. That is what the Labor Party has become. Believe you me, the old Labor prime ministers will be rolling in their graves—the Labor prime ministers who came from blue-collar backgrounds, the toolies, the tradies and all of that. We know the Hawke-Keating government sold all that out and adopted a Marxist approach when they backed the Dawkins plan and backed the Button plan that basically destroyed manufacturing in this country and replaced it with academia running the world.

If this country wants to get back on its feet, it needs to get back on the tools. But we cannot get back on the tools in this country and rebuild manufacturing in this country if we don't have cheap and reliable energy. The sad thing is that we have the potential for cheap and reliable energy in this country. Just near my hometown we have 400 million tonnes of coal in the ground that is owned by the Queensland people. All it takes is the cost of production—the cost of digging it up, and it's only just below the surface, and taking it about two kilometres to the power station where you burn it and it's converted straight away into energy. It's not just Kogan Creek; it's Tarong Power Station. I can well remember in the early eighties when Tarong Power Station was opened that Queensland was excited. It delivered us the cheapest energy in the world.

Senator Scarr will well remember when I spoke in my first preselection speech at the exhibition showgrounds when I first moved to Brisbane from my hometown of Chinchilla in 1988. Brisbane was a big country town back then, and there was very little difference between those from the regions and the city folk because big-country-town Brisbane knew that it relied on the people in the regions to give the people in the big city their power and their jobs.

We should never forget that—that we are one country. The ideologues in the cities that want to impose poverty and austerity on the hardworking people of this country should be ashamed of themselves for wanting to import expensive energy from offshore in the form of solar panels that's going to destroy farmland, in the form of transmission lines that are going to wipe out large swathes of our beautiful environment, of our farmlands. For what? So they'll be sending power all around the country, when you can simply dig it up, put it straight into a power station, get it into the Southern Interconnector and there you go: one transmission line and it's done. But no, we're going to have this crazy grid-like structure where we're going to have transmission lines running across the country. We're going to have problems with synchronicity, keeping the electricity at a level amount of voltage—all of this stuff we're going to have.

And then of course we're going to have recycling. Yet again, this is another reason we need to measure the data. Another answer to a question in estimates, courtesy of Larry Marshall of the CSIRO, was that the cost of recycling batteries is three times more than the cost of producing them. How is that going to reduce costs? And let's not forget the crazy subsidies this government is giving to renewable energy: $224 million for 400 batteries that is basically going to power 100,000 homes. When I asked questions about this in estimates, the energy department didn't even know where these batteries were going to go. They originally thought these batteries were going to be off grid, and then they had to be corrected by my Senate colleague Senator Hughes, who effectively pointed out that, no, no, no, they're going in the inner city areas, these batteries that are already on grid. So why are we going to spend $224 million on batteries that at best might last for one to two hours and will effectively come out of the pocket of the taxpayer—another $224 million on that?

Then we've got the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Can someone please tell me, if renewables are cheaper and so efficient, why they need to rely on government funding to be built? Why isn't the private sector, our wonderful banks—who are closing down branches in the regions so that they can reduce their carbon footprint; yet again it's the regions who have to pay the costs of this crazy ideology—funding renewables? I'll tell you why the banks won't fund renewables: because they won't make any money. And I will tell you another thing; I will tell you another thing. Why are they building these renewables? What's the cost to the environment going to be from the likes of Chalumbin Wind Farm, which is going up, being built, right next to World Heritage rainforest in North Queensland? That is going to be built on top of lakes—right next door to lakes—in the pathway of migratory birds and endangered species. How much koala habitat's going to be wiped out, how much glider habitat is going to be wiped out, before we realise that this crazy ideology is going to destroy not only the economy but also the environment? It's going to destroy the environment. And for what? Because of this imaginary ideology that there's a greenhouse up in the atmosphere, that there's a glass dome up here that attracts convection. It's completely absurd.

Yet here we are today trying to improve, trying to hold these people to account on the cost of energy. And what do they do? They're sitting there interjecting, still refusing to say that renewable energy makes money. Renewable energy makes money. Let's see it in these reports. But of course the Labor Party and the Greens won't do that, because they know their lies will be exposed. But let me tell you something: your lies have already been exposed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a promise before the last election that he was going to reduce electricity prices by $275. That did not happen. Electricity prices have increased by about $700 already, and what are they going to do? They're going to rob Peter to pay Paul and give an energy rebate to some people. They're going to give an energy rebate to businesses, who now not only are going to have to pay higher electricity costs—and that is one of the biggest input costs of any serious goods and services producer—but also have to buy carbon offsets as well.

Are you people trying to build this country or destroy it? If I didn't know better, it would look to me like the Anthony Albanese Labor government is trying to destroy this country. They are trying to tear down everything our forefathers have built. It's not just in the energy sector; we know it's in the entire array of ideology, where everything is about guilt, shame and fear. These people do not want to build; they want to destroy. I say: shame on you. If you were serious about actually improving productivity in this country—and we hear it all the time: 'We've got to improve productivity; we've got to improve productivity'—you would start measuring input costs so that we could start to improve productivity and actually employ people in gainful employment, not employment where we sit around shuffling paper but employment where we're back on the tools, building things. You'd think the Labor Party, who, under the Button plan in 1985, destroyed manufacturing in this country and then introduced Marxism via their Dawkins plan in 1990, would want to do something about fixing up the mess that they made. But they don't. Well, I say: shame on you, Labor, and shame on you, the Greens. I commend this bill to the Senate—a brilliant bill that will lift productivity and hold the cost of electricity and renewables to account.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a fitting move, from a party that is rapidly sliding into national obscurity, to bring such an obsolete bill to this chamber. Senator Rennick wants to talk about paper shuffling; well, this bill is little more than that. It shows a complete lack of understanding about how prices are regulated and whose job it already is to report on electricity prices. Senator Duniam's private senator's bill, the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023, is a weak swipe from the coalition in a redundant attempt to seek legitimacy in a conversation about electricity prices that outstripped them years and years ago. They have been missing in action for a decade on these issues. Instead of a meaningful contribution to the debate about electricity prices, about energy generation or about our electricity grid, what we get in their contribution is absolutely pathetic. It requires the Productivity Commission to table a report on electricity prices for each state. The ACCC already collects this data. This is indeed a pointless piece of legislation before us. There are already multiple avenues for ascertaining energy prices across the nation.

I would have expected those opposite to be capable of grasping this fact. It is little wonder, frankly, that Labor was left with the mess that it was if those opposite are unaware of such basic facts of market management in Australia. The ACCC already reports on and monitors not only electricity prices but profits and margins in the national electricity market every six months. The bill also completely overlooks the fact that, in my home state of Western Australia, for example, prices are fixed and set by government. The opposition are somehow in the dark about the fact that the Australian Energy Regulator already produces a state of the energy market report, a quarterly retail energy market performance update and a wholesale market report. What is the point of this bill? Well, this bill has no point. It is a desperate and shallow attempt at legitimacy in a policy debate in which you have been missing in action for a decade. Instead of a meaningful contribution, what do we get? We merely get paper shuffling and duplication of government resources, with yet another electricity market report.

You opposite were part of a government that aggressively hid all the energy price rises from the Australian public in the lead-up to the last election. You hid the prospect of significant energy price rises that were forecast by the energy market regulator in the lead-up to the election. It is hypocrisy to the nth degree to now bring forward a bill that talks about transparency in market pricing. You didn't allow Australian families to prepare for or understand what was going on in electricity markets; you just tried to hoodwink Australians into voting again for a government that mismanaged Australia's energy needs every single step of the way. Not only do we already have systems for providing information but you are, in this legislation before us, needlessly gilding the lily, while also totally barking up the wrong tree.

The Productivity Commission should not be given this kind of job, in any case. Their function is focused on economic and policy research, not on monitoring markets. That job already rests with the ACCC—which they already do—and, indeed, with the Australian Energy Regulator, the very organisation that you had cover up the electricity price increases in the lead-up to the last election. Perhaps that's why you didn't want to give the AER this job, because you didn't want to draw attention to the fact that you had this great cover-up happening. Didn't you learn from your former leader's illustrious and bizarre multiple-ministries debacle? When people take on roles that aren't a good fit and that they're not equipped for, it never ends well.

Our government, the Labor government, is not distracted by money-wasting, duplicating data-gathering. We are focused on the significant toll that the cost of living is having on Australians. We're worried about the effect of energy bills and the burden they place on a significant cohort of Australians. We're concerned about businesses, households, homeowners, renters and social housing residents—everyone who lives in our great nation—which is why we took urgent action to shield Australian families and businesses from the worst of global energy price spikes. It's why we put forward our energy relief plan, a plan that limits gas prices and coal prices and provides energy relief for households and businesses. It's why we're doing the hard yards with the states to put in practical measures, including in states like WA, where electricity prices are already controlled via the fact that electricity generation and the grid is still owned by state owned enterprises. Even then we've got the flexibility to adapt and put in measures to make these things work.

We're committed to partnering with the states and territories to deliver targeted and temporary relief on power bills. It is also why we're partnering to deliver $3 billion worth of electricity bill relief for eligible households and small businesses. From July this year we are delivering on our plan to deliver up to $500 relief in electricity bills for eligible households and $650 for eligible small businesses. We're getting the states to pitch in too because the more we work together, the bigger the difference we can make, which is why we have made this a matching program, with states and territories being asked to match this funding on a dollar-for-dollar basis. This provides hundreds of dollars of additional bill relief for eligible Australian families right around the country.

We are also investing in cheaper, cleaner and more reliable energy for the future. We are investing more than $1.6 billion in helping businesses and households, including energy relief and support in social housing. We're working to make energy performance upgrades to social housing. We are putting an energy investment in social housing that is expected to cut the energy demand and needs of some 60,000 social housing properties. This is to cut their energy use and bills by one-third, which is incredibly significant for low-income households in social housing.

We've got access energy savings and upgrades through our 'save energy, save on energy bills' package, including $1.6 billion to relieve cost-of-living pressures by making energy performance upgrades more accessible and affordable and $310 million for the small business energy initiative to give small business and medium business an additional 20 per cent deduction on spending that supports electrification and more efficient use of energy. It's these kinds of things—for example, enabling a tax deduction to draw down more quickly so you can make more efficient investments to get that transformative change happening sooner—that really help small business drive down expenses and costs as well as, really importantly, reduce emissions.

Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Pratt, the time for this debate has expired, so you will be in continuance when it resumes.

(Quorum formed)