Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand today to strongly support the progression of this private senator's bill on electricity reporting. The rationale behind the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023 is straightforward, as it is aimed purely at creating more accessible, better consolidated public information and reporting on electricity prices and generation in Australia. In short, the core objective underpinning the bill is that its passage would require the Productivity Commission to compile quarterly reports on retail electricity pricing, as well as on resources from which that electricity is being generated and for each state and territory. The relevant minister would then be required to table these reports in parliament. This would fill a glaring void that exists in Australia, given that we don't currently have a central national repository for this kind of data. Australians right across the country deserve to know not just how much they're paying for their electricity and why but also how much these amounts are changing over time and how they compare to what people in other parts of the country are paying. These are important concepts when it comes to improving accountability and transparency in relation to energy policy, and the passage of this bill will ensure these objectives are better realised.

It is true that a substantially broader variety of data about electricity generation, pricing and usage has been made available to Australians over the past decade or so. In particular, there's been an emergence of several new and/or improved reporting mechanisms and tools from agencies like the Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator. Foremost amongst these has been the AEMC's residential electricity price trends document and the AEMO's online dashboard. We have seen a number of companies and publicly funded bodies opening up avenues for Australians to compare the price and deals being offered by retailers and to secure financial savings for themselves in the process. Those have included 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. Unfortunately, however, there still isn't a single source or a single report through which Australians can regularly see, at a glance, something as simple as a full national snapshot of current and past retail electricity prices.

The content of this bill is aimed at bridging that divide and, if successful in doing so, would represent a significant advance. It would also ensure that not only the Albanese government but also each future Commonwealth government in Australia would be held to a better standard of accountability in relation to the impacts of their policies on electricity supply and pricing. This would, likewise, sharpen the country's focus on the trajectory of energy prices and, accordingly, exert greater pressure on an incumbent government to arrest ongoing increases in these prices, where that is occurring. This would be an eminently good outcome. It would also mean that a government that is not acting responsibly or achieving good outcomes in the energy portfolio, like the present administration under Mr Albanese, would be better held to account for their broken promises and abandoned commitments. This includes broken promises like the one made 97 times before the 2022 election—but, shamefully, not even mentioned once by the ALP since then—that Australian power bills would be reduced by $275 annually.

Households should brace for bigger bills as the new financial year ushers in higher taxes and increases in electricity prices, courtesy of the Albanese Labor government. From today, Australian households and budgets will be slugged with some of the highest electricity prices in the world as energy bills increase by up to 28.7 per cent across the country. That's an additional $564 a year that families will need to find just to keep the lights on and to keep the house warm in winter and cool in summer amidst Labor's cost-of-living crisis. Small businesses will need to fork out up to $1,738 a year just to keep the doors open. These energy bill increases are a slap in the face to hardworking Australians who were promised 97 times that they would receive a $275 reduction in their energy bills and were guaranteed that nobody would be left behind by an Albanese Labor government. Instead, Albo has delivered the highest energy prices on record.

Labor's electricity increases will force more Australian families onto hardship programs because of this government's failure. More small business, the backbone of our economy, will be forced onto a knife's edge, fighting for survival. Australians keep seeing their power prices going up, not down, and it is only Labor that can be relied upon to pat themselves on the back while Australian families and small businesses struggle to make ends meet. It's little wonder the number of families on electricity hardship programs has reached record highs under Labor. It is this kind of arrogance and prioritisation of politics over people that saw electricity prices double the last time Labor was in government. Australians have been warned by AEMO of energy rationing and blackouts in the coming years. When we left office, there was no reliability gap. Labor has lost control of Australia's energy system. Labor has broken its promise and it has broken its trust with the Australian people.

Regional Queenslanders outside of the South-East Queensland corner are set to cop the highest electricity price hikes in the country—the highest in the country! Families across regional Queensland are already doing it tough, and Labor hasn't a clue what to do. The Queensland Competition Authority confirmed the news with the release of the final determination of regulated electricity prices for regional Queensland. Labor was elected on a platform of transparency, honesty, integrity and not going missing. Well, we know how that is going. But what better way to prove that they are holding to that than to allow regional Australians to see exactly how their power is being generated and how much it costs? Regional people and businesses facing rising power bills don't have the luxury of simply encouraging more customers from a limited population base through the door, and they often don't have a choice of electricity providers. Think of the local butcher, the IGA or any of the businesses that rely on high energy use to service their customers and to ensure cold supply chains are kept intact—for food and nutrition, in particular. As food moves further north and west across the country, we see nutrition values fall in food. In part, it is because of limited cold supply chains. And yet Australians, Queenslanders, are seeing a conga line of Labor ministers continually telling them to ignore their eye-watering power bills and believe that the rush to shut down conventional energy will bring costs down. Every cost increase is like a hammer blow for regions already paying more for insurance, transport, fuel and food.

Failure to vote for this sensible bill can only mean Labor is trying to hide the truth about its energy policies and its claims about energy policies. After not being honest, dozens of times, about bringing power bills down, it's time for the Labor Party to come clean with the Australian people. A government confident of its energy policy should support anything that shows Australians more information about just how these policies are supposedly helping them. This bill is not about playing politics. It is about openness and transparency. Openness and transparency are meant to be Labor's new approach to government. But unfortunately we are yet to see any such openness from those opposite. This bill provides a chance for them to put their money where their mouth is and give Australians clear information on the state of our electricity market. For each of these reasons and many more, it would be a tremendous development if this bill were passed. The coalition looks forward to the support of all senators and members for its translation into law.

Just specifically, proposed increases to regulated offers will ensure that 1.6 million households will be worse off in New South Wales by $564 a year, in South Australia by $485 a year, in Queensland by $432 a year and in Victoria by $426 a year. Labor's rush and lack of a sensible plan mean that Australians are paying more for electricity at a time when they can least afford it, with higher interest rates and higher costs for insurance, food and flights. This is all at a time when Australians are now being expected to miss out on those small luxuries that they had in life, the small things that they might have been able to provide for their kids, like sports gear or activities. Instead, they're spending that money on electricity because this government doesn't have a plan. The government are in a headlong rush to turn off, prematurely, affordable, reliable energy generation and move to renewable energy. They have no plan. As we know, without a plan, you are actually planning to fail. The gas market interventions last year and further into this year mean that we have less gas supply available in this country. Gas will not be available the way it was last year and in previous years when there have been shortages because of maintenance of coal-fired power stations or for other reasons. People are buying generators because they know that the government will fail to be able to provide their electricity needs in the coming months and years.

At the same time, the energy minister is urging manufacturers to be a part of a rebate scheme to use less electricity to allow more manufacturers to access the market. This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how business works. When you shut down your production, your manufacturing program, it means that you generate less income. You generate fewer profits. And that never comes back. If you missed those this week or this month, there's not a period when you do doubly well later on. So the government are determining with this failed energy policy that Australian businesses, already with other higher costs of business, are doing it even tougher when they don't supply this core business supply of electricity.

It is shocking for a nation that is so truly blessed with energy sources, ones that we have relied upon for generations and that other parts of the world would give their eyeteeth to have, that Australia is so recklessly turning its back and rushing without a plan to move away from this reliable energy and to move instead to a new source of energy that will only hurt Australia. The latest news reports regarding the need to extend the licence at Eraring to keep the lights on should come as a wake-up call to the Albanese government and its tattered energy plan.

I support this private senator's bill. It's planned to provide more transparency, more data and more information to Australians from a single transparent location. I can only urge those opposite to come to the table, to live true to their stance on transparency and openness for Australians and to pass this bill. It is urgently needed and an excellent proposal.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. Senator Duniam has proposed a very straightforward bill to improve the accessibility and transparency of electricity prices and electricity type. I think it's important that we have a discussion about the why, the what and the how of Senator Duniam's proposed bill, looking into the context of where Australia is at the moment.

Australia and my home state of Queensland are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. The No. 1 issue in Queensland, whether it's in Cairns, or it's in Chinchilla, or it's in Burketown or on Bribie Island, is cost of living. What we need as a parliament, and what Canberra needs, is for the Labor Party in power, who are very good at talking about voices, to grow some ears and listen to the people who are crying out with their voices about the cost-of-living crisis. I'm unsure what planet Labor Party politicians are on, but it's certainly not planet Earth, because the Labor Party's No. 1 priority for the next three or four months, maybe six months—no-one knows because of a lack of transparency—is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a referendum that is risky, that is unknown, that will be permanent and divisive.

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Plus their treaty.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But, Senator Henderson, they're not spending this money—which is not their money, by the way; it's the taxpayers' money—to address the cost of living. Now, I've spent the last five weeks driving around Queensland. I spent the last five weeks being up in the far north-west, being up in the Far North, being down in the south-west and all the places in between. We senators on this side of the chamber spend our time not locked up in capital cities or hiding in Canberra but out on the road listening to people because we do have ears. We use those ears directly in proportion to our mouths. We've got two ears and two eyes. We watch and we listen and then we speak, whereas the Labor Party is the other way round. They do a lot of speaking; they don't do much watching and they certainly do very little listening. That is why this bill is actually so simple. It will be so effective in helping, in a very unique way, address the cost-of-living crisis that is impacting all Australians.

I want to talk about some statistics. I don't like the word statistics, because I think sometimes statistics lead down the Mark Twain path, but this is very interesting in terms of facts that are relevant to how my fellow Queenslanders have been hurt in this cost-of-living crisis. We've had 11 interest rate rises—11 interest rate rises—under the Labor Party. This year close to a million people are going to fall off what is known as the mortgage cliff. What that means is they are going to go from having fixed rate mortgage repayments and they are going to be hit by going to variable rate mortgage repayments. This means that interest rates are going to be the highest they have been since 2011, and this means that in my home state of Queensland there actually is a housing crisis.

The housing crisis has come about because rents are going up, because mortgages are going up and also because power bills are going up. When you sit down with people and talk to them about the issues that are impacting how they live their lives and what is impacting upon their families, in Queensland the No. 1 issue is cost of living. In Queensland, we are very unlucky in that we have a state Labor government who will have been in power for 30 out of 35 years at the next state election. They are indolent, they are intellectually lazy, they are tired and they are caught up in the trappings of power, but they do not understand that the reason we all go into politics is not to seek power for the sake of power; we go into politics to make lives better for our fellow Queenslanders. The Queensland Labor Party, who are a cabal, merely used the instruments of state to better themselves at the expense of my fellow Queenslanders.

In Queensland at the moment, 55 cars are stolen each day. In Townsville, Phil Thompson is always fighting and standing up for the people of Townsville, along with Senator McDonald, who spoke in this debate. Senator McDonald is a strong voice for the north. They understand that in Townsville people not only have high electricity bills and high insurance premiums but also have the scourge of crime. In Townsville people don't just get their car stolen; what happens is these gangs of youths break into the house. That is crime No. 1: a home invasion. They will beat up the people living in the home. That is crime No. 2: assault or GBH. Then they steal the car. So people in Townsville get the criminal trifecta. They get three criminal acts that are performed on them—that they are attacked by. Then you have a state Labor government who have actually cut the number of police in Queensland. What happens is my fellow Queenslanders have to deal with crime, but they also have to deal with the cost of living.

That is why this bill is so important. Before the election, Prime Minister Albanese promised 97 times that he would reduce power prices by $275. I would encourage anyone in this chamber to put your hand up if you think your bill has gone down by $275. Let Hansard record that no-one put their hand up because no-one's power has gone down by $275. The parents of the school children upstairs listening and watching—hello—will be getting smacked by very expensive power bills. The journalists who, by lack of misfortune, may be listening to me speak at the moment, have certainly not had their power bills go down by $275. No-one in Queensland or Australia has seen their power bill go down by $275. Indeed, not only have power prices gone up; they've soared. They've exploded under Labor.

Since 1 July, power bills have gone up in South Australia by $512 a year and in New South Wales by $594 a year. In regional Queensland, where I live—I live out in the Darling Downs—our power bills have gone up $429 a year. Down the range, down in Brisbane, they have gone up $402 a year. What planet are these Labor Party politicians on? What medication has been taken by the decision-makers and the policymakers who think that it is acceptable that we have some of the world's highest electricity prices in a country which has so many natural resources?

Everybody likes to talk about renewable energy. Brilliant! But, if we've got all this free renewable energy, why are our power bills going up? If we have got all this coal—and we've lots of coal in Queensland; we've got clean coal in Queensland that we're very good at exporting to developing countries, like India, who want our coal because they know they want cheap and reliable electricity—why aren't we using more of our coal? Also, Australia has a third of the world's uranium. So, if you want net zero emissions and you want reliable electricity and you want affordable electricity, you need to take a pragmatic approach to this, and Australia needs to look at the resources we have. It is using uranium. It is using coal. It's using the sun. It's using wind. It's using gas. It's using whatever it takes for Queenslanders and Australians to have cheap, reliable electricity.

As I said before, what Senator Duniam's bill proposes is very, very simple. It just requires 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. Brilliant! How simple is that? Because, if you believe, as we do on this side of the chamber, in transparency and accountability, if you believe that the best way is to show how government works and how the economy works, you do that with information. I can go back to some basic economics—and I'll look through Paul Scarr's drawer where he has essentials of economics for dummies—to show people how a market operates. A market operates at its best when there is readily available information. It allows the consumer to make decisions. Also, it allows policymakers to make decisions using sunlight as a disinfectant. It will show to Australians how and why there are price rises, but also, importantly, it shows where power is coming from. Australians across the country deserve to know not just how much they are paying for their electricity but also how these amounts are changing over time and how they compare to what people in other parts of the country are paying. That will give businesses and families confidence about how they can manage their own budgets. It will help with planning in this cost-of-living crisis that Labor has created.

Labor has been in power for over a year now. In that year we've seen power bills go through the roof. We've seen mortgages go through the roof. We've seen rent go through the roof. We've seen insurance go through the roof. There actually isn't a roof left because so many things have been going through the roof that they've blown the roof away. What we're doing on this side of the chamber is proposing sensible suggestions to help Australians, to help Queenslanders deal with this cost-of-living crisis because what you're getting from the Labor Party is nothing. They talk about voices, but they don't listen and they will never listen to the voices that are already crying out for help.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak this morning on the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023. There are only three issues which the Labor government need to keep top of mind. They are the same three issues that Australians need to keep top of mind when they come to judge the performance of the government at the election, most likely late next year. Those things are interest rates, inflation and productivity. They are issues that the government would like to avoid. They are issues that go to the core of the current and future financial prosperity and success of Australian families. They will protect Australia, if they're managed carefully, from future economic harm and distress and future economic shocks that we can only speculate on at the moment.

The productivity one is by far the most important and the most urgent because, put simply, improvements in productivity in Australia improve living standards for Australians. Anything that reverses productivity gains, anything that diminishes productivity across the Australian economy dampens or worsens the living standards for Australians today and, importantly, also for the children and grandchildren of Australians into the future. So it's productivity that is the core and most immediate challenge facing the government, indeed facing the whole country, and I'll come to why this modest improvement presented in this private senators bill is necessary and, while modest, would be a very constructive addition to our transparency and reporting over energy prices.

It's important to add that any discussion that this country wants to have, led by the Labor government, with regard to wages and inflation is a hollow discussion unless it also involves discussion about productivity gains. And you don't have to be Einstein to know that at the moment, after more than 12 months in government, this Labor Party wants to avoid discussions on productivity despite the fact that the Productivity Commission has just recently released its roadmap into how Australia can achieve those future productivity gains. During a Senate inquiry process recently, it was revealed that the Productivity Commission itself had confirmed to senators that the Treasurer, Dr Chalmers, had not even found the time to meet with the Productivity Commission to be briefed on its ideas, its findings and its recommendations contained in its most recent five-year productivity review. I was present for that revelation. It is quite remarkable that the person who is most responsible for the economic direction of this country, the Treasurer—it's in his job title—has not yet found the time to speak with the Productivity Commission about its report. It is a thousand pages of plans, ideas and recommendations for how we can move this country forward and secure future productivity gains that will improve the living standards of Australians into the future.

If that wasn't bad enough, it was then revealed that the Prime Minister has not found time to discuss, inquire into or be curious about this 1,000-page report prepared by the Productivity Commission on what is the future plan for productivity reform in this country. That is alarming, and it should send bells ringing in every Australian household. If the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are not interested in discussing and exploring how we're going to tackle productivity reform in this country, why would anyone else in the government think it's important? The answer to that is: no-one would. If the Prime Minister doesn't think he should give the Productivity Commission his time, if the Treasurer doesn't think he should give the Productivity Commission his time, then no other Labor minister in the government is going to think it's worthy of their time either.

There was an interesting remark the other day by Deloitte Access Economics which I think is very important. It goes to the conversation around inflation, which, with interest rates, with productivity reform, is a critical economic issue facing the country. The government has sought to portray the recent quarterly decrease in inflation as a success. I will come to why it's not a success in a brief moment. Deloitte Access Economics had this to say about the inflation battle:

… defence against the supply side challenges which are driving underlying inflation in Australia needs to come in the form of a wider set of economic policies, namely fiscal policy, investment and innovation to lift productivity, competition policy to improve efficiency and erode market power, and tax policy to boost prosperity.

When we hear the government talk about inflation, its conversations around inflation are very narrow. 'Look how well we have done,' the government tries to say; I will tell you why it has not done very well shortly. The government doesn't want to engage on that broader suite of issues which will be necessary if we are going to bring down inflation in a meaningful and sustainable way so it does not continue to wreak havoc on the Australian economy. Inflation is a great economic evil—perhaps the greatest economic evil—and the government is being tardy, is being slow and is being narrow in wanting to address the inflation dragon that is wreaking havoc across the Australian economy.

We will go to a vote on this bill shortly. If the government can't embrace a simple, modest but transformative initiative like this, contained in Senator Duniam's private senator's bill, how can they possibly be interested and how can they possibly be trusted to engage, embrace and advance the much bigger reforms that are necessary in the Australian economy? The answer to that is: they can't. The answer to that is: they won't.

Make no mistake about it, Anthony Albanese is not Bob Hawke and Jim Chalmers is not Paul Keating. There are some virtues in that, I'm absolutely sure of that. But when it comes to the economic reform agenda and when it comes to the productivity reform agenda—to be fair, Mr Hawke and Mr Keating were supported by Mr Howard and the coalition, who offered up significant and important bipartisanship on important economic reforms—Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are not Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. That has been demonstrated enough already, but that will be demonstrated over the course—and, we would hope, the limited course—of this government.

The inflation challenge in the country continues to be real and continues to be urgent. As I said, the government is interested in trying to convince people that it has made welcome progress. The Treasurer remark earlier this week was that the government had made 'welcome progress' in tackling inflation. Yesterday the Australian Bureau of Statistics blew open the myth that the government is dealing with inflation. Yesterday the ABS released its Selected living cost indexes, which come out regularly from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It said that over the 12 months to June 2023, all living cost indexes—and there are five—rose by between 6.3 per cent and 9.6 per cent. That means that in the last 12 months prices rose between six and nine per cent. So, when Australians are going shopping, filling up their car and buying financial services products and they are feeling the financial pain and they are thinking, 'Why am I not getting as much from my dollar as I used to get?' it's because the government hasn't met the inflation challenge.

The ABS went on to say:

Employee households recorded the strongest quarterly and annual rises due to increases in Mortgage interest charges.

Those mortgage interest charges are the cumulative effect of 11 rate rises under this government. Just to be clear, employee households, in the mind of the ABS, are those households whose primary source of income is wages and salary. Many of us can relate to that. Many of the constituents we represent would fall into that particular category. The ABS went on to say that employee households—that is, those with a primary source of income such as wages and salaries—recorded the largest annual rise, of 9.6 per cent, on record. The ABS has blown the whistle. The government has achieved a record, and that record is inflicting financial harm on Australian families. That record is that employee households recorded the largest annual rise on record. That is what the ABS released yesterday.

It goes on to say:

Mortgage interest changes makes up a higher proportion of expenditure for Employee households. Mortgage interest charges rose 91.6 per cent, the largest annual rise on record, driven by banks passing on the RBA's multiple cash rate rises over the year.

Why has the RBA had to have layer upon layer upon layer of interest rate rises? It's because the government has not been doing enough. Eleven interest rate rises are the RBA's verdict and judgement on the performance of the government in tackling inflation in the Australian economy. It is bad, and guess who is wearing the cost of that? It is the electors, the families and the businesses across Australia.

So I have a question for the government: where does it think this pain is being felt? I can tell you where the pain is being felt. It is being felt not exclusively but predominantly in outer suburban areas of our cities, which at the most recent election predominantly chose to elect Labor members of parliament because Anthony Albanese said in May 2022, on the verge of the election, that life would be cheaper under Labor. Don't believe me. The front page of the Australian newspaper on 22 May said that life would be easier under Labor.

Well, after 11 rate rises, life has not become easier. The ABS is saying that costs for families are the highest they have been on record. Labor has not delivered on its commitment that life would be easier for Australian families, and now, when we have a bill that contains a modest but important transformative reform that will bring transparency to the issue of energy prices, the government can't even muster the courage and the foresight to agree to this private senator's bill. That is a capital-F failure. So, next year, when Australians go to judge the government on interest rates, inflation and productivity, the Australian community will give the government a big F for failure.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the second reading of the Productivity Commission Amendment (Electricity Reporting) Bill 2023, Senator Duniam's private senator's bill, be agreed to.