Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to talk about industry, the costs for industry and the alarming rise of electricity prices in my electorate of Flynn and in Queensland as a whole.

As we settle into the FTAs that we have with nine nations now, our farmers and anyone else who wants to export to these nine countries must be competitive. I know, having been on this earth for quite a few years now, that cheap water and cheap power were the success stories of Queensland in past years. This is not currently the case. Ergon Energy and Energex are GOCs, government-owned corporations, and there seems to be no government control when it comes to how they administer their job and how they continually put up prices—prices which astound me—seemingly, without giving a reason as to why these prices are going up so quickly and so sharply. If you compare the prices in New South Wales and Queensland, you see that they are something like 35 per cent cheaper in New South Wales. In Victoria they are even cheaper. They are 65 per cent cheaper than in Queensland.

Most of the industries in Flynn use a lot of electricity. This was highlighted to the member for Hinkler and me last year when Bundaberg was going through a particularly dry period and the cane crop was at a critical stage and needing water. You could not get the water from the sky. There was water in the two dams close to Bundaberg, but the farmers could not afford to water their crops because of the price of electricity. That is a fact. So the crops withered and died in the field.

This issue affects a lot of industries. If you go to the west of Bundaberg you get into the Gayndah and Mundubbera areas where we grow a lot of fruit. When fruit is grown it has to be chilled and stored in cold storage. As we know, once you go into cold storage, bringing the fruit down to about four degrees centigrade, you are going to use a lot of electricity.

The caravan rolls on to Emerald at the 2PH Farms, where a lot of their fruit is exported to China and South America. They have very large cold rooms, as do Gayndah and Mundubbera—cold rooms so big that you could drive trucks and tractors into those cold rooms. That is how big they are. So you can imagine the electricity used to keep those products chilled and ready for market, whether it is in Australia or overseas.

This is the problem we have. I have got three coal fired power stations in my electorate: at Stanwell, at Callide and near Biloela, and of course at Gladstone, which is the single biggest power station in Queensland. These are all coal fired power stations. As we know, along with other commodity prices, coal is the cheapest it has been for a long time, and that includes thermal coal, so why are the power prices going up so high? I think it is up to the minister in charge of the Queensland government to talk to Energex and Ergon and try to get some satisfactory reply as to why Queensland prices are so high compared to the rest of Australia, because it is going to do damage. It is doing damage now to our industries. Aluminium and other metals and resources are very much at rock bottom. They are a lot lower now than they were before the GFC. It is critical for the aluminium industries and other industries in my electorate that they have cheap, affordable power. Here we are, exporting coal and gas and uranium to other countries in the world, and they have cheaper electricity than us, but they have no natural resources. This is a ludicrous situation, and it must be addressed by the Queensland government, Ergon, and Energex. Thank you.