Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister update the House on actions taken by the government to support the household budget by keeping electricity prices down and childcare affordable, including in my electorate of Bonner?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. The government has taken decisive action to address the challenge to energy prices and energy availability and security caused by years of Labor complacency, operating particularly in the states of South Australia and Victoria. We are about to see the closure of the Hazelwood power station, which provides nearly a quarter of the electricity for the state of Victoria. This is a power station which has seen the cost of generating power increased by the state government increasing royalties on brown coal—

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tripling!

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has tripled the royalties. It is a state where the Labor government wants to get out of coal but will not let anyone get into gas. It has put a ban on gas exploration and development, whether it is conventional or unconventional. It is clearly determined to head down the same road as South Australia, where we know, following more than a decade of Labor government, the state has the least reliable and most expensive electricity in Australia. The gas shortage on the east coast of Australia has approached crisis levels, and what we have done is secure from the gas producers a commitment, a guarantee, to make gas available for peaking power needs. This is critically important, because as coal fired generation is allowed to close, recklessly in the case of Hazelwood—what has happened there is a state Labor government has allowed that plant to close without any plan to make provision for it to ensure security and, of course, has put its own opposition in the way of making more gas available. So we have done that.

We have also got underway the work to deliver the largest addition of storage capacity in our history. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a 2,000-megawatt step to deliver storage capacity that can power half a million homes. It will enable renewables to be more reliable. It will enable Australians to have more security. We are getting on with that as well. That is the big difference between our side of politics and Labor's. We are committed to delivering results based on economics and engineering. We want to bring electricity prices down. We want to support families. We want to take the pressure off the cost of living and we are doing that right through our approach to energy. Economics and engineering—that is the way to go. Labor's ideology has driven gas out of the market and it has driven renewables into the market and they have had no plan to back it up.