Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to raise the issue of household bills in my electorate of Brisbane. Electricity bills, gas bills and water bills are often the biggest bills that households and small businesses face. Rising energy prices is one of Australia's biggest challenges. It is an issue that's receiving significant media attention and it's raised regularly with me in Brisbane. Considering how blessed we are in Australia when it comes to abundant energy sources, it's worth thinking about how we got to this point. I was asked last week on Brisbane radio why the state Labor government was having difficulty managing the price of water bills for Brisbane residents. I used to work as an economist in that sector, so I outlined my experiences. In short, water costs twice what it should in South-East Queensland because a former state Labor government, the Beattie government, was really good at short-term politics and really bad at competent governance.

In those years South-East Queensland's population was growing rapidly, but the Labor government did not build any new dams, didn't raise any dam walls and didn't find any new sources of water. We've got to remember that this was a time when the Brisbane City Council was doing all the heavy lifting in Brisbane—digging tunnels and building roads—whilst the state Labor government built a footbridge over the Brisbane River. Don't get me wrong, it is a great footbridge. But the point is these were years when the state government was being outperformed by the local council in the delivery of infrastructure.

When the inevitable happened and the water almost ran out, they got caught in a crisis of their own making, so they paid far too much to build a desal plant and recycled water scheme. The cost of those little-used assets and the bad deals Labor entered into to maintain them effectively doubled the price of water in South-East Queensland. While it's not quite that straightforward—there's a price path and government subsidies—it is true to say that Labor's incompetence when it comes to planning and delivery is why water prices have been going up like they have been for Brisbane households.

It's a similar story when it comes to electricity. Labor have failed to have a plan, although sometimes they have been quite good at the short-term politics. They set short-term energy targets with a focus on ideology not planning. They set their targets without any detailed plans about how to meet them. They have not planned for storage, dispatchability and how the transition would actually take place. As targets have obviously forced some existing generators to shut down, we now rely more on gas generators and so the gas price really starts to matter. That should be a good thing because Australia has abundant sources of gas and it should be cheap here, but some former Labor government signed some gas export contracts that were flawed, which meant all of our abundant local gas could be exported without leaving enough for our needs here in Australia. Don't even get me started on how Queensland Labor have put so much market power into the hands of the two generators that they owned, who are now potentially working together to bid up the price of electricity for Queensland residents.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for constituency statements has concluded.