Damian Drum (Murray, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The energy crisis that we have in Australia at the moment is quite simply a gigantic failure of the states. The states have responsibility for providing energy to their people in each of their respective jurisdictions. At the moment in Queensland, they actually own the poles and wires. The poles and wires have been acknowledged as creating about 50 per cent of the increases in families' bills. They actually own the Queensland poles and wires, and this gold-plating is just going on. It's an incredible system. The Queensland government have actually been caught out for gaming the system and creating further profits than anyone else would be game to announce, yet this has been run by the government against the people of their own state. In Victoria, where I live, they are sitting on 50 years of gas reserves, and yet the Andrews government has a moratorium and a ban on the extraction and even the exploration of gas. They've got the opportunity to bring the explorers in, find out where the gas seams are, bring more gas onto the market and create lower electricity prices, but they choose not to. They choose not to have any gas exploration. Certainly they have no gas extraction from onshore gas wells in Victoria.

What they want to do is build a gas port off one of the docks in Melbourne, so they're happy for someone else in Australia to have gas wells, they just don't want to do it in their state. In Victoria, they don't care whether it comes from the Northern Territory, whether the gas is drilled in Western Australia, whether it's taken out of Queensland or whether it's even from South Australia. They're happy to bring it around on boats, they just don't want to have any in their own patch, because, somehow or other, it's okay for someone else to do that work, but they don't want to get their hands dirty themselves.

In Victoria, they also tripled the coal royalties that they were charging at the Hazelwood mine. Within three months of that decision, the French owners decided to close Hazelwood down. This has also had a huge impact on the price of electricity in Victoria. There are some of the most amazing anti-electricity price policies that are coming out of the Victorian Labor government, and yet all of a sudden we look around the various states and see the cost of energy to the average Australian household. Well, the Australian government felt as though it had to get involved. It had to try and generate a NEG, a National Energy Guarantee, that would somehow or other create further investment into the sector, not just in investment for renewables. We all love renewables and we all want renewables to be the cornerstone of our electricity grid, but we also want to look after the families and the businesses that need electricity when the sun is not shining and when the wind is not blowing. The previous member said her plan is that she wants more and more renewables backed up by appropriate storage, but she failed to mention what this appropriate storage could be for the whole world.

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