House debates

Tuesday, 11 September 2018

Matters of Public Importance

Energy

4:09 pm

Photo of Trevor EvansTrevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's a good reason why the majority of Australians say that they trust the coalition more than Labor when it comes to keeping energy prices lower; it comes down to the lived experience. Australians have been through this before. When Labor's in government, energy prices tend to skyrocket, in part because Labor does so many deals with the Greens, pursuing ideology ahead of substance and fact. But it is also significantly down to Labor's sheer mismanagement in office, because you can't get around Labor's incompetence when it comes to running anything more complicated than a closed shop. Whether it's energy or other schemes like pink batts or school halls—you name it—their incompetence is at least consistent across Labor's people, both federal and state, as I will come to in a moment.

The substance of this MPI can be dismissed, as silly as it is, in a single sentence: our electricity prices just came down in Queensland, in New South Wales and in South Australia. It was a matter of weeks ago, around 1 July. It was on the front page of The Courier Mailthose opposite may have missed it and it was in press releases and letters sent to customers from energy retailers like AGL and Origin. It was in the annual pricing determination of the Queensland Competition Authority, where I used to work as an economist in the energy sector. That organisation sets a benchmark price. Everyone can check it out. Go to their website, qca.org.au, and there's a button right there on the front that says 'Regulated electricity prices 2018–19'. If you click on that, the first sentence says:

Electricity prices for most regional customers will fall in 2018–19. The typical customer on the main residential tariff (tariff 11) will see a decrease of 1.3%, and the typical customer on the main small business tariff (tariff 20) will see a decrease of 3.4%.

That reduction, worth about $140, on average, to the typical family, has been a direct result of the number of actions this government has taken over the past year or so to put downward pressure on energy prices, including, most notably, the government's big wins around securing domestic gas supply.

Of course we do need to see further and much larger decreases. There's not one step but many steps that need to be taken to bring energy prices down even lower. It's not enough to simply note that the coalition government has managed to decrease prices in two out of the five past years, whereas they always went up every year under Labor. The minister earlier talked about some of the government's plans, including bringing in a new default price for vulnerable customers, a safety net. The member for Boothby listed a few others. From generation to distribution and retail, this government is taking action on all of those fronts and more.

There's another significant pressure on electricity prices which people really should know more about, especially those of us from Queensland. The Queensland government itself has been caught out gouging profits out of people's energy bills. The ACCC chair, Rod Sims, has pointed this out. The two big generators in Queensland have a significant market share between them, and they're both fully owned by the Queensland Labor government. The ACCC has accused them of using their market power, essentially holding back their supply while waiting for the price in the market to rise as a consequence of that artificial shortage they create and then swooping in to take advantage of the higher prices. Those higher prices meant that the Queensland government got higher dividends through the energy companies they own. Those windfall profits by the Queensland Labor government came at a cost. It came at the cost of families, small businesses and everyone else as they paid their energy bills, which were higher than they otherwise would have been. That's not just the energy bills of those of us in Queensland but the energy bills of everyone throughout the National Electricity Market.

This government called out that Labor government and, as soon as we did, the Queensland government—I presume, through sheer embarrassment at being caught out—instructed one of their two generators to cease the disgraceful conduct. What did we see? Prices immediately came down. It was basically as clear an admission as you will ever get of having market power and abusing it. More Queenslanders should know about that history. Of course Queenslanders can form their own views as to whether the Queensland Labor government wisely spent their gouged profits. But one thing is very clear: this is one more clear demonstration of the approach that Labor always takes when it comes to issues like energy at a federal and state level. It's about ideology over facts, spending over thrift and incompetent management. You will always have higher energy bills under Labor.

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