Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. My concern goes to all businesses in Queensland and all businesses across our country. My concern goes to all households across Australia and their energy bills, because we want to work and we are working and we will work to ensure that their power prices are as low as possible, whether they're on the DMO or not. The DMO does feed into energy prices; that's a statement of fact. The former minister for energy knew that. Perhaps that's why he hid that increase from the Australian people.

In the budget, we had a choice. We could have hidden the pressure on power prices—option A, which the previous government took. We could have hidden that. Option B is to actually be upfront with the Australian people about the pressures. That's the option we took. We take the option of actually being honest with the Australian people.

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