Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The shadow finance minister acknowledged that on 8 March, but those opposite come in here and pretend that they didn't know anything about that. Here's what Clare Savage, the Chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, had to say on 15 March: we have seen 'unprecedented volatility in wholesale electricity markets' over the last couple of years. We have had very high coal and gas prices as a result of the war in Ukraine and the recovery from the pandemic. We've also seen a number of outages, in particular at our old coal plants. Of course, we know that's related, as well, to some of the natural disasters that were occurring.

The fact is that the proposed increase to the default market offer is much, much lower than it would otherwise have been, because of the government intervention. Here's what the Australian Energy Regulator had to say:

Forward contract prices for 2023-24 have fallen substantially since governments began discussing possible interventions in gas and coal markets in October 2022 …

They're the facts of the matter of what has occurred.

The fact is also that, when that intervention did occur to put a price cap on gas, when the New South Wales Liberal government intervened to put a price cap on coal and when the Queensland government regulated to put a price cap on coal, we voted for that; they voted against that. Then, when we had $1½ billion of energy price relief, we were for the energy price relief; they were for higher prices. (Time expired)

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