Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Skills and Training) Share this | Hansard source

This weekend, when I return back to my electorate, I'll have the great pleasure of being part of the opening ceremony at the Beaudesert Show. Located in the middle of my electorate, Beaudesert is probably one of the larger communities. It's a great day out. There's cattle, transport, agriculture, show bags. Kids bring their photos to exhibit. There are honey producers, and the ladies bake. It's a typical outback regional show.

What won't be typical about it this year will be the conversations I'll have with the people I represent. I'm confronted by it time and time again when they ask me: 'What are you doing about electricity prices? Why aren't you holding those guys on the other side of the chamber down there in Canberra to account? We were told that electricity prices were going to be cheaper.' And I'll have to apologise to them, because I know it's hurting their family budgets. I know that electricity prices have gone up 39 per cent, and I know that only 40 per cent of the retail market goes to households. The remaining 60 per cent of energy production goes into the manufacturing sector; that's the cost of fertilisers and the cost of tractors.

When you go into Woolworths and you buy items on the shelf, like a tin of baked beans or a frozen food product, everything has a component of electricity tied to it. That has had an inflationary pressure on our economy which has inhibited the Reserve Bank and led to their decisions to not give rate relief as quickly as they would have otherwise. There is not an original farm in my electorate—of which the largest contributor to GDP is agriculture—that still does not have a windmill on it. Southern Cross Windmills are celebrating 150 years here in Australia. They're situated in my electorate. So I won't be told by the richest postcodes in our country that we need to have an environmental conscience, that we need to be doing more to accept renewables. We are the early adopters of renewables and, when those windmills collapsed, we replaced them with solar pumps. But we didn't do it because we had a burning desire to save the environment; we did it because we had a burning desire to save our wallets. It was the most efficient type of energy. Unfortunately, renewables are far too expensive at the moment. That's a conversation this place needs to have about helping the people of Wright.

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