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

I, for one, Mr Speaker, would never call Senator Canavan random. Senator Canavan said:

The other thing I often hear from government senators and members of the other place is that the former government failed because four gigawatts of baseload power came out of the system over that decade or so and only one gigawatt was installed to replace it. That is true. That is a fair criticism of energy policy over the past 10 or so years.

You won't often hear me approvingly quoting Senator Canavan, but he's spot-on there.

Then the second question is: what do you do about it? Well, we on this side of the House think that you introduce more of the cheapest, fastest-to-deploy form of energy. Those opposite think the answer is more of the most expensive, slowest form of energy. On that side of the House we saw four gigawatts of dispatchable power leave the grid and one gigawatt come on. In our not yet four years in office, we've seen two gigawatts leave and 7.7 gigawatts come on. That's more supply. More supply means lower prices. Less supply means upward pressure on prices, and that's what the Liberals and Nationals left Australia with, particularly their former energy minister the member for Hume, who promised that he would 'slash $183 to just over $400 per annum from household bills' in a speech on 30 August 2018. By the time he left office, were bills down $400 a year? No. They were up $45 with Ausgrid, $116 with Endeavour and $135 with Essential. The member for Hume— (Time expired)

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