Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The very first thing I did as the shadow assistant minister for energy, security and affordability was to go to the seat of McMahon and have an energy forum down there. Of course, that is the seat of the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, and I wanted to go to better understand the minister and what drives him, because we have such different views on the role of energy in the economy. I wanted to go and see if he is a representative of a community that does not care about energy prices. You can see it in my title; it's a very different approach that we bring to the energy space. For the minister, energy is about climate change, our international commitments and promises we've made to other countries. For me, energy is about industry. It's about jobs. It's about local communities like Oakey, which has a wonderful coalmine, a great meatworks and a hugely energy intensive community.

I wanted to understand the minister better. I went to Fairfield and held a little forum. I walked the streets of Fairfield talking to people. There were a couple of people who stuck out. One was Taric. He's a small-business owner. He's got five employees, all from McMahon. I sat down and asked him about his energy bills—and, like with everyone else around Australia, they've gone up, by $1,500. I said, 'But, Taric, mate, what about the home battery scheme?' Every time we ask the minister about rising energy bills, he says the home battery scheme is the answer. He looked at me and said: 'Mate, I can't afford home batteries. I can't afford to put in solar. I'm barely struggling to pay the bills to keep my kids fed and in school. I'm just struggling to hold it together. I need to focus on the issue of my power bills, not on some scheme separate to that.'

I then went out to a local mosque. It was iftar, at the end of Ramadan. Everyone was coming out and having a feed; they're a little bit happier! I remember one gentleman who came out, and he had this great line for me. I said, 'Do power bills concern you, sir?' He said, 'Mate, I've got a big family and big power bills.' It was a commonly-referred-to joke—and I made the connection that in Toowoomba I say the same thing to my local Irish Catholic community, who have four kids on average. They have big families and big power bills, and they're feeling the pain.

So, no, this is not a community that does not care about its power prices; this is a community who, like everyone else in Australia, is hurting and struggling under rising power costs. When we go further into the home battery scheme, we see how unfair and unequal it is to battlers. If you look at the top 100 postcodes by income, they get four times the investment from that scheme than the bottom 100. This is not just middle-class welfare; this is upper-class welfare. This is not helping those who are struggling; this is taking the tax dollars of those who are struggling and using them to help the upper class buy batteries above the capacity they need. It's absolutely insane.

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