Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

When energy prices rise, it's not the politicians who feel it; it's the families and the businesses. In my community of Fowler and for small business owners across Western Sydney, we are currently living through a period of immense pressure. When we talk about energy in this place, we often speak in abstractions, targets, transitions and percentages. For the people I represent, however, energy is a line item on the balance sheet that is increasingly failing to add up. I've been raising these concerns since I entered parliament. I have called for fuel excise relief and warned about the rising costs of power. I have asked the Prime Minister and the government for a clear explanation of how government policies translate into real relief for struggling households and businesses.

Here are just some examples of what energy chaos looks like on the ground. A local bakery cafe in Cabramatta told me that their energy rate in March 2024 was 32c per kilowatt. By April, it had jumped to about 49c per kilowatt. That is about a 53 per cent increase in a single month. Another local bakery in Canley Vale have seen their flour prices rise by 40 per cent since 2022, on top of skyrocketing energy prices and rent. When you hit a small business with these kinds of increases, you aren't just adjusting a price. You are removing the hope of even a small profit. You're asking a family, who have poured their life's work into a shop, to decide which staff to let go and whether they can even afford to keep the lights on.

The government's primary answer to this crisis has been the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, but there is a massive disconnect between the press releases and the reality in Western Sydney. A home battery rebate does very little for a bakery strangled by commercial energy tariffs and rising overheads. Even on its own terms, the batteries program is stumbling. It launched with a promise of one million batteries by 2030, backed by $2.3 billion. Yet, because the initial funding was exhausted so rapidly, the government has had to commit a further $5 billion of taxpayers' money just to chase the original target. But it's questionable whether that target will even be reached. In a cost-of-living crisis, a $5 billion correction is a massive figure.

More importantly, we must ask who is actually benefiting from this spending. In Fowler we have approximately 68,000 households. Do you know how many, as of late last year, are actually benefiting from the battery program? It is just under 500. Fowler sits at 96 on the list for installation. For the vast majority of my constituents—the renters, the families in townhouses and those in social housing—this program is practically inaccessible. My community is being asked to pay for a transition that is leaping over Western Sydney and landing in the laps of those who are already ahead. I don't say this to be partisan. I say it because the current approach is leaving the entire ecosystem of Fowler behind. Our small-business owners are the very same people heading these households.

If we want sovereign capability, we must ensure that our local shops remain viable. If we want a fair transition, it must be accessible to the families, the renters and the workers, who simply cannot afford the gap payment for a battery, even with a discount. I ask the government to look beyond the Instagram feeds and to the tens of thousands of households in my electorate who are still waiting for the cheaper power they were promised. We need structural reform, not just sugar hits. No-one should be left behind, and it's time that the government's energy policy reflected that. I'd like to say thank you to the member for Kooyong for raising a matter of public importance on this subject.

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