Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the mover of this motion and this MPI and the spirit in which it's been brought into this place. I have long advocated for making sure Australians get their fair share of our gas for domestic customers and making sure they get their fair share of our sovereign wealth. I was one of the first people in this place to sign on to the AWU campaign at the time to say, 'Reserve our gas.' That's why I'm proud to stand here today and be part of an Albanese Labor government that has done that. It took us getting elected into government to methodically draft that, but we now have a gas reservation policy in place on the east coast. What we will see over time is that start to grow and really benefit gas customers on the east coast.

I say 'gas customers' because we cannot ignore the simple fact in Australia that there are still over five million homes connected to gas that can't electrify any time soon. It is in the walls. It is in the floors. It is how people heat their homes. It is how they cook their food. The cost to electrify is just out of reach for many households. Some households also can't sustain or support, because of the age of their roofs, solar panels. Whilst it is working for some being able to put solar on their roofs and connect to batteries, it's not a solution for everybody at this time.

So that is why our government is approaching the energy transition that's going on in our country in a methodical and considered way. We are looking at the fact that we need to have a level of gas in this country to help service existing customers. We simply can't just cut them off. I say this worried about what's going to happen to three communities in my electorate. Because of jumping-around policy by the former Liberal-National government in the state of Victoria that promised something they could not deliver, we have now got homes in Victoria that are literally being cut off gas. Those who are from Victoria might remember the Baillieu-Napthine government promised to connect towns like Marong, Maldon and Heathcote to gas, and they outsourced to Solstice Energy the ability to connect to gas. But they didn't build gas lines. What they did was install infrastructure. It was like having a portable gas station built just outside the town. They encouraged people in these towns to spend the money to connect to gas. Some of those residents invested a lot. At the time, gas prices were a lot cheaper. We saw households installing gas equipment and gas burners because they thought they would be, in the long term, better off.

Fast forward over a decade, and we've seen that government lose. We've now got a Labor government in place, trying to deal with the mess that was left. Because of the spike in gas prices, the energy provider that was delivering gas—literally on trucks—to mini gas stations in these communities has announced that it is going to stop supplying gas to these 10 regional Victorian towns. This is a disaster, a demonstration of what happens when you don't have long-term thinking around energy and gas policy. These communities are devastated, and I really feel for them. They are now trying to electrify. They are now trying to do what they can. I do acknowledge the work the Allan government have done to try and help these communities, including through the subsidies they're offering. These communities have really been led up the garden path by bad policy from a previous government and are now living with the consequences because of a change in the market. I say this to demonstrate why we can't just have these blunt instruments, these ideas that may be good today but could, in the long term, deliver damage.

I've had a lot of people reach out to me about the proposal, the simple idea of a 25 per cent tax on companies that take Australian gas overseas. I have to be really honest with people that it's a blunt instrument, and we don't know the impact this idea of taxing companies 25 per cent could have on our own gas market. We don't know if increasing taxes on gas that we export will lift the price of gas in our country. Will it destabilise the gas markets globally in a time when we already have these challenges?

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