Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would just like to take this time to make the Australian public aware of some of the radically higher prices that Australian consumers are paying for electricity compared to what is available in the United States of America. We know from an article in TheDaily Telegraph published in Sydney today that, in the state of Virginia, they're enjoying residential retail prices of around 15c a kilowatt hour. It wasn't that long ago that Australia enjoyed equivalent or even lower prices for electricity compared to the USA. But, compared to the 15c a kilowatt hour that consumers in Virginia enjoy, consumers in Australia are paying upwards of 40c a kilowatt hour. The prices we pay are not 25 per cent or 50 per cent or even 100 per cent higher; the prices that Australian consumers pay are more like 150 per cent higher.

It is not just the state of Virginia. I have here a table from the US Energy Information Administration. It lists the average price for electricity to end-user consumers. Looking at a few other states, in Illinois, the price—these are in US cents, converted to Australian cents—is A16c a kilowatt hour; in Florida, US12.12c, the equivalent of A15.3c; Georgia, A14.4c; North Carolina, A14.8c; Kentucky, A13.8c; Louisiana, A12.3c; and Oklahoma, A13.9c. How are we going to have a competitive economy and attract investment, going forward, if we have electricity prices that are two and three times higher than they are in America?

Then there's the corporate tax rate. We've seen the US reducing their corporate tax rate to 21 per cent. We've seen a flow of investment as a result of that into the USA. We've seen companies giving out $1,000 bonuses to their workers because of the reduction in the corporate tax rate. And yet we have members on the other side of the parliament that won't even agree to the smallest of corporate tax rate reductions in Australia, from 30 per cent to 27½ per cent.

Getting back to the price of energy, the simple reason the cost of electricity has exploded in Australia is the lack of base-load coal generation. You can see it in all the numbers. The maths is there. When the Northern Power Station was closed down, prices in South Australia skyrocketed. It was closed down and actually blown up—physically blown up. When the Hazelwood power station closed down and was not replaced with base-load power, the prices throughout the states in the national grid skyrocketed. In fact, if we go back just a few years to 2012, the average wholesale price for electricity in New South Wales was $29; in South Australia, $30; and, in Victoria, $27. For the first month of this year, in New South Wales—after having that average of less than $30 in 2012—it was $84. In South Australia, the average price was $101. In Victoria, the average price was $99. That's the wholesale price of electricity.

Today we've seen AGL release their profits. We should always try to encourage companies and congratulate them when they report high profits. But, in this case, the additional profits that AGL have made have simply been the result of higher wholesale prices in the market which flow through to consumers as higher retail prices. We need to fix up— (Time expired)

House adjourned at 17:00

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Vamvakinou ) took the chair at 10:00.