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

I'd like to congratulate the Prime Minister, the member for Cook and also a fellow shire resident, on announcing that the NEG is dead. To the hundreds of constituents, to the small businesses, to the cafe shop owners, to the restaurateurs and to the bakers who have come to me and have raised the issue of their electricity costs, I say: we have listened. To those pensioners and those hardworking families who have raised the issue of electricity costs: we have listened. To people running factories that must have internationally competitive electricity: we have listened. We have listened, and our sole focus on this side of the chamber is to get electricity prices down.

There is also now a very great contrast between this side of the House and that side of the House. While our focus is on getting electricity prices down, they have a policy over there of copying the failed South Australian experiment. That is Labor's official policy, to copy South Australia—an ideological failure of an experiment that not only gave that state the highest electricity prices in the nation but gave that state the highest electricity prices in the world. Every member over there wants to copy that policy and to take it nationwide. There is a clear distinction between what we believe in, which is lower electricity prices, and what they believe in—

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hughes.