Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. By how much has the Essential Services Commission determined that the Victorian default offer will increase from 1 July?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What Clare Savage of the Australian Energy Regulator has said about the default market offer is the following: 'We have seen unprecedented volatility in our wholesale electricity markets over the last couple of years. We have had very high coal and gas prices as a result of the war in Ukraine and the recovery from the pandemic.' She went on to say, 'We've also seen a number of outages, in particular at old coal plants,' and that was a result of natural disasters having an impact. She went on to say: 'The proposed increase to the default market offer is much, much lower than it would have otherwise been. Forward contract prices for 2023-24 have fallen substantially since governments began discussing possible interventions in gas and coal markets in October 2022.'

She said that, it has been backed up by the RBA Governor, it has been backed up by every economist, which is why every government in the country came together to support caps on gas and coal and to put downward pressure on the default market offer, which we released, unlike those opposite who hid it.