Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning my office was contacted by a pensioner from Gunnedah. She was most upset because she lives alone and is terribly concerned about how she's going to manage her living expenses. The Albanese government before the election promised power prices would go down by $275, and exactly the opposite has happened. The impact of that is that people like this lady that contacted my office and making really hard decisions. They're deciding what to turn off. They are very careful just turning on the lights in the room they're using. She's reluctant to turn on her stove to cook a hot meal. She was telling my office this morning how cold it was in Gunnedah, and she's even considering turning off her hot water system. The difficulty as we sit here and we listen to the people from the wealthier suburbs of this country talk about their desire to reduce emissions and use signals for people to use less energy is that on the ground it's the most vulnerable people in the poorer parts of this country that pay the price. They can't tick a box that gives them offsets. Their only way of reducing their emissions is to turn off the power point.