Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier this week the Minister for Climate Change and Energy was forced by the Senate to release the incoming ministerial brief on electricity prices—he'd tried to hide it since May—but the sad reality is that what he released still had blank pages right through it. Now, what was the minister trying to hide? He was trying to hide the fact that electricity prices are driving inflation through the roof in this country. That's going to have a real impact on families and on businesses, because unless you can drive energy prices down, sadly, what we're going to see is inflation continue to rise and rise in this country.

What are those opposite doing to try and stop this? What they're doing is spending all their time trying to hide documents which show that, once the bureaucrats briefed them, it was clear that they had to do something about electricity prices. What we think is that all those blank pages show that electricity prices are forecast to double. What is that going to do to inflation? If they think that's not the case then they should release the whole document. Otherwise, what it shows is they do not have electricity prices under control.