Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Energy Security and Affordability) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are right to be angry about the cost of living. They feel it every single day at the checkout and through their power bills, their rent and the cost of getting to work. When you strip it back, one truth sits underneath it all: energy is the economy. When energy gets more expensive, everything gets more expensive.

Over the past few years, we've made a political decision to rebuild our entire energy system around emissions targets—not around cost, not around reliability and not around what works for Australian families. And that decision has consequences. We're forcing early coal-fired power plant closures before firming replacement is ready. That reduces supply. And when supply goes down, price goes up.

We've built an energy system that's dependent on the weather, which means we now need to duplicate the entire grid with back-up generation, transmission lines and storage. That's not cheap. It's one system becoming two, and we're paying for them both. We've seen billions of dollars in subsidies flow into projects that cannot stand on their own, and those costs don't disappear. They're paid for, one way or another, by Australian households. We've created a system where industries—the businesses that make things, employ people and anchor our communities—are now paying some of the highest energy prices in the developed world. And that flows straight through to household budgets—higher fertiliser costs, higher freight costs, higher grocery prices and higher rents as a result of construction costs rising. This is not abstract. This is the weekly shop. And that's why, back in 2021, when Australia signed up to net zero, I took a different path—not because I don't care about the environment but because the engineer in me could see that this was heading towards a system built on higher costs, a system that weakens our industrial base and a system that makes Australia more dependent, not less.

There is no strong country without a strong economy. There's no strong economy without low-cost, reliable energy. From steel to fertiliser and transport to manufacturing, energy sits underneath it all. If we want to ease the cost of living, rebuild our economy and be a country that makes things again, then we have to be honest about what's gone wrong. We cannot keep pretending that higher-cost energy will somehow magically deliver a lower cost of living. It will not. The path forward is simple, but it requires courage. We must rebuild our energy system around the core principles of affordability and security. That means using the resources we have: coal, gas and, where it stacks up, new technologies to deliver the lowest possible cost to households and businesses. The best cost-of-living policy you will ever see is cheap energy. Until we get that right, everything else will keep getting harder.