Senate debates

Monday, 11 November 2019

Bills

Treasury Laws Amendment (Prohibiting Energy Market Misconduct) Bill 2019; Second Reading

7:39 pm

Photo of Jenny McAllisterJenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Prohibiting Energy Market Misconduct) Bill 2019. Labor was critical of the original bill in the last parliament. It risked doing harm and it seriously risked the privatisation of publicly owned electricity generators. The government has dealt with some of our reservations by introducing into this parliament a different bill, which makes improvements, particularly in relation to privatisation. The passage of this bill will not change the fact that, after 17 attempts, the coalition government still has no sensible overarching energy policy to drive investment, to reduce emissions or to cut power bills for struggling Australian households and businesses. This legislation has not been recommended by the consumer watchdog. Not only did the ACCC, after its lengthy examination of the retail electricity market, not recommend the legislation, but indeed it specifically recommended against a divestiture power, as did Professor Ian Harper in his landmark review of competition policy for the government a couple of years earlier.

As any observer of this debate would know, various business groups, energy users and energy suppliers over the last 12 or 18 months have been critical of the legislation in its different iterations. But, since the election in May, the business groups—most notably the Business Council—have changed from opposing the legislation to instead seeking to work with the government to improve the operation of this bill. That too, in the spirit of being constructive, has been the approach of the Labor Party. Most notably, after considerable debate about the impact of potential ministerial overreach in the operation of the original bill, it is pleasing to see that the government has curbed or pulled back the ministerial power that would be able to be exercised under this legislation. Instead, a role for the ACCC has been put in place, as well as a very important role for the Federal Court. We take that as a significant improvement to the bill, given that, since its original presentation, we have been complaining of overreach on the part of ministers.

Since the original presentation of the bill, we have been steadfastly against its very significant loophole which would have allowed the privatisation of publicly owned electricity assets—namely, the forcible divestiture of publicly owned electricity assets and the transfer of those assets to private companies. We know that the Liberal Party is addicted to the privatisation of electricity. We were promised that there would be more choice and that there would be better prices and more competition in the market, but I think anyone who has had even a casual look at the operation of the electricity market knows that privatisation has worked for the companies but it hasn't worked for consumers. The member for Kennedy and Labor identified this loophole after the original presentation of the bill in the other place. Labor was able to ensure that the loophole was closed absolutely and completely, to ensure that, if the operation of this legislation results in the divestiture of a publicly owned asset, it can only be divested to another publicly owned asset with the same or a greater level of public ownership.

As the Labor Party, we are of course very concerned that workers and their entitlements not be prejudiced by the operation of this legislation. Workers have no responsibility for the conduct that is apparently the driver of this legislation, no responsibility for allegations of cartel conduct and no responsibility for reductions of competition in the market. It's not surprising to anyone that the government has apparently paid no attention at all to the possibility that workers' entitlements will be reduced by the operation of this legislation. It's simply not a matter that is typically on the radar for the government. Labor in the other place moved an amendment to ensure that the transmission-of-business provisions of the Fair Work Act are deemed to apply to this type of transmission—namely, a forcible divestiture. This will ensure that those entitlements that are contained in registered enterprise agreements and in awards are preserved and protected for workers, who are, as I said, not the subject of the so-called mischief that lies at the heart of this legislation.

Since consideration in the House, and thanks to the work of the Senate committee which inquired into this bill—an inquiry in which I took part—it has become clear that a similar issue exists for non-registered agreements between workers and employers in the context of possible divestiture. Labor does not accept that workers should be made worse off as a result of divestiture which is a remedy for prohibited conduct that workers themselves had no part in. Put simply, workers should not be punished for the anti-competitive actions of a company. That is a position that all senators in this place should agree with. That is why I am now flagging that Labor will move a further amendment in this place to ensure that non-registered agreements between workers and employers which provide workers with additional protections agreed by employers should be safeguarded in the event of divestment. That is the right thing to do—it's the Labor thing to do—and we call on the government to support our amendment.

I want to be clear that this bill in no way substitutes for a proper, coherent national energy policy. We are in the throes of the deepest energy crisis since the mid-1970s. But, unlike that crisis, which was caused by an external shock, this crisis is the product of a profound public policy failure. Households and energy-using businesses are paying the price for this crisis. Power bills for households and businesses are going to go up and up, and it's quite clear that the market expects those bills to go up too. Wholesale prices are up across the National Electricity Market—on average, by 158 per cent since the Liberal energy crisis really took a grip in 2015.

The Financial Review reported very recently that forward prices in the electricity market are up 29 per cent, in just 12 months since the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the National Energy Guarantee were both dispatched in a coalition party room ambush. The key problem identified in advice after advice and in all of the evidence that has been put forward to the Senate committee that examined this is the lack of a coherent national energy policy. The Grattan Institute, reflecting on what's happened to wholesale prices under this energy crisis, confirmed that it has resulted in $1 billion in additional windfall profits to just the three big private energy companies. That is an additional $1 billion in profits every year since this crisis took hold, paid for by Australian households and energy-using businesses.

The Prime Minister seeks to convince the Australian people that everything is hunky-dory; that this is fine. We did have a burst of investment in renewable energy to meet the Renewable Energy Target that the Labor Party put in place when we were in government, and those opposite have tried to tear that down time and time again, particularly the now Minister for Energy, who came into this parliament surfing a campaign about being anti renewable energy. But what the Prime Minister doesn't tell the Australian people is that Bloomberg—the organisation that he enlists in his claim that we're leading the world in renewable energy investment—has also reported that renewable energy investment is already down 50 per cent in the first half of 2019 alone. The Clean Energy Council says that's probably a low-ball estimate. We should expect thousands and thousands of jobs to be lost from this sector which should be growing. We do support this bill, but we will continue to hold the government to account for its completely hopeless management of energy policy.

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