Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Energy policy

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (16:31): But back to the issue of grieving for Victorians, who are doing life harder. Businesses are doing it harder under this Andrews government, and it is not just about taxes and charges, it is also about policy decisions – policy decisions that are driving up the cost of doing business and driving up the cost of household bills. And the first of those is energy policy. If you go back a number of years, the tripling of the brown coal royalties was the trigger that actually drove the closure of the Hazelwood power station down there. That started the spiral in electricity prices. That started the whole process of unwinding the power generation in Victoria. That was a policy decision – it was a cheap shot at the power companies to triple the coal royalties – which started that process there, which started this huge increase in electricity costs in this state.

There is the policy decision to oppose natural gas. Even the federal Labor government says that natural gas is part of the transition in energy to renewables. You cannot close natural gas and actually have time to transition to renewables. The philosophical opposition to using natural gas in this state, to developing any new natural gas in this state, means that gas bills are going through the roof. This year they are going to go up anywhere between 20 and 50 per cent. I have got food processing businesses in my electorate that are coming off their fixed-term contracts and are going to see huge price increases in their energy consumption, particularly gas – because food processing needs gas to run the boilers to actually process the various foods. Kagome Foods, the tomato processing plant in Echuca, is a classic example of that. They are owned by Japanese masters who have tomato processing plants in other parts of the world, and they can benchmark the costs of energy, the costs of producing tomato crush and the costs of producing tomato paste. And they know now that Victoria is getting more and more uncompetitive because of the cost of energy, because energy is such a key cost for their processing. So, we are at risk of driving businesses either interstate or back out of Australia to other parts of the world because our energy prices are so high.