Tuesday, 19 March 2024

Bills

Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023

State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023

Second reading

Debate resumed on motions of Harriet Shing and Ingrid Stitt:

That these bills be now read a second time.

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (15:03): I will speak on this on behalf of my colleague Mr Davis, who will be back shortly. I want to speak on this cognate debate, but I also want to first note, like my colleague Mr Davis did, the shambolic nature of the government in providing timely briefings to the opposition. It took over 100 days after the bill was first introduced and many, many requests for the opposition to receive a briefing on what we are voting on here. I have to say some other ministers are quite good at offering detailed briefings to the opposition, but seemingly with this Minister for Energy and Resources that is not so. If we are coming in here and being asked to make a decision on a policy but also a permanent change to our constitution, one would think that all sides of the Parliament should be well briefed on such a change, the government’s intention, the policy detail and the reasons behind it, so I want to put on the record the opposition’s deep disappointment in the government for that.

I know Mr Davis has done quite a bit of consultation with regard to the SEC, and we will propose an amendment to the SEC bill – not the constitution amendment bill but the policy bill. Mr Davis has put forward that we propose to amend the bill to ensure annual reporting on residual issues from the old SEC, and I am happy for those amendments to be circulated in Mr Davis’s name.

Amendments circulated pursuant to standing orders.

Evan MULHOLLAND: The fact that we are debating this together with the constitutional amendment I find a bit bizarre, because I think they are two separate pieces. They are asking different questions. One is a policy commitment, and the other is to put a piece of policy directly into the constitution to hamstring future governments in a quite undemocratic way. We know that the government has form on this, but I think it is really quite disappointing. I do not think it should ever have made it past the thought bubble. This is what happened, because I know that this is how it happened: Daniel Andrews announced the SEC proposal during the election campaign, put it on his jacket – put a logo on a jacket – and then wanted to create an extra news story on it, so he decided he would announce late in the campaign that ‘Not only are we going to implement the SEC, we’re going to also put it in the constitution.’ He was trying to make a double announcement. It never should have made it this far.

The Victorian constitution is a serious and fundamental document. It is the most important legal document in Victoria. It provides a framework for democracy and responsible government in this state. It sets out rules relating to the Crown, the Legislative Council, the Legislative Assembly, local government, the Supreme Court, the executive, ministers and the public service. It is what gives Parliament the power to make laws, and it also sets out things such as the number of members to be elected, when elections must be held, who can be a member of Parliament and who can vote in elections. It is a serious document that provides a serious framework for a responsible government. But that is the problem with Labor – they are not serious about doing what is in the best interests of all Victorians, and they are not serious about responsible government.

Labor is treating this most important legal document as its plaything. The Victorian constitution is a fundamental foundational document. It is not the place for policy. It is not the place for some kind of constitutional graffiti put in the constitution to hamstring future governments from taking democratically elected positions on policy. They are demonstrating their contempt for Victorian voters and Victorian democracy. With this bill they are saying Victorians do not have a choice in the policies at the next election – that is what they are saying – and every other election after that. They are saying they do not trust Victorians to support their position. They do not trust future governments with democratically elected mandates to be able to change the policy positions of the government of the day. This does not just apply to the SEC. The principle of putting things in our constitution is constitutional graffiti. It should not belong in our foundational document. They have to take it off the table for future governments by essentially making it impossible to repeal some of their policies.

Labor’s position is illiberal, undemocratic and at odds with centuries of Westminster parliamentary practice. In Victoria the Parliament is sovereign. This principle was received from the United Kingdom and dates back to the Bill of Rights of 1689. Being sovereign, the Parliament has the right to make or unmake any law within the legislative scope of the state Parliament, and no person or other body, including previous parliaments, has the right to override or set aside the legislation of the Parliament. Binding future governments by preventing the amendment of statutes is antithetical to these fundamental principles of parliamentary government and undermines the democratic process, but that is exactly what this government is trying to do.

We got a press release from the Premier on 15 November last year. It states:

The Allan Labor Government is enshrining the State Electricity Commission (SEC) in Victoria’s Constitution – preventing future governments from destroying it …

They are trying to prevent a future government elected by the will of the people implementing policies Victoria wants. The only conclusion one can come to is that those opposite do not trust Victorians to want their policies. It seems like they will do anything to lock in policy, even if it means destroying the principles of parliamentary democracy. Preventing voters from electing representatives that may want to change their policy positions is fundamentally autocratic and illiberal.

I would ask those considering voting in favour of this bill to consider a few things. Would you be happy to see something you did not support put in the constitution? That is the precedent we would be reinforcing as a Parliament. Would you be happy to know a policy, perhaps one that you fundamentally disagree with, is virtually impossible to repeal? That is the precedent this house would be reinforcing. What if it was a ban on unions? What if it was a ban on renewable energy? What if it was a ban on marijuana or a constitutional protection of greyhound racing? It could be any of these things, because this government has set a precedent. I say to Mr Limbrick: what if it was a ban on vapes being put into the constitution? I think all of my parliamentary crossbench colleagues understand the seriousness of what we are debating here and the contempt the Labor Party has for our foundational document. It is not a place for policy positions of the government of the day, it is a rulebook. It is a place for serious rules governing how we make rules in this state.

This particular example is a little perplexing. Labor are attempting to enshrine what is essentially a reborn shell of an entity that was privatised almost 30 years ago. These days the SEC seems to consist of a few mugs, show bags, jelly beans, pens, jackets with the SEC logo. Almost 40 per cent of Victorians were not even born when the SEC was privatised. An FOI request by the opposition showed the Allan government spent a total of $380,593 on SEC merchandise, including $2172 on Minnesota canvas colour tote bags, $820.45 on 300 wooden yo-yos, $924 on 100 Campster mugs, $4193 on strategy launch canvas tote bags, $3231 on booklets and postcards, $7062 on branded templates and visual guidelines and $791 on 100 calico tote bags.

A member: Who are they for?

Evan MULHOLLAND: Exactly. We saw an event at Parliament with all the show bags and jelly beans and everything else, and we even saw it at the Melbourne Show. The government spent a bucket of money to have a stall at the Melbourne Show for the SEC – really? While power prices are going up, while Victorians are feeling the pinch, we see the government branding of the SEC, which is doing nothing to reduce power prices for all Victorians. It is contemptuous.

Here we are on the other side of the house. There are yo-yos, show bags. We are in a massive budget position; we are going to have massive cuts. I spoke last sitting week about how maternal and child health services in the western suburbs could not be funded past eight weeks because this government has not got the money to invest in them. In my electorate people are suffering from a serious lack of public transport because this government has not got the money to invest in that. But it has got the money for show bags, it has got the money for jelly beans, it has got the money for yo-yos. It is a contempt of this place and a contempt of the Victorian people that it is slashing, and it will slash, in the upcoming May budget – we know from the outgoing Treasurer that it will slash and have a horror budget – while it is spending money on yo-yos. These people should be embarrassed – absolutely embarrassed. And who is at the helm of this? Of course the member for Mill Park.

I was pleased to join my colleague Mr Welch in Mill Park at the Whittlesea festival on the weekend. People there do not have too high an opinion of their local member – well, I do not think she actually lives there – because their energy prices keep going up, because she is not listening to the concerns of residents in regard to her electorate and because she is spending money on yo-yos. We know the government also promised – and Daniel Andrews promised this during the election – full government ownership, majority government ownership, as part of the SEC. We know this is not the case. You are not making even majority investments in different projects. You are in fact contributing to projects that already have finance. So that is a broken promise. Now you want to put what is a proposal that you have already broken promises on permanently in the constitution – forever. Seriously, this is amateur student politics by those opposite and shows a contempt for the Victorian people and the Victorian constitution.

We know what the speaking notes of those opposite will say, because Labor claims that it was us on this side of the chamber that privatised the SEC. That is true, and we are proud of it. Not only did it significantly contribute to the budget repair after finances were destroyed by those opposite, it also lowered electricity prices for Victorians. That is not me saying that; that is Tony Wood, an energy expert at the Grattan Institute. In the decade following privatisation, prices were generally low. Additionally, Victorian power networks delivered electricity at a lower cost than government-owned counterparts in New South Wales and Queensland. If you hated privatisation of the SEC so much – and all of your talking points will say that – why on earth did the Bracks and Brumby governments do nothing to renationalise the electricity market? Would any members following on the other side like to offer an excuse as to why they left it as is? Would they like to offer an excuse or maybe an apology on why the government did not renationalise the energy network if they hated it so much and thought it was so nasty?

I wish we could take all the credit for privatising the SEC, but we know if we check Hansard – and I did – it was the Kirner Labor government that began the process of privatising the SEC. I want to thank my friends at the parliamentary library for some information on this, which I would love to educate my colleagues on. There is actually a media release here, a news release, ‘Loy Yang B bill passed by Parliament’ from 11 June 1992:

Legislation paving the way for an historic partnership between the Victorian Government and U.S. power company Mission Energy passed through State Parliament late last night.

The Loy Yang B Bill authorises the Government to enter into a contract with Mission Energy for joint ownership of the new Loy Yang B power station in the Latrobe Valley.

The Premier, Ms. Joan Kirner, said the successful passage of the Bill provided the framework for an exciting future in Victoria’s power generation industry.

“Loy Yang B will be a state-of-the-art power station,’ Ms. Kirner said. “It is required for the energy requirements of Victoria in 1993.

There you go. So you have got a great history of privatisation. You started off privatising the SEC. You started the whole process. You should all be very proud of it. You should all be very, very proud of your great history of privatisation. Often members opposite do not actually know these facts. They will go out with Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan and Lily D’Ambrosio and say, ‘Well, it was the nasty Liberals who privatised the SEC,’ yet it was Joan Kirner who got the ball rolling on this. It was, and they know it. Hansard knows it. The parliamentary library knows it. Maybe stroll across the hallway there and have a look for yourself before repeating such lies. And now you want to put this into the constitution. It is just ridiculous from this government.

With the rhetoric that I am sure is to come, because they have all got it in their speaking notes, it would make you think that the Victorian Labor Party and the Australian Labor Party hated privatisation. I am here to tell you they do not. It is actually in their DNA, and I have brought receipts. In 1990 those opposite flogged off the State Bank to Keating in the form of the Commonwealth Bank, who then sold it off. In the 1990s the Keating government sold countless entities. There was Aussat, which was sold to Optus. There was Australian Airlines. There was Aerospace Technologies, there was Qantas, there was CSL, there was the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corp, and who can forget the Gillard government, which sold the Commonwealth’s last remaining shares in Telstra?

But there is also your own Labor government. Labor’s history and love of privatisation runs deep in this current government. You leased the Port of Melbourne for about 99 years. You sold off your share of the Snowy Hydro scheme. You love privatisation so much you even privatise genuine government departments. You sold the Land Titles and Registry office in 2018; the outgoing Treasurer described this as a great result. You have essentially partially privatised VicRoads in a 40-year deal for $7.9 billion. Those on the other side of the chamber love the privatisation of prisons too. During the Bracks Labor government, under the Partnerships Victoria policy, new prisons were built under a PPP model. Contracts were for 15 years, with competitive retendering every seven years. Contracts included design, construction and financing of the facility, including maintenance and security. You love partially privatising our prisons too.

There is a wealth of history of privatisation that runs deep in the Labor Party – the Moomba–Sydney pipeline by the federal Labor government in the 1990s, as I said. Removals Australia was another Labor privatisation. I think I mentioned the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corp. There was Australian Defence Industries, the Australian Industry Development Corporation and of course the Commonwealth Bank. The Labor Party absolutely loves privatisation, but in all their speaking notes that I know are to come, because they read them word for word, they will decry that the Liberals and the Nationals love privatisation. No-one in this chamber loves privatisation more than the Labor Party. It runs deep in Labor history, and they should defend it. They should absolutely defend their history of privatisation. They love flogging things off. Do you know what they also partially privatised? Federation Square. You guys loved selling that off. They absolutely love selling things off – anything for a dime – especially in their current situation. Do not, as you will do, decry us for privatisation when you love privatisation probably even more than we do.

This is what we will get from this government in their approach to policy. They want to decry us even though they got the ball rolling on the SEC. But more seriously, as I mentioned, they want to trash our foundational document with a kind of constitutional graffiti, and I think hamstringing future governments and the ability of future governments to make decisions is completely illiberal and undemocratic. You want to tie down future governments with the policy positions of today.

Returning to the heart of this bill, I want to talk about legacy for a second. I think all of us in this place, when we leave, want to look back and see the positive change we have made. Supporting this bill, which tarnishes our democracy and our parliamentary system, will tarnish your legacy and the legacy of anyone who would support such a proposal. You will be responsible for cementing a bad precedent, and you will be responsible for undermining democracy and increasing autocracy in our state. I hope that Victoria is going from strength to strength hundreds of years from now. If it is, people will look back and read your name in Hansard, and they will know that it is despite you, not because of you. How anyone could support this bill in good conscience is beyond me. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame, because this is one of the most shameful pieces of legislation that has been brought into this place. I urge the Council to reject this amendment.

Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:26): I rise to speak on the two bills before us today regarding the State Electricity Commission, which we are debating cognately. The bills fulfil a clear election commitment of the Andrews – now Allan – Labor government to bring back the SEC and to enshrine it in the constitution.

Bringing back the SEC is a transformative development in our energy landscape. It signifies Victoria’s firm commitment to renewable energy and the community’s repudiation of the Kennett-era attitude of privatising at all costs. I do apologise; I know Mr Limbrick was excited for me to praise privatisation, but I am not going to do that in this contribution today. It is a repudiation that the Victorian public has clearly demonstrated of the mindset of privatisation no matter the long-term costs.

The election results do speak for themselves. The privatisation of the SEC has failed. It has cost the public and the state a great deal. People are concerned about climate action, the cost of living, energy bills and other rising costs. Communities across Victoria want the SEC back. They want that investment in renewables and that focus on reliable energy delivery and service over the profit of private multinationals. The public was promised better service and cheaper prices when the SEC was sold. What Victoria got was increased power prices and sacked workers, with profits going offshore.

The SEC will increase the amount of energy and competition in the market by investing in new renewable energy and storage. This will push more energy into the system, putting downward pressure on wholesale power prices and delivering benefits to all Victorians. The bill covers a number of objectives for what the SEC will deliver, including:

to support Victoria’s transition to … net zero greenhouse gas emissions …

to generate, purchase and sell electricity in Victoria;

to own or operate or participate in the operation of –

renewable energy generating systems … and

… energy storage systems and facilities;

to develop or support, or participate in the development of, or invest in –

renewable energy generating systems and facilities; and

…

to supply energy-related products or services to energy consumers in Victoria.

The SEC, enshrined in the constitution with these objectives, will help Victoria to achieve our target of net zero by 2045 in the long term and help to reach that 95 per cent renewable energy target by 2035.

I normally do enjoy being the first speaker after my colleague Mr Mulholland because he normally gives me a lot of things to respond to, but I was struck today in that he actually did not give me much to respond to. I am not sure if he mentioned climate change in his speech once. It is not part of their thinking at all on this. I also do not think he mentioned at all the future generations of workers that the SEC will train, build up and support – no mention of that at all. He also barely, if at all, touched on power prices themselves. We had the bizarre contribution by Mr Davis earlier today. Only the Victorian Liberals could get up in this place on a day when we have seen a decrease in the Victorian default offer announced – a decrease in the energy prices that all Victorian residents and businesses will be eligible for – and say this is terrible and that prices are going up when quite plainly they are going down. Even if they do not welcome that relief of pressure on cost of living for everyday Victorians, I do welcome it. I particularly welcome the fact that this will mean a decrease in bills of $112 for households and $266 for small businesses, on average, for Victorians who are on the default offer.

Mr Davis made a rather bizarre point in saying that because something in the order of 80 per cent of Victorians are not on the default offer, they would not get it, but he seems to have overlooked the fact that we have an energy system where people have that choice. Again I would remind people that they can go to the Victorian Energy Compare website. It is a free tool. It is not going to lead to power companies starting to spam you with emails, because it is a government-run website. It will show you, matter for matter, fact for fact, the best power deals for your particular situation, and it is a really good resource that all Victorians have access to.

It was quite striking then to see Mr Davis put forward this amendment, which was circulated by Mr Mulholland:

3. Clause 4, page 4, after line 20 insert –

“(2) The purpose of this Part is not to restrict the ability of Victorians and Victorian government entities to choose who will supply electricity to them.”.

That is already the case, and Mr Davis should know that. He should know that Victorians do have that choice. For him to imply that Victorians do not have the choice – do not have the option of accessing that default offer – is frankly misleading and playing into a narrative that, desperate though those opposite are to build it, flies in the face of the fact that today’s announcement is very good news indeed for Victorian households right across the state, and Victorian small business owners as well. This is good news. It is money back in the pockets of over half a million Victorian families and over 58,000 Victorian small businesses.

The main driver for this decrease in the Victorian default offer rate is a reduction in wholesale electricity prices by 22 per cent. That has not happened by accident. That has happened because of our record investments in renewable energy in this state, because renewable energy is the cheapest form of new-build energy that there is. It is quite interesting to note that the default offer as proposed today will still be better than the default offers applied nationally and in other states, so once again, despite the fire, fury, rage and empty yells from those opposite, Victorians under this default offer are going to be not only better off than they are currently but also better off than people in any other state.

I certainly welcome today’s announcement with the draft Victorian default offer. Again, it is a reflection of the fact that this is a government that invests in renewable energy, with over 38 per cent of our power now coming from renewables. That does not happen by accident, and it does not happen if you have a government that has no clear direction on energy policy. This is a government – under the former Premier and under the current Premier – that has a clear, singular vision for reducing this state’s emissions and reducing the cost of power for Victorians. That is done by hard work, that is done by investing in renewables, and that is exactly what we have done.

It stands in stark contrast to those opposite, who when they were last in power federally, not so long ago, had something in the order of 14 or 16 – I do not know how many power policies they had. They had so many different energy policies. They would come to an agreement after great struggle and then they would get a new policy the week after. They had absolutely no direction and created such incredible uncertainty for the sector, which contributed to worsening power prices across Australia. No state operates in isolation from the national network – certainly not where we are in Victoria anyway – and that absolute failure of leadership that we saw from the Nationals’ and the Liberals’ federal counterparts directly contributed to that situation, that uncertainty of delivering certainty, which this government will be providing, the certainty that this government will be providing not only by legislating the SEC but also by enshrining it in the constitution, because in Victoria we are committed to delivering the renewable energy that is going to provide cheaper, greener, cleaner electricity for all Victorians.

They seem to have another policy once again. I am still waiting to hear from those opposite if Mr Pesutto – or perhaps I should not be asking him about this. Perhaps I should be asking Louise Staley, since she seems to be the spokesman for him these days – certainly he is afraid to talk to his caucus without having her in front of them, it seems. Perhaps she can come out and give us a clear answer about whether the Victorian Liberal Party supports the roll-out of nuclear reactors in Victoria. Perhaps they do, perhaps they do not; we do not know. Their federal leadership certainly seems keen on it. They are even going so far as not to rule out nuclear power reactors in the seat of Dunkley. Mr McIntosh covers the Mount Eliza section of that seat; I cover the Frankston area. I do not think people in that area are too keen to have a nuclear reactor on their doorstep. We also had the contribution, I note, of our new member Mr Welch. In his maiden speech he spoke heavily in favour of renewables when he pirouetted his way into the debate on nuclear energy. Perhaps you are John Pesutto’s last dancer here.

Nuclear power is frankly not the solution. It is going to take decades if not longer to set up. It is going to be more expensive as well. To get an example of this we can look at a current project that is underway in the UK, in Somerset, the Hinkley Point C project, which is a brand new nuclear power station that is being built over in the UK. That is a country of course that already has an established nuclear network and has been operating them for quite a long time, so you would think that it of all countries should be able to easily deliver such a project, because it does not need to set up a whole new sector from the start. But that project, Hinkley Point C, is currently under construction. It has been under construction since 2017 – it will be 12 to 14 years by the time it is finished. And not including any potential future blowouts, that project is currently estimated to cost anywhere from £31 billion to £35 billion – that is 60 billion to 68 billion Australian dollars in today’s conversion. All of that will deliver, they estimate, 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, which is broadly comparable to Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B combined – a decent amount, sure, but nowhere near enough for nuclear to be a viable option. If this one project is costing almost $70 billion – and that is in a country that already has the capabilities – you cannot come to the Australian public with a straight face and say that this is going to be a viable option for Australia, because if you do, you are implicitly telling them that you are prepared to spend tens and hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear energy when you could achieve much more by spending much less on renewables. To put this solution forward just shows once again that those opposite have no solutions – they have no clear answers either.

Whilst I acknowledge that some members, like Mr Welch and others, have spoken passionately in favour of nuclear energy, others, such as Mr McGowan and others in the Assembly as well, have spoken just as passionately against it. So what do we know? If they were in power, we know that rather than having a clear, direct way forward and providing this certainty for Victorian residents and businesses but also critically for investment into electricity networks – that certainty is so important for investment – we would have more of the same of what we saw in their nine years in Canberra, with almost twice as many different policies in that time as they had years in office. That would be complete dysfunction and chaos. We know that they cannot all agree to vote in the same way on any of these bills as they come before the house; we saw that in the last sitting week. Imagine if they were in government. You cannot trust a party like that, which has no clear direction, which is tearing itself apart – in more ways than one of course, but in this case particularly on the nuclear energy issue. We will have people over there pushing it forward at the same time as we have others pulling against it, and all that will mean is more dysfunction, chaos and disunity. That would lead to higher and higher power prices, just as we saw as a result of the completely failed energy policies of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Liberal governments. It was an absolute shambles, and we know that is exactly what would happen over there.

Over on this side of the house of course we do believe in providing reliable, safe, clean energy to Victorians at the cheapest price possible, and that is exactly what the two bills before us today will seek to do. They are a very important part of our setup of the SEC. Victorians know – because Victorians emphatically voted for the return of the SEC as it was put to them by this side of the house at the last state election – that this is an SEC that will deliver for generations to come as a result of what we are talking about today. Again, even if Mr Mulholland is not talking about it, we are talking about the strong, reliable jobs for the future. We are talking about climate change, and we are also talking about lowering power prices, not trying to add two and three to make 17 and throwing up things into the chamber and saying that power prices are going higher actually, in spite of today’s announcement that the Victorian default offer will go lower. This is a government that delivers. Today’s default offer announcement is actually an example of what you get when you have these policies, when you invest in renewable energy and when at last we have a federal government that seems to be swimming in the same direction as well, not having 70 players of the same swimming team swimming in all different directions and punching each other. This is what you have when you have a clear, unified direction. This is what you have after 10 years of a state Labor government that has been working on delivering renewables for Victoria, and it is what you have with the SEC and what you will see more of with the SEC as this comes into play.

This is a very important bill. It is one of the more substantial things that we are talking about in this chamber this week, because it is going to have such an impact on so many people. It is going to have an impact on mums and dads in my electorate, in regional Victoria, in inner-city Melbourne, wherever you may be. It is going to have an impact on them paying their power bills, having them as cheap as they can reasonably be. It is going to have an impact on the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that operate in this state, and it is going to provide the clean, safe, secure jobs for the future as we rebuild a strong, publicly supported energy network. I commend the bill to the house.

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:41): I also rise to speak in this cognate debate on two bills today. The first is the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023, which I will not comment much on other than to say it effectively amends the State Electricity Commission Act 1958 to abolish much of the old SEC and transfer assets and makes other amendments to give effect to that. This is of less concern to me. The other bill that we are debating in this cognate debate is the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023, and I will confine my comments to it.

This bill combines a number of really bad ideas and puts them all together in one place. Let us go with the first bad idea. The first bad idea is entrenching policy positions into the Victorian constitution. We saw this in the last term of Parliament with the fracking ban, where the government, and the opposition I might add, supported putting that particular policy in the constitution. Whether or not I supported fracking or whether or not I supported the SEC, even if I loved the idea of the SEC, I still would not support putting it in the constitution because that is not what constitutions are for. I am glad to hear the Liberal Party now talking about constitutional graffiti. I share this view; in fact I spoke about it at length when the fracking ban went through and called it ‘constitutional graffiti’ and ‘undemocratic’ et cetera. The government does not want to put it in the constitution because they think it is a good idea to put it in the constitution; they want to put it in the constitution because it requires a special majority to put it in and a special majority to remove it in the future – to override and rule from the grave, so to speak.

Some time has passed between the fracking ban and now, and my team has done a bit of research on this topic. The special majority required to remove it may not actually be required. In fact one of the things that determines whether or not you need a special majority to pull something out of the constitution is the determination of whether or not the entrenchment in the constitution meets the manner and form of the powers and procedures of the Victorian Parliament. To my mind this clearly does not; it has got nothing to do with the powers and procedures of Parliament. In 1996 the Queensland Parliament repealed an entrenchment in their constitution for section 14(1) concerning the appointment of secretaries, which was entrenched by section 53 of their constitution. The advice that they received from the Queensland solicitor-general was that the provision did not concern the constitutional powers or procedure of the legislature and that they could remove it with a simple majority. So there is some good news for the Liberal Party in the future: if one day you ever come into government and you want to get rid of this constitutional entrenchment, have a talk to the solicitor-general and maybe they will come to the same conclusion that Queensland did and what the Labor Party is doing today will be nothing more than signalling to no real effect.

That is the first bad idea: entrenching policy in the constitution. I would say that the other bad precedent that we set here by putting things in the constitution is people will question the government, and maybe even the opposition from now on, about whether they really believe something, whether they really care about something unless they put it in the constitution and make it absolutely permanent forever. I hope that whoever gets into government next, whoever it may be, will look at repealing this constitutional graffiti.

The second idea put forward by this constitutional amendment bill is the formation of the SEC itself, and what we are talking about here is what was originally planned to be a company majority owned by the state. I believe there are now amendments to make the government the sole owner. If you are trying to set up a competitive market and get private investors to come into that market, create competition and all the things that capitalism does – lowest prices, increased productivity, all of those things that normally happen in that sort of market – the number one thing that you could do to terrify everyone involved in that market is say, ‘I’m the government and I’m going to start competing in this market – and by the way, I also set all the rules in that market.’ So we have this situation where the government have tried to encourage competition in the market, and now they are stepping in and saying, ‘Well, we’re playing in this market too now, and we’re not even going to have other shareholders – we’re just going to be the sole shareholder.’ I am glad to see that there was some interest in privatisation and this sort of thing. This is reversing that. This is state ownership of the means of production. Look it up – it is the dictionary definition of ‘socialism’. It never worked. It never will work and it never has worked. It is always a mess. ‘Maybe socialism will work this time’ – that is what they keep saying, but it never does.

I also question the method through which the government came up with this announcement that they are going on about this morning of the reduction in the default offer. I would note that again this is centralised price setting, and I question whether this is actually sustainable. As we all know, price caps equal shortages. We have spoken about this, and the government understood this. When we spoke about this in the supermarket debate, the government understood this concept. To their credit, they understood markets, they understood that price caps equal shortages, and they did not want to set up food shortages like the Greens were proposing. They wanted to starve everyone. They do not tell people that they want to starve people, but that is the end result. You end up with food shortages and people eating their pets, like has happened in countries that have instituted government controls on food. But then we come in today and we have price controls on electricity – a cap, a default offer.

Now, shortages in the electricity market are arguably just as dangerous as in the food market. Although they will take a lot longer to flood through the system, ultimately we will end up with problems here. If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about going into competition with the government, because the government itself makes the rules. You do not want to go into competition with someone that makes the rules of the competition, because they always rig the competition. So that is the other big problem here.

I do not support the entrenchment of the SEC in the constitution, and I also do not support the resurrection of this zombie SEC that the Labor Party and others seem to have these fond memories of. I do not think, once it is resurrected, it will have all these desirable qualities that they seem to remember from the past. So I will be opposing this constitutional amendment bill, and I urge all others to oppose this constitutional graffiti.

Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (15:48): I am pleased to rise to speak on the cognate debate on the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023 and the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023. One of these bills seeks to abolish the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) established in the State Electricity Commission Act 1958 and transfer all powers, functions, property rights and liabilities to the minister; the other one seeks to enshrine this new sham of a policy into the state’s constitution. I know that there are some amendments on the table. The Nationals and the Liberals seek to amend the former to ensure that there is annual reporting on residual issues from the old SEC, and whether or not those amendments go through, we will be opposing this bill. Indeed the latter – putting the sham of the SEC into the constitution – we believe just deserves to be flushed down the proverbial.

Enshrining the SEC mark 2 would be to enshrine a sham of a policy that ultimately does not serve to lower electricity prices for Victorians or Victorian businesses. It will not create reliability, affordability and security. I will go into some of my rationale behind that – indeed not necessarily my rationale but that of learned experts in the field. You have a revised logo and you have a few media releases, and this is what the government is calling reliability, security and affordability. Nor will this new enshrinement or repeal of an old piece of legislation do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Let us look at the historical context. We know that the SECV was formed just after World War I, and we know that Sir John Monash was integral and the hero in that story about creating power, overwhelmingly from the Latrobe Valley, for our state and indeed parts of our nation, keeping the lights on, providing competitive electricity on the domestic front. What we had then was good wages, because we need to have good wages in this country, but we had cheap power, so those input costs were cheap, and therefore we had a recipe for prosperity over years. That was really also driven by those European immigrants that came out postwar and created the most wonderful country indeed in the valley with that wonderful breadth of skill and knowhow, and many of those are still here today. Move forward to 1958, and we see the current act that the government is seeking to amend today.

Very briefly, my grandfather worked for the SEC. He came from being a butcher. He became an electrical engineer and worked in the valley initially. Then he worked as a regional manager and opened up power – poles and wires – right across Rochester, Lilydale, parts of Gippsland and Koo Wee Rup when he retired, and in that he had to budget to the nth degree. He had to budget poles, wires, transformers and insulation devices, and if he did not get down to the right absolute micromanagement of that, he would be asked to please explain. He was astute, and he did that. I am very proud of his work. He retired, and the chap up the road from him worked at the SEC, so worked in the power station, and his back shed was full of tools that he had acquired from the store that was known as the State Electricity Commission. Actually – and this gentleman bragged about it – his toilet rolls came from the SEC.

Things certainly needed to change, and how did they change? Back in the day I was certainly starting to learn about politics in the 1980s and the 90s, and we had the Cain–Kirner governments. It had to start to sell off things. It sold off the state bank for $1.6 billion – this is on record – at the time to try and scramble out of the dark hole that Victoria was falling into. Pyramid, Tricontinental and the Victorian Economic Development Corporation are all names that send a shiver up the spine of people older than me. Next came Loy Yang B, and we saw Joan Kirner’s Loy Yang B Bill 1992 pass the Parliament. I know my colleague Mr Mulholland has read considerable amounts of this in. I will just keep this brief:

Legislation paving the way for an historic partnership between the Victorian Government and U.S. power company Mission Energy passed through State Parliament late last night.

The Loy Yang B Bill authorises the Government to enter into a contract with Mission Energy for joint ownership of the new Loy Yang B …

It goes on to say:

There are enormous benefits for Victoria as a result of this sale …

In that part, let us just put the cards on the table in relation to privatisation. Privatisation certainly has merit, and we have seen the government do it in all sorts of contexts. I mentioned the state bank, and we have seen it in other contexts as well.

Come 2022 we saw Daniel Andrews come to the Latrobe Valley, where I was busy working supporting my lower house candidate at the time Martin Cameron, who is now duly elected. There must have been a brainstorm. ‘Let’s reinvigorate the SEC,’ they said. To what end? Victorians still struggle to pay their power bills – at record levels – and this government, the Allan government, has wasted almost $400,000 on SEC-branded merchandise. We see canvas tote bags, yo-yos, mugs, postcards, booklets, templates and visual guidelines. Is that what this Victorian population, mothers and fathers, deserve from the government, who have – talk about DNA – wasting money in their DNA? This is the government that is the gold star of this. One of these bills must abolish that so that they can go on using that logo legally.

Now, to my point, Martin Cameron won that election. We have heard from the Labor Party on that side that it got carte blanche support – that it was fantastic. Well, that was not from the people of Latrobe Valley, where this government through the tripling of the coal royalties tax back in 2016 forced the closure of Hazelwood. It was always going to close, but they forced an early closure. It could have been a staged closure, like Bracks and Brumby actually put to the lower house. But they forced the closure of it, and that started the loss of jobs in the Latrobe Valley. If you want to talk about jobs and jobs in the Latrobe Valley, this government has used people in the Latrobe Valley as a kicking ball, and it is not fair. At the moment we also see – I hate to say this; it is sad to say – that Morwell unfortunately has an unemployment rate over 10 per cent. Indeed it was very interesting when the Commonwealth Games inquiry came to the Latrobe Valley last week. There were some really captive and raw comments from many people. One particular business owner said she was gutted, it was cruel, this government had abandoned the Latrobe Valley. Some of those I am quoting approximately.

My colleague bought from his own money, his own purse, caps that said not ‘SEC’ but ‘Soaring energy costs’. That is what this means to the people of Victoria. Indeed clearly the Australian Bureau of Statistics has come up and said that in the past 12 months electricity has gone up 25 per cent. Gas has gone up 27 per cent. If this government is fair dinkum about a positive transition, we will see the closure of mines and we will see the closure of power stations. I have been out to Yallourn power station on a number of occasions, and we know they are slated to close in 2028. They are making those plans and working with community and their workers, and I appreciate that fact very much. They will close. I actually had a conversation with the CEO of Loy Yang A the other day, and they are working very closely on their plans to close, I think it is in 2035. The government has come to them and said, ‘We need to make sure that you’re not going to shut your power station down before we have adequate supply in the system.’ Not only do we need adequate renewable supply, but it also needs to be able to be transmitted. There need to be those poles and wires – the proper transmission.

Just finishing off on Martin Cameron, the people of the Latrobe Valley walked backwards on their Labor vote. It bombed, and that is no reflection on the very lovely lady who was put up to be their candidate. But this policy of the SEC stunk in the eyes of the Latrobe Valley. They lost 6 per cent of the primary vote, so if it had been a winner, it should have been a winner there, but it was not.

What we also see is a vague pledge from the former Premier about a billion dollars – there are no independent costings, and experts say it is woefully inadequate. If they are going to take over the reins of the transition to renewables – we hear from experts – then $320 billion is required. These are absolute facts that have come through from the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings, where my colleague Danny O’Brien quizzed the Premier at the start of 2023.

But the Premier in 2022 said offshore wind, not offshore profits. I will say it again: offshore wind, not offshore profits. But what happened when Mr O’Brien quizzed the then interim CEO of the SEC? He asked if the SEC would preclude foreign investors? No, they will not. He also said that we had the Premier at the time talking about the government being a major stakeholder in any renewables. In estimates Danny O’Brien asked the minister to clarify what proportion of the electricity generation sector the SEC will control by 2035, with a target of 95 per cent renewables on the table. The answer was that out of 25 gigawatts the SEC will control 4.5 gigawatts – less than one-fifth of the generation. Somehow, with the government entering into this play, it is going to get costs down. Well, we know that that is absolutely not the case. We have seen that.

We also know that Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute is an expert in this field, and he has done a lot of research over time and has communicated in Parliament and to the Nationals and the Liberals on a number of occasions, and he has got a lot of reports and research out there. He said in June 2023 in the Age that the government had made some ‘big statements’ about the SEC’s ability to provide more renewable energy and push prices down. He said:

I can’t see anything that says the SEC is going to do something that the private sector wouldn’t have done.

This then brings us to that complex nature of a competitive neutrality. This legislation speaks about competitive neutrality. Well, you are in the playpen and you have also got your hands on the reins of pricing and tendering. So how can there be competitive neutrality when you have actually got your hands on the reins of tendering? So there is not necessarily going to be competitive neutrality. It is not going to serve people.

The other thing that is of most interest to people in my electorate is: what does it look like to have that renewable matrix? There will be a renewable matrix; it needs to be important. We have seen that solar panels on rooftops are going gangbusters not only in Victoria but across Australia. We see solar plants either up or in the pipeline, and we have got to watch out for the planning issues and the importance of retaining good agricultural land and not impacting on our agricultural land. We see wind turbines; I was down in Bald Hills at Tarwin Lower only on Sunday and saw them ticking around gently. We see the offshore wind energy, the potential of that. However, we also see Tanya Plibersek from the feds saying it is a no-go zone for the Hastings renewable terminal hub there. So you have got the feds pulling, and the state has not pushed well. We also see VNI West; that is going to be a debacle. And we have got other good examples. We heard from professors Mountain and Bartlett only recently about their plan B around the VNI West using existing easements. There is a lot of this to go forward, and this government is not planning for a good transition. It is not planning, it is scrambling for energy production. Rather than proper planning and bringing people along with consultation, we are seeing yo-yos, logos and tote bags. I absolutely oppose these bills.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Michael Galea): I would like to acknowledge that we have former member Fiona Patten in the room.

John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) (16:04): I rise to speak on the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023 and the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023. It gives me the opportunity to endorse a future that provides workers with confidence and security by enshrining our State Electricity Commission into our state constitution. By enshrining the SEC into the constitution we can protect it from future privatisation efforts and ensure its provisional responsibility stays with the government of the day, like our water services. By doing so the SEC will be safeguarded with a super-majority guarantee in the constitution and a special majority if the coalition ever decide to go for broke. There are various reasons for doing so, but I think fundamentally it boils down to the devastation that was wrought upon not just Victorian consumers but workers by the last multiterm Liberal government.

I want to talk about some of the people affected by the SEC shutdown, and I have been around long enough to know a few of these people. Graham Watson was affected by Kennett’s privatisation. The electricity commission and the whole sector was gutted by Kennett. Graham talked to his two kids about his career in the electrical trades. He saw it as a sector on the decline, with more and more jobs lost to redundancy. He knows about the devastation. As Graham said, in just a few years the privatisation led to a devastation of jobs, from 22,000 to 7000 in a short period of time. This lasts a generation.

The SEC is now an essential element of our path to net zero as we work to meet the gap left by the departure of the multinationals from the market. It was the state government, not the private companies, that incurred the risk and coughed up the money to build our power plants. But after the Liberals were done, it was the private companies making the profit off the assets built by the taxpayer. The privatisation of our power assets was a mistake that has seen over $23 billion in profits going overseas, skyrocketing energy bills and of course the loss of thousands of jobs across the state.

Everyone in this chamber has a story of a friend, a family member or a loved one that was impacted by the privatisation of the State Electricity Commission. Take Ray, a former SEC worker. He described the privatisation as an act of decimation on the community – shops closed, businesses and work dried up. The money stopped flowing. He said that before privatisation a Friday night in Morwell felt alive, bustling with customers on night-time shopping sprees at 9 pm. Now that is all lost. Instead of people socialising and rushing to grab food late at night, he felt like his community had dried up. Instead of being a busy atmosphere, he saw closed shops, he saw people out of jobs, with no work to go around. The SEC kept the communities and businesses alive, and with the privatisation of the SEC went alternative job prospects for people. Under the Kennett government thousands of workers were laid off, businesses went under. All the while the Liberals butchered the SEC and sold it off like scrap to the multinationals, power bills skyrocketed and these companies raked in billions in profit while leaving workers on the wayside and ripping communities in half.

In 2022 former mineworker Ron Bernardi spoke to the Age newspaper about what happened when they started shedding jobs. In his words, after privatisation Morwell felt like a Sunday every day. Whether people knew it or not, the SEC was helping keep local businesses alive by providing stable, well-paid employment to their workers, who could go out and spend in their local community. After privatisation the shops went out of business, communities that were once bustling and busy were empty and withering, and trainees and workers were left to rot by the Liberals. Ron rejected the narrative that the SEC was what they called ‘slow, easy, comfortable’ and spoke the truth: the SEC in public hands gave good, stable jobs to workers and helped keep local communities alive. In their absence came empty shop floors and people wandering around looking for any job that they could find. Workers and young people were disregarded by the Kennett Liberal government, which was more focused on money than the people and the community.

One story that echoes this well is told by Mick from the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), who in 2022 recounted what the SEC was like before privatisation and the community that it fostered that the Liberals destroyed. There are some even in this place who are quick to cast the old SEC as a rusty old unproductive drag, but stories like Mick’s tell a different tale. He described the workforce as being closer to a tightknit family, with over 100 apprentices a year coming out to work in the sector. The program did not just give these apprentices an opportunity to work, it gave them a strong community that they could rely on and that would help them prosper. These workers were the backbone of our energy sector, maintaining and powering the grid for all of us to benefit, not just for the benefit of profiteering companies. Unfortunately, with the privatisation of the SEC not only were these jobs axed but those apprenticeship programs were also wound up, draining talent from the SEC and leaving those apprentices alone looking for work. To quote Mick, it felt like a piece of him had been taken away.

It is easy for some in this chamber, particularly for those opposite, to look at this as a mere issue of immediate finances. For them, privatising the SEC was not about a social impact, it was about improving the budget bottom line. They did not have any regard for the businesses they bankrupted along the way or the families they destroyed. It was all about the money, not the people. On top of that, the privatisation of the SEC damaged the workforce even after the deed was done. There are workers such as Damien, who started working in the sector 14 years ago, after privatisation, who can attest to the hardship. The SEC gave apprentices and workers job security, and with its sale they were thrown on the streets and were jumping from one contractual gig to another. That insecurity makes life planning hard. Damien spoke to the ETU about his experiences and how that insecurity made it tremendously difficult to plan with finances. Taking out a mortgage, planning for a family – all that gets called into question when workers do not know where the next job or stable income will come from.

Privatisation did not just destroy the lives of people who worked in the energy sector at the time, it ruined the sector for years after, and they struggled to find work. It is why after the privatisation of the SEC so many workers were left wandering, doing anything and everything they possibly could to fund what choices they had. The Liberal government was out to get them. Under their watch the new firms had bounty clauses in contracts where bonuses were distributed to employers should they meet certain targets for the number of workers laid off. While thousands of workers were walking home with redundancy payment slips, Kennett and the Liberals would kick back knowing that their multinational executives were walking home with generous bonuses for sacking hundreds of workers each. It is difficult not to be troubled by the sheer brutality of what happened in the 1990s to these workers.

Take Cliff, another former SEC worker. Cliff remembered how there were nearly 200 apprentices a year when the SEC was in public hands. He watched all of that dry up as the SEC was broken up and sold to massive companies who then started taking the profits overseas rather than reinvesting in Victoria or in Australian jobs. Having taken the package offered to sack workers, Cliff said that there was no work to go around. For nearly 10 years he was wandering the joint with basically no work to do. He eventually found that instead of finding 10 years worth of work, he found maybe four years worth at most. Make no mistake, this was a Liberal war on workers and a war on Victorians.

Take another worker, like Shannon, who worked in the same sector for some years after the privatisation of the SEC. What they saw from job to job was struggling families and pensioners. Jobs were being cut left, right and centre after privatisation, and the effect has continued to this day, with the enormous profits going overseas to these multinational companies. While the Liberals were cutting workers out, industry executives were making money hand over fist. With the Liberals, the SEC, which helped give people dignified, well-paying jobs, was dismembered and sold off to multinationals that raked in billions in profits off the back of sacked workers and hardworking Victorians copping absurdly high fees.

I am a union man. I know the importance of a hard day’s work and the importance of dignity at work and a job that will provide for you and your entire family. Take Andrew Haughton. Andrew worked at the SEC and recalls the scale of the community trauma wrought by the privatisation and decommissioning of the SECV in the 1990s. He described 14,000 workers being sacked, their jobs pulled from right under them. What happened to them? He recalls what felt like nearly 20,000 people affected as manufacturing, clothing and other businesses dried up across Morwell and Traralgon and workers were tossed over a payout. Their homes went bust, their businesses dried up and those that survived had over a third of their turnover wiped out. Even former workers who used their pay to buy out newsagencies watched it shrivel up as the money stopped flowing. It was and still is a traumatising era in Victorian politics and has scarred communities forever.

Before us now is an opportunity to make sure something like this cannot happen again. Through a constitutional amendment we can protect the SEC from being sold off again. We know that the Liberals will get into power some day. Who knows when that will be. The Liberal philosophy for a number of years has been to find anything state owned that is not nailed down to the ground and sell it off. It is the nature of the coalition to break up and sell off the state assets and leave workers aside. This constitutional amendment will make sure that the SEC is nailed to the ground.

In 2003 we enshrined our water authorities in the state constitution. We understood then that water is an essential service and should be safeguarded from the Liberal Party. In that tradition, we now stand here ready to protect our power assets and services in the same way. The SEC should never have been privatised, and we want to make sure it does not happen again. You cannot undo the hurt and suffering that Kennett and the Liberals unleashed on this state, but what you can do is start investing, not just in the renewable energy future but in our workers and apprentices, and make sure that something as essential as our energy assets cannot be sold off. We want to make sure that these workers have the dignity and job security they deserve, and we want to make sure that when the Liberal Party try to they cannot start breaking apart an essential service like electricity and selling it off for quick cash, like they did in the 1990s.

The revived SEC is set to create nearly 60,000 jobs; 6000 of those will be apprenticeships and traineeships. Victorians will stand to benefit from that kind of investment not just in their jobs and skills but in their own future. It is nothing to roll your eyes over when thousands of apprentices can train and work in a community that supports them, just like Mick talked about with the old SEC. A former SEC worker is Wayne, who started out as one of the many apprentices in the commission. Like many others, he saw unemployment rocket up to nearly 20 per cent as future jobs in the industry fell off a cliff after privatisation. He said that no larger industry came in to fill the void and now he sees multiple applicants for every possible job to be found. The devastation, in his eyes, destroyed the industry’s reputation as a haven for good. As a result, every business suffered and everyone in every industry was struggling to find work at all. That was tens of thousands of workers who could have had job security and a stable income so they could plan for their dream of owning a home and starting a family.

It was amazing to see Victorians throw Kennett’s legacy in the bin in 2022 in favour of our positive plan for Victorians and the energy sector. In between seeing Kennett on the news talking about the Hawthorn Football Club and donating to the member for Hawthorn in the other place’s legal fund, we have seen Kennett bringing back the big troops of the 1990s. But thankfully, we have chosen a different path. Former mayor of Latrobe City Council Cr Graeme Middlemiss used to work in the power industry. He worked in the sector during the era of privatisation and watched not just the economic downturn but the drain on Morwell. He saw hardworking Victorians with good skills packing up and leaving. The opportunities were gone, and with them went people’s hopes and dreams of staying in the region. Many sold their homes and moved out, while thousands of workers who had non-transferrable skills could go nowhere. Over time he watched the people eventually find work, but it was never what they once had – never as lucrative as the high-earning power jobs.

When I think of people like Mick or those many workers I have talked about today, I think about a community working together for the good of their community and how the coalition smashed that environment. They smashed the SEC to bits. I want workers like Damien to have an opportunity to have secure work and a stable income so they can plan, get a mortgage and own a home. I want pensioners and working families to not break their backs over energy bills. I want Victorians to have a fair go and for Victorians to move towards net zero emissions and keep the lights on. With these bills today we can do all of that. Make no mistake: you are going to hear all sorts of things about this today – about the market, the market, the market – but we need a well-regulated market. Without competition there is a monopoly, and Victorians deserve better.

Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (16:18): I am delighted to rise and talk today on the rebirth of the SEC. I believe that there is no better way to politicise an industry than to embed it in the constitution, and that is exactly what this government is trying to do. This is a desperate move to signal to the community that they are doing something about the cost-of-living crisis and the energy crisis that they created.

I have listened to many of the contributions from the other side, and it has been interesting. To be honest, they have been quite feel-good contributions because they have been completely based on feelings and not fact. Occasionally it pays to actually look at the facts, because if you are making decisions for a state and you are refusing to look at the facts, you can run the risk of becoming no more than a propaganda unit. This government has lost control of the budget through big spending and big cost blowouts. Their actions have driven this once great state to an economic edge, and they have Victorians in a financial chokehold. They are now claiming that they are going to bring down the price of electricity through the SEC, yet history shows that whenever the government gets involved, things tend to get worse.

If you claim to reduce energy prices through renewables, I think it would be really good to actually look at the facts. I am not anti renewables; I am pro renewables. What I am anti are false narratives and misleading the public. When you actually look at the facts, those nations with the lowest share of wind and solar renewables have the lowest energy prices. These are places like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Korea, India and China. I do not think that they are the benchmark for energy at all. In fact I believe they do a whole lot wrong. But the fact is that this is the cheapest form of energy. Those nations with the highest renewable share have the highest energy prices, and those nations are Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. So why are we telling the public that they are going to save money through renewables when all of the facts point the other way?

Wind and solar are both very good energy sources to have in the mix. However, they are only commercially successful when they are the recipient of a subsidy, and only a state that actually has some money can afford to give a subsidy. Victoria was once the jewel in the nation’s crown; yet now we are the most highly taxed state in the nation, we have the highest debt in the nation and Victorians are paying more for their energy than anyone else in the nation. Historically it was our cheap, reliable baseload power that allowed Victorians to prosper. Victoria was a place where you could come and get ahead. Victoria was a place where you could come and start a business, build a home and see your dreams fulfilled because it was Victoria that had the resources to provide cheap, reliable power.

I was interested to hear during my colleague in the other place Danny O’Brien’s contribution that the government stifled debate on this bill. They restricted it to only 2 hours of debate despite the fact that these are amendments to our constitution. For such a monumental change I believe that that is shameful. He also said that during a Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing last year he asked the minister for clarity. He asked, ‘What proportion of the electricity generation sector will the SEC control by 2035?’ Just remember that 2035 is when we are going to have 95 per cent renewables. I was really shocked to hear that it was less than one-fifth. Less than 20 per cent is what the SEC will control. Why are we hearing that the government is a major stakeholder when it is going to be in control of less than 20 per cent? It is just another misleading piece of information.

I think it is absolutely crazy that we are telling the public we are going to save money by going to renewables. Renewables I believe are part of the recipe that is going to be the way for the future. But saying that you are going to save money is like saying, ‘Oh, come shopping; we’re going to save some money.’ It is just completely ridiculous. It sounds really good, but it just does not work. This government talks big yet delivers little. The decisions made in this place impact the lives of every Victorian, so we really need to do better. I think it is time for us to drop our ideology, come back to practicality and look at what this state actually needs.

I read an article recently that said the biggest threat to our way of life and our standard of living is the cost of energy, and that is something that we must take into consideration. Victoria is so rich in natural resources, yet we are in a manmade energy crisis. I think that we are all aware that the rebirth of the SEC is a political stunt and will not bring down the cost of energy, yet they will most likely spend a whole lot of money in the process, trying to have a narrative that shows they are doing the opposite. And guess who will foot the bill? The Victorian taxpayer. On a more local level, the Latrobe Valley in terms of jobs has not recovered from the closure of Hazelwood. Up to a thousand jobs were lost. We were promised a transition to renewables, and we have transitioned to absolutely nothing. Yet here we are being asked to trust the government again.

It seems like we are years behind the rest of the world. Many European nations experimented with renewables, and now they are actually turning back to coal. Across the world there are actually 350 new coal power stations being built right now. Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria were all flying the flag for renewables a few years ago, and they are turning back to coal. China and India are mining almost double the amount of coal Australia is. If the Victorian government believes that we are going to make any difference in the global emissions by forcing us into renewables while sacrificing jobs, driving up the cost of living and getting rid of reliable power in the process, I think we need to be a bit smarter than that. If renewables were both cheaper and reliable, I would be completely supporting this, but the fact is right now the data says they are not.

In the meantime the government has completely abandoned coal without considering the improvements that can be made to the industry. We never have adopted best practices, and that is a real shame. We have not ever applied the latest pollution control technologies, and that is a real shame. And there is no political will to improve this industry. It has just been exited altogether while the rest of the world seems to be moving ahead. In fact with the money that the government and industry is spending on work packages and site rehabilitation at Hazelwood we could have built two new state-of-the-art coal stations and protected a third of Victoria’s energy supply. Regardless of this, the government has cared more about the narrative than it has for the truth, and Victorians deserve better. I urge the chamber to reject this bill.

Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (16:27): I rise to speak today on the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023 and State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023. Despite some concerns about these bills, particularly the former, following constructive discussions with the government regarding amendments, the Greens will be supporting them. My colleague Dr Tim Read in the other place has outlined in detail the Greens perspective on the role of a state-owned electricity commission.

There are a couple of points which are important to revisit because they are missing from the debate in this chamber. Whilst the announcement to reinstate a State Electricity Commission was a key pillar in Labor’s election campaign back in 2022, this new SEC in fact bears little resemblance to the SEC of the 1900s. Now, I do not mean to romanticise the SEC of old, especially given it was originally established to tap into the vast coal reserves of the Latrobe Valley, but the proposed SEC before us today will not manifest in a publicly owned electricity commission that can sell clean power directly to Victorian households, nor will it actually ensure that the projects it invests in are majority publicly owned. It is a real shame, because the Greens are big supporters of this government’s efforts to bring in more renewables, but these need to be matched by genuine government ownership of essential services. We are not sure that the proposed SEC will be effective for achieving either of these goals.

For decades governments, Labor and Liberal, as highlighted by Mr Mulholland, have sold off and outsourced essential services to big corporations. This includes electricity services. Labor and the coalition take donations from big corporations whose primary objective is to profit, not to meet the needs of the population. The reliance on the market to meet essential needs is fraught. It relies on strong and enforced regulation to prevent inequity, which in turn can often lead to greater costs for the government. Market failure is apparent everywhere in the energy sector, and Victorians are paying for it. Rather than giving millions of dollars to private corporations, this money could ensure that public services are properly funded and delivering for everyone, not just shareholders. Further, there is nothing in this bill to prevent future governments from selling off SEC assets, just as we have seen in the past. This is disappointing.

Whilst Labor’s efforts to re-establish an SEC are welcome, the Greens urge that a swift transition to renewables still requires a clearer path for what Victoria’s future electricity grid and renewable energy generation mix will look like, further industry and consumer regulations and incentives to electrify the state and a detailed jobs and housing plan to make sure that Victoria actually has the workers to build the renewable projects that are being approved. While I have said many times in this place that Labor has set some ambitious and welcome renewable targets, we are still lacking detail about how they plan to achieve them. A $1 billion investment is a start, but it is really a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the transition required and a pittance compared to what this government is willing to spend on things like toll roads. As Dr Tim Read in the other place pointed out, there are mountains of renewable projects stuck in the planning pipeline with seemingly no pathway for them to be realised. We need a plan to get these moving and adequate funding to support them.

To address some of our concerns, when the constitution amendment bill returns to Parliament, we will be introducing a number of amendments. Firstly, linked to our concerns about public ownership and to ensure that the SEC is a significant player in the renewable energy market, we will introduce a renewable energy generation amendment. This amendment establishes that the SEC must, by 2035, own, operate or participate in the operation of generating systems that have a combined capacity to generate not less than 4.5 gigawatts of electricity by utilising renewable energy sources or converting renewable energy sources into electricity. In the process of re-establishing the SEC, we must ensure that future governments do not reduce or abandon the current government’s stated commitment to the minimum amount of renewable electricity that will be generated from SEC projects. Constitutionally enshrining an SEC that does not own anything or do anything is not really getting things done. This amendment ensures that the SEC actually produces some renewable energy and reports transparently on this.

The Greens will also be moving a constitutional amendment to ensure that the SEC’s profits are always directed into further investment in renewable energy projects and cannot be ripped out of the organisation by a current or future government in the form of dividends. We know that governments frequently like to pull billions of dollars out of public corporations – for example, the TAC – but for the SEC to fulfil its stated function of consistently accelerating renewable investment it cannot be used as a piggy bank whenever a government is strapped for money. Absurdly, a government could in theory even direct any dividends received from the SEC into funding new fossil fuel projects.

A key government promise at the time of the announcement was that all SEC profits would be invested back into more renewables, but there is currently nothing in the bills before us to hold it or, importantly, future governments to this commitment. The Greens amendment fixes this oversight. I sincerely want to thank the minister’s office for their time and willingness to have a constructive dialogue about this amendment, and I look forward to keeping the door open for future conversations about our shared climate goals.

Finally, I will seek to move an out-of-scope constitutional amendment which would ensure that no future government could construct new fossil fuel projects. This would cover the mining, burning, storing, transmitting or refining of fossil fuels. It is an essential step if we are to protect our communities and environment from any future government who may wish to derail the progress of the current renewables transition. It is all well and good that the SEC does not invest in fossil fuels itself, but this government has numerous coal and gas projects on the go that sit outside the SEC. Further, while the SEC logo might not be able to be used on a new fossil fuel project, nothing in these constitutional amendments prevents future governments from investing in fossil fuel projects outside the SEC. What is the point in having an SEC investing in renewable energy while at the same time opening a new fossil fuel project; for example, the coal-hungry hydrogen-to-energy supply chain project or a waste incinerator? Climate action is about actually reducing emissions overall.

To avert the worst possible impacts of climate change, we must keep fossil fuels in the ground and rapidly move to 100 per cent renewable energy while supporting people and communities as we do so. We look forward to members supporting our amendments, which I would ask be circulated now.

Amendments circulated pursuant to standing orders.

Sarah MANSFIELD: We hope that these amendments will make sure that the current bills before us, particularly the constitution amendment bill, are more than just symbolic acts and that there are some meaningful outcomes with respect to our climate and renewable energy goals. The Greens will be supporting the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill as it goes through committee today. We look forward to seeing the constitution amendment bill return to Parliament at some stage as well as ongoing constructive work with the government to move Victoria rapidly to 100 per cent renewables.

Jacinta ERMACORA (Western Victoria) (16:35): I am delighted to talk quite specifically on the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023, because this bill is about the future – our future. It is about future jobs, it is about affordable energy and, overwhelmingly, it is about the future of this planet and the urgency of curbing global warming. Right here, right now we must take action to prevent a climate disaster. I can tell you that the Allan Labor government is determined to continue Victoria’s transition to renewable energy. Victoria is currently at 38 per cent renewable energy, and we have committed to achieving 95 per cent by 2035.

This is why the Allan Labor government is reviving the SEC. The new SEC’s role is to support and hasten the decarbonisation of our economy. It will attract more investments, it will create thousands of jobs and it will reduce energy bills and emissions. This bill amends the State Electricity Commission Act 1958 to abolish the old State Electricity Commission of Victoria. It makes amendments to the Electricity Industry (Residual Provisions) Act 1993 and other acts to remove or clarify remaining references to the old SECV. This is so there will be no confusion between the pre-existing entity and the new SEC in the statute books. The bill will transfer the small number of remaining assets and liabilities to the state for these to be managed by the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. The Minister for the State Electricity Commission will be the responsible minister.

The new SEC as a government-owned renewable energy company will primarily have the following roles: firstly, to invest in renewable energy and storage projects to ensure the transition to renewables and deliver commercial returns; secondly, to support households to go all electric to reduce their energy bills and emissions; and thirdly, to build the renewable energy workforce our energy transition requires. The new SEC will partner with the industry for further innovation and investments in renewables. Critically, this includes an initial $1 billion in funding to be used to deliver 4.5 gigawatts of power through renewable energy and storage projects. These are investments being made right now with the overarching goal of our state reaching carbon neutrality.

Victoria’s privately owned coal-fired power stations are run down and reaching the end of their operational lives. Regardless of climate change, we see their owners progressively announcing their closure. These private sector closures are both a risk and an opportunity for our state. The risk is if we do nothing and let the coal plants close without any plan for the future, we will then end up in a worse situation than what we had after the last Liberal government, with unreliable electricity supply and increasing prices for families and businesses. We must ramp up renewable energy to keep the lights on, we must invest in renewable energy to meet our climate targets, we must invest in renewable energy to protect our climate at a local and a global scale and we must invest in renewable energy to make energy affordable.

We are decarbonising through new renewable energy across our state – wind, solar, batteries and of course our nation-leading plan for offshore wind generation in Victoria. Offshore wind offers a critical and unique contribution to Victoria’s future energy mix. The consistency of wind offshore provides for a baseload type of energy supply. This is why the Victorian government is committed to offshore wind being a part of the future energy mix, and I support the federal government’s recent declaration of an offshore wind zone in the Southern Ocean off south-western Victoria. Contrary to some misinformation, this zone will be at least 15 kilometres offshore from Warrnambool. On some days it will be visible on the horizon, depending on the weather.

As reported in the Age newspaper on 5 March 2024 in an article written by Broede Carmody and Mike Foley:

The final zone will sit about 15 to 20 kilometres off the coast of Warrnambool and could generate 2.9 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy – the equivalent of keeping the lights on in more than 2 million homes.

The article goes on to say:

The scaled-back area responds to pushback from environmental groups, which had urged the Commonwealth to avoid marine life hotspots, particularly around the Bonney Upwelling, which lies between Portland in Victoria and Robe in South Australia.

This offshore wind zone will support Victoria’s target of at least 2 gigawatts contributed by offshore wind in 2032. To reassure the previous speaker, it will also reach 4 gigawatts by 2034 and 9 gigawatts by 2040.

Every stage of the project’s life from planning to construction, operations and decommissioning will include a robust consultation process with local residents and with traditional owners and rights holders as well as a strong evidence-based review of environmental considerations. The Allan Labor government will ensure alignment between Victoria’s renewable energy objectives and its environmental objectives. This is why we are strengthening our understanding of offshore wind through an integrated and coordinated whole-of-government approach. To ensure projects comply with strong environmental protections, we are engaging and learning from international jurisdictions.

To reduce risk to whales and other marine animals, offshore wind energy projects employ technology considered to be less invasive than those used for offshore oil and gas. The use of high-energy seismic surveys are not necessary for offshore wind. Instead, high-resolution geophysical surveys are a much less intrusive alternative. These sound sources are much lower energy than the seismic airgun surveys typically used with oil and gas.

It is reassuring that offshore wind in Australia is emerging within a highly regulated environment at both state and federal levels. Offshore wind projects will be assessed under the Australian government’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. This includes construction, operation and decommissioning of wind turbines, cables, substations and all other associated infrastructure. It maintains Australia’s obligations under numerous migratory bird conventions and treaties, and there will be continued public consultation and feedback as projects progress.

Offshore wind is an established technology in other parts of the world. I have seen thousands of offshore wind turbines in Europe, in particular in the waters off Copenhagen. I have also seen the development of offshore oil rigs and offshore gas infrastructure off my own community in Port Campbell. We have all heard the horror stories of fracking coming from other states in Australia and around the world, and we know that people living near nuclear power plants in Europe, particularly in France, are given iodine tablets in case of a meltdown. I know what I would rather see: a clean, safe renewable offshore wind energy industry that respects the marine environment and saves our planet.

I thank the Minister for Energy and Resources for her leadership in guiding our state towards our renewable energy future. It is a complex and nuanced space, and I have absolute confidence in our government’s ability to bring us through to the other side. We are navigating the transition with the highest level of responsibility and accountability – the same commitment we are applying to the SEC. The Allan Labor government is working for a healthy, prosperous and enduring future for all Victorians, and I commend this bill.

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (16:46): I am pleased to rise and make a contribution to these two bills in a cognate debate: the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023 and the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023. Let me just first be very clear: we think this is very bad principle and we will be opposing both bills.

I will start with the simpler bill first, the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill. It abolishes the old SEC Victoria established under the act, transfers the functions of the abolished body to the minister, transfers all property rights and liabilities and changes the name of the act to the Former SEC (Residual Provisions) Act 1958. This bill is in effect a non-bill. It is really about symbolism by the government. It is a bill that we will oppose because we think it is focused on the strange activities that the government is doing with the other bill, and I will come to that in just a moment. We think if anything there should be some annual reporting requirements around this bill so that whatever is left of the SEC in the original shell will actually be reported as part of the activities of the department when it is sent to its new home. But the bill in itself is very much a non-bill, a bill that does not achieve terribly much at all.

More important, though, is the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill, which requires that the state always has a controlling interest in the SEC and provides for the objects of the SEC to constrain the power of Parliament to make laws repealing or altering it. This is basically the entrenchment of the so-called SEC. But let us ask a question: what is the government proposing to actually entrench? It is proposing to entrench a private company. It has established a private, proprietary limited company, a $20 company. The company is now going to manage a billion dollars of government money, and the company is now able to go out and do deals. But it has got to retain majority ownership, the government says. It has got to maintain a controlling interest, the government says. But let us be clear here: we are entrenching in the Victorian constitution a private, proprietary limited company. That is actually what we are doing with this today. It is a slightly bizarre outing.

We have heard the government members go into rants on privatisation and so forth, but we know that state Labor governments have privatised a whole series of things, starting with Joan Kirner and Mission Energy in 1992, and in the recent period the titles office –

Sonja Terpstra interjected.

David DAVIS: Well, you know the titles office has been privatised. You know that the motor registration branch has been privatised. You know that there are private interests controlling those now, and that has been the action of the Labor government that is currently in power. Ten years into its cycle it has privatised and flogged off all sorts of things, and now it wants to claim that it is more pure than the driven snow. Well, nobody believes it. It is complete and utter nonsense.

We did consult widely. We found very few people who actually thought this was a good idea. We know that the state government’s energy policy is in a catastrophic mess. We know that the state government’s energy policy has seen –

Members interjecting.

David DAVIS: We have one too, and it is to reverse the bizarre changes that have been made on gas. Let me just say also: today we saw the energy default offer come out. The price of energy is 17 per cent up on what it was two years ago, $240 per household on the default offer, and more on what most people are actually paying. If you look at the St Vincent de Paul tracker, it shows a 28 per cent surge in electricity costs and a 22 to 23 per cent surge in gas costs. And it is the same for small businesses: very significant increases for small businesses. To the question of what this SEC body would do for all those energy costs, it would do absolutely nothing. Would it bring down energy costs for families? No. Would it bring down energy costs for businesses? No. Would it drive them up? Probably. There is no evidence at all that it would in any way do anything constructive.

We have seen the government’s offshore wind proposals end in catastrophic failure. The place where they were going to assemble the offshore wind was Hastings. The federal minister has just ruled it out – crossed a line through the Port of Hastings option. So we were going to do offshore wind – ‘We’ve got these targets; we’re steaming forward towards these targets’ – and there has been a hit below the waterline of the ‘SS Hastings’. That particular option for assembling and building the large offshore wind facilities has been lost. Where will they be built? Nobody knows. I asked the minister here on that bill that went through a week or two ago where on earth they were going to build the offshore wind farm, and she could not tell me. She could not tell me when they would be doing it. She could not tell me when the first wind farm would open.

Lee Tarlamis interjected.

David DAVIS: I can tell you what, it is absolutely catastrophic. Let me go further: the enormous tax charges that are imposed by the government on consumers in this state through the long high-tension powerlines and the levy of land tax on them are a straight pass-through.

Sonja Terpstra interjected.

David DAVIS: You pay it every year. Everyone pays it. Every small business pays it. It is just a straight pass-through into your bills, just to be very clear here.

The Labor Party wants to entrench a private company called the SEC proprietary limited into the constitution. It seeks to put these entrenchments there; it will require 60 per cent of the vote. It seeks to bind future parliaments and say, ‘Actually, you can’t do this.’ Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute made clear the SEC’s role. He said in June that the government had made some ‘big statements’ about the SEC’s ability to provide more renewable energy and push down power prices. He said:

I can’t see anything that says the SEC is going to do something that the private sector wouldn’t have done.

That is the truth of the matter. On the government’s plan going forward, I read the strategic plan, and I must say I am slightly worried. The SEC is to begin by servicing government electricity requirements. I am nervous about one of the early things an entrenched SEC would do. The government would mandate that every single government agency – every school, every hospital, every agency – use this SEC.

We know that on reliability and security of supply the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO, has become increasingly worried that Victoria will have insufficient gas supply during the winters of 2023 to 2026, and we know that that is a problem. We know that there is a risk that we are going to see uneven and uncontrolled falls in supply on certain occasions, and we know that there is a real risk that we will lose reliability of supply. We have already seen that the firming capacity has been inadequate. We have already seen the system under stress; it has not been able to cope. There is a really clear point here. We cannot guarantee security of supply on the one hand, but we have got surging prices on the other, massively surging prices for small businesses and for households – up, up, up. That is actually what they have been doing.

Then we start to look at what we are going to do to bring on renewables – to actually look at a proper way forward to see renewables play a legitimate and significant role in the market. Well, we have got problems with onshore wind. Mrs McArthur will be very clear about the problems with onshore wind –

Sonja Terpstra: Can’t wait to hear.

David DAVIS: Well, she will have a lot to say – and on the failure of the government to consult. It wants to steamroll over local communities, that is what it wants to do, and that is what it is doing right across the state. It wants new planning changes – that was announced in the last week – where it is going to strip out the right of people to go to VCAT. You will not be able to go to VCAT if you have got problems with planning that is put in place or proposed for a new renewable project. They want a fast-tracked system, even though when you look at renewable projects there are dozens of them on the ministers’ desks at the moment – and the planning ministers, plural, have had some of those proposals on their desks for more than five years. So let us be clear.

Sonja Terpstra interjected.

David DAVIS: How do I know? I have actually put together the list. I have actually got a list. I will give you the list, if you would like. I can provide you the list.

Sonja Terpstra: Where are they? Name them.

David DAVIS: Well, they are all over the state, actually.

Sonja Terpstra: Whereabouts?

David DAVIS: I can give you the exact list, but I can tell you that some of them have been on the ministers’ desks for more than five years. So much for a quicker system. The government says it is going to have a stripped-down system. The slowness in the system – it is often the planning minister and it is often the energy minister themselves who are actually providing the break, the stop, the difficulty.

I do want to go to the central issue here about whether it is wise to entrench a private company in the Victorian constitution – a private, proprietary limited company. I should say that this private company will not be FOI-able. This private company will try to stick beyond the reach of profit scrutiny, and that is why we have drafted a series of important amendments, which would hold the government to account on that. One of the points we will say is:

The purpose of this Part is not to restrict the ability of Victorians and Victorian government entities to choose who will supply electricity to them …

We say that if you are going to have the SEC there, the choice must be with Victorians. They must not be compelled to choose any provider. We talk about storage and the importance of gas storage, because we know that we actually need to smooth out the supply of electricity. We know, further, that there is a risk that the SEC will behave anti-competitively, so an amendment that we have drafted says the SEC is to:

… comply with State and Commonwealth competitive neutrality requirements

The SEC, if it is entrenched, will need to comply and cannot go around and monster with special advantages and special arrangements and work against the choices of consumers. The SEC must:

… comply with all requirements of a Registered participant in the national electricity market

I think one of the risks here is that the state government will try to exempt the SEC from the normal rules. They will try and have one rule for their SEC that is entrenched in the constitution and different rules for other providers.

We also make the point that the SEC body – whatever its shape is, whatever future version the government puts in place – will be able to be FOI-ed. We say the SEC must not prevent consumer choice in the provision of electricity in Victoria and people must be able to choose who will supply electricity to them.

That includes government bodies. They will need to table an annual report. We need to make sure there is an annual report for this supposedly – this is what the government wants to do – entrenched body. We need to make sure that an annual report is required, and that it cannot be cut out by the government through some release out of Financial Management Act 1994 requirements. The SEC must:

… publish information about Victorian domestic customer electricity consumption costs and greenhouse gas emissions produced by Victorian domestic customers

If the SEC is going to achieve so much, it needs to report on what it is achieving on the consumption costs and the greenhouse gas emissions. We need to see those figures put out closely and regularly. And the SEC must:

… annually publish information about the amount of electricity supplied to Victorian consumers of electricity

We want to see all of those transparency measures in place, and we want to see those behavioural mechanisms in place so that this new SEC will not behave in the way the old SEC did many years ago.

We know the assessments of the old SEC were not favourable. The old SEC actually had a low reliability factor. Some of us are old enough to have been around and remember the electricity strikes in the 1970s. We had the whole Latrobe Valley closed down. We had the SEC, the State Electricity Commission, closing down and saying, ‘We’re not going to provide electricity to households in Victoria or to businesses.’ People were put off work because of the actions of the old SEC. It had low reliability in the 1970s. Yallourn and Loy Yang B and so forth – massively more efficient now, massively more reliable than the old SEC ever was. So one of the things here is that Labor started the privatisations and now they seek to claim, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, we want to entrench this as a public thing.’ Well, what is it? It is an entrenched, private, proprietary limited company in the constitution – (Time expired)

Adem SOMYUREK (Northern Metropolitan) (17:01): I rise to make a contribution and speak to both the bills before the house today. When I first saw the press release, I think it was – or it could have been a tweet – by the government in October last year during the election campaign that the government was committing to putting the SEC in government ownership again, I immediately thought this was a manifestation of the newfound confidence in the Socialist Left takeover of the Victorian branch, Socialist Left takeover of the party, Socialist Left Prime Minister and Premier – who had been in charge for a number of years, but he had some checks and balances on him in the strong right. I thought this was the Socialist Left going a bit mad at that point.

In the 1980s it was the Hawke–Keating governments’ market-based macroeconomic reforms that repositioned and transformed the Australian economy and made the Australian economy more efficient and indeed more globally competitive. Before the Hawke–Keating macroeconomic reforms, Australia was pretty intellectually lazy, let us say. We were happy to get by on the sheep’s back or sit back and think that it will always be okay because we have got an abundance of natural resources. But thanks to the Hawke–Keating governments – by the way, soon after the Hawke–Keating governments we had globalisation – the fact that we had efficient industries and we had gone through macroeconomic reform held us in great stead to make sure the Australian economy was globally competitive.

What is happening now in Australia is that we have been able to increase our living standards – despite some pretty rough periods of time in the global economy – because of the reforms of the Hawke–Keating governments. But it was not easy for Hawke and Keating; they had the Socialist Left to contend with. It was only after a couple of leftie – not in the Socialist Left – independents in the Labor Party ministry flipped, and then flipped a couple of their Socialist Left senior ministers, that the Hawke–Keating governments was able to bang these reforms through the party room, through the cabinet and through Parliament. Australia has benefited ever since.

Like I said, we have gone through many, many global economic crises, but Australia has not gone into recession. It has managed to be globally competitive, it is efficient, and we are a bit of a powerhouse as far as the economy is concerned. I think we owe that to the Hawke and Keating governments – although I wish Mr Keating would stay out of public debate these days; I like to remember him as the reformer that he was in the 1980s. Soon after the Hawke–Keating governments – well, during that time but soon after the major economic reforms – we had the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collapse of communism was equated with the collapse of socialism. We had a period of time when the Socialist Left were very, very cynical about the market. They had to distance themselves from that cynicism, but it was a latent issue with the rank and file.

Fast forward to today and to that press release. I am going to support this bill, but I was cynical. Like I said before, I was cynical. I thought this was the Socialist Left getting carried away with themselves and wanting to refight the Cold War. I am still a little bit suspicious, but I see enough merit in this bill to support it. I believe in the market. I believe the market is the most efficient way of allocating a nation’s or an economy’s scarce resources. I believe when a market is going well, intervention in that market creates a deadweight cost to the economy. I am in favour of government intervention. I support the welfare state. I also believe that markets fail, and I think that is what we have got here.

I support the government’s housing policy because we have got a housing crisis. We have got a housing crisis because there is market failure. We have got huge demand but we have got private enterprise that will not meet that demand, so we have got market failure. My interpretation of market failure is a lot more liberal than the right’s, but I see that we have got market failure in housing as well.

When I was the Minister for Local Government one of the things I took up was the cause of the 16 or 17 isolated small rural councils which were having problems with financial stability. They had a very low revenue base. Their population was low. They occupied vast spaces of territory, and again because of market failure private industry could not deliver some services – and I presume they still cannot deliver services – which councils should not be providing, so the councils, even though they were all cash strapped themselves, had to deliver them. I was an advocate for those small rural councils because there was that market failure there as well. In fact this has been a problem with Australia’s history. Again, with the sparse populations and vast amounts of territory, Australian governments have had to fill the void by delivering services that private enterprise should be delivering. That is why we have been a mixed economy throughout our history.

When we come to this particular bill, notwithstanding all of the other things that the government has talked about, I think this bill is about addressing market failure in a key service area. What we have got here are generations-old, decrepit, unreliable coal-fired power stations that are falling apart, yet the owners of those facilities are not willing to reinvest – rightly so – in the upkeep of those facilities. We have got the perfect storm of exponential increase in demand for energy and then we have got private enterprise not stepping up to the mark. Again, we have got huge demand and we have got private enterprise that cannot fulfil that demand, so what we have got according to my interpretation is market failure. We have got market failure in a very, very important industry. It is the essential service of essential services – energy. So I am glad the government is stepping in to ensure that we do have a reliable source of energy. It is very important for our state, needless to say, so I will be supporting this particular bill.

Another benefit of the bill – and I am not sure that the government intended it this way – is that after this bill passes I think the government can no longer duck and weave and hide for cover when the lights go off or when the air-conditioning goes off in 40-degree heat. They are directly accountable – this makes the government directly accountable. I am not sure if this features in the talking points of the government, but as far as I am concerned this makes the government directly accountable for the lights staying on and the air-conditioning system staying on in 40-degree heat.

If I can talk about the entrenchment of this bill into legislation, I do not like entrenchment. This place is a majoritarian system – if you have got 50 per cent plus one in the lower house, you form government; it is a winner-takes-all institution. Parliament is sovereign for those that have been elected into this place. We as members of this Parliament have got a mandate to legislate, but I am not sure that that mandate extends to the next Parliament. I think it is pretty cheeky for us to assume that it does. I am going to support this one, but I would urge caution for future governments to be very, very judicious with the exercise of this tool, because I think it will be susceptible to a High Court challenge, and I think there is some principle along those lines. So I am just urging general caution.

If this is a legitimate tool to use, I think this is a good time to use it. I do understand that if we are arguing that we are not getting enough investment from private enterprise, we do need to send a signal to private enterprise that their investment will not be buffeted by the whims of the cut and thrust of politics and that their investment will survive a change of government. They really do not know as much as I do about parliamentary procedure and parliamentary theory, or the theory of this place, but I think it is important to send a message to private enterprise, if we are having a hard time getting them on board to invest, that their investment will be safe. Private enterprise – what do they want? They want a robust regulatory regime, they want strong infrastructure, they want good infrastructure, they want an educated workforce, but they also want their investment to be secure. This will at least give the perception that their investment will be secure, and it will go a little way to attracting more private investment. Notwithstanding that, I support both bills based on the arguments I have mentioned in my speech. I will not entertain any amendments to the bills.

Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:13): I rise to make a contribution in regard to the cognate debate on the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023 and the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023. I was watching the debate from outside the chamber, but I decided to come up here and sit in the chamber so I could listen more intently to the contributions that are made by everybody. I note that Mrs McArthur is going to be speaking after me, and I am a bit disappointed; I would have liked to respond to some of the things I know you are going to say about nuclear, Mrs McArthur. But nevertheless I will make some comments and observations about the debate, because we seem to have traversed a wide range of subjects today. We have talked about privatisation, we have talked about renewables, we have talked about market failures and of course we have talked about nuclear as well, so there is a lot of ground to cover. Also I note Mr Davis’s contribution in regard to the SEC itself, and I want to put some of these remarks on the record and correct some of Mr Davis’s scare-campaigning tactics about what the SEC actually is.

I will start my remarks by saying I was a young union official when, as I recall, the Kennett government was privatising the SEC. I note that Mr Berger also made some contributions earlier about the workers – very personal stories of workers and how they were affected. I remember at the time what the unions were saying, and this is true of any privatisation story, really, about the devastation and the damage that privatisation causes not only to the entity that gets shut down and sold off to private companies who want to extract billions and billions of dollars in profit but to the job losses and the downstream effects that then occur to local communities, schools and local businesses when workers move away and find other jobs potentially. That impacts communities, and the effects of that reverberate for generations to come. We can still see that in the Gippsland area. That is why, on the privatisation of the SEC, I note that unions were very loud and very vocal, and there were big campaigns and lots of protests around that. That is something that left an indelible mark on me as a young union official and as a person watching the devastation that that has caused not only for people who were directly affected but for generations to come.

In terms of the SEC itself, we have committed to bringing back the SEC as a publicly owned, 100 per cent renewable, active energy market participant. On 25 October 2023 SEC Victoria Pty Ltd was registered with ASIC as a proprietary limited company under the Corporations Act, so what Mr Davis said in that regard was correct. However, on 14 November 2023 the SEC was declared a state-owned company under the State Owned Enterprises Act 1992. The Premier and the Treasurer each hold one share in the SEC, and the SEC will always be a government owned or controlled entity. This is reflected in the bill’s requirement that the state will always fully own and control the SEC. Now, this is important, and the reason why it is important is, as I said before, that we watched and we saw a Liberal government under the Kennett regime privatise a state-run asset. I have heard other people talk about this before. When you talk about essential services, you talk about electricity, water, sewerage and those sorts of things. These really are essential services that should never be privatised, because what we see is, and we have seen it happen, that billions of dollars in profit have been siphoned off to overseas companies, not retained here in Australia or in Victoria so that Victorians could benefit from it.

In fact we also hear arguments about why privatisation is good. We hear the same old rhetoric – things like ‘The private market can deliver this better. Government is inefficient and too slow to do things, and that’s why we needed to break up these government-controlled entities.’ But what all of that is code for is that those opposite wanted their mates who are involved in big corporations to make money, to profiteer at the expense of Victorians. Mr Somyurek mentioned earlier about market failure. Absolutely there was a market failure because what the companies that moved into the electricity space wanted was to profit, and that meant that prices for electricity went up.

We also got a lot of rhetoric during the 1980s and 90s. I remember Professor Hilmer did a paper on competition policy in the 90s, and there was a lot of discussion around those sorts of comments, about competition supposedly driving down prices. But what we saw in fact with electricity prices under private corporations is that they profiteered and electricity prices in fact went up and went through the roof. Of course we need to have government intervention when private companies get in there and muck it all up. Those opposite do not want to hear us talk about those sorts of things, because the truth hurts. The truth hurts in the fact that when all of this pressure was brought to bear about allowing the private market to intervene, it stuffed it up. So of course what happens? It takes a state Labor government to intervene in the market to correct it, because we have got people who cannot afford to pay their electricity bills. We have seen massive profiteering –

David Davis: They’ve gone up massively.

Sonja TERPSTRA: No, we have had massive profiteering. Again this is why the government has had to step in and make sure we are bringing electricity prices down, and I am not going to have enough time to talk about all the stuff that is going on. I could talk about the Victorian default offer as of 19 March 2024. For example, Victorian households under the Victorian default offer will pay $370 less on average for their electricity than those on the default market offer in New South Wales, South Australia and south-east Queensland. And you know what? Even better for small businesses, it is going to be $1328 less. Those small businesses will appreciate that $1328 that is going to stay in their pockets, no thanks to those opposite, because the Victorian default offer will mean that there will be downward pressure on electricity prices. Not only that, but the fact that we are increasing our mix of renewables into the market means that we will continue to drive electricity prices down.

It is hilarious. I watch all the banter and the stuff that is going on on Twitter and other social media sites about nuclear energy. Honestly, I think the only people that are talking about nuclear are Sky News. Someone mentioned earlier that electricity prices in the UK are expensive. They are expensive because they have got nuclear, and nuclear energy is horrendously expensive. Those opposite talk about the fact that renewables are going to drive electricity prices up. There is no basis to say that.

What we have seen is private companies profiteer, so it is kind of laughable to try and listen to those opposite and others in the chamber – there are lots of things that have been said today – talk about socialism and all this kind of rubbish. Honestly, like I said before, when you have a market failure, it takes governments to step in and fix that failure. People talk about socialism, but the bottom line is markets do fail. They are not perfect. I do not want to give everyone a treatise on economics, but I can talk about what we saw come in with Reagan and Reaganomics. This is what started it. We were all promised the trickle-down effect of economic reform would mean that people would benefit more from it. It is utter rubbish. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The divide between rich and poor is widening and widening. We were all sold a pup with this idea that trickle-down economics was going to benefit everybody. Truth be told, the rich are just hanging on to the things that they have got, and they have benefited from arguing that we should not have government intervention in these things because they were going to deliver a better outcome for everyone. We have been sold a pup, we have been lied to and we can see this now with markets that are failing and the massive profits that are getting ripped off and being sent overseas.

In terms of the Constitution Act amendments, I heard Mr Davis earlier talk about why this needs to be in the Victorian constitution. It is because we want to protect it. We want to enshrine it in the constitution so future governments, like any future Liberal government – goodness forbid that we might have a Liberal government at some point in Victoria – will be prevented from selling off the state’s energy assets. We want to protect thousands of jobs for future generations. We want to make sure that this will be protected and baked in so that it can never again be sold.

I reflect on my earlier remarks. I said there are essential services that should never be sold. That includes electricity, that includes water and that includes sewerage. I know Kennett had plans to privatise sewerage. I know that, and they started to do it with water. They started to privatise water as well. Could you imagine if we had privatised sewerage operation? Oh, my goodness. We had it with electricity. You could just see this is where this would go. It is important that we as a Labor government protect this to make sure the wreckage and the carnage that were caused by the Liberal government under the Kennett regime can never, ever happen again. It was outrageous. The destruction and the devastation that were caused by the Kennett Liberal government privatising and selling off and breaking up the SEC was a disgraceful chapter in Victoria’s history, and we never want to see that again.

As I said, in October 2022 the Victorian government committed to reviving the SEC to help accelerate the energy transition, a point that is lost on those opposite. As part of this commitment we stated it would be enshrined in the constitution to prevent a future government from selling off the state’s energy assets – I will say it again: the state’s energy assets – and to protect thousands of jobs for future generations, and this bill delivers on that commitment. We said what we would do, and we are going to deliver on that commitment. Enshrining the new SEC in the constitution will help ensure that Victorians can continue to rely on the new SEC to invest in renewables, support households and help create training and work opportunities for generations to come.

The bottom line is that when we do something like this not only are we making sure that the SEC as an entity cannot be sold off, but we are also making sure we are going to bake in jobs for locals. That is what got taken away under those opposite when they sold the SEC: local jobs for people in Gippsland. There were generations of people and their children and their family members who all worked at the SEC, all taken away by those opposite. With a stroke of a pen they completely disregarded generations of people who lived and worked in the valley and relied on those jobs for their families and for their children who went to school there. All of those things were lost and trashed. That is the legacy of those opposite. That is the legacy of the Liberal government, because you know what, they hate anything that is publicly owned. They hate TAFE. They hate anything that is publicly owned. They hate public schools. They hate public hospitals. I could go on; the list is indeed long. It is a very long list. Anything that is publicly owned and publicly funded they hate. So we are going to deliver on our commitment to protecting the SEC and to making sure that this can never happen again.

What is lost on those opposite is that we actually have ideas and we have policy. That is something they do not have over there. They are too busy arguing about who is going to be leader. Who is it this week, I wonder – because last sitting week I was told who it was going to be, but it might be somebody different this week.

David Davis: On a point of order, Acting President, I think the speaker is straying from the bill into a silly attack on the opposition, and I ask you to call her back.

Michael Galea: On the point of order, Acting President, this has been a very wideranging debate, which started with Mr Mulholland’s contribution earlier today.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (John Berger): Can I bring the member back to the topic, please.

Sonja TERPSTRA: Of course you can, Acting President. Thank you very much for your ruling. As I said, this is an important debate. There are two important bills in this matter and, as I said, whilst we are getting on with the job of delivering our policy ideas, we have ideas. Those opposite do not. They are too busy arguing amongst themselves about who is going to be leader. So again, whilst we are over here delivering on our policy initiatives and making sure we deliver on our election commitments, because they are critically important to the Victorian people, we want to make sure we deliver and let people know that the state’s electricity assets are in good hands for future generations. There will be jobs for Victorians, and we will do everything we can to drive electricity prices down. That is our commitment to the Victorian people, unlike those opposite – all they want to do is hate on each other and argue about who is going to be leader this week. I will conclude my contribution there.

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:27): In rising to speak on this bill, or rather these bills, I cannot help but think how little things have changed since that day in September when our former Premier finally announced he was quitting. These bills were brought in without briefing of the opposition for an unprecedented period, and apparently even the belated briefing occurred only at the behest of the departmental officials, not the Labor ministers. They have been subject to guillotine motions, like the bills in the Andrews era, and the tactic of playing politics with the constitution is pure Andrews – pure old Labor. I spent some time on this when we debated the absurd and unnecessary constitutional ban on fracking in the last Parliament. It is nothing more than playing politics with our constitution. It is vandalism.

Nick McGowan: I think we supported that one.

Bev McARTHUR: Yes, that was really clever. Legally it is likely to be little more than constitutional graffiti, but again that does not matter when politics trumps all else.

Still, you have heard all my reflections on this before, so I would like to turn to some new matters, namely the SEC itself. I have looked at the three pillars of the SEC strategy for the next decade, and they are:

… investing in renewable energy generation and storage, supporting households to go all-electric, and building the renewable energy workforce we need to drive Victoria’s energy transition.

It is so clear to me that the government has got it wrong on all of these. There are a huge number of flaws I could pick on, but I will just go for the biggest two: transmission and the problems inherent in an over-rapid over-reliance on renewables. None of the priorities of the SEC can currently be delivered, and however much Labor try to bash a square peg into a round hole, their policies are never going to work. I have always maintained a neutral stance on energy technologies. Our focus should be on increasing the country’s energy supply rather than reducing it, and Labor’s obsession with the soon-to-be constitutionally enshrined SEC has done nothing but undermine our energy security. Unfortunately their nirvana of 95 or 100 per cent renewables not only remains difficult to achieve – we are actually going backwards. So that makes other low-carbon energy options less appealing – possibly making nuclear an indispensable choice, especially if achieving net zero emissions continues to be a political goal.

Building renewable energy sources theoretically seems straightforward, but practical and recent challenges have diminished their appeal. Onshore wind projects face significant hurdles due to noise complaints and environmental concerns, as exemplified by the Willatook wind farm’s legal precedent and the brolga breeding season construction moratorium, which have severely impacted the wind energy sector. In fact it would be amazing if that project ever proceeded.

Offshore wind is encountering difficulties as well, with increased scrutiny over its impact on marine life – we will be worried about the whales in Warrnambool with the current proposal that is offered – construction effects and the fishing industry consequences leading to substantial public opposition and even governmental resistance from South Australia, and the catastrophe of the Port of Hastings installation project is the icing on the cake. If we cannot install offshore wind, we cannot operate it. The infrastructure and logistics supply chain is inconceivably complicated, and it cannot be created by government fiat.

It is not just offshore wind installation infrastructure they have got wrong. The requirement for new transmission infrastructure to support a 95 per cent renewable energy goal involves constructing 10,000 kilometres of new transmission lines nationwide, as estimated by the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO. My support for nuclear power stems partly from its compatibility with existing grid infrastructure, advocating for a holistic environmental impact consideration of both generation and transmission technologies. The current separation in impact analysis, especially overlooking the comprehensive costs associated with transmission line impacts, is problematic. Victoria’s renewable energy investment has plummeted due to grid inadequacies, with AEMO projections indicating significant energy wastage from wind and solar sources due to insufficient transmission capacity deterring institutional investors.

The land usage for renewable projects should not be overlooked, with nuclear offering a less intrusive option. The significant land requirement for achieving a 95 per cent renewable target through onshore wind and solar would drastically transform Victoria’s landscape, consuming up to 70 per cent of its agricultural land, as outlined in the state government’s offshore wind policy directions paper, a paper so embarrassing it has now been officially removed. It has been removed from the website – deleted. You are so embarrassed about it you have deleted it. The escalating systemic challenges facing renewable projects, including rising capital costs and inflation in construction expenses, highlight that renewable energy cannot single-handedly meet Victoria’s energy needs, thus making the case for nuclear power stronger due to its smaller footprint and compatibility with existing grid infrastructure alongside its reduced environmental impact from minimised mining requirements.

The SEC and Labor’s whole energy policy are misconceived. It is idealism over reality – too little too late; government led, not industry led; and absolutist and centralist, not market driven. The damage will be incalculable. To enshrine it in the constitution is crazy. All we can hope is that the monument of reckless stupidity it becomes will be a lesson for decades to come.

I should comment on Ms Terpstra’s comments where she waxed lyrical about the job losses in the Latrobe Valley. Now, let us be realistic about this. Who caused those job losses? You did, because you applied royalties to the power generators, deliberately rendering them unviable – so it is you who has taken away the jobs of workers in the Latrobe Valley. You have closed down the power plants and you have rendered the workforce jobless. You did the same thing in the timber industry in that area – shut that vital industry down and rendered those workers jobless. In the meantime we import timber from areas where we have no idea about the environmental impacts. That is clever – not. We all know your side hate the private sector, but those taxes that the private sector generates are what keep people like you on that side of the fence in a job and keep your burgeoning public service in a job. You are taxing hardworking Victorians out of existence like never before, and you are taxing the very workers you claim to support.

I would also like to go to how you are investing in the whole energy space. The Age revealed on Thursday that the state government would provide $245 million for the 600-megawatt Melbourne renewable energy hub, giving the SEC a 38.5 per cent stake in that battery project. Now, the battery project in my electorate down near Lara has gone really well – it caught fire. They could not put the fire out. But ownership is not spread evenly across the MREH’s three large batteries: two are 70 per cent owned by investor Equus and 30 per cent by the SEC. The third and largest battery is 49 per cent owned by the commission, but a binding contract gives the SEC 100 per cent control over its capacities. Anyway, this was an election pledge, and we have got these batteries. Equus and the SEC are jointly investing in the Melbourne energy renewable hub and Equus is a global fund, so who knows where their capital comes from? You know, a substantial investment from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. This is foreign investment that will make money, no doubt – why else would they be in it? It is all very well saying the SEC is going to be there for the people of Victoria, but you are investing without majority control in investments that could well end up with the profits going offshore. So I would say this whole proposal – these two bills – is nonsense. It is something that we should not be doing. You should never introduce policy issues into the constitution for generations to come. It will be difficult to take them out, and that should not be the case at all. I will leave my remarks there.

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (17:38): A brief contribution, if I may, on the exceptionally important legislation before us today – legislation that goes to the heart of the path that Victoria can take to its energy and economic future. The bills before us today will establish and entrench a pathway that is built on renewable energy, on clean energy, and that delivers to Victorian consumers the confidence that they have got a government that both believes in renewable energy and is willing to take action to make sure it succeeds.

The other thing that the bills before us today do in creating the new State Electricity Commission, the new SEC, is recognise that we on this side believe that government can and should be an active participant in this journey and not merely at best a bystander that watches things happen or at worst someone who actively flogs off our energy assets. The SEC that the government is bringing back will help Victorian consumers realise the benefits that arise and the cheaper cost of living that arises from electrification, and it will help us build our renewable energy infrastructure. That is what this SEC is about, that is what its objectives are and that is what the legislation before us is designed to do.

Earlier in the debate I think Mr Somyurek made a very apt descriptor of what the alternative is, and he said that the alternatives before us are things that are old, decrepit and unreliable. Of course he was referring to the state’s coal-fired energy assets, but he just equally could have been referring to the opposition’s energy policy, such that they had. That policy is unreliable, it relies on decrepit foundations and it is searching back to the kinds of old technologies that are not the path to Victoria’s energy future. This debate is fundamentally about whether we support Victoria and the Victorian people having a say and a stake in a renewable energy future. I fundamentally think that we do, and I absolutely support this legislation.

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:41): I rise on the cognate debate on both the Constitution Amendment (SEC) Bill 2023 and the State Electricity Commission Amendment Bill 2023. I have got only short remarks also, to everyone’s relief. I endorse everything that has been said on this side of the house. But the thing that I find absolutely wild about this proposition is effectively what Labor want to do is enshrine a venture capitalist (VC) into the constitution. This is a body that will go and pick winners that might produce energy at some point, so they are going to pick winners and losers – just like the Breakthrough Victoria fund at the Department of Premier and Cabinet, a $2 billion fund that, again, goes to pick winners, and just like SRL, where a third of the cost is being extracted by speculating on what tax you can extract out of property prices coming out of it.

The Labor government, having run out of its own money and then run out of the ability to borrow even more, has decided to get into speculation. That is what this is. The SEC is not the SEC you are talking about that we all have a sort of a romantic heritage of. It is not going to hire any apprentices, it is not going to train anyone and it is not going to build anything. It is going to speculate on whether it can find partners to deliver energy. It is a VC. Here the doyens of socialism are buying into ‘Yes, let’s put VCs into the constitution, and maybe we can bet on a winner that might reduce climate change.’ If it was not so tragic, it would be hysterical. But it is tragic because you have so little comprehension of what you are talking about and the fact that you love to cloak yourself in this virtuous cloak of the SEC, which is a brand looking for a concept. I would simply like to say it is a ridiculous idea, but it is sort of humorous that you want to institutionalise a VC into our constitution.

With that said, to the other piece of legislation, the SEC amendment, I would like to move an amendment, and I would ask that that amendment be shared. It is a reasoned amendment, probably very reasoned, and I move:

That all the words after ‘That’ be omitted and replaced with ‘the bill be withdrawn and not reintroduced until the government includes annual reporting on property, rights and liabilities of the former SEC into the bill that requires the Treasurer to ensure that every report of operations and financial statements of the Department of Treasury and Finance under part 7 of the Financial Management Act 1994 separately accounts for the property, rights and liabilities of the former SEC that became property, rights and liabilities of the state under that part of the act.’.

That completes my contribution.

Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (17:45): I too will make a short contribution to this debate. I think it all comes down to values that inform principles that then inform policies and investment. The values on this side have informed and delivered investment that has seen a 42.7 per cent drop in emissions in Victoria from a peak around 2010, 38.6 per cent renewables in our grid and just today a 7 per cent drop to consumers and small businesses in electricity prices. The Liberals are ideologically driven, and they actually do not care about outcomes for Victorian households and businesses using electricity. For decades they have fought against action on climate change, they have fought against policies to drive down our electricity prices and instead they have advocated for or pushed issues around fossil fuels like fracking farms for gas and now of course the very expensive and slow to build nuclear reactors. So whilst they are using the politics of fear to try and divide the nation, voters, when they go to the polls in Victoria, have a clear, demonstrated action of values, principles, policy, investment and action from the state Labor government that has seen electricity prices coming down and is seeing clean energy – as I said, 38.6 per cent currently in our grid. We are training the next generation of workers because you cannot take your hands off the wheel and expect trained workers to be here for our state to deliver what we need. We will provide tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment, and in doing so we will reduce our emissions and ensure a quality of life for this generation and future generations to come, continuing to improve on that which came before.

Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (17:47): Today I rise to inform the house of a very important matter – that is that the SEC is back. But it is not just back, it is better than ever, because the new SEC that is being delivered by the Allan Labor government will be run entirely off renewable energy. With this bill before us we will entrench it within the state’s constitution. We have fulfilled our commitment for a 100 per cent renewable-powered publicly owned energy retailer, an election promise that this government has stuck to and achieved.

Just last year in mid-November the SEC was declared as a state-owned company with the Premier and the Treasurer each holding one share, and it is a requirement that the state will always fully own and control the SEC. In fact the first project of the SEC is already under construction. For families wanting cost-of-living pressure relief, cheaper energy bills and a renewable state-run energy provider, this government is in fact delivering. Construction has already begun on the SEC’s very first project, the 1.6-gigawatt-hour battery in Melton with Equis Australia. It will power over 200,000 homes across our state and will be one piece of the puzzle of the new infrastructure we need to modernise our grid.

If there is one thing that this government knows how to do, it is building things, let me tell you – because we are doing that, and it is happening sooner. Sooner it is going to be bigger, it is going to be better, and we are going to get it done to the highest possible standard. You see, we smashed our 2020 emissions target of a 15 to 20 per cent reduction – we achieved 29.6 per cent. I recall speaking about this very recently, in fact in the last sitting week. In 2021 we achieved a 32.3 per cent reduction. You see, we do not just talk about climate action, we are in the business of delivering on it. We have the strongest climate change legislation in the country, and Victorians voted overwhelmingly for the next step in our ambitious agenda. Our targets of a 75 to 80 per cent reduction by 2035 and net zero by 2045 in fact align Victoria with the Paris goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We have become the first state or territory in the nation to set a 2035 target, and our new net zero target of 2045 is one of the earliest anywhere in the world. It is a testament to this Allan Labor government that we are not just leading the country in our climate targets but indeed leading the world.

Along with our ambitious and achievable target of 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035, we will create jobs – thousands and thousands of jobs. That number: 59,000 in total. We have staggeringly ambitious offshore wind targets of at least 2 gigawatts by 2032, 4 gigawatts by 2035 and 9 gigawatts by 2040 – my goodness. But let me talk about energy storage targets. The energy storage targets that we talked about last week in a bill before us contained targets of 2.6 gigawatts by 2030 and at least 6.3 gigawatts by 2035. We are decarbonising through our new renewable energy across our state, whether that is wind, solar or batteries, and of course we have got our nation-leading plan for offshore wind generation in our state. In 2022 over 35 per cent of our energy came from renewables. This is more than three times the 10 per cent we inherited in 2014.

We have created 5100 jobs in large-scale renewable energy since we were elected, providing stable, secure work for Victorians. In this government we create jobs, thousands of them in fact, in the renewable energy sector. In the 2022 calendar year more than 510,000 households and 49,000 businesses received discounted energy-efficient products and services through the Victorian energy upgrades program. On average households and businesses that undertake energy efficiency upgrades under the program save $110 up to about $3700 respectively on their annual energy bills, and those are some really strong savings. It is a huge saving for Victorians and a huge benefit to the environment, but I need to say it is a big step up in our state’s modernisation. Even those that do not participate will save on their bills, and there are many, many thousands of dollars being saved right across the state. But that is not all. I want to talk a little bit about Solar Homes and how much we have got to do there. There have been 300,000 installations of solar panels, hot-water systems and batteries since 2018, and over 1.8 million homes have applied for the power saving bonus looking to come off some really rubbish deals, frankly. Good on them – they came off some really bad deals for their hip pockets.

Of course I love the fact that by 2025 we will power all Victorian government operations with renewables – in our new schools. We have been building hospitals like the new Footscray Hospital, our Metro Trains are going to be running through the tunnel and so much more. The new SEC will invest with industry to accelerate our transition to a more affordable, reliable and renewable energy system. This transition is centred around our commitment to providing Victorians with clean and cheap energy, which is exactly what we are doing with our commitment before us, to embed for a very long time the SEC in our constitution. We are getting on with the business of the SEC. We are putting power back in the hands of Victorians and accelerating our transition to cheaper, more reliable renewable energy.

I am sure that there have already been some contributions in this place talking about the life of the SEC in the 1990s, but let me just say, the SEC used to make many, many millions of dollars in yearly profit. It did not just make power for Victorians but made money too. ‘Where is that money going now,’ we must ask ourselves. Those very same private multinationals increased prices and sacked workers, and now it is Victorian families that have been paying the price, with $23 billion in profits going overseas and counting. This is money that could have been in the pockets of Victorians. It could have been invested in our state, and we could be so much further ahead on the road to our renewable energy future. I have got to say, when I am thinking a little bit about nuclear – I know there have been contributions in here – I cannot help but ask myself: where are they going to go? This is a debate that I have been around for a great number of years. Is it in the Latrobe Valley? Is it at Anglesea or Daylesford? Is it in our beautiful pristine tourist areas? I do not know, and that answer has a giant question mark next to it. But what does not have a question mark next to it is the firm view of the Victorian people who have told me many, many times that they do not want nuclear here in this state. I know –

Bev McArthur: The majority want it.

Sheena WATT: I question that. It is not the survey I have been talking to. The people that I have been speaking to know that they want renewable energy in this state. They want a legacy of renewable energy in fact. They want an SEC. They want an SEC entirely funded by renewable energy. That is in fact what we took to the election, that question about the future of the SEC and its embedding in our constitution. I have got to say that is what the results showed us in November of 2022.

We need to accelerate the pace of investment in new electricity generation infrastructure. We know that the ageing coal-fired power stations are coming to the end of their operational life. When these coal-fired power stations go offline unexpectedly, the wholesale price of electricity shoots up because of course supply and demand become rather tight. But what we have seen is that as we bring new electricity supply into the market, particularly from the renewables sector, we are a lot more resilient as a state. That is just one reason why the SEC’s first investment in this state was in fact a Big Battery, to soak up clean renewable energy where there is surplus generation – how marvellous that is – and put it back into the system when supply is tight. You see, big batteries can respond to a power outage in seconds, keeping the lights on and keeping prices down. What a delight and how joyous it is to see that this state’s need for clean and renewable energy is met by the ambition and future of the SEC right before us in this bill today. Thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution, and I could not be more delighted to see that the SEC is back.

Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (17:57): I too am rising to speak against these bills and for various reasons. First of all and most importantly these bills corrupt the purpose of our constitution for political gain. The constitution is supposed to serve Victorians, not the Labor Party or any political party and their ideologies. As my colleague Mr Limbrick has said, they cannot make the rules and also play the game. Elections reflect the will of the people, and this current set of MPs entrusted to govern should not presume, quite arrogantly I might add, to have a mandate to govern beyond their elected terms. I actually struggle to think of a more arrogant, condescending and disrespectful assumption than that, and yes, that goes for the fracking ban too.

Secondly, it disempowers Victorians. Our charter of human rights tells us that every person in Victoria has the right to express their will in the conduct of public affairs through freely chosen elected representatives. But what have we heard from the government? We have heard Mary-Anne Thomas say that we must support this bill:

… because it is so vitally important that we protect –

not the voters –

the SEC from the privatising inclinations of those on the other side.

…

… we want to do everything that we can to protect the SEC from those on the other side, should they ever have the opportunity to return to the government benches …

They want to protect the SEC from democracy. The reality is that Labor is trying to insulate themselves and their mates from the will of the Victorian people. This is a direct attack on our democracy. If the government were so confident that they were acting on the will of the people, instead of against it, then they would be very confident to leave the SEC enshrined in ordinary legislation rather than corrupting the constitution. This bill does not just prevent privatisation of the SEC; it prevents changing the SEC’s objectives, those same ideologically driven objectives that throw practicality to the wind. They do not care about actual outcomes or actual costs or actual delivery of promises. Yet again this is putting the cart before the horse.

This sounds to me like yet another government-funded workforce artificially created to be dependent on only those political parties who pursue government power and who, in order to get it and keep it, care nothing for the devastation that state debt, cost-of-living blowouts and non-delivery of promises have on our poorest Victorians. This is not going to improve energy outcomes. It is not actually going to improve anything. It is going to disempower Victorians, and this is the kind of precedent that can be abused, as we have already seen. It has been done so many times before.