Energy costs
David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (19:07): (1060) My matter for the adjournment tonight is for the attention of the Minister for Energy and Resources. I notice the minister for energy’s social media feed. I occasionally do look at it, and others look at it and tell me what they think. But I notice that she is moving around the countryside to different places, with jovial bits of social media that show her saying that solar is great. I want to be on the record here, and I say solar is great. It is fantastic. It plays a significant role for many people. It does give another option and it does give people the ability to access power outside the grid. However, some of this is a little bit dishonest. The minister is trying to say that things are cheaper, but actually the price of electricity for households and businesses has increased. Last year the figures from St Vincent’s were very clear: electricity was up 28 per cent for households and 22 per cent for gas. These are up, up, up. The minister likes to point to the default offer and say it has come off a tiny bit. It has come off a little smidge, but actually it has been up, up, up, and people are paying far more. Even with solar, many people are paying far more. Certainly the people I speak to and the businesses I speak to are being clobbered. They are being smashed. I notice that the minister is not attending many businesses in this; it is mainly households. She is moving around.
What I want her to do is to actually publish the average prices that people with solar are paying and the prices that people without solar are paying. There are still some feed-in tariffs and cross-subsidies that help some people. The feed-in tariffs, as everyone will understand, had the ribbons cut out of them. There is not much left in them for many people. I think what is required here is for the minister to be more honest instead of being fundamentally dishonest in the way that she is approaching some of this, claiming that everything is cheaper; whereas actually even with solar, people are paying more, family budgets are being smashed, and when it comes to businesses, those businesses are doing it very, very tough indeed. It is a little bit disingenuous and it is a bit unkind to a lot of these households and businesses to be dragging them along in a sort of dishonest way like this. I would encourage her to have proper publications that actually compare the prices, compare previous prices and show the increase in prices that households and businesses are facing.