Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Energy Regulator Separation) Bill 2025

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (18:18): It's good to be back. This is the week for tinkering around the edges, Deputy President, can I tell you. Just now, we've passed legislation in this place to deal with an administrative issue relating to the management of national parks in this country.

After three years of absolutely nothing except closed-door meetings to deal with environmental law reform and stakeholders signing non-disclosure agreements, this is all we've passed. Here now we have legislation in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, an energy crisis, which you talked about today, Senator Ayres—I'm pleased Minister Ayres is here today—the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Energy Regulator Separation) Bill 2025.

At a time when people can't pay their power bills, this is Labor's answer to fix it all! They promised in the lead-up to the 2022 election that Australians would pay $275 less on their power bills—by this year I might add; that was the promise. There was only one minister that had the guts to repeat that number in the last term of parliament, and that was Minister Ayres.

I have to give him credit for that. Everyone else had this allergic reaction, this aversion to repeating that number, which was repeated ad nauseam in the lead-up to the 2022 election. It was as if the promise was never made.

We talked about the number in question time today; 97 was the number of times the promise was made ahead of that election in 2022. Of course, after that it was the number of which we shall not speak. It was a number that did not matter any more.

It was a number that Australians might have banked on, but, hey, it doesn't matter because since that point in time power bills have gone up, on average, by $1,300 per year per household. Instead of dealing with the substance of the issue, which everyone talks about, and this government say they have an answer to, they want to tinker around the edges again. They want to deal with the backend of things, the bureaucratic side of things, the issues that actually won't make a difference to households.

It is really a case, sadly, of wrong priorities when it comes to what this government is doing. Indeed, I do wonder whether the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Energy Regulator Separation) Bill 2025 will do anything to assist those major industrials that are struggling with the cost of energy at the moment—something that's quite topical. I know the minister is focussed on that.

I've spoken to him directly about his efforts to try to assist some of the heavy emitters and intensive energy users in the form of smelters, in the north of my home state. But will this bill do anything to assist them? No, it won't.

Yet here we are. One of their first pieces of legislation in this term related to the energy portfolio, and it does diddly squat to assist those businesses that, all together, would employ tens of thousands of Australians, particularly in regional communities. In question time today the government was asked: what are you going to do?

The government say that they are working on supply side, and they're working on bringing on generation. Well, I want to see the evidence of that because it just isn't there. The end result is that we have the situation we now face, and that is that the Australian community is struggling under the immense weight of electricity prices in this country.

It isn't just the $275 missing from this equation. It's now $1,300 in the opposite direction, and that's just a household. That is a household that runs hot water and dishwashers and kettles—typical domestic use.

Let's think about those businesses that burn so much energy at such great cost, and they have nowhere else to get it. These are often owned by international companies as we know and as is often talked about in this place. These are businesses that make decisions about where they're going to invest, where they will expand their operations and whether they should continue to invest in these entities here in Australia to shore up their ongoing and future operations, and, in doing so, securing the jobs of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of hardworking men and women across the country.

But when they are making those decisions, the reality is that one of those key inputs to the decision-making process is the cost of doing business here, and one of those key costs is energy, amongst others, that this government has driven up. So they are making decisions, tough ones sadly, as a result of the business conditions in this country, driven by bad government policy or inaction, whichever you want to pick, where it is more expensive to do business here than it has been for a very long time.

We are seeing businesses offshore their operations; this is disastrous for jobs. It's an appalling outcome and something we should all be concerned about. Of course, along with that comes worse environmental and emissions outcomes.

If you do business somewhere else that doesn't have the regime that is in place in Australia when it comes to emissions disclosure, you do it somewhere else where they don't care, because that is the nature of what is happening here. Globally, there is a much more negative outcome than we've had previously. Does the bill deal with any of that?

No, sadly, it doesn't. It doesn't deal with higher energy prices. It doesn't deal with emissions.

It doesn't deal with renewable energy investment rates, which stalled in this country because of the approvals process. We talked about that in the debate on the last bill. It doesn't talk about energy security either, for that matter.

It doesn't deal with the fact that risks are escalating around the likelihood of energy blackouts or, indeed, even brownouts in the coming months as the system goes under strain because of increased consumption. All this does is deal with the bureaucratic end of things, and that is an arrangement related to the Public Service and how we structure the Australian Energy Regulator and the ACCC.

This isn't going to deal with any of the problems that we face in this country, and we are yet to see a credible answer. It has been three years. I again today heard the government minister, the Assistant Treasurer, Dr Mulino, saying: 'Don't worry about the Treasury modelling.

Don't worry about some of the concerns that we are seeing come down the train line at great pace towards the Australian community when it comes to increased costs of energy. These issues are going to be short term.' The government's answer thus far has been to use taxpayers' money—these are the same people who are paying higher power bills—to rebate these higher power bills.

So they are paying twice for these higher power bills. There is no lower electricity cost. It is just using the money these people pay in tax to then notionally reduce their power bills by giving them a rebate.

This is not good policy, but it was the only one that could be pointed to today by the Assistant Treasurer in terms of how to actually deal with increased energy costs. I don't think that's fair, especially when the promise was made specifically by the Prime Minister and a number of ministers multiple times in the lead-up to their first election victory that power prices would go down by $275 a year.

Obviously this legislation was given a very short hearing in front of the economics committee on 12 August. That hearing was intended to ensure that there was not a need for additional funding to be provided to these bureaucratic entities, the AER or the ACCC. There was some suggestion that there would be some efficiencies gained out of this separation of entities, but, again, is this the outcome that Australians want the government to be striving for when they can't afford to pay their power bills?

I think anyone in this chamber, including the government, would say, 'No, it's not.' The government say the job's not done and there's more to do, but we will not rest because it is the Australian people who are missing out, who have been dudded in this arrangement, who are still paying higher power bills, who are not getting energy security when they need it and whose jobs are on the line because the businesses they work for don't have the certainty they need when it comes to cheaper power.

We only have to go back to the catalyst for some of these significant employers in regional Australia and in my home state of Tasmania. I've referenced these employers already. The smelters we have in the northern part of Tasmania came to Tasmania, which, as anyone would know, is geographically as far from the rest of the world as you could possibly be.

So for them to participate in an intensive industry such as metal smelting in Tasmania and to then have to ship their goods to market at great distance and, therefore, great cost means there must have been a very attractive proposition to get them to do business there in the first place, and that was cheap energy. In Tasmania, that was in the form of cheap hydro, a reliable, clean renewable energy.

But, now, because of what has happened in the national electricity market under this government's policy settings, under this government's failed promises to deliver completely the opposite of what it has, power prices have gone up. Tasmanians are paying a lot for energy. Indeed, it means businesses are becoming uncompetitive.

Those energy costs are much higher, making it harder to do business and jeopardising those jobs. So Australians are getting it every which way—in the mailbox when they go to pay their power bill and at the workplace, where their jobs are now less certain. It is an all-round nightmare for Australians in business and for households themselves.

All this government is able to do is bring in this bill to separate bureaucratic entities and tinker at the back end. It is a crying shame, but it's something we're coming to expect from this government. More needs to be done, and the coalition will certainly be holding them to account on this.