PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr REBELLO (McPherson) (13:07): Australians need look no further than their power bills to determine the effects of bad government policy on the ordinary lives of Australians. We are quite frustrated on this side, but we're not frustrated just because we're the opposition; we're frustrated because we're channelling the frustrations of those that we represent around the country.

What does that look like? It looks like families who are struggling to afford their own energy costs. It looks like older Australians who—I represent parts of Queensland, and people are not prepared to turn on their air conditioning in summer, and I don't want to have to go through that again for people in my electorate.

It looks like small businesses who are having to decide where they're going to cut in their day or in their staff because of the increased costs. And it looks like goods and services across this country getting more and more expensive due to the rising costs of energy. Prior to the election of this government, Australians were promised a $275 cut to their power bills, and that promise extended to a $378 cut by 2030.

But where have we got to? We've got to a situation where Australians are paying up to $1,300 more. We saw electricity costs rise by 21.5 per cent in the 12 months to December 2025.

So, instead of those promises coming to fruition, we're seeing Australians having to deal with the opposite. There are 230,000 households in Australia at the moment in energy distress, up nearly 70 per cent in just 3½ years. That's the highest level of hardship on record.

It's disheartening when I speak to those opposite and when we hear the contributions that they make and they're saying, 'These are all the things that we're doing as a government in this space,' and they're failing to recognise that it's not actually trickling down to Australians—to individuals, to businesses and to families. I say to Australians, though, that there is an alternative The coalition has recently come out with our plan.

Australia should be an energy superpower. There is no reason why we as a country should have our citizens dealing with the high cost of energy that they're dealing with today, and Australians deserve and need a government that's prepared to harness everything—every opportunity that we have as a country. We're blessed with so much of that, which is why, in contrast to what we're seeing under Labor, a Taylor coalition government will deliver cheaper power and an abundance of energy.

We will do that through backing any technology that can deliver that affordable and reliable energy for Australian households and businesses. We will do that through working with coal-fired power plant operators to make sure that that generation is running as long and as hard as it can to get electricity prices down. We will do that through lifting the ban on nuclear power and through scrapping Labor's carbon taxes, including the safeguard mechanism—which in essence has turned into a carbon tax on business that's driving industry offshore—and Labor's other taxes on cars and utes, for example.

We will do that with an ultimate aim of lowering emissions as quickly and responsibly as technology allows without imposing those additional costs on families or industries, especially at a time when we know that they just cannot absorb those costs. That is the alternative. This government came to power promising cheaper energy, and it was a defining election promise for it—a $275 reduction that Australians never saw and a $378 reduction by 2030 that they still will not see.

Instead, Australians have received the opposite: higher bills, greater uncertainty and a fragile grid that's underpinned by ideology, not economics. I speak on behalf of thousands and millions of Australians who say to this government that it is time for the government to come clean, to stop the spin and to deliver real, affordable and reliable energy, not just more of the broken promises that we've seen.