MOTIONS

Ms BOELE (Bradfield) (17:45): I welcome the motion from the member for Bonner. The government doesn't get everything right, but they've done a fantastic job with the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. I called for a home battery subsidy in the lead-up to the last election, and I was delighted when the government committed to a 30 per cent subsidy for households.

The response was massive. Uptake rapidly outpaced expectations, with over 1,000 batteries being installed every single day. This is world-leading stuff—truly astonishing figures.

In the last financial year, nearly 60 per cent of household-scale batteries across every country in the world, except for China, were installed right here in Australia. We crossed the 500,000 home battery mark last month. With batteries all the old arguments against renewables—that wind and solar are unreliable and need lots of expensive gas backups—just fall away.

Batteries make the grid more stable. They make households energy independent, and they cut power bills. Australia's benchmark electricity price fell by up to 10 per cent a few months ago, specifically because battery storage was displacing the need for expensive gas peaking.

One of my constituents shared her battery story with me recently. When she moved into a 1970s home in Gordon last year with poor insulation, her household electricity bill jumped to $525 in one month—ouch. Fearing a $6,000 annual bill, her household installed solar panels and a 32-kilowatt-hour battery, making use of the 30 per cent subsidy.

Well, their bills dropped to an average of $126 per month in winter and $40 a month in summer. That's a huge, huge difference in power bills, and they're expecting to recoup the costs in only 4½ years. She tells me that she 'couldn't be happier' and she says, 'It's a great feeling every day, to feel more self-sufficient and to know that we can live more comfortably with less stress.' With this subsidy, Australia has seized the global battery revolution with both hands, making the most of falling prices, improved safety standards and better resource efficiency to accelerate the rollout that we need to power our economy this century.

The rapid uptake shows that Australians have an appetite for electrification. They love this stuff. We see it again and again.

Electrification schemes, when they exist and they're well communicated, are more successful than anyone imagined. We saw it in the early days of the feed-in tariffs for rooftop solar, which kicked off what now sees Australia as the largest per capita solar user in the world. We saw it also with the discount on new EVs, which was more expensive than Treasury had anticipated because it was so popular.

Now, beating expectations like this is not a sign of failure. It's a clear sign of success. The government should heed these findings and keep creating such schemes.

It recently announced the extension of the solar scheme for households to be available to farmers, community facility managers and business owners so that they too can install solar systems. This is excellent news because it tackles what people call the missing middle of electrification. Solar panels can now go on factories, warehouses, farm sheds, dairies and other industrial buildings.

Those enormous empty roofs could be covered in solar panels, and this scheme update will help make that happen. The next step is to ensure that renters and people living in apartments can also benefit from electrification. One important option is to make plug-in solar panels legal.

You could just buy these simple appliances off the shelves at Bunnings, chuck them on your balcony or in your backyard, plug them in and save Aussies up to $370 a year on energy bills. They're legal in the UK, Germany, Spain and other countries. It's an easy win, just sitting on the shelves at Bunnings.

If the huge success of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program is anything to go by, the government shouldn't waste any more time waiting.