E&OE….
Topics: Record electricity price drop, Renewable Energy Target
LEON BYNER:
Let’s talk to Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt. Greg, good morning.
GREG HUNT:
Good morning Leon.
LEON BYNER:
This is a good news story except that you said that they were going to fall eight or nine. What happened to the other three or four per cent?
GREG HUNT:
No, in fact the full amount involved the carbon tax has come off bills. Of course you’ve got underlying pressures. But if you put the carbon tax back on tomorrow around the country, on average, your bills would go up by nine per cent, around the country, on average, they’ve come down by that compared to what they would have been. You have other things such as poles and wires which have added, but let me just give you an example.
LEON BYNER:
Sure.
GREG HUNT:
In New South Wales, bills are down by (inaudible) ten per cent, up to ten per cent on residential bills compared with what they would have been (inaudible). In South Australia you’ve got eight per cent for small businesses and eight per cent for residential and these are the actual official reductions compared with what they otherwise would have been.
So you’ve got a, you know, a five per cent reduction around the country if you did have the carbon tax it would’ve been probably have been a four per cent increase, give or take. So taking the carbon tax away is flowing through to the largest reduction in electricity prices in Australian records.
So they’ve been kept for 34 years. This is the largest reduction. Under Labor, electricity prices went up by 101% over six years. Under us, they’re down and for families that’s actually appearing on their bills now.
LEON BYNER:
Alright. I want to ask you – gas is up 1.2% and the prognosis, Greg, is that it’s going to go up more and more and we’re not protecting our – because we’re exporting a lot of gas elsewhere and very successfully, but it doesn’t seem to be helping the consumer who is bearing a big cost.
And now there’s this ideological fight between those people who believe we should reserve a degree of our supply, like WA does – they reserve 15%, whereas others say no, no, no, no, no that’ll blight investment. We should just let the market decide. Where do you stand on this?
GREG HUNT:
Look, there are contracts that are being struck. They were mostly done under the previous Government I’ve got to say, for the export of gas. So you can’t break contract and nor should, you know, I think a Government of any persuasion would contemplate, let alone a Coalition Government.
What we can do is introduce more gas into the system because it is a, you know, a very clean source of energy, it’s easy to use if you’re using gas directly, it’s very easy to use within the power system in the sense that it can be on and off if you’re making electricity from it. That means we’ve got enormous reserves of gas around the country…
LEON BYNER:
Shouldn’t that drive the price down?
GREG HUNT:
Well, it’s not coming out of the ground and what we see is that in Queensland it is. In some of the other States it isn’t and it’s been held hostage to some political agendas from some of the Greens.
And I would say that if you can ensure that there’s sufficient gas, all the advice that I’ve got is that if New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia especially, then you can have a real impact on gas prices because at the moment, by the Greens running this agenda of saying we want to keep it in the ground, we don’t want to see this out, good, clean natural gas is being prevented from being used by families and small businesses and electricity producers and it’s that supply of gas which is the single biggest thing which can take the pressure off gas prices in South Australia as well as the other two critical States that are affected are Victoria and New South Wales.
LEON BYNER:
And while I’ve still got you, one of the other decisions that was announced yesterday was that you’re not going to remove the solar rebate…
GREG HUNT:
Correct.
LEON BYNER:
…because you know, I reckon the best thing we could do for people who are the battlers is to get them in to solar.
GREG HUNT:
Well, what we have done is we’ve maintained the solar rebate for households. There was a lot of speculation to the contrary and it was wrong. So that’s what we’ve done. We’re trying to get, again, a balance here which ensures that there is a reduction in pressure on electricity prices and at the same time there’s long-term stability for the renewable sector and what we’ve done is said there are two big things here.
We will not touch household solar, that will allow the existing to continue and we will maintain our position, long-term bipartisan position , of a bipartisan support for a 20% renewable energy. That’s a good outcome but be very careful about people picking massive figures which would suddenly drive up the price of electricity. Balance, stability, jobs – that’s what we’re focussed on. We said what we’d do with the carbon tax. The Labor Party said a) we’d never repeal it and b) they did everything they could to stop that and c) we wouldn’t get the pass through.
All those price reductions have come through. We’ve had the biggest fall in electricity prices in recorded Australian statistics and that means lower prices for families.
LEON BYNER:
Greg, thanks for joining us. That’s the Federal Environment Minister.
(ENDS)