Council’s Amendments
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (15:15): I am just going to say a few words on this, but I will just take up the last comments made by the member for Preston about how the transition is going, because it is very easy these days to quickly have a look at what is currently happening with electricity supply. If I look on the National Electricity Market app, currently and pretty much for the last 24 hours around about 80 per cent is coming from brown coal, so good luck when that goes. I am very happy to support renewables – very happy to support renewables, Minister – but 100 per cent renewables is not going to work to keep the lights on.
Lily D’Ambrosio interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: Who said 100 per cent, Minister? You are the one that is opposed to gas. You do not even want gas, let alone coal.
Lily D’Ambrosio: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Danny O’BRIEN: I don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, Minister, this is how well it is going for your renewables at the moment: 80 per cent brown coal powering Victoria for the last 24 hours – and it has been sunny, I might add. It has been a beautiful, sunny couple of days. Anyway, on the amendment, because it would be wrong of me to digress away from the amendment –
Lily D’Ambrosio: He opposes energy efficiency. He said so on Sky News last week.
Danny O’BRIEN: I have not done Sky News for a long time, Minister. I think you have got your members confused, Minister.
This is a continuation of the sort of energy policy that we are having a debate about – that the government is bringing in an amendment like this literally under cover of darkness in the upper house last night. This is a significant issue, to remove the feed-in tariff for solar on homes. Every MP, I am sure, is aware of this issue because we have all had the complaints over the last few years about the solar feed-in tariff dropping. I understand the market realities. We have got so much solar on rooftops, and in the major market large-scale solar, that in the middle of the day there is just not any demand for it because it is oversupplied. Particularly when people are at work, power usage is not as high as at the shoulders of the day, and as a result the feed-in tariff has had to keep coming down.
But this is news for all those people that the government has encouraged to go and get solar over the last few years. The people will be very angry about this, quite frankly, that the government has messed up its policy on energy so badly that it has to sneak an amendment like this into another bill at the last minute, and it is a considerable amendment. The solar feed-in tariff has been a feature of solar on rooftops of households for around about 20 years. There were those lucky few that got in early and got locked in at 60 cents a megawatt hour and the like. Those days are long gone; we understand that. To be frank, for people coming to me over the last 10 years, if anyone has asked me, I have said, ‘If you can use the solar yourself, by all means go ahead and do it, but please do not make an investment decision based on the feed-in tariff, because it is going to continue to come down.’ And as we are seeing now, the government is abandoning it all together. I had complaints considerably last year when it did drop to 3.4 cents. The fact is that the Essential Services Commission mandated figure is now down to 0.4 cents – as the minister herself said, that is effectively zero – so it becomes pointless.
I think this situation highlights the policy melange that the government is involved in when it comes to energy, that this has been just snuck into a different bill at the last minute to finally abolish the solar feed-in tariff. It highlights the government’s ineptness on electricity generally and energy more broadly, and I think Victorians, particularly those who have invested in the last couple of years, will be very upset about this decision.