I rise to speak on the Energy Legislation Amendment (Licence Conditions) Bill 2020. Now, this is not the first energy bill that I have spoken on in this chamber since being elected as the member for Tarneit, and every time I have spoken on these types of bills, just like this one, I have spoken about our government’s track record of making Victoria’s energy market simpler and fairer. Again, this is what this bill will do.
Now, I remember I was only 25 years old—it feels like some years ago—working in Canberra at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. During that year, when I started work there as a graduate, a completely new sub-branch had formed, and that was called the Australian Energy Regulator. I remember it clearly, this new division, because it was the sub-branch that very few newbies, including me, wanted to rotate into or wanted to go and work in. The reason for that was simple: it was an incredibly complicated industry to get your head around. In fact still today the National Electricity Rules, the regulatory framework that governs this industry, are just so incredibly complicated. There was often office humour, I remember, or if staff were going out to drinks there would be a laugh that anybody that actually did a stint in the AER either left it immediately, tearing out their hair and vowing never to go back, or was actually able to create a career of living and breathing all things energy related. You could never actually go home and switch on the lights and think about that action and not the amount of work and the amount of regulation behind such a simple task. You learned to I guess embrace the complexities, and you would probably spend the next decade, like me, working them all out.
Remember this was all back when no-one really thought about or really talked about their energy bills or energy prices. We certainly did not talk about renewable energy and technology as we do now. I remember discussions around the office. There were conversations around solar panels and conversations around electric vehicles and batteries, but that felt so far off on the horizon that we felt we may never see them in our lifetime. I spent 13 years living and breathing this stuff. I loved it. It is funny looking back, because I think some of the engineers quite loved someone like me, a lawyer and not an electrical engineer. I would always be knocking on their doors asking for explanations. I used to say to them that it was so complicated they needed to explain it to me like they would to a five-year-old. This was really important, because the framework was so complicated and the industry was so complex, and I needed to be able to explain things to customers in a language—in plain English—they could understand. It struck me way back then, and still did when I left the energy industry to become the member for Tarneit in this place: how could costs and reliability of supply be transparent and be fair if your average customer could make neither head nor tail of their bill or what those charges were made up of?
Energy networks in the time that I worked in the industry had come a long way towards helping their customers understand and providing simpler, fairer and more transparent information to customers. But let us face it, they still have a long way to go. We know that the cost of energy household bills is an issue that matters to millions of Australians across the country, not just here in Victoria. Having worked in the sector for so long, I know all too well how energy policies can make or break governments. My expertise in this sector tells me that a combination of investment in renewable energy and price competition is the key to making our energy market more competitive, but it is also the key to making it fairer for customers and consumers—and on these fronts the Victorian government, our government, is doing both.
When we implemented the Victorian default offer we were directly providing energy providers in Victoria with a competitive incentive, a standard that informs customers about what their bills should look like and indicates to providers what they should be charging. As a result, we know that over 130 000 households right across Victoria have actually saved between $310 and $450 annually on their power bills, as well as 30 000 businesses out there who are between $1300 and $2000 better off.
Even more recently we expanded this to customers in embedded networks, saving them up to $370 a year. That means people living in our caravan parks, in our retirement villages and in our apartments can all be better off under this scheme. In fact our default offer was so popular that the federal government have decided to copy it with the national framework, because across Australia, let us face it, governments are looking to us—they are looking to Victoria—for leadership in this space. As I so often say to my community about this, folks, this is indeed something we should all be proud of.
But as I said, putting downward pressure on energy bills is only part of the equation. It is so, so important that our government continues to make strong investments into renewable energy. I have to admit that I was very excited when I heard the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change announce last week that our government is going to be building a new battery in Moorabool just outside Geelong—and this is not just an ordinary battery. It is the largest in Australia, it is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and indeed it is one of the largest batteries in the world. We know that projects like these create good, green jobs, and that is what a renewables policy framework should look like. You do not need to take my word for it, because the US has just elected a president who campaigned on just that.
When you talk about the jobs in renewables and how they save money on power bills and how they are good for the environment, that is a policy that wins. It is why our Solar Homes program has been so popular with households right across Victoria, especially in my seat of Tarneit, which has consistently enjoyed being one of the biggest uptakers of this program. Whether it is solar panels or batteries, Tarneit is a community that is actively investing and engaging in renewable technology from the comfort of their own homes.
On that note, there is another government program that makes a difference in this space, the greener government school buildings program. This program is run by the Victorian School Building Authority, and it provides grants to our schools to install solar power systems. I want to draw your attention to this program because the impacts of it are quite incredible for schools and indeed do reduce carbon emissions. By October this year the first round of grants to install solar power systems in our schools had powered the equivalent of 196 houses. It has also saved schools up to $300 000 a year on electricity bills. So you can see a policy like this is not just good for reducing our carbon footprint, it actually reduces the cost of powering our schools. That is $300 000 that can now be invested in keeping our schools well resourced. That is what a renewable energy program should look like, and I am very proud that our government is getting on and delivering it.
Now, what this bill does is tackle the licensing scheme that all of our energy providers operate under, and the key change in this space is that the bill is actually going to empower the minister to set conditions on these licences. One particular use of this power will be for energy providers to complete connecting new houses to the grid in a timely manner. This way new homebuyers will not be waiting for houses to have a proper energy connection before they move in. For growth areas like mine in Tarneit and Truganina this is a welcome change because this change is going to make a huge difference. Families in my area will be able to move into their homes a lot quicker than they are now. As part of our COVID recovery it is incredibly important that we continue to support our housing construction industry, which still has such a vital role to play in restarting our economy. Reducing delays in connecting these houses will remove a considerable barrier for these construction works, not just in the industry but also for people who are waiting to move into their new homes.
This bill is another step forward in our government’s energy fairness plan. It is the ninth bill implementing our energy policy introduced by Labor in the last six years and the fifth in the last two years alone, and I am absolutely positive that it will not be the last. This is a great bill, and I wholeheartedly commend it to the house.
