I assure you this afternoon there will be no shouting from me on this side of the house. I am simply going to be talking about the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing that this Labor government is doing. We are bringing back the SEC, as our wonderful Premier talks about. We are not just talking about climate action and other things on this side of the house, we are taking real action. We are making legislative reform in this place. We are enshrining the SEC into our constitution, and it is a great deal of pleasure to rise to speak –

[Member Interjections]

I do forgive the member for Gippsland South for clipping me in my first 60 ‍seconds of just trying to say how great it is to be standing here this afternoon at the end of a long parliamentary sitting week to talk about something that is truly great that the Allan Labor government is doing for the whole of Victoria to create a fairer and more equitable Victoria whilst also taking real action on climate change. And it is legislation like this, this afternoon, that reminds me of why we are in the business of governing. We are in the business of governing in this state for all Victorians. We are in the business of governing. We have big plans. We have been in government now for almost a decade and we still have big plans. There is still so much more we have to do, and we are getting on and doing it. And this bill before the house this afternoon is very much part of that. Because what I say to my community time and time again is, ‘We are bringing back the SEC,’ and this is part of it. We are going to deliver a public energy supplier back into the hands of all Victorians, and that is something that any government that has that kind of vision should be proud to call their legacy. This is a legacy policy. We are making it happen, and that is what this bill is all about.

We know that the biggest enduring legacies of those opposite when they were in government were, yes, cuts and, yes, sell-offs that took place during the Kennett years. And what the member for Gippsland South may not know about little old me is that I was not here during the Kennett years, but when I am out there on the front line talking to my community, they remind me of the Kennett years time and time again. They remember. Folks in Melbourne’s west remember, and they talk about cuts and they talk about sell-offs. During the election in 2022 out on the hustings a lot of them talked to me about the importance of bringing back the SEC and what that meant to them.

[Member Interjections]

People have a real, emotional – emotional, member for Gippsland South – connection to this policy. It means the world to them because they never wanted to see it sold off in the first place, and we are bringing it back. That is a legacy policy of the Allan Labor government. We are doing it.

What we know is that privatisation has been an utter fail for Victorians. Victorians do not like privatisation, and at the time it was sold off the SEC was far, far from being a financial drag on the Victorian budget. Actually it was quite the opposite, and I think it is important to point out that in 1994 it actually paid $990 million in interest.

[Member Interjections]

It provided a $191 million dividend to the state government, and, member for Gippsland South, you will be very pleased to know it had a $207 million profit for the state. This is really important stuff. If you ask me, common sense would say that is not the kind of asset that you sell off if you are a government whose focus is on fixing debt.

It has been 30 years since this sale took place in 1994, and since then the energy providers that replaced the SEC have raked in, get this – I mean, I am smiling, but this is not funny, this is just quite shocking ‍– more than $23 billion in profits, and all the while Victorian mums and dads are left dealing with soaring energy bills. Something has got to change, and you need a government to have vision and to have the tenacity to go ahead and make that vision a reality, and this is it. Victorians deserve to have affordable renewable energy powering their state and powering their homes. We know it is cheaper and we know it is cleaner, and that is what our government has been supporting for the past nine years. That is indeed what Victorians have been voting for and continued to vote for over the past three elections. We know because we are out there talking to people, and when we raise these things, this is the stuff that matters. This is what the Victorian people want.

Last sitting week I was here in this place again talking about the incredible work that our government has done investing in renewable energy. It feels like we are talking about renewable energy every single sitting week here in this place, which I am not going to say is a problem – it is a wonderful thing to have, a great problem to have. We are talking about it all the time because we are doing so much work. We passed legislation that boosted our government’s new and ambitious emissions reduction targets and renewable energy targets. These targets would not have been possible without our government’s massive investment worth more than $3 billion since 2018. At the end of last year when these pieces of legislation were introduced into Parliament we were sitting at 5280 megawatts of large-scale wind and solar capacity; 4030 megawatts of small-scale rooftop solar capacity, probably thanks to my crew out in Truganina – and the member for Point Cook has just left, but I know that he will indeed try and claim some of that rooftop solar capacity – and 537 megawatts of energy storage capacity. That is huge. We are not stopping there. Good governments should not stop there. We need to keep going, because an additional 1407 megawatts worth of energy projects are currently to this day still under construction, with a further 6129 megawatts worth of projects currently in our pipeline.

This transformation is absolutely huge, and Victorians will reap the benefits of these projects through the rejuvenated SEC, which will actively invest, importantly, in the renewable energy market by funding and operating renewable energy infrastructure. The investment is not only great for meeting these renewable energy targets; it will also translate – and this is what those opposite hate most – into cheaper power bills for all Victorians, and the SEC will only build upon these investments. And we have already begun. That is what this bill here before the house today is. Our government has already invested $1 billion to get it started with delivering 4.5 gigawatts worth of renewable energy and storage projects. On 25 October last year our government registered the SEC, most importantly, with ASIC. In November the SEC was declared as a state-owned company, and as we speak, the SEC’s first project is already under construction.

To my very pleasant surprise – and I always claim this, because I love being able to talk about the western suburbs – it is being built in the west. A 1.6-gigawatt battery is being built in my lovely neighbour the member for Melton’s electorate, which when complete will be able to power over 200,000 homes. That is just absolutely extraordinary. This is just the beginning, and this is what good governments, long-term Labor governments, are able to deliver for Victorians. It is about delivering fairness and equality, lowering those power prices and taking real action for climate change. This is the stuff that matters. This is the sort of stuff that our children and our grandchildren will benefit from. There are so many more things, but I will commend the bill to the house.