Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:12): I rise to speak on the National Electricity (Victoria) Amendment Bill 2020. I do so by saying at the outset that every Victorian is entitled to a reliable, affordable, accessible supply of energy. This government has failed catastrophically to deliver this fundamental right. As my colleague Gordon Rich-Phillips said, we once had the cheapest energy in Victoria; now we have the most expensive power in Australia. This is a scandal.

Ms Taylor did not seem to like the ideology of Mr Finn. I can tell Ms Taylor that the ideology of her party has caused a 25 per cent reduction in the supply of baseload power in this state due to the closure of Hazelwood caused by a 250 per cent increase in royalties. That is what Ms Taylor’s party’s ideology has done for Victoria.

Electricity is a fundamental requirement for modern life, one which most Victorians should be able to take for granted. Yet as a representative of regional Victoria I know that my constituents are left wanting in this regard, sadly. Electrical infrastructure causes real problems to households if it is a failed infrastructure and to businesses in most rural areas. This ranges from the lack of three-phase power to business, blackouts, unreliability of supply and, most concerningly, the risk to life and limb and livelihood that outdated and unsafe electrical infrastructure causes households, farms and communities.

While I support the claimed intention of the bill to improve the provision of power and network resilience, it would be remiss of me not to use this opportunity to highlight the issues surrounding electrical infrastructure that ministers have been less willing to acknowledge. We hear much from the government about its progressive policies on renewable energy and what they will mean for our future but almost nothing about the inadequacies and dangers our existing network presents. Perhaps it does not make such good media releases.

We need to increase supply in this state, and we need to be technology agnostic about the supply. It might be from onshore conventional gas, which the government has just decided is okay, but I wonder whether it will give royalties to landowners, which is the policy of the Liberal-Nationals and which is vitally important to those farmers who have gas on their land. I have long been promoting the need to lift the moratorium on onshore conventional gas exploration, and I did so as a councillor in my council of Corangamite shire.

This bill has been framed as supporting the increase in renewable energy generation projects in Victoria, yet even before these began to come online our infrastructure was far from adequate. Farmers and other businesses across my electorate have for years complained about the limitations which inadequate power infrastructure causes them. As a politician I am firmly of the belief the best thing the government can do for business—perhaps the only thing it should do for business—is provide essential enabling infrastructure. The inadequate state of power provision in parts of regional Victoria is a clear example of where this must be done. There is huge potential to be unlocked. Investment in infrastructure will not simply support existing businesses but enable them to expand, unleashing a wave of new enterprise, and will take the pressure off this congested city.

I have recently been pleased to support the network operator’s proposed upgrade of supply in Tyrendarra, Strathdownie, Cape Bridgewater and Gorae West, which will bring three-phase power to more than 1000 properties. I urge the minister and her department to do everything they can to support this long-overdue upgrade and to do the same across regional Victoria. We have suffered second-class infrastructure for far too long. If the government is genuine in its wish to support growth in regional areas, this investment is a prerequisite.

But it is not just that the existing network is inadequate; in many places it is also positively unsafe. The bushfire season seems a long time ago now, but we must not forget the experience and the lessons we need to learn. Jill Porter, a dairy farmer from the Garvoc area and survivor of the 2018 St Patrick’s Day fires, knows all too much about this. Following her experience she has become an expert advocate on the subject. Speaking to the public meeting I convened earlier this year on the subject of bushfires, she noted that while the majority of bushfires are not caused by power infrastructure, the majority which cause fatalities do arise from electrical faults. She said:

When we look at Victoria’s history we can see that over 80 per cent of bushfire fatalities since the 1950s have occurred from powerline-started bushfires.

And:

In 2009—Black Saturday—six of the 11 fires were caused by electrical assets. Of the 173 people who died, 159 were directly related to powerline-started fires.

This is the less glamorous side of the government’s admission that things need to change, which apparently causes this bill to be necessary. The current assets do not just constrain a fantastical renewables-led future; they cause untold misery and loss of life and property today. It is essential that the minister uses any relaxation in regulation, any new investment in transmission networks, as an opportunity to address these problems.

It is clear that not enough has been done to implement the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission’s recommendations on electrical infrastructure. Unsafe and faulty poles continue to exist, and communities fear that inadequate inspection and maintenance by Powercor will lead to future fires. Even the action that has been taken is of hugely questionable value. Nearly $1 billion has been invested in REFCLs—rapid earth fault current limiters—a technology which has been questioned by a number of credible experts, which has cost businesses tens of millions of dollars in forced upgrades to prevent damage to their own electrical equipment and which has brought a disastrous and repeated series of blackouts to communities like Apollo Bay. Residents there do not believe REFCLs are safer, businesses are counting the cost of the power cuts and no-one can comprehend how poorly $1 billion has been spent.

How much better if this money had been redirected to something already proven to improve safety—the replacement of single-wire earth return lines, for example. The pole infrastructure should have been replaced. It will take 250 years to replace the unsafe power poles. The royal commission could not have been clearer in requiring their speedy removal in high-risk areas and required an ongoing program to replace the remainder. It is not simply that the power network companies have failed in their safety obligations; they have been allowed to fail, and this is an issue the minister must address. It is not just down to individual error or even corporate cultures; the whole structure of the sector is wrong. Jill Porter noted that:

Currently there is no incentive for the network distributors to do the right thing. There is little to no cost to a company like Powercor when they start a fire. When their assets get burnt they simply apply to the Australian Energy Regulator and get a cost pass-through to replace them. A cost pass-through means it gets passed through to our electricity bills, so we pay to replace their burnt infrastructure. When we say, ‘You need to pay what we’ve lost’, and then ends up a legal battle, their insurance company steps in. What then happens is the insurance company raises their premiums.

To paraphrase, Powercor do not pay for their errors, we do as consumers, and more tragically communities do when electrical fires cause death and destruction. While the minister may blame the regulator, may rename it and reform it, she cannot delegate its ultimate responsibility. Yet again I call upon the minister and the government to take their responsibilities to rural communities seriously.

Finally, this bill demonstrates the government’s failure of vision and planning. It is a reactive measure, perhaps even a desperate measure. To look at the media releases alone, we might think that all was well with our energy future. Yet what is the reality? Existing wind farms are seeing their generation curtailed. New wind farms cannot be connected at all, and future wind farms now cannot even raise the investment necessary for construction. The financial markets know what the government will never admit—that the transmission network has been so mismanaged that investment in new capacity is simply futile.

There are real consequences outside of the renewables sector too. A lack of resilience threatens the future of the Portland smelter, where a blackout is so much more serious than simply turning off the lights. Interrupted power supply there could render the entire plant inoperable and cost the jobs of many hundreds of people.

My fear is that this bill is not simply an admission of failure, however. It is that this government, which has so badly failed to keep our electrical infrastructure up to date let alone ready for the future, will take the opportunity now to place the cost of that failure on businesses and consumers. Amidst the so-called streamlining of process the bill enables is the removal of the requirements for competitive tenders, cost-benefit analyses and the oversight of cost recovery charges levied on consumers. While my instinct is to support a reduction in the bureaucracy involved in project delivery, it is obvious here that the government’s main motive is enabling costs to be transferred to consumers. I look forward to supporting the Liberal-Nationals amendments and urge our crossbench colleagues to do likewise.