Thursday, 19 February 2026

 Matthew GUY (Bulleen) (10:17): Good morning to you, Deputy Speaker. It is nice to see you in the chair again for a meandering presentation of 20 minutes. I tell the Labor Party – I do not know who you have got up first; you might be listening – that I will be about 20 minutes.

Members interjecting.

Matthew GUY: I am going to be 20, not 30 or 29. I do not think there is that much. I give you the heads-up, so go and talk for 19½ minutes and then you can –

Members interjecting.

Matthew GUY: No, no, no. I might shout for the last 30 seconds to get some socials, I will tell the minister, but other than that it will be the Guy show for 19½ minutes. How about that? You can deal with that one.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: At the risk of ruining the mood, member for Bulleen, through the Chair, shall we?

Matthew GUY: Sorry, Deputy Speaker. I like speaking on energy bills. They are quite entertaining, actually. The member for Morwell said to me, ‘Are you going to talk about your grandmother getting the coaldust off the clothes back in Newborough?’ I can and I will. There are many things to talk about in relation to energy. This bill has got a little bit in it to go on about, and I certainly intend to do that and make some comments in relation to it.

The first point to note more than anything else is that the coalition does not intend to oppose this bill in the Assembly. We will make the comments we need to make and then make some further comments around the bill in the upper house. Our Shadow Minister for Resources David Davis will do so when it goes there.

The bill does have a number of provisions – seven of them, in fact. They are to amend the Electricity Safety Act 1998, requiring the distribution companies in the grid to prepare network resilience plans, which I will expand on a bit later – it is very straightforward – and providing for the approval and enforcement of network resilience plans – which you would expect, once they have been prepared; and to amend the Electricity Industry Act 2000 and the Gas Industry Act 2001 to provide increased flexibility for the setting of retailer obligations to life support customers. I do want to talk about that and the gas industry, as you can imagine. There is a lot of debate around the gas industry and the future of the gas industry in Victoria, which I am very supportive of and my side of politics is very supportive of. We see the gas industry as having great potential and certainly believe in the use of our natural resources and natural gas being a key part of that.

The third point is to amend the National Electricity (Victoria) Act 2005, which is in clarifying the eligibility of payments to landholders by limiting it to interests in land in relation to new major transmission infrastructure – very straightforward – making further provisions in relation to the issue of grid impact authorities, conferring further functions in relation to the national electricity market into VicGrid, and making further provisions in relation to the preferred transmission project areas of interest and between renewable energy zones. I do want to talk about renewable energy zones a bit later on as well, because there is always the line from those opposite that when in government the coalition did not approve any renewable energy projects, and that is just completely false. In fact I took quite a bit of heat from – I will not say ‘my friends’ – people on Sky News like Alan Jones, for instance, about projects which I did approve and projects which I expanded as planning minister in relation to wind energy, which was, in my view, the right thing to do.

The bill further amends the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target Amendment (Energy Upgrades for the Future) Act 2025. Repealing certain provisions of that act is point (e) of this bill. Point (f) is making amendments to the National Electricity (Victoria) Amendment (VicGrid Stage 2 Reform) Act 2025, which is a consequential act relating to the transmission project areas of interest within and between renewable energy zones, which I have said I am going to make some comments on. The last point is to amend the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act 2018 to make further provision relating to the composition, structure and legal reform of the Self-Determination Fund referred to in that act.

On my side of the Parliament, the Liberal–National parties, we have never been hypocrites when it comes to our natural resources. We do not run into the Parliament and say we support one and then put policies in place to oppose it. We do not tell inner-city Victorians of Melbourne that we oppose gas and then run out to Gippsland and say, ‘No, we love it.’ We have a very clear position, and we believe our natural resources, particularly in relation to gas, are an important natural resource that Victoria should be using. We have a natural advantage in that area, which we should be using, and we have said for some time that we should be valuing it as part of our economy, particularly in regional Victoria and of course in a city like Melbourne, with 5.5 million people now, where the vast majority of homes are still on natural gas.

In my electorate, which is heavily of East and South-East Asian background – particularly East Asian ‍– they will tell you straight out that you cannot cook with a wok with electricity. You just cannot get the same kind of heat, the radiant heat, that a gas flame will give you. A lot of them just cannot believe how the government wants to phase out gas in their homes when (1) we have a good supply of it, if the government will allow that supply to be used, and (2) it is very important culturally for a number of communities. Not just culturally – I would argue that it is economically an important resource for us to use, and I think we have said this on a number of occasions. It is.

Deputy Speaker, I have been around a long time. I have been interested in politics a long time, and no doubt you have too. I do remember in the 1970s when my parents got a colour TV, and the black and white TV was relegated to my parents’ bedroom. I do remember seeing the then Labor Party’s 1980 campaign jingle Raise the Standard. And I know my mum actually voted for Bill Hayden. She thought he was a thoroughly decent individual, and by all accounts he was. The jingle Raise the Standard back in 1980 for the Australian Labor Party said:

We’ve got oil beneath the oceans

We’ve got mountains made of ore

Industry to build the future

Nature’s bounty, shore to shore

That was the Labor Party’s jingle. Who would think, 40 years later, that the party that talks about oil beneath the ocean, nature’s boundless shores and mountains made of ore is the party that is themselves or doing deals with others who want to stop all of that which has produced such great benefit for our country. And while we do know that, particularly in Victoria, brown coal is being phased out as an electricity generation method – I understand that; these things do change. But particularly in relation to gas, is the Labor Party espousing this? I know things change, but it is fascinating to see how a party which espoused the workers, the families and the economy – which was built off, in their own words back in 1980, nature’s boundless shores – comes back to be the party that wants to shut it all down. From our side, we just do not understand this with gas. I know, from the Labor Party’s perspective and the government’s perspective it might be about preferences with the inner-city Greens. You could make comments about One Nation and make comments about the Greens and their views on multicultural relations in this state. I would not be boasting about that.

But what I would say is that one of my early memories of the Australian Labor Party, particularly through the 1980s, is it talking about natural resources – and now the party is pandering to people who want to shut it all down. That I do not understand, because of the jobs which come with it – working people in the Latrobe Valley, more than 1000 families, nearly 2000 families, who are now without a primary source of income with the premature shutting down of some of our power stations and no plans to replace them in the Latrobe Valley. Some of those could have been looked at as a gas plant, particularly Yallourn W, but they will be shut down under the Labor government. In my view this is just a monumental policy failure from the government. We do not know if the government is opposing gas anymore in residential homes. I mean, let us be clear, the coalition is not, but we see one thing from the Minister for Energy and Resources saying they oppose it, then they do not oppose it, then they are going to shut it all down, then they do not oppose it. Then there is legislation in the Parliament that criminalises plumbers and gasfitters actually installing new gas cookers in people’s homes – criminalises it. Can you believe this? Criminalising the concept of installing a replacement gas cooker in someone’s home – who actually thinks this up in the department and presents it to a minister and then the minister says ‘yes’? That you would actually say that a plumber or a gasfitter simply doing their job in the suburbs could face criminal charges and fines and lose their licence on the possibility of looking at installing a gas cooker, I mean, from our side of the Parliament, we find this quite stunning. The Labor government in New South Wales are intent on phasing –

A member interjected.

Matthew GUY: You can say whatever you like, but they are intent on phasing out coal-fired generation in New South Wales. New South Wales Maitland black coal is some of the best – in fact it is the best – quality black coal in the world, particularly for power station generation, and the Port of Newcastle is the single largest port in the world for a single export item, and that is black coal. The New South Wales Labor government take the royalties off that Maitland black coal, which is very, very good quality. Even the railways in Victoria used to boast when they got a shipment of Maitland black in as opposed to the Wonthaggi black coal that we would be using, because it was so good and it had such a high temperature and solid combustion, so the gas in the coal would be much purer, and in terms of burning potential the coking coal was not as bad. Certainly it was very, very popular. Yet, again, the government up there is content to phase it out but seeks to increase its export potential for New South Wales. On our side of the chamber we find that quite quizzical. It was the same thing out of Queensland with the Beattie government. In Moranbah, which is Goonyella and the Peak Downs mines, they are very large producing. They are the old Utah company out of Hay Point, where they exported. It was massive potential for Queensland. They were very shallow strip mining methods which produced a huge amount of revenue for Queensland over the years, and Labor certainly has not shied away from that.

Yet in Victoria we have a government that is prepared to shut down our gas industry, which is much cleaner certainly than lignite, which is brown coal, and much cleaner than black coal. But with Labor governments exporting and looking at black coal interstate, they are prepared to shut our gas industries down in Victoria. I find it quizzical that the government wants to shut it all down here, yet its emissions are more than 30 per cent lower than any coal, particularly high-performance Maitland black coal or coal out of, as I said before, Peak Downs or Goonyella. But in Victoria they are prepared to sacrifice the whole thing. This is where I say again that our side of the Parliament is not hypocritical when it comes to this, particularly when it comes to gas. We believe that a number of regional economies are dependent on it or could be dependent on it and certainly could prosper as a result of using gas and expanding the use of gas. But that does not mean you look at one method of generation; we have never said to look at one method of generation. There was all this kind of commotion around how we had setbacks for people with wind turbines. Well, yes, I do not think that is unfair at all for regional communities. I would expect that if someone went to Windy Hill and put up a tower that was as large as Collins Place, you would say to the locals near it, ‘We’re going to put strobe lighting on it, and it’s going to be opposite your house. There should be some setback.’ That would be right for someone on, let us say, Windy Hill, so why would it not be right for someone in regional Victoria? It is just the fair and reasonable point of the planning scheme, isn’t it, to say that someone in regional Victoria should have the same rights as someone in metropolitan Melbourne? You would not put any structure that is 180 metres tall – 183 in Collins Place’s case – or anything of that height next to a residential property without having an appropriate planning mechanism in place, without having a potential setback in place, whatever that might be. You might have some kind of planning law around it, as opposed to a tick and flick from a minister.

You would actually say, ‘Let’s be fair and reasonable.’ I think everyone with a brain would argue that it is fair and reasonable to say, ‘Why wouldn’t you have the concept of a setback in place?’ Why wouldn’t you say, ‘Okay, we’ve got wind turbine targets we need to meet.’ Sure – there is no problem with that. But make sure you do not disenfranchise people or treat people with disrespect along the way. You have actually got to engage people in the process. I think a lot of people in regional Victoria are fundamentally upset because if something is on one property, then it removes the right of the neighbour to have a say. I am not saying they should veto it, but I am saying they should be included in that planning process. In this bill, particularly with the government looking at specific zoning around this, that is taking away some aspects of regional Victorians’ rights to have a say in what goes near their farms. You would not expect that in a metropolitan area. Why should country Victorians be subject to something that is not expected in a metropolitan area? I do not think that is fair and reasonable, and I do not think regional Victorians think it is either.

Solar is obviously something that is coming along the same lines. A lot of solar farms are being put in place, and quite rightly so. We are the sunniest continent in the world; why wouldn’t you? They are particularly on the roofs of buildings and apartment blocks, on larger structures and even on things like Southern Cross station. We have these great big structures which could sensibly be used for solar harvesting, and why wouldn’t you, even in Melbourne? All through China they use solar power. I remember getting a train through China and looking at all the little farmhouses with their roofs that have solar panels. It was eminently sensible. But that obviously means that in regional Victoria, where you are having large swathes of land being taken over by solar panels by larger companies, again, given the heat impact that does have in those areas, there do need to be appropriate planning provisions. I am not saying stop it, but I am saying you must at least engage in a planning process with those who do abut those farms. That is only fair and reasonable, because that is what you would do in a metropolitan area. If you are doing that in a metropolitan area, then there is no reason why you should not be doing that in a regional area as well.

I think a lot of these issues are not insurmountable when it comes to renewable, either wind or solar. None of these issues have been insurmountable. Some have been highly weaponised, but they should not be insurmountable. It is my absolute, firm view that you will not power cities the size of Melbourne and Geelong, a metropolitan area of close to 6 million people as a conurbation around the Port Phillip and Corio Bay basin, by wind and solar alone – of course you will not – and that is where the baseload discussion comes in. No doubt our Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction will have more to say on that later in the year. But what we do say is you must have a baseload energy point beyond that, and that is why in the last couple of elections this side of the house has not been ambiguous when it comes to, for instance, using gas. The Newport power station is that, and I think the peaking station in Mortlake is that. They have been used quite successfully and quite reasonably for the last 30 or 40 years. It is quite unique that somehow we would turn away from it on one hand but then use it on the other. But that is the hypocrisy of the current government’s attitude to gas, which this side of the house has constantly pointed out. If you are happy to use it for peaking power and if you are happy to use it for other generation methods, then do not turn around and say to average Victorians, ‘You can’t use it in your home. We’re going to criminalise the plumber and gasfitter who comes in to install it.’

In the bill I noticed there are a number of discussion points, as I said, around renewable energy zones. I think, as I said before, Victorians, particularly outside of the metropolitan area, are just keen to know what can go where and what it will look like. Stripping out provisions or local input, even local government input, into projects is very unfair, and that is what has happened under this government for the last 11 years. Regional Victorians are not Luddites – they are happy to accommodate – but they just want to know with a great deal of certainty, like you would in a metropolitan area, what it is going to look like. I think that is a fair and reasonable point to note. This legislation again refers to those renewable energy zones. This government, from my point of view, might achieve one aim, but they are doing it at the expense of regional Victorians, and I do not think it needs to be that way. If you have an aim, then it can be done properly and appropriately by engaging regional Victorians in that process, particularly through the local government areas, which has not been done.

The member for Morwell is not in here. He did say to me, ‘Are you going to refer to coal and gas and the Latrobe Valley?’ and I think the member for Narracan also asked me, ‘Are you going to refer to your grandmother getting the coal dust off the clothes in Yallourn and Newborough?’ Now that the member for Narracan is coming through, let me just say brown coal has been a staple of our power generation industries for many, many years, and this was the advantage of Victoria post war. We were a cheap place to do business because electricity was cheap. It is now the complete opposite, and this is what we have been saying on this side of the house for some time. This is what MPs from Gippsland on our side of the chamber – given they are all ours, thankfully – have been saying for some time. Victoria’s economic prosperity post war from the migration booms, which many of us in this chamber, including me, have families who came out of and were a part of, was primarily because of the ability for us to provide cheap electricity to businesses wanting to do business and operate in the state of Victoria. From Ford to General Motors to SPC to the Portland smelter, big businesses – and small and medium – had the ability to do business in this state. We were self-sufficient in electricity generation in fact for Victoria and South Australia. We powered most of South Australia for many years.

This is, over the life of this government, something that has now reversed. Many days of the year we are now importing. We are an importer. Yes, there is a national grid, but the point is we went from being self-sufficient to a state that now imports at cost from Queensland or New South Wales, which is producing that power that we are importing off black coal. It is quite the irony that on this side we say you have not got the basics right, you are not considering gas, but you are going to black coal, which is dirtier, to top up power on many days of the year in Victoria when we cannot supply ourselves.

Danny O’Brien interjected.

Matthew GUY: As the member for Gippsland South said, those emissions do not count because they are not here, and that is exactly right – that is the hypocrisy. I say it again: we have never been hypocrites on natural resources on this side of the house. We have been very consistent. Consistency in this policy I think is what industry is looking for from this government, for the remainder of its term of office, till the end of the year, and then hopefully a new government will then be able to give policy consistency for at least, hopefully, four years or beyond. Industry then can reinvest in Victoria, knowing with great certainty that we actually will have targets to achieve and places where we need to be but with industry and community participation that is sincere and real as opposed to just being insincere, which has been the lie for 10 years.

I did say to you from the very start that I would try and keep my comments to 20 minutes on this bill, riveting as it is. I did give the Minister for Agriculture at the table an assurance that I would not be yelling, so much so that, as a Monty boy to a Monty girl, I honour my word and I will not be yelling. I am going to conclude my remarks and say thank you.

 Daniela DE MARTINO (Monbulk) (10:38): I did just hear one of the members on the other side of the chamber there say that they were very grateful for the fact that the member for Bulleen did not yell, as am I. I am very grateful for that. I am going to focus on perhaps the most significant aspect of the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026, which places the responsibility squarely on electricity distribution companies to plan ahead and invest in the upgrades that we need to ensure that we keep the power on when our communities need it most. For places like the Dandenong Ranges, where storms and outages have become all too familiar, this work is absolutely essential. In fact it was actually the storm of June 2021 that resulted in the first network outage review. That was the genesis of what we see today. This is a final tranche. I will come to that more in a bit. But I was personally affected myself by that storm, and evidently everyone who lived across the Dandenong Ranges at the time was also affected, and it was far reaching.

To achieve this very noble aim the bill strengthens the Electricity Safety Act 1998 by requiring every Victorian electricity distribution business to develop a detailed network resilience plan every five years. It is not enough to just do one set and forget – every five years, because we know that things change, the landscape changes. These plans must then be submitted to Energy Safe Victoria, our independent safety regulator, which will have new oversight powers to monitor and enforce compliance. What this means in practice is greater accountability and transparency. These plans will make resilience initiatives visible – not hidden, not optional. They will drive distribution businesses to adopt a more proactive, community-focused approach to strengthening their networks, because our communities, my community, deserve nothing less than a system that is ready for the challenges we know are coming, because climate change is real and climate change is here.

I say to those wanting to dance with One Nation: know this. They categorically state:

Fake Science Drives False Climate Change Claims.

… the United Nations and Pacific leaders urge Australia to commit to stronger 2035 emissions cuts … they falsely warn of rising seas and existential threats. However One Nation remains united in our fight against this rort and false narrative.

Unbelievable. It is tinfoil hat wearing stuff. But I will say to One Nation and their leader, who likes to visit Mar-a-Lago, that NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is the United States of America’s government coastal and ocean agency, also states:

Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has increased in recent decades. In 2014, global sea level was 2.6 inches above the 1993 average – the highest annual average in the satellite record … Sea level continues to rise at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch per year.

Well, the next time the leader of that party goes and visits Mar-a-Lago, she may want to make sure that she does not get her feet wet as the sea levels continue to rise.

In my electorate of Monbulk, we have already experienced some storms unlike any which came before them. On the nights of 9 and 10 June 2021 the Dandenong Ranges were subjected to wind speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour coming from the south-south-east, the opposite direction to where the prevailing winds normally came from, north-north-west. Unused to wind speeds from this unusual direction, 25,000 trees fell – 25,000 trees fell across my electorate, including the giants of the forest, the mountain ash. They typically reach 70 to 90 metres in height. It was like a giant from up on high was playing pick-up sticks and picked up these trees and just threw them on the ground. When they were lying on their sides, those trees, they blocked all the roads, all the access across the mountain, into the mountain. Emergency services could not get around, and they had trees falling down around them while they were on the road trying to rescue people trapped in their homes. There are – I have seen the photos – trees on their side, and the girth of the trees, the width of them, is higher than the height of 6-foot men and women. I have seen some of our tallest emergency services workers standing in front of those trees – you cannot chop them up with a chainsaw.

It was mass devastation and destruction. Seventy-one dwellings were destroyed and 54 were damaged, and the electricity network collapsed. It absolutely collapsed. There was no power – which means no NBN and no mobile telecommunications, for weeks. The mobile telecoms came back up earlier than that, when generators got to the towers, but they did not have the resilience for the initial time, and it was unsafe for telecoms workers to actually get to those towers and turn them on. The power was out. It took around three weeks to rebuild the network around the mountains. It was a scene of absolute devastation and destruction. The trauma from that storm still resonates. There are people who still feel very, very uncomfortable with the sound of high winds and with knowing that damaging, destructive winds are coming. I can tell you now, it still resonates.

That was not the only storm. There was another one later that year in October, and that actually set a record for the loss of power across the state. In fact, the first one in June 2021 had set its own record, and then we almost doubled it with the number of properties: 525,000 properties lost power across the state in October 2021. We thought, ‘My God, that’s an incredible number; that was record-breaking.’ And then two years ago, on 13 February 2024, the southern and eastern ends of the Dandenong Ranges once again copped it. That was part of a storm event which saw a new record set, with 531,000 ‍properties losing power. Again, across my district, most of us lost power across the Dandenong Ranges, and those at the eastern and southern ends were without power for around a week. The impact was huge. These trees, when they come down, are unforgiving. The lines come down with them. This time there was a better response, and there was a better response, I will submit, because we had been doing the work as a government. The minister had been doing work to ensure that power distribution companies were ready to respond and were more, for want of a better term, responsive in their response.

Now we get to this bill here. We do not own the power grid anymore. We did once. Remember that, everyone? I remember when we owned the power grid, and I have spoken in this place before about the fact that I found some papers released at the time when the SEC was fully sold off. We had what was considered one of the most stable, reliable electricity grids in the world. It was internationally renowned amongst people in the know; you obviously had to be quite excited by electricity to be in the know. But those who did know knew that Victoria’s grid was amazing. Do you know why? Because redundancies were built into that network, wonderful redundancies that meant that if one line failed another one kicked in, so we did not have constant brownouts. That happened at the time, not long after the SEC was sold. Once that was shut down and private companies bought that infrastructure, the stories are countless of those redundancies, that extra work in there to ensure that we had continuity of power, being stripped out of the network and placed into warehouses to be used as spare parts.

I do not know if everyone recalls through the 1990s the constant brownouts that were happening then. I remember because I thought, ‘This is new; this is unusual.’ There was a reason. As a government, we have had to work so hard in order to ensure that legislation is now compelling energy companies to do the right thing by all of us, by every Victorian – by residences, by businesses, by all of us – to ensure that we can have a more reliable electricity network, because when the power goes out for long stretches of time, it is not just the lights that go out, it is the mobile telecommunications. The NBN stops working, the food spoils. I know someone – she has become a friend now – who I met when she was distressed because she had lost her full fridge and freezer of food for the fourth time in a number of weeks a while ago, and it had such an impact on her. It is a cost-of-living issue. This bill is addressing it. I have not got to the technicalities of it – I know many others will do that – but I wanted to talk about why this is so important. I am thrilled. This is the final recommendation that came out of the network outage reviews. The final tranche is being acquitted in this bill. I am absolutely thrilled because we have actually seen that things are getting better in the responses, but they can continue to improve for all of us, and I am absolutely delighted by this. I commend the minister and her team on their work, and I commend this bill to the house.

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (10:48): I rise this morning to talk on yet another lazy Labor bill that talks about a problem we all know exists but will again fail to really address the problem. What I want to highlight is the constant effect on my electorate, the good electorate of Polwarth, based on this government’s inability to build long-term resilience into our power distribution and energy distribution networks. What do I mean by that? In 2018 my electorate was badly affected by the St Patrick’s Day bushfires, and three years after the St Patrick’s Day bushfires a court found that the offending power company, Powercor, simply had not kept its infrastructure up to date. In fact from that we learned that 50 per cent of Victoria’s wooden power poles are more than 50 years old. Just think about that – we have got a piece of wood that is about a foot, 300 mil thick, in the ground for more than 50 years in Victoria, and this government is expecting it to still last and be robust.

We have seen grandstanding opportunity by this government after grandstanding opportunity to talk about electricity, talk about how we are going to have solar power and wind power and we are going to create all this energy, and we are putting it on a horse and cart. We are putting it on infrastructure, in many parts of the state and across my electorate, that was put in before the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. Do you know what the consequence of that is? We will hear speakers from the Labor Party all day talk about climate change, wind, fires, storms and all this tempest. It is knocking down power poles that a two-year-old could push over with their little finger. That is the problem, because this government has refused to accept the advice from the power companies and experts in power distribution. For decades, years, they have ignored the call that we have to improve the quality of our power poles.

It is quite simple. This bill does not talk about allocating money to solve the problem. No, it talks about employing more bureaucrats, more public servants, more people to think about the problem. But the problem is quite simple. Of the 1.5 million wooden power poles in the state of Victoria, 750,000 are over 50 years old. They are older than me, most of these poles. I would get a bit tired standing up there all day, holding the power up. Then as this government has its full-blown attempt at getting people off gas, getting rid of other choices in energy and moving everybody to power, of course there is going to be massive disruption. But the disruption is there anyway, because if the power poles keep falling over and the power poles do not get replaced, it does not matter how many bureaucrats this legislation dreams up and how many more regulations it puts in place. If this government does not invest the money wisely, then we will have problems.

Why is this so important? Think of the devastation of fire. Eighty per cent of all infrastructure losses caused by fire in Victoria since the 1939 bushfires have been the result of electrical failures, and we can go through them: 1983, Ash Wednesday, massive loss of life, massive loss of infrastructure, thousands of homes lost across Victoria because power poles fell over – we did not learn the lesson then; 2009, most of the losses on Black Saturday were from power poles falling over; the St Patrick’s Day bushfire in my own electorate, 40,000 hectares burnt, tens of homes, luckily no lives lost. Guess why: because a power pole put up in 1936 fell over. We do not expect cars to last that long. Heavens above, this government is pulling down public housing towers built in the 1960s and 1970s because it says they are too old, yet we are putting the most dangerous energy source right across our state on infrastructure that was around when we still had horses and carts. That is what this government is doing. They are not investing in it.

What they are finding when this power infrastructure collapses, falls over and causes deaths, destruction, loss of income and disruption for years to communities is that the current methods that this government employs in keeping that vital infrastructure resilient are just archaic. Do you realise that this government has allowed the ludicrous situation of a piece of hardwood stuck in the ground for more than 50 years? Do you know how we test to see if that pole is safe? We drill a hole in it. If you go to 50 per cent of the poles, so only one in two poles, you will find little black plugs all around the bottom. On what planet is drilling a hole every five years into the base of a wooden pole a sensible way to maintain the integrity, strength and resilience of that pole? It is simply not. Water gets into it, ants get into it and termites get into it. It actually makes the problem worse.

There is no mention of just using common sense and going to talk to someone like my friend here the member for Narracan, who is a builder and understands structural integrity. He would tell you that, if you went and drilled a hole in the base of your house stumps every five years for the next 50 years, the chances of the house holding up would not be very good. It is exactly the same for power poles. This moronic government will stand with a hard hat and a fluoro vest at a new battery that, mind you, will keep a community going for approximately 2 hours when the power poles fall over. They will go and do that, but they will not go and do the hard work, the hard yards, the sensible infrastructure investment which is just the basics. Then again, it comes as no surprise, because we have also noticed that in the state of Victoria we do not look after our roads either, so there is no resilience in our roads. Let us face it, our roads were built some time ago, and like our power pole infrastructure this government is perfectly happy having us drive on infrastructure and roads that are so old.

I referenced earlier this week in a members statement the fact that my community has just been devastated by fire – and one of the few fires in my electorate that was not caused by power pole failures, I might add; Mother Nature sorted that one – but it did not destroy too many houses and whatever. But it did find that the two temporary bridges on a state government funded main arterial road collapsed, and we have got no funds to fix it either. When we talk about this innocuous, do-nothing piece of legislation that is so insipid that the opposition is not going to oppose it, because there is really not much to oppose in it, because it is really not going to do anything, it makes us think. Just on power pole replacement alone, on the back of a piece of paper anyone can calculate 750,000 poles at around $3000 a pole. We are talking some $2.2 billion to $2.5 billion. Guess where we could have found $2.5 billion to make every pole safe in Victoria. We could go and have a look at our CFMEU friends, couldn’t we, or some of the Labor Party apparatchiks over here who have been gladly taking donations from the CFMEU. That is some of the money Victorian taxpayers have paid to have this basic infrastructure maintained. It is devastating and will continue to be devastating.

It does not matter how many regulatory changes and it does not matter how many more high-paid ex-Labor union officials or former Labor MPs we appoint to some new governing board or whatever infrastructure we set up to tell Victorians we are doing a good job. It does not matter how much we do that unless we focus on fixing the power poles, making them resilient, making them strong. For example, in the short time I have left, this government, since the devastating 2009 fires, have gone about trying to do something, but of course they bought a pup. They bought a piece of infrastructure called a rapid earth fault current limiter, which we have had on, which has cost $1 billion to $1.5 billion, nearly half the price of just replacing the poles that fall over. We have seen this huge investment in infrastructure. For example, the St Patrick’s Day bushfires and some other smaller fires have been caused on lines that this government’s so-called safety infrastructure has been put on, because at the end of the day, if you have got a matchstick in the ground and you want it to withstand normal weather conditions, it is just not going to.

It is disappointing, despite court cases, despite report after report – the long-term Auditor-General’s report into the resilience and strength and age of our wooden power pole system that we have got here in Victoria – on this vital, absolutely essential piece of infrastructure, which under current government policies of moving us all to electricity you would think they could get right. You would really think that the sole focus would be to make sure the resources and the support are there to make sure that we are not expecting our primary source of energy to be travelling down bits of infrastructure that were put in place in 1936 and even earlier. It is quite insane – it is totally insane in fact. It is a disappointment, and it shows that this government would rather look after its friends in the CFMEU and waste money on things like that than put money where it is needed in Victoria, into decent infrastructure like our roads and like our power infrastructure.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (10:58): I thank the member for Polwarth for an engaging discussion on poles, which, yes, are important, and I will go to some of the issues that he raised around the safety of those poles, the structural soundness of those poles. But I will point out the irony of the Liberal Party talking about structural soundness and white-anting, considering it is their business. And it is interesting too that when you think about this physical infrastructure, which part of this bill goes to – in fact quite a significant part of this bill goes to – and you look at that physical infrastructure, which is managed and owned by private companies, you would think the former champions of the free market over there would understand that there are rules in place around how these private companies that operate and own this infrastructure need to be held to account but also are accountable. In fact when it comes to the resilience of the network and power poles in particular, in September last year all the companies, including Powercor, submitted to the Australian Energy Regulator for a determination around what that investment would look like by those distribution companies. The thing that that federal regulator looks for is prudent and efficient investment in those poles and wires and the infrastructure that gets power to where it needs to go. ‘Prudent and efficient’ you would think the champions of the free market would be all for.

Some of the things that this bill explicitly goes to with the changes that we are bringing in around that are monitoring resilience and making sure that we have some of the things around making sure companies are keeping our network online as much as possible. It is important to know that we do not necessarily want it to be gold plated, because we saw what happened post 2009 with a lot of the work that was being done by the distribution companies and the effect it had on power prices for people who ultimately were consuming that electricity.

To go to the detail in this bill, it is amending the Electricity Safety Act 1998 to have new obligations for these distribution businesses to have those resilience plans every five years and to submit the resilience plans to the independent safety regulator, which is Energy Safe Victoria. This is particularly important when we think of our changing climate and the increasing severity of the different natural disasters that we are seeing across our community, something I know the Labor Party more broadly has been talking about for quite some time, whereas for those opposite and their cousins in Canberra, it has been a little bit confusing around whether or not they actually think climate change is a thing. I respect the Victorian Liberals, who are a little bit more moderate when it comes to this.

A member interjected.

John LISTER: Some of them. I wish they would have a good chat to their cousins. There was a bit of history from the member for Bulleen, which I always love. That is why I chuckled at the start of his contribution, because I always get a little bit of history, particularly if it is the history of coal in Victoria. It is always interesting, and I respect that fount of very particular knowledge about the types of minerals that we are extracting down in Gippsland. It is always particularly interesting, but we have to remember a little bit of history that last time those opposite had the chance to be in government they tilted at windmills. VC82 – remember that? VC82, with those weird restrictions around where you could build wind turbines, meant that half a billion dollars of investment in clean energy was jeopardised as a result of those changes. I also find it quite humorous that the member for Bulleen likened himself to a bit of a Sancho, encouraging those Don Quixotes in his party at the time that the wind farms were not just giants, we needed those wind farms. I liked the little bit of revisionist history there.

It is important not only to look at this history but to look at our current situation. Climate change is real, and we have seen a lot of progress with this government and the subsequent legislation leading into what we are dealing with today. We have seen a 31.4 per cent reduction in our emissions since 2005, and our 2025 target was hit two years early. 42.4 per cent of electricity was produced by renewables in the financial year 2024–25, and I note amazing reports from the minister over summer that we had days where nearly 50 per cent of our electricity was being generated by renewable energy. That is not just wind and solar but battery and hydro as well, so that is fantastic stuff. We have seen the impact of climate change over this summer not only with fires but with floods and high wind events, and I am going to reflect on one in particular in my electorate in just a moment. We know that there are hardworking crews on the ground. My Powercor crews are always there within the hour, and a lot of them are good Electrical Trades Union members. They are out there in all sorts of weather. I know that when we are with the fire brigade and you get on the radio and request Powercor, they are always there within the hour. They say within the hour, but it is usually within 15 minutes. They are fantastic, our local crews – and many of them are locals.

But while we have that fantastic work on the ground and sometimes up in the air too – I do not know how they do it on some nights – we must also acknowledge that the distribution businesses that own those poles and wires have not been prepared as much as they could have been for the new reality of extreme weather. My colleague from up in the hills spoke about some of the incidents they saw in 2021 and more recently with high wind events in the Dandenongs. In 2024 we saw 531,000 homes lose power at the peak of the event – half a million Victorians losing power. While nearly all of those outages were restored by the following day, all these events highlight the need for a proactive approach to the resilience of our network. I also want to reflect that in Werribee on 26 October 2025 we had a mini cyclone. I did not even know a mini cyclone was a thing until October 2025.

We had a lot of call-outs with the fire brigade to jobs all over Hoppers Crossing and the back of Werribee, particularly around Purchas Street and Kookaburra Avenue. In the morning, when I went back out, just as tired as some of those residents, I saw how they helped each other out and the resilience of those neighbourhoods. I thank the CFA and SES crews for their response that night as well. But I think we need to back them up by making sure that these private distribution companies are held to account to make sure that there are a fit-for-purpose network and resilience across the network.

This is bringing about some of those last changes that came out of the review into resilience in the network. While the power companies have to submit annual plans – and the way they are going to do that is over those five-year periods – we want something that is more specific around energy resilience during natural emergencies and climate-related emergencies, because I think it is particularly important to note that even though we are restoring power as quickly as we can, we want to reduce the likelihood of that needing to happen at all.

Our power companies – Powercor and the like – know where these vulnerabilities in the network are. We do not need a gold-plated network. We do not need to have everything absolutely upgraded with billions and billions of dollars, but we need to make sure that those areas that are vulnerable are addressed – like the Shaws Road transformer. I do not know how many times I have had people talk to me about how when that transformer goes down half of Werribee goes down. When the transformer not far from Watton Street goes down, it means that half of Watton Street – ironically, one side of the street – is without power for hours while they restore that infrastructure. There are points in our network that we know need to be improved. We need to hold these private distribution companies to account, because every time we have a high wind event the Shaws Road transformer will flutter, we will have a brownout and then inevitably it will go out. While they do get it back up online as quickly as they can, a lot of the time that transformer is not doing a good job. That does remind me: I will probably email Powercor again about some of those resilience things in Werribee. They are quite good and responsive to their local members, and I thank them for that. These resilience plans acquit those recommendations from the network resilience review, and they provide obligations for electricity distribution businesses, like AusNet and Powercor, to publish five-yearly resilience plans. It also goes to making sure that those life support arrangements are in place.

We have 150,000 kilometres of wires and 1.3 million poles – which is a lot for the member for Polwarth to try and hold up or push over with one finger, or whatever his analogy was – most of which are exposed to the elements. Network costs make up about 40 per cent of household power bills. So having these plans and having the accountability of these private companies means that we can manage that 40 per cent of the cost on a power bill to make sure that it is not necessarily gold plated – and we are not increasing costs beyond what is reasonable – but that we are looking to those vulnerabilities as we do it. In conclusion, I commend this bill to the house.

 Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (11:08): It is a pleasure to rise today and speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. It is always interesting to follow the member for Bulleen’s contributions, with his knowledge of the power industry, what coal is good, what coal is bad and where it all comes from. We are talking today about resilience and essentially putting the energy companies on notice by saying that if there is a problem they need to fix it or have preventive measures in place – even better. That is essentially what this omnibus bill is about.

When we talk about resilience and reforms, we should also be talking about reliability and affordability in the same sentence. On power generation in Victoria at the moment, we used to be an exporter of power; that is well documented. Unfortunately now we do import a lot of power from other states, which has driven up the cost of power in Victoria. What I am concerned about when we talk about power generation in this state is the actual supply of the power and how that supply will be after Yallourn shuts in 2028. Yallourn currently, I believe, supplies about 20 to 22 per cent of Victoria’s power.

We know the government is going hell for leather on renewable projects. I do have a concern that we are only two years away from Yallourn power station shutting down, and will we have the reliability of a power supply? I think this is something Victorians are rightly concerned about, and so they should be. In my electorate I have quite a number of battery storage projects scheduled to go to the Minister for Planning for approval. Do I have a problem with battery storage? No, I do not. I do have a problem with battery storage when the builders of these battery storage systems do not consult with the community and put them in relatively stupid locations. One such thing in my electorate is out at a little area called Shady Creek, where they are putting about 25 acres of batteries right into bushfire overlay areas, and in a catastrophic bushfire event the CFA cannot go out to these areas. This is why I say I am not against battery storage but whoever is providing these has to actually look at the locations. I hope that when this these come across the minister’s desk she actually takes into account these overlays that exist.

When I look around the state of Victoria – and I understand that the batteries need to be close to those transmission lines, and that is the best way to build them so they can store the energy close to the source – regional Victoria always bears the burden of renewable energy. We do not put wind farms in the middle of Melbourne. They are out and about in regional Victoria, and it is the same with these battery projects. But what I would encourage the minister to look at is maybe if there are pockets around Melbourne. I understand why they are in my electorate, because the energy travels from east to west in this state, and I have the main transmission lines running east to west right through the electorate of Narracan. But maybe there are other locations. We have a renewable energy zone up at Yallourn, and maybe batteries should be put up in that location. I do not know if there are any there, but at the moment I have four locations in my electorate, and two of those locations I would say are not fit for purpose. The community is actually very, very concerned that if we do have a catastrophic bushfire event these batteries may catch fire. I do understand that these batteries have an internal fire suppression system which, if the batteries are having a meltdown, puts it out. But community concern will always be about external bushfires, because in my electorate we have seen them time and time again and we know how catastrophic they can be.

When we talk about resilience and reliance and all these other things, we cannot go past gas. We on this side of the chamber have made it very, very clear where we stand on gas. We believe there should be more gas exploration in this state. Gas is a good source of power generation and should be used. Some of the legislation that the government has passed through this house in recent years, like if you are a plumber and you install a gas cooktop, you could be up for prosecution – these things are not right. In my building career most of the houses I built – I would actually be safe to say 98 per cent of the homes I built – were on gas. A lot of older Victorians, a lot of pensioners in Victoria, still have gas appliances in their homes. They cannot necessarily afford to transition from gas to power. They just cannot afford it, and we should let them replace like for like. The one thing I do support and I do not necessarily have a problem with is the old gas wall furnaces – probably the worst heating source we could have in this state because they can be quite carcinogenic – being replaced with another system.

We are at a point in this state. We are only two years away from Yallourn power station shutting down, and I do not know – maybe the government does not know either – when we do finally flick the switch on Yallourn whether we will have enough renewables in the system to make sure our power supply is there. This is a very real concern, because I think it is a bit of a hope at the moment that when we turn off Yallourn we will have enough there. Will we or won’t we? We are not sure.

The government’s whole offshore wind program has been delayed now for years. That has not gone ahead. I have not heard anything. The government was spruiking it when I first got into this chamber back in 2023, but it went very, very quiet when they had a problem down at the Port of Hastings, and I have not heard much more yet about what is happening with that offshore wind program. I know in my area we have got the Delburn wind farm, which still has not started, and for some reason the government has bought that off the private sector. From what I have gathered in conversations I have had with people, the private sector did not want to go through with this wind farm because it was not viable. If the private sector is saying it is not viable, why would the government buy it if there is no viability attached to the project? That beggars belief. Again, that community up there has had very little consultation on that wind farm. This is becoming a bit of a norm with this government – throughout regional Victoria there is a lack of consultation when it comes to the renewable program of the government. It is a little bit ‘We’re going to bulldoze our way through, and bad luck to the community.’

The community of Shady Creek have a petition running at the moment about the battery energy storage system project in that area, and Baw Baw Shire Council have actually turned around and said they do not want any BESS projects in their area, purely because everywhere they have been nominated is in bushfire overlays. So it does come back to that community consultation. As I said, I do not have a problem personally with battery storage, but I do have a problem when locations are stupid. I do have a problem when there is a lack of community consultation. The providers go out there and talk to the community or let the community talk to them, but whether they listen is an entirely different thing. Part of the problem is that these people that are building the battery storage systems are buying the land or leasing the land up-front to get their project through. So they are pushing very hard, and they will push the minister very hard on this. I know this, and I have brought it up in the chamber before. I have asked the minister, especially for the Shady Creek battery farms that are out there, not to approve them because they are in the wrong area, although the minister does have the right to remove overlays. But I think if you start removing bushfire overlays or if you start removing cultural heritage overlays to make room for these battery storage systems, that is fraught with danger. The overlays are there for a reason. We do not just create them out of thin air. I implore the minister again in this contribution to look at these battery farms in the locations where they are going.

Anyway, I am nearly out of time. We obviously are not opposing this bill.

Paul Edbrooke interjected.

Wayne FARNHAM: I do not know what the member for Frankston said – ramblings again from that side of the chamber – but I will leave it at that.

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (11:18): I too rise to speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. I can tell you this, and I will pluck this out of thin air: this bill is certainly about strengthening Victoria’s capacity to withstand increasingly severe climate change driven weather events. The member for Narracan talked about lack of community consultation. I will say that we have spent 12-plus years in community consultation, not just here in Victoria but across the country. Climate change is real, people. It is real, member for Narracan. That is what you get through listening to the community. Then you come to this place, which is actually your job as a member of Parliament, as a representative of your community, to put through a legislative agenda and changes to the energy industry and energy legislation here in this state that benefit the community, tackle climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which is exactly what this bill is intended to do. The Minister for Energy and Resources sitting here at the table has worked tirelessly for the last 12 years, having specialised in energy in her four years as a shadow opposition member in this same portfolio and become an expert on this. Those opposite are experts in nothing. They are a jack-of-all-trades. To come here into this place and say there has not been community consultation is absolute nonsense. The bill that we are addressing goes to the vulnerabilities that we have seen exposed by storms, by bushfires, by prolonged outages. It will ensure that communities are better protected and essential services remain operational. We do not need to do community consultation to know they are the basic expectations of our communities, of Victorians right across this state.

We know that climate change is what is driving more frequent and more severe storms, heatwaves, floods and bushfires and that this places communities in Victoria at risk. We have been talking about, in this place, the dangers of leaving the door open to parties like One Nation. It is absolutely imperative that the Victorian community understand that One Nation do not believe in climate change. They are climate change deniers. So when we talk about, in this place, tackling climate change and driving down greenhouse gas emissions, moving towards our targets of net zero here in this state, we are never going to leave the door open to a party that does not believe in climate change in the first place. Those opposite – I do not think the same could be said of them.

Not too long ago at all we had a 45-degree day here in Melbourne. I know if the member for Mildura was here, she would probably start laughing, because at 45 degrees in Melbourne someone like me might be hiding in a dark, air-conditioned room from such heat, but I know in Mildura it nearly reached 50 degrees. That is extraordinary – 50 degrees. That was likely the hottest day on record in Victorian history, and with extremely hot weather like this comes dangerous and severe bushfires. It is true that Victoria has seen her share, too much of it, this summer. We have also had, and I found this quite shocking because we love camping at Wye River, flash floods, these freakish flash floods across parts of the state as well. All of these severe weather events do incredible damage to our distribution network, the poles and wires. That causes areas, sometimes entire townships, to go without power for an extended period of time.

I do want to take a moment in my contribution to acknowledge the absolutely incredible emergency service workers and volunteers. Every summer they do this, but particularly this summer they put themselves on the line to help with fires and flood-affected communities. I know that my friend, the member for Werribee, was one of those volunteers. I have to say, as the member for Werribee is just a little bit younger than me, it was just remarkable watching such a young man out there on the front line fighting these fires and not thinking of himself but putting other communities first. What an amazing attribute that is to have at such a young age. Bravery is one of the ways in which I would describe the member for Werribee – so brave to do that along with his comrades. They went out and they helped communities in regional Victoria with their local branch, and that was the Werribee branch for the member for Werribee.

Disasters like this do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot pretend they exist in a vacuum. We know from previous storms how vulnerable our grid is to extreme weather. In February 2024 storms damaged over 12,000 kilometres of powerlines and poles and over 529,000 homes and businesses were affected. In June 2021 more than 250,000 Victorian households and businesses lost power, and this was followed up in October that year when over half a million Victorian households were also left without power. This is happening more and more regularly at such extreme numbers. In these particular instances, some of those folks went for up to 49 hours without power in cities and as long as 84 days – that is 12 whole weeks – in some rural areas due to the scope of the damage caused.

Following these disasters the electricity distribution network resilience review expert panel concluded that distribution businesses must do more to reduce prolonged outages, and what we know is that communities explicitly wanted stronger, more reliable infrastructure capable of withstanding climate impacts. This work is not new to our government, and a lot has been done over the last decade that we have been in government to strengthen Victoria’s energy resilience. We have delivered climate change adaptation plans, sector-based reviews, climate risk assessments and targeted investments as part of this work. And while we continue to address the impacts of climate change through our world-leading emissions and renewable energy targets – they are targets that we are absolutely smashing, by the way ‍– we will also continue to assess and implement measures that mitigate those effects because, and I say this to my kids, the unfortunate reality is that these extreme weather events are happening more and more, and we need to look at ways and think outside the box to make things like our distribution network a whole lot more resilient when it comes to these climate change weather events.

We do know that the government does have a role to ensure that the private network businesses know they need to spend more on increasing the resilience of their networks, and I think we have made that extremely clear to them. We do this because we know that power outages are not just a temporary inconvenience. They impact people’s lives, and those impacts are not always recognised by the national framework that governs these private companies, and that is where we get involved. That is why our government initiated the work of this resilience review, and that is exactly what this bill makes good on.

There is a lot to say about this bill. There is a lot I am sure will be said this afternoon, but the bill does position Victoria as a national leader – something we should all be proud of – in embedding resilience planning into electricity distribution regulations. It ensures that our communities, especially the most vulnerable to climate-driven extreme weather events, are better protected from the rising risk of prolonged outages. While we cannot prevent power outages entirely, we can take the right steps to ensure that they are less likely to happen, and to do that we need the power distribution companies to step up. That is exactly what these resilience plans are all about.

Victorians know that when it comes to strengthening energy reliability, improving climate preparedness and supporting the renewable transition, our government has their back. We have almost 12 years on record where we can say our government has their back when it comes to energy. We will also be continuing to make sure that our network is strong and that we are as prepared as we can be for the impacts of these extreme weather events as our state continues to grapple with the disastrous effects of climate change. This is a comprehensive reform package. It is focused on safety, reliability, accountability and long-term resilience, and it is why I want to congratulate the minister at the table, the Minister for Energy and Resources, for bringing such an important bill before the house this week. I wholeheartedly commend the bill to the house.

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (11:28): I rise to very briefly commend this bill to the Parliament. The Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026 will require electricity distribution network companies to publish network resilience plans to ensure our grid can better withstand natural disasters. The Minister for Energy and Resources in her second-reading speech for the bill appropriately recognises that climate change is driving more frequent and severe storms, heatwaves, bushfires and floods, leaving Victorian communities ‘increasingly vulnerable to prolonged power outages caused by extreme weather events’. In the face of these threats it is appropriate that we take the necessary steps to make our grid more resilient to climate disasters. But perhaps more importantly, this bill further consolidates the VicGrid reforms as the foundation for Victoria’s critical transition to renewable energy. Victoria needs to build transmission lines and increased generation capacity – yesterday. As we have seen again this summer, climate change is incinerating our farms. Drought and floods are destroying our crops and roads, and algal bloom has done untold damage to South Australia, particularly its fishing industry. We are not closing climate-wrecking coal-powered generation fast enough.

If evermore frequent and severe droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves are a climate emergency, then we need to act like it is a climate emergency, and if the Allan Labor government does not pick up the pace, Victoria will not hit its target of 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035. We probably will hit our target for renewable energy by 2030, but that is a less ambitious target. The stark truth is that despite evermore renewables coming online, coal consumption is just not falling at the rate we would expect because our power consumption is increasing. Data centres in particular are a threat to further reductions in power consumption. So too is the slow pace of improving the energy efficiency of Victorian housing. Until we make the transition to renewables we are left vulnerable to an increasingly hostile climate and unreliable and ageing coal-fired power plants. Every year of delay in building more transmission capacity means that when we do build it it will cost more, driving higher bills for Victorians when they can least afford them in a cost-of-living crisis.

Finally, before I finish, I want to condemn in the harshest possible terms the baseless opposition to building the transmission and generation capacity that Victoria so desperately needs. When members of the Liberal and National parties associate with and promote opposition to building these essential transmission lines across Victoria, they are effectively delaying the transition from coal. Not only will they have their children to answer to for this, they will have their constituents. A heating climate is the real threat to agriculture and human existence, not poles and wires in paddocks, as ugly as they may be. We refuse to be sidetracked by your manufactured outrage and alarmism, and I commend this bill to the house.

 Bronwyn HALFPENNY (Thomastown) (11:32): I also rise to speak in support of the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. It is really yet another step, another piece of legislation that in many aspects is continuing the clean-up after the decision of the Liberal–National parties to privatise the electricity industry. While we can say it was a very long time ago, the implication of private companies motivated by profit over what is really in the best interest of Victorians is what we are seeing every day when it comes to electricity generation and the need to change to renewable power in order to do our bit in trying to prevent the continuing devastation of climate change.

As the previous speaker said, the Liberal–Nationals must be condemned for peddling the misinformation, the lies and the incorrect information that are constantly talked about both in this chamber and out in the community. When we look at what has been going on, they oppose electricity generated by wind and they oppose the necessary transmission lines. They oppose everything that really is about converting our state and our country to renewable energy so that we can hope to assist and help future generations in tackling the causes of climate change and not just having to deal with the terrible consequences and effects that we are seeing every year, whether it is the bushfires, including the devastating bushfires in January of this year in Victoria and other parts of the state, whether it is the floods or whether it is the huge and catastrophic storms, all of which we know are connected to and due to the changing climate as a result of human activity over years and years.

I will mainly talk about the resilience requirements. Because of what has been going on, we have seen many massive power outages as a result of bushfires, floods and so on. With the types of weather events that we are having, it may not be possible to completely guarantee we can protect residents and Victorians from power outages completely, but there are no doubt many things that can be done in order to protect the power infrastructure. This is on power companies, in particular the distribution companies. This legislation talks about a requirement where they will have to develop resilience plans, and those plans will be about what they will do to ensure that power can be secured as much as possible. Victorians worry about not only what is going on with the bushfire or flood in their area but also how they are going to receive the necessary power. Whether it is a clean-up or whether it is fighting fires, power will always be needed in those situations, even if you are not directly affected by the fire or the flood. We are seeing over and over again many thousands of households being affected by the crashing down of powerlines, which means the power has stopped and they cannot get that power into their homes. We all need that power. Whether it is to see what we are doing in our home, whether it is to preserve our food or whether it is to keep us warm or cool, we need that electricity in the home. The economy needs that power as well to power industry, so the cost of power outages is twofold: the cost to individuals and households as well as to industry, and the big hits to our economy when we cannot produce what we need to and therefore create the wealth that then goes back into our economy.

There is a vast combination of wires – 150,000 kilometres in wires – and 1.3 million power poles. These are not all exposed to the elements, but many are during weather events and other events, so it is critically important that power companies do develop their resilience plans, which are then endorsed by government to ensure that our power is protected into the future.

Another aspect of this legislation which is extremely important is around amendments to the Statewide Treaty Act 2025. I recall there was legislation late last year around the Self-Determination Fund, which provides for funds to be distributed back to traditional owners, and this legislation amends the treaty act to ensure that that Self-Determination Fund is fit for purpose and a vehicle to distribute funds generated through the Victorian transmission investment framework to traditional owners and enable traditional owners to apply for these funds for community benefit.

Again, in speaking on this legislation it is so important that we do acknowledge climate change, that we do acknowledge that the extreme weather events that we are seeing are a result of that climate change and that we need to in many aspects change the way we do things – change the way that we live – in order to protect ourselves as well as possible from these situations. We often talk about how legislation debated in and introduced into this Parliament, this chamber, is about responding to what is going on in the world. Legislation is not just a dull, fixed thing. It is something that has to change, has to adapt and has to be flexible in order to meet the changing requirements of society. In this case it is around changing various aspects of energy legislation so that we again can adapt and ensure that people, and Victorians in particular, are protected as well as they can be. Power companies being required to do resilience plans to ensure that they can protect power infrastructure to as great an extent as possible in the event of extreme weather events is a very important and very key aspect of the legislation. I commend this bill to the house.

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (11:40): I am pleased to rise to speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience, Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. This is somewhat of an omnibus bill in the energy space, but there is some important stuff in here and some issues that we certainly have concerns with. There are few issues in regional Victoria at the moment that are more contentious than energy in a whole range of factors, and this bill covers quite a few of them. The resilience reforms are of particular importance or concern to my electorate.

The member for Monbulk highlighted the impact of the June 2021 storms on her electorate, and I think October 2021 as well. We had subsequent storms in 2024, particularly the mini tornado that hit Mirboo North, or the Boonado, which the locals sometimes refer to it as, which was far more significant and localised than any of the other storms, which were devastating and did massive amounts of damage, as the member for Monbulk indicated. I think she said 20,000 trees in her electorate – I would be surprised if I did not have 200,000 trees damaged, frankly. There were some parts of the Strzeleckis where entire plantations were wiped out. Again as the member for Monbulk described, they did look like giant matchsticks in that area. But in the Strzeleckis, particularly on the southern side of the Strzeleckis, there were just trees down everywhere and subsequently powerlines down everywhere. It was an unusual south-easterly storm, which the trees and the forests and the farmland do not normally cop in Gippsland. We normally get south-westerlies or northerlies or easterlies, but the south-easterly clearly had an impact and took out many, many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of trees and at the same time powerlines.

It was a wake-up call, I guess, on the question of resilience, for AusNet in our neck of the woods and for other distributors and transmission line operators, because in some areas we had people that were off for a week. We had dairy farms that were off for three and four days, and at that point some still did not have a backup system. I think pretty much every dairy farmer now does, because they cannot afford to be without power for 24 hours or more, and that storm really did impact them. The Mirboo North storm was not just Mirboo North; it did hit quite a wide area, but the intense impact straight through the town of Mirboo North was something to behold. If you did actually go and see it at the time, even if you had seen the photos and the film or the video of it, nothing prepared you for what it actually looked like in person.

I remember talking to AusNet the day after it occurred, about getting powerlines picked up and getting them in there to get it fixed, and the message clearly had not got through. A couple of days later I mentioned there were still powerlines on the road, to which the AusNet staff member said to me, ‘Oh, don’t be going anywhere near powerlines on the road.’ And I said, ‘Mate, they’ve been down on the road for three days now.’ Virtually the entire power grid in Mirboo North was taken out. There were concrete power poles that were literally snapped in half, Acting Speaker Addison, and you might have seen them when you visited. There were others that were broken off at the base and teetering, just held up by the wires from other poles, so it was a massive issue.

I did call, back in 2021, for a review. The government did undertake an electricity distribution network resilience review after that, but it was very poorly advertised. Indeed when I asked the minister at the time how it was advertised and who gave feedback, I think there was a public information session or feedback session in Traralgon, and I think it was six people that provided feedback. Given that Traralgon had not been particularly badly impacted, I do not know that they necessarily got the views of those that were most impacted. Nonetheless, this is one of the outcomes of that review. I have no problem with the resilience reforms. I would have thought, as a principle, that the distribution companies would be doing exactly what is proposed here in having a resilience plan and making sure that they stick to it.

The broader issue that I want to raise is that of resilience and the performance of the network more generally. I am getting repeated complaints about blackouts in the network in the electorate of Gippsland South. There are concerns in places like the Tarra Valley, Yarram, Woodside, Mcloughlins Beach and Woodside Beach. I get complaints from Loch and Nyora, the Poowong area, the Buffalo area near Fish Creek and Meeniyan, which have had multiple blackouts over the last period of time. Some of the excuses provided by AusNet are implausible, and some of them are genuine and they have worked to address them, but I am concerned that not enough is being done by the distribution companies to ensure longer term resilience. We saw concerns also in the recent heatwaves that we have had, particularly on the catastrophic fire day, where there were rolling blackouts in certain areas. In one area in particular, Central Gippsland, originally a text message went out to customers that indicated it was the result of a direction by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which clearly got many of my constituents hot under the collar, who felt that they were losing power for grid stability to ensure that Melbourne was kept on. AusNet subsequently advised that that text had been sent in error and that it was in fact a fault on the line to Bairnsdale that had caused the blackout. There is a fair bit of scepticism in our community about that explanation, I have got to say. There are a fear and a scepticism that country areas, particularly the less populated ones, are the first to be switched off to ensure grid stability and that blackouts do not occur elsewhere in the system. That is something that I think they probably have good reason to be concerned about.

It goes then to the point where in this legislation the government is making some changes with respect to VicGrid’s powers. There are probably not too many agencies or organisations that have had more legislation in the last couple of years than VicGrid. Some of that is progressive reform, and some of that is the government messing up and having to go back and clean up its messes. The single biggest mess of course was last year’s legislation on VicGrid that gave them and their agents the power to force their way onto private land and threaten farmers with $12,000 fines if they had the temerity to defend their land from that access. This is after both the Premier and the Prime Minister said, ‘We acknowledge we’ve been doing this wrong and we’ve been disrespecting regional communities.’ Well, Premier, the way to respect regional communities is not to say, ‘We’ve got it wrong, but we’re now going to bring in legislation that’s tougher and will result in you being fined.’ I find that in this legislation as well. We have had the government establish renewable energy zones. This legislation we are debating today will give flexibility to make new renewable energy zones where there is not one yet declared and where there is existing sufficient transmission infrastructure. So in effect the government is saying, ‘We can just make a renewable energy zone wherever we feel like it.’ In that case, what the hell is the point of them? That really is the question for me. I do not understand what that is.

Second to that are the changes to the assessment process that effectively give the ability for some ‘limited class of transitional projects’ to not have to go through the same processes that are required, particularly for community engagement, for projects in renewable energy zones. While I understand there might be some that are further progressed and that have got a different set of circumstances, no is our response to that. They should not be subject to different community engagement processes, because it is a very big issue in regional Victoria, and certainly in the west of the state at the moment. It has been a big issue in the south-west and in Gippsland for a long time, and we have been dealing with this. I have said so many times in this place that we cannot continue to have a situation where regional areas bear the brunt of the bad parts of renewable energy development and the city only gets the benefits, and so we need to do better on that. We need to actually make sure that if this is going to happen, firstly, regional communities are respected and, secondly, they get benefits out of these projects and that their communities, their landscapes and their farms in particular are not adversely affected. That is why the Nationals and Liberals have committed to introducing a strong test about the impact on farmland from these projects, and I am concerned that this legislation will actually make that worse.

 Matt FREGON (Ashwood) (11:50): It is my delight to also rise on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026 and thank previous members for their contributions. I was lucky enough to be in the chair when the lead speaker for the opposition gave his contribution, which was measured, which is good, and I appreciate that the opposition are not opposing the legislation, which is also good. We will have some agreement there. There are a number of things that have been said that we do not quite agree on – but mostly.

One of the important aspects of this bill is about resilience, as other members have mentioned. I take the member for Monbulk’s contribution in regard to her area, which I am very familiar with, because as a boy growing up in the gully we were at the bottom of the hills, and if power poles and powerlines go down, it can cause catastrophe and tragedy and a lot of outages over the years. I also take note that the member for Monbulk was talking about the resilience of the old SEC, and I think I have mentioned in this place before, but far be it from me to not repeat myself, that I had an extended family member who used to work in the SEC back in the day – back in the 1990s – and I think he was a linesman, from memory. I will give a shout-out to the good people of the ETU, while we are at it, who do fantastic work getting our poles and wires back in the ground and working when these things happen, and usually it is under some duress, and further than that, to our SES, who do a lot of work. We had the winds last month. When these things happen they come out at 2 in the morning; they get the call and they come out. So a good shout-out to George Haitidis and everyone down at the Monash SES and the Whitehorse SES; I share both – a fantastic bunch of crew.

Anyway, I digress – SEC. I was talking to my extended family member years ago, and he was telling me that he worked for the SEC and then when it was privatised fully one of the first things they did as the new corporate owner was to remove all of the gold-plated redundancy that our public money had paid for – that they had bought; I mean, it was theirs to do that with, right? They got all the redundant equipment off all the poles and wires and everything else and they put it in a shed, and that was their spare parts for the next decade. So we used to have a system – in, what are we talking, the 1980s – where we had redundancies and we had less issues with things going wrong, and they were quicker to fix. And then all of a sudden they went, ‘You know what, we’ve got an asset here we can protect and we can use that, and then we don’t have to buy spare parts for the next decade, so we’ll put it all in the shed.’ As a result – I think the member for Monbulk was talking about more brownouts in the 1990s, and I take her word for it.

I can also remember similar times. Someone will have to point me out later about the timing, but if you remember when the gas network went off, we all had cold showers. Everyone who was on gas had cold showers.

Josh Bull interjected.

Matt FREGON: 1999. Thank you, member for Sunbury, for reminding me. The gas network went off and there was a while there when we were all having cold showers. Luckily my mother had an electric hot water service, so we were all going to Ferntree Gully to get showers every day.

Resilience is important is where I am going with this speech. It makes perfect sense to expect our distribution networks to not only plan for it themselves but have to be accountable to that by publishing what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. I commend the minister at the table, the Minister for Energy and Resources, for her work not just on this bill but also on a very long time, many years, working in this sector. And I commend her office. I think it is fair to say we as a state are years ahead of other states in our transition to renewable energy, and that is something that we – and I think our children and I think their children – will all get the benefit of, because that is the way the world is going. We can argue – and I will come back to the gas measure – about baseload power. We can argue about the transition speed and where you do this and where you do that and what we need to do first, second, third and where we are going.

But surely we all understand in this place that climate change is a thing, that humans are having an effect, and that therefore it is prudent and responsible, not only to ourselves but to future generations, that we do what we can to cut our emissions. The member for Bulleen did mention that we occasionally ‍– I do not know how occasionally – import energy, from time to time, from other states and that states generate theirs from coal. We also import energy from Tassie, who I think generate a lot of theirs from hydro. We do not have the luxury of the Tasmanian hydro system, but we are years ahead, thanks to the minister, the former Premier and the current Premier for their foresight in doing this work to encourage everyone to transition. Not only is it in the grid, which we are talking about today, but it is also in the Victorian energy upgrades (VEU) program, which is also in this bill, and it is also in the plan that we have to transition away from gas. Yes, we will need gas for a very long time, and this is something the government has said. I noticed the member for Bulleen was accusing us of some hypocrisy. I do not think that is a valid argument, but I do think that it is quite feasible to argue that we need to transition from fossil fuels to renewables where at all possible and, at the same time as saying that is a fact and that is what we are working on, to also say that, yes, gas is going to play a part of our energy creation for the foreseeable future.

It has been interesting over the last number of years. I remember I had certain constituents telling me off because we had stopped exploration for conventional gas. I said, ‘No, we haven’t.’ They said, ‘I read it in the paper.’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting,’ because we had not. I vaguely recall it was a former government that stopped it – and I am not arguing why, where or whatever – and then we actually opened it up again. So gas is going to be a part of our future, but that does not necessarily mean that it is in households’ best interests – and I will come to the financial equation – to use gas in their homes. I will give you an example of that. In our house we have had the old gas ducted heating, like many, many Victorians, because Victoria had a plethora of gas and 50, 60, 40, 30 years ago that was exactly what we should have been using. But now we all know it is better to go to electricity. In our house we had a look at replacing dying gas ducted heating, which was costing us $1000 a year to just keep running, with a heat pump system. It was not cheap – I get that – so we spent some money. But, doing the numbers, it will pay for itself in eight years. We are about three or four years in now, so we have half-paid for it already, and then after that it is technically money for nothing. That is based on the figures of gas at the time, which was four years ago. Our eastern seaboard market is the global market, and we are at the whim of the world’s gas prices. We can refer that argument to the feds.

So it makes sense to assist people transitioning. And what better way to help with transitioning than to subsidise those that might not find it easy to afford it otherwise? We all in this room are paid pretty well; we can afford it. But there are a lot of people who cannot necessarily afford those things. So programs like Solar Homes and the VEU, which are in this bill, are not only crucial to helping us transition to a cleaner energy sector but also crucial to helping Victorians save money. Cost of living is going up. We all know that. Wages, inflation – these are not new problems, but everyone feels the pinch. So if I can save, theoretically, 100 bucks a month on not paying gas but paying electricity instead, then so can everyone else.

 Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (12:00): The Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026: whenever there is a bill with regard to energy legislation and more amendments on the government business program, those throughout my electorate, particularly the southern parts of my electorate, get very, very nervous, and with good reason. They should be nervous, because at the moment they are not being consulted. They are angry. They are having legislation that allows VicGrid and AEMO to do whatever they want on land that has been in families for generations, and it is appalling. It is just another thing that adds to the anger on the ground, and I will get to that in a second. But let me begin, because there is a lot to this bill, but it still makes us very, very nervous.

I will begin where we might be able to agree, and that is on strengthening the electricity network resilience in the face of severe weather events. I do note that in fact a few members have spoken about high temperatures in this place today. Being from the northernmost part of this state, when I hear ‘It was so hot; it was 42 degrees’ I do get a wry smile across my face and think that is pretty cute – 42 ‍degrees. At one point during the heatwave, on farm at our place it was 53 degrees, and then it was followed by another week of over 40 degrees and about 90 per cent humidity. I live in the desert for a reason; the humidity is not ideal. However, strengthening the resilience of the network in weather events like that is important, and I did have many constituents contact me in Mildura about power outages and having to use the hose outside and stuff to cool down because they did not have an air conditioner. Communities that have endured those prolonged outages during weather events like that and storms deserve a system that is better prepared.

But we cannot discuss resilience in isolation from the broader energy planning chaos that is unfolding right across regional Victoria, because while this bill talks about strengthening poles and wires and moving assets out of flood zones and all of that, if we are going to talk about poles and wires, why on earth we would talk about upgrading the existing poles and wires and then putting an extra 250 kV next to the existing power network instead of bulldozing through regional Victoria like they are doing to construct VNI West, which is completely void of logic, is beyond me. But I have spoken about that plenty of times in this place, and the government continues to just push through with massive transmission projects, particularly through the Buloke shire council. They have got communities now at war with one another – some that would like to host renewable energy projects. I need to make that clear too: communities throughout regional Victoria are not anti transition to renewables. They are not anti renewables. They are anti governments coming in and just bulldozing through without consultation. That is what we are anti. We are not anti the transition; we are not anti renewables. We are anti lack of consultation; we are anti lack of transparency. We are anti the lack of community input, and we are anti the lack of community benefit, if I am completely honest, because at this point there has been no obvious presentation from this government of any larger community benefit – no regional fund, no infrastructure funds, no clear direction on how communities that are being bulldozed over are actually going to benefit from this.

VNI West – that is a trigger term if I have ever heard one for those in my communities – has shattered trust in the very communities it claims to be protecting. It cuts through prime agricultural land, and it affects generational farming families that have been there forever, who are now considering just walking away. It carves transmission easements through productive country that feeds the state, the nation and the world, when there are existing easements there that you could use. Upgrade the poles and wires that need it and just add an upgrade. But what have landholders experienced? They have experienced consultation that feels merely performative – tick the box.

A member interjected.

Jade BENHAM: We got consultold, exactly. In fact I know there is a consultation with VicGrid open at the moment – Leader of the Nationals, you will love this – and that consultation ends on 15 ‍March. In no way has the community been told that that consultation is open – no ads in papers. There might be ads on their website, but unless you are going to that website, you do not actually know. What they have done, though, is they have booked some ads in local papers through the Buloke Shire Council. The Buloke Times will be one and maybe the Sea Lake and Wycheproof Times Ensign. Those small papers have booked those ads, and guess when they have booked their ads for: 12 March. When did I say the consultation ends? 15 March. Three days – you cannot make this stuff up. It is absolutely mind boggling. So not only do they not consult, they are actively now trying to avoid consultation with the communities that this affects. It is disgusting. It is just another example of how regional communities are being bulldozed over in the name of renewable energy and energy transition. It stinks, and we will not stand for it, not for a second.

Not only does this bill do a lot of other things, it also expands the powers of VicGrid, introducing flexibility in renewable energy zone declarations. We heard from the Leader of the Nationals earlier that these changes were only made recently. VicGrid only had amendments in 2024, I think it was, and now they are changing them – and last year. Again, like I said, every time there are the words ‘energy legislation amendments’ on the government business program, people through my electorate shudder, and we get very, very nervous. It introduces special rules for so-called transitional projects that may be advanced without meeting the full suite of planning and environment effects statement requirements. This is going to cause angst for those not only in the Buloke Shire Council but in Yarriambiack as well – those around Hopetoun, who have wind turbine companies knocking on their doors. There have been rumours – and this is where you should listen to the communities – that I have been hearing through landholders that the EES requirements are going to be swept under the rug. I am the eternal optimist most of the time – this job has changed me, believe me – and I would say, ‘No, they have to.’ This is a government that claims that environmental protections matter and that they want to save the environment, until it is politically inconvenient, don’t they? It is proven that if you listen to the communities, they know what is going on. They know.

If the government has any consideration for these communities or genuine confidence in its transmission planning, then it should welcome the scrutiny and the feedback instead of avoiding it. It should welcome full environmental assessments, I would have thought. Wouldn’t you? It should welcome robust planning processes so we are getting it done right the first time. Wouldn’t that be helpful? It might make sense. It is certainly not the habit here, though, is it? Again, whenever we see the words ‘energy legislation amendment’ we get very, very nervous. Resilience is not achieved by sidelining landholders. It is not achieved by centralising power and obscuring costs. If energy transition is going to succeed, it has got to be built on trust, and that is the trust of the regional communities that they are going to go straight through. That trust has been completely eroded, and it will continue to be if they insist on using regional Victoria as a transmission corridor rather than a community.

 Anthony CIANFLONE (Pascoe Vale) (12:10): I rise to support the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. This is a bill that builds on our ongoing work and ambition as a state Labor government to foster a strong, reliable, renewable, resilient and affordable energy network that keeps the lights on and supply flowing for all Victorians. It is a bill that takes action to ensure our energy supply and infrastructure are strengthened, especially in the face of more extreme and volatile weather events. This summer has shown us the increasing impact that climate change is having on our lives and on our infrastructure. In January alone we experienced widespread bushfires, flash floods and record temperatures. These catastrophic conditions have impacted our electricity distribution network – the small poles and wires at street level – causing a higher than usual number of power outages, including in my community. Crews have been working around the clock in extreme conditions to repair the network and restore power during this time, and I thank and acknowledge every single one of them for that work.

However, while we acknowledge the hard work of the crews on the ground, we must also acknowledge that the distribution businesses that own the poles and wires have not been prepared for the new reality of extreme weather driven by climate change. Victoria’s electricity distribution network was privatised by the Liberal government in the 1990s and is now owned and operated by private companies, with network expenditure approved on a five-yearly basis by the Australian Energy Regulator. Along with selling off the SEC, it was the Liberals – the Kennett government – who privatised the electricity distribution network. As climate change drives more extreme weather like January’s heatwave, the poles and wires that make up the distribution network are subject to damage. For too long many of these private energy distribution network operators have simply not been making the necessary investments to maintain strong, robust and resilient energy infrastructure, and that is why the Victorian Labor government has intervened to ensure that private businesses do spend more on increasing network resilience to help keep the power on.

The events of this summer are just the latest in a series of extreme weather events that have led to widespread and prolonged power outages. In June and October 2021 Victoria experienced two extreme storms which caused unprecedented damage to the electricity network. The 21 June storm caused the largest electricity outage in the state’s history. At its peak there were nearly 250,000 ‍households and businesses without power. The damage caused by the June storm was largely concentrated around the Dandenongs – we heard the member for Monbulk talk to some extent on this ‍– and required an almost total rebuild of the network in very difficult terrain and circumstances.

Following the 21 June storm the Ministry for Energy and Resources initiated the distribution network resilience review, which led to an expert panel and sought recommendations on improving the resilience of the network and the response to extreme weather events. These recommendations centred around improvements to communication with critical infrastructure operators, enhanced public messaging to support community preparedness and faster support for power-dependent customers. The second phase of these changes was led by the expert panel and sought recommendations to improve the resilience of the network and the response to these extreme weather events. The panel made eight core recommendations and 35 subrecommendations. We passed legislation, the Energy Legislation Amendment (Electricity Outage Emergency Response and Other Matters) Act 2023, which allows the government to direct the power companies to provide information to the Victorian public and assist in the delivery of relief activities during and after electricity outage emergencies.

However, this was soon surpassed by the number of outages caused by the storms in October of that same year. At the peak of the October storm more than 525,000 households – nearly a quarter of all Victorian homes – were left without power. This storm affected a much larger area, and prolonged outages were experienced in western Victoria, the Mornington Peninsula and the Gippsland region. A third storm on 13 February 2024 broke the record for the third time, with 531,000 homes losing power at the peak of the event. Following these catastrophic storms the minister initiated the network outage review, again led by an expert panel, and key themes that came out of that included the need for better planning by the distribution businesses, the use of temporary generation in town centres, improving the performance of vulnerable feeder lines and updating customer communication tools.

Just last week, on 27 January, Victoria of course experienced record hot temperatures and record electricity demand. On that day Victoria did have sufficient reserves of generating capacity, but the combination of bushfires, the burning out of poles and wires and heat-related equipment failure saw 100,000 homes lose power. Nearly all of these outages were restored by the following day, but this event again highlighted the need for a proactive approach to increasing the resilience of our network in the face of accelerating climate change. These outages also heavily impacted my community across Pascoe Vale, Coburg and Brunswick West. These local outages, as I said, were caused by a combination of bushfires affecting electricity assets across the regions, trees falling on poles and wires across my community with the high winds and heat-related equipment failure too throughout my community.

As of 8:30 pm on 27 January there were around 2300 homes locally that had remained without power for a prolonged period. Crews of course did work hard overnight to restore power to many as quickly as possible, with more than 4000 homes locally which experienced these outages that afternoon or evening having their power restored by that night. As a result, I was contacted of course by many local residents in real time conveying their concerns, particularly those who experienced those prolonged outages until the morning of 28 January.

Following on from this recent major local incident, but also following other similar related incidents over recent times, I have since taken the opportunity to make refreshed representations to the minister for energy and the CEO of Jemena requesting a specific response and briefing on what exactly Jemena is doing and/or intends to do to invest in and upgrade the resilience of our local energy infrastructure across the northern suburbs and Merri-bek. Along with this, that is why we are moving this bill, which will hold privatised electricity companies like Jemena to account.

Since privatisation in the 1990s the distribution network has been owned and operated by private companies. Across Victoria there are five electricity distributors, including Jemena, which looks after the north-western suburbs; Powercor Australia, which looks after the western suburbs and western Victoria; AusNet Services, which looks after the outer northern and eastern suburbs and eastern Victoria; United Energy Distribution, which looks after the southern suburbs and Mornington Peninsula; and of course CitiPower, which looks after the city and the inner-ring suburbs. In terms of gas distributors, we have AusNet Services, Multinet Gas and Australian Gas Networks as well. Victoria’s distribution network consists of 147,900 kilometres of distribution lines and 1.3 million power poles. The network is split into five distribution areas. AusNet control 45,985 kilometres of those lines and 417,000 of those power poles; Powercor, CitiPower and United control around 95,000 kilometres of those distribution lines and 858,000 power poles; and Jemena, which looks after my community, is responsible for 6800 kilometres of distribution lines and 61,200 power poles. Network costs make up about 40 per cent of the typical household power bill, so we have to be careful of course not to gold-plate the network and increase costs beyond what is reasonable for the consumers.

Every five years these companies submit network expenditure plans to the independent regulator, the Australian Energy Regulator, for assessment and approval, and state governments do not fund or control these network upgrades. However, since 2021, when severe storms caused record outages across Victoria, our government has intervened to ensure that private network businesses spend more on increasing network resilience under the national rules. We have done this because we recognise the impact that outages have on people’s lives, and impacts are not always recognised by the existing national framework, but it is also why we are taking further action through this bill.

This bill’s primary purpose is to obligate the electricity distribution network companies to publish network resilience plans to ensure investments in network upgrades that reduce power outages. We will do this by amending the Electricity Safety Act 1998 to provide new obligations for Victorian electricity distribution businesses to prepare resilience plans every five years and submit the resilience plans to the independent safety regulator, Energy Safe Victoria, to monitor and enforce compliance. This will increase Victorian electricity distribution businesses’ accountability by ensuring resilience initiatives are visible and encourage Victorian distribution businesses to adopt a proactive network and community resilience strategy.

There are quite a number of other amendments throughout this bill as well, but of course this is a bill that builds on our ongoing work to build, as I said, a sustainable, resilient, robust and renewable energy sector network, and it is all about our broader package of work. We are bringing back the SEC. Public-owned power and clean energy are now powering public assets and institutions – our schools, our hospitals, our transport network and our football stadiums as well. Fifty-four solar farms and rooftop solar account for 16 per cent of our electricity. Wind farms contribute 24 per cent of the state’s power. As I said in that regard, as of last year 44.6 per cent of the state’s electricity generation is from renewable energy, above our legislated 40 per cent target. As well, we have developed a clear vision for an offshore wind sector, and despite what some on the other side may contest, renewables are keeping energy prices low. Victoria’s average wholesale price is $78 per megawatt hour, compared to $103 in New South Wales, $96 in Tasmania, $87 in South Australia and $85 in Queensland. We are also supporting that with real action for people with the cost of living and the cost of energy through the $100 power saving bonus; the energy compare website, which saves people an average of $240 when they change providers; and Solar Victoria rebates, the energy default offer, the energy assistance program, hot water rebates, the savings finder and so much more.

 John PESUTTO (Hawthorn) (12:20): I rise to speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. Two years ago to the day I remember standing up and asking the Premier why her government would not agree to an upper house inquiry into the storms of February 2024. We all remember those storms. The Premier said she would have none of it. They would not agree to an upper house inquiry, and we as an opposition worked very hard two years ago to corral the support in the upper house to ensure that there could be a proper review of the government’s failures and that resilience in our distribution network was achieved. The government refused that. I remember visiting Mirboo North – I think other speakers on this side of the house have spoken about this too – and seeing massive trees that had been just ripped out of the ground like toothpicks, houses destroyed and people traumatised.

Do you know what the saddest aspect is? Much of the damage to the distribution network could in fact have been avoided. Do you know why? Because in June and October of 2021, there were severe storms, as most of us will recall, and some 1 million or so homes in Victoria were without power for substantial periods. There was a review at that time, and the review made a number of recommendations. Chief among those recommendations was a proposal that the government should seek an amendment to the Australian energy rules that would require distribution firms to include, in their investment plans, schemes for building resilience of the distribution network. So just think: five years ago the government was given recommendations about the need and the urgency to build resilience in the distribution network. It did nothing.

Even if you take 2021 as a baseline, why couldn’t the government have acted with sufficient dispatch to ensure that when future storms of a severe nature occurred, as in February 2024, the system would have been more resilient? No-one should or can reasonably contend that damage would not have been caused and that people would not have been traumatised; those storms were severe. But we might not ‍– in fact, it is almost certain to say we would not – have suffered as much damage to the distribution network as that which saw towers collapse in Anakie, north of Geelong. We saw Loy Yang A trip because of the interruptions to distribution and energy supply.

This government, like with so many other bills, brings to this house things we will support, because frankly we were calling for better resilience in our energy distribution network. But it has taken five years for the government to bring this bill to this house. So it is with some frustration that I say this, because it is like the bill we debated in this house yesterday on improving child protection and family services – the government has received warning after warning, and then it brings a bill which deals with only part of it.

It is so important because we have seen the added costs that a failure to invest in resilience has caused the system. I noted with a great deal of interest this week comments by the CEO of Origin Energy, whom I know, Acting Speaker Farnham, you and I have had the pleasure of sitting down with on occasion – Frank Calabria. He made public comments, which I think are a good summary of one of the biggest challenges we face in the transmission journey. He has made the point that although there have been a number of pressures which are exerting downward pressure on wholesale power prices – benign weather, more generation and output from renewables across the national electricity market and fewer interruptions to the coal fleet, so fewer outages amongst the coal fleet operations, which has seen downward pressure on wholesale prices – what he identifies as the biggest risk to affordability of energy is the transmission project. So it is really important that governments act with urgency, and this government has not acted with urgency. You can see what happens when they do not and when they take their eye off the ball.

Last year we debated the fourth increase, if I am not mistaken, in the costings for VNI West. It started off at $1.8 billion, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator. Now we are looking at $11 billion. It will probably go above that. There is no reason why it should stop at that when there have been so many revisions to the estimates of the costs. This week Transgrid, which is building EnergyConnect East, an important piece of the transmission project which joins South Australia to New South Wales with a spur down into Victoria, a $3.5 billion project – it will be more now – has applied to the Australian Energy Regulator to be able to pass on to consumers an extra $1.1 billion, and that is what is going to happen down here with Transmission Company Victoria and VNI West. It is almost certain to happen with Western Renewables Link. We are seeing across the transmission portfolio just rising costs.

Add to that the mounting community resistance. Acting Speaker Farnham, I know you and others on our side have spoken eloquently about this, and I have certainly addressed this in my comments over recent times. With population growth, with the need to deliver more housing, with the need to achieve greater food security, with the need to support regional and rural businesses, we need to make sure that in terms of community buy-in for these projects we are securing the social licence needed, because there are very real, serious and legitimate concerns in regional Victoria in particular about decisions of government that ride roughshod over the interests and views of the community. What makes it worse is that this government is using – in a cavalier fashion, I would argue – the development facilitation program, and there are a number of projects which the government is rushing through under the DFP which mean that communities and affected stakeholders have no ability to contest those. Those projects just go through, and that is not a particularly fair way to proceed. It is not even a sensible way, because what we are seeing is, if you do not have community buy-in, you will ultimately encounter resistance, which can often mean further delay down the track. Look at the Port of Hastings application to Minister Plibersek on the need to develop a stabling facility for offshore wind. The government did not take into account not only the implications of the Ramsar convention, which was the ultimate ground on which the federal government rejected that initial application, but also the community resistance to that. The government just proceeded. It had not genuinely consulted with the public.

I do think that the government would be better off if it stopped acting so arrogantly and actually took the concerns seriously. My appreciation of the many communities I have spoken to over the years is that people, in my view, overwhelmingly support an orderly, sensible, affordable transition to renewable energy, because ultimately we all want to bequeath to future generations a world that is sustainable. I strongly believe that. I actually do strongly advocate for that. But I place emphasis on the words ‘orderly, sensible, responsible, achievable transition’. The government here, on whatever front you look at, whether it is offshore wind and the collapse and withdrawal of many project proponents who have withdrawn their feasibility licences, including many that had undertaken advanced works, or onshore wind farms, are imposing them on communities without consultation. I want to make it clear I am not advocating that ‘consultation’ is a code word for not building things. I do support the transition, but that transition will be achievable only if you engage communities responsibly.

To the government I say: you have brought the bill forward. We are not opposing it. We called for greater resilience many years ago. The government was warned many years ago that it needed to invest in resilience. It ignored the findings from its own review. Here we are five years later, after severe storms in February 2024 that visited damage that might have been avoided in substantial ways and recent bushfires. Think about what might have been avoided if the government had acted responsibly and expeditiously.

 Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (12:30): It is regional and rural communities that can experience the worst impacts of climate change, and the imperative to accelerate the transition is not just for the city slickers, it is actually for everyone in Victoria, not least those who are managing in the agricultural sector. They get hit hard. The increasing severity of storms and droughts et cetera is, without a doubt, impacting our regional and rural communities, so they are absolutely our priority and certainly at the forefront when we are not only thinking about but taking successive action over many years. I do want to refute the proposition that we have done nothing, and I shall do that in a moment.

Firstly, just to set the premise of this bill, the bill’s primary purpose is to obligate the electricity distribution network companies to publish network resilience plans to ensure investment in network upgrades that reduce power outages. The underlying premise is transparency and accountability. It will do this by amending the Electricity Safety Act 1998 to provide new obligations for Victorian electricity distribution businesses to prepare resilience plans every five years and submit the resilience plans to the independent safety regulator Energy Safe Victoria to monitor and enforce compliance. This will increase Victorian electricity distribution businesses’ accountability by ensuring resilience initiatives are visible and encourage Victorian distribution businesses to adopt a proactive network and community resilience strategy.

I do want to put a caveat, because I think there was an inference particularly by the member for Polwarth about who was actually responsible when it comes to the poles and wires. Since privatisation in the 1990s, the distribution network has been owned and operated by private companies. Every five years those companies submit network expenditure plans to the independent national regulator, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), for assessment and approval. State governments do not fund and control network upgrades, so let that be clear on the record. However, since 2021, when severe storms caused record outages, the Victorian government has intervened to ensure that the private network businesses must spend more on increasing network resilience under the national rules – just to be clear where the responsibility and liability lies. We have done this because we recognise the impact that outages have on people’s lives – very significant impacts. No doubt they have been well articulated in the chamber today and previously. These impacts are not always recognised by the existing national framework.

On a further point that I do want to articulate, the member for Hawthorn said the government has done nothing. Let me refute that point emphatically. There was a review in 2021 following the June 2021 storm. The Minister for Energy and Resources initiated the distribution network resilience review, which was led by an expert panel and sought recommendations on improving the resilience of the network in response to extreme weather events. In response to the review, the government invested $7.5 million in crucial backup power systems in 24 towns hit by major storms in 2021, including batteries and rooftop solar on community buildings, henceforth really building that localised resilience and the ability to bounce back quicker. The energy systems provide power to community hubs when damage to the network causes a widespread outage, allowing residents to shower, heat food, charge devices and access information.

We passed legislation, the Energy Legislation Amendment (Electricity Outage Emergency Response and Other Matters) Act 2023, which allows the government to direct power companies to provide information to the Victorian public and assist in the delivery of relief activities during and after an electricity outage emergency. We submitted a rule change request to the national rule maker, the Australian Energy Market Commission, to ensure that network resilience is considered when the AER assesses the expenditure proposals from the distribution companies. This rule change was accepted and will apply to the next five-yearly plans, which will cover the 2026 to 2031 period. It is important to factor in the years that are elicited here, when we are talking about the government doing nothing. Well, I can profoundly and emphatically refute that, and I now have it on the record.

There is further information to be provided here to refute the claims, which were incorrect, of the member for Hawthorn. Following catastrophic storms in February 2024 the minister initiated the network outage review, again led by an expert panel. This second review focused on the operational response of the distribution businesses to prolonged outages. I should note further that the panel engaged deeply with affected communities, distribution businesses, regulators, emergency services, peak bodies and social and community organisations. This included in-person community sessions, which had over 150 attendees across all sessions. The panel made 19 recommendations, all of which were supported in full, in part or in principle by the government. Key themes included better planning by the distribution businesses, the use of temporary generation in town centres, improving the performance of vulnerable feeder lines and updating customer communication tools, and we have seen these measures implemented this summer. For example, AusNet set up a temporary generator to power the Corryong township following the fire that devastated the region and destroyed electricity infrastructure. So fundamentally, when we are looking at resilience plans, measures that have been undertaken will force the distribution businesses to spend money on upgrades that reduce outages, if I put it as a rounded principle.

It is all very well for the opposition to laud how they would do magnificent things when it comes to renewables, but I do not believe it for a second, because we know that the Leader of the Opposition says one thing in Kew and another thing in the regions. She says she supports renewables to her constituents in Kew, but her anti-renewables policies were announced at a misinformation convention headed by Barnaby Joyce. The opposition have said that they will place new restrictions on renewable energy if elected. They will force proponents to undertake independent agricultural and economic impact assessments and allow objectors to delay projects through VCAT.

We know climate change is here now. We know that the cost of energy will only go up, save for the measures that we have already implemented, noting that we have consistently the lowest wholesale prices in the nation – and I already heard a learned colleague speak to this. Renewables are keeping electricity prices low. Victoria’s average wholesale price was $78 per megawatt hour, compared to $103 in New South Wales, $96 in Tasmania, $87 in South Australia and $85 in Queensland, and I am talking about 2025. But we must do more; we must keep on this trail. We note that in 2025 renewables generated 44.6 per cent of the state’s electricity generation – above our legislated 40 per cent – but we are not stopping there. We know that we have legislated renewable energy targets, and these are mechanisms to give the market certainty but also to keep us on track.

When we are talking about the opposition we should say that at their core the measures that the opposition plan to implement, should they be elected, are only targeted at renewable energy and transmission projects – funny that – not the fossil fuel industry. Those opposite have no idea how to plan for our energy future, and they are going back to the future with their renewables policies. When they were last in government their planning restrictions meant 14 wind farm projects were abandoned in 2012, renewable energy jobs were slashed by 25 per cent and retail power prices increased by 34.1 ‍per cent. In today’s terms that would mean an extra $570 on the typical annual power bill, based on the current Victorian default offer of $1677. This is eye watering: an estimated $4 billion in investment was lost. While they think they are the party of the free market, $4 billion in investment was lost – eye watering. Their plan will result in higher power prices and less reliability.

I note that we have incrementally undertaken a number of very significant measures to be able to control the price of electricity in any case: the Victorian default offer, the energy compare website – you can go on there easily, and you can compare prices and make sure that you are getting a fair deal. We have also had the power saving bonus – a number of those. The latest one will acquit by the end of March, so it is important for people to get in there and get their $100. Through the SEC we have also been able to accelerate our investment in renewables. I will note the Melbourne renewable energy hub, located near Melton, is a major 600-megawatt, 1.6-gigawatt-hour, utility-scale battery storage project that became fully operational in December 2025, so this is building further resilience into the network and particularly in a localised mechanism. This is what we need now, but also into the future. We are doing it incrementally, and we are doing it for the sake of all Victorians.

 Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (12:40): I rise to speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026, which brings together a wide range of reforms, some of which we support, some we question and some that require significant amendment before they should proceed. Let me begin with the resilience reforms. This bill introduces a legally enforceable obligation for electricity distribution businesses to prepare and implement network resilience plans. These plans must be accepted by Energy Safe Victoria and will outline how businesses intend to prepare for and respond to severe weather events. That includes strengthening poles to withstand high winds, reallocating assets from flood-prone areas and deploying mobile generators to support communities when disaster strikes.

The bill also amends life support provisions in both the Electricity Industry Act 2000 and the Gas Industry Act 2001. This is intended to support priority restoration of power after prolonged outages, a recommendation from the electricity distribution network resilience review. However, there are real concerns here as the government has not released the departmental review underpinning these changes and the bill allows eligibility to be altered by regulation rather than legislation. So here we are again: the government amending legislation before releasing the review that supposedly justifies the change. This is becoming a pattern, and it becomes quite chaotic. We will of course not support any reduction in life support categories, and we will be seeking reassurances on that point.

The bill also revisits the Victorian energy upgrades program. The government now concedes that its own 2025 amendments would unintentionally exclude a major business model responsible for a substantial share of the program activity. The state government rushed this in last April, and now they are rushing to take it out. Honestly, this government does not put any thought into the creation of its legislation, and you can see that with these amendments that came in in April and are going out again in less than 12 months. They are not considering unintended consequences, and this is basic policy work. It is embarrassing and it is careless, and the Victorian public deserves better.

The bill also introduces what the government calls ‘greater flexibility’ in declaring renewable energy zones, even where no transmission project is proposed on the planning horizon. What is the point of creating these zones with research and so-called community consultation – which I question – when they are going to be sidestepped or ignored altogether? Communities like Garvoc in South-West Coast know exactly what this looks like: zones declared without proper justification, without proper planning and without any genuine respect for people who live on and work the land. These are people who rise before dawn to milk the cows, who work hard every single day and who carry the responsibility of feeding our state, our nation and our world. Their diligence, their skill and their contribution deserve respect, not to be brushed aside by decisions made far away from the farm gate. The Allan Labor government’s intention to blanket 70 per cent of our state in renewable projects should be ringing alarm bells. It shows unmistakably that farmers are being sidelined and treated as secondary to the government’s renewable energy targets. The government should remember that food is vital also. We want a sensible transition to renewables; it is expected. We are not anti renewable energy, but it should be a transition that is sensible.

The bill also enables VicGrid to adopt new methods of assessing and issuing the renewable energy zones under the REZ scheme. But where is the community consultation? Where is the engagement with the people who farm the land, produce our food and carry the burden of these decisions, the people whose land this government treats as if it is their own? Instead the bill legislates the circumstances in which the government can enter private property – people coming onto your own land, people who have no understanding of the nuance of livestock or crop management. It is extraordinary and frankly offensive that this government believes that it has the right to walk onto a farm as though it were just another parcel of land on a map. The reality is in most cases a farm is also a family home. It is where the children are raised, where generations have poured their sweat and their pride into the soil, and it is where every fence post and every paddock holds a story. To think that the bureaucrats can simply enter that space – a place of work, yes, but also a place of safety, memory and identity – shows a complete disregard for the people who live there. These families are not just running businesses, they are living their lives on that land, and they deserve the basic respect of being treated as people, not obstacles. This is yet another example of decisions being made about communities, not with communities.

An area of this bill I find most concerning is the creation of special rules for so-called transitional projects. These projects, including some in development stage, can skip the planning stage, including the environment effects statement (EES) process. This is alarming, and this is exactly what our community is so anxious about in South-West Coast with regard to the offshore wind project announced a couple of years ago. The federal Labor government announced the Warrnambool and Port Fairy offshore wind project before any environment effects works had begun, so they had no intention of communicating or doing the processes. They said: ‘It is going to happen.’ It seems that the Allan Labor government, unable to meet their own renewable energy targets, are now providing a pathway for developers to bypass proper process. That is a significant erosion of scrutiny, and it is of particular concern in South-West Coast.

We have already seen what happens when renewable projects are fast-tracked without robust oversight or proper consultation with local communities. Last year we learned that many wind farm turbine towers containing asbestos – banned in Australia in 2003 – are putting farmers, firefighters and the environment at risk when being dismantled or when people are responding to fires. This bill might allow the government to push ahead with projects, but it does so by stripping away the very checks and balances that protect our environment and our communities. It is yet another example of a government more interested in meeting targets they know they are falling short on than safeguarding the valuable land that produces our food, or our whales and their migratory pathway and nursery grounds. This is a failure of environmental responsibility and it is a betrayal of community trust. No wonder the community is sceptical.

We have watched the state government ignore not only community concerns but even the findings of their own federal Labor colleagues when it comes to environmental impacts, including the plans that would see the destruction of the Ramsar World Heritage–listed wetlands near Hastings. They were told to stop, but they say they intend to push on and find a way anyway. It seems renewable targets are more important than the environment, the economy or the services that we are all missing out on. How can communities have confidence when governments treat the environment like an inconvenience and treat people who live and work in and care for these places as though their concerns do not matter? This pattern of secrecy, contempt and disregard has eroded trust. People see the corruption, they see the shortcuts and they see a government that has forgotten who it is meant to serve: the community and the environment, not its own political agenda.

The Allan Labor government’s complacency has become impossible to ignore, and the findings in Watson’s Rotting from the Top report only confirm what communities like mine have been feeling for years. It exposes a culture where accountability has slipped, standards have been eroded and voices of ordinary Victorians are treated as an afterthought. When a government shrugs off warning signs this serious, it sends a clear message that integrity is optional and community trust is expendable. We deserve better than a government that looks the other way while mismanagement festers at the very top.

Across the bill there are several overarching concerns. The government has refused to reveal the cost impacts of these measures on household energy bills, key reviews have not been released, major changes are being made to legislation that has already been recently amended, and the bill contains powers and certain processes for projects to bypass proper planning and environmental scrutiny. It should not have the transitional project provisions that allow projects to avoid a full EES and planning requirements. This bill contains measures we support, measures we can live with and measures we cannot accept without amendment. Our responsibility is always to ensure Victorians are protected as consumers, as energy users and as a community entitled to transparency and proper process.

 Josh BULL (Sunbury) (12:50): I am pleased to have the opportunity just before lunch to make a contribution to this important bill before the house, the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. I follow on from a number of members who have spoken on this piece of legislation that is before the house this afternoon and go to the points around certainty, reliability and sustainability across the network and making those improvements as we deal with a number of different, changing factors. Those factors are, as other members have touched on, the increasing number and severity of severe weather events, changing population and changing patterns in usage. What we know as a state, as local members and within our local communities is those changes are occurring each and every day and have occurred over time. As the state grows by around 100,000 people per annum and we of course have differences in where those people move to and where people choose to live, we must also make for reliability and certainty as we grapple with those severe weather events that I mentioned earlier, knowing that improvement to the network is such a fundamental and important role and responsibility. As those matters are dealt with in a really live environment, we know the importance of that reliability when it comes to all of the services and all of the functions across the grid.

What we have set out to do for more than a decade now is invest in renewable energy, back in the Victorian renewable energy target and back in projects that I have spoken of earlier in the house, like the big battery and like those investments in solar panels for roofs and batteries for homes. Making a more resilient, more sustainable network is something that we have focused on and continue to deliver. What we know and understand is that the mechanisms and the functions of the network need to be able to be operated in that dynamic and live environment. We see, Acting Speaker Farnham – and I am sure you know, as a good local member – what happens when we do not have those services, what happens in the event of severe weather, what happens when poles and wires get hit, what happens in those instances where there is a major accident on a freeway and infrastructure gets taken out. That then changes the response and our ability to deal with that response. What we set out to do through both this piece of legislation and other initiatives that I have mentioned earlier is create that framework whereby we improve sustainability and certainty and of course work to drive down cost.

We know that not just here in Victoria and not just across the country but right throughout the globe, the environment is grappling with the cost of energy and the cost of living, which we talk about often in this chamber and outside as well. We know that we need to make these investments to be able to provide for more supply, which goes to driving down the cost of energy. I had the opportunity to have the Minister for Energy and Resources out to the electorate last year to meet Adam and Effie, two terrific local Sunbury residents that do not live too far from my place. We sat down and had a cuppa and talked about the renewable energy targets. Really importantly for them from a household point of view, we had a conversation about the energy efficiency upgrades, the solar panels that were on the roof and the battery that Adam and Effie had just installed at the premises. I think that gives you a really practical realisation of just how important these upgrades can be and the pride that goes with a lot of the work that is done in providing for that certainty with that additional support and infrastructure.

The bill’s primary purpose, as others have mentioned, is to obligate the electricity distribution network companies to publish those network resilience plans to ensure that investment in the network upgrades reduces power outages. It will do this by amending the Electricity Safety Act 1998 to provide new obligations for Victorian electricity distribution businesses to prepare resilience plans every five years and submit the resilience plans to the independent safety regulator, Energy Safe Victoria, to monitor and enforce compliance. This will increase Victorian electricity distribution businesses’ accountability by ensuring resilience initiatives are visible and encourage Victorian distribution businesses to adopt a proactive network and community resilience strategy.

I think canvassing those points in terms of the functions of the legislation but setting out the purposes around what needs to happen by way of certainty is really important. There is a recognition, though, and an honesty in understanding there is no way to prevent power outages entirely. I do not think anyone can comfortably get up and say that power outages will never happen again; that is just not reality. But what we can do, across the vast network of 150,000 k’s of wires and 1.3 million poles which are exposed to the elements, is consider the impact of network upgrades on bills, with the costs of building and maintaining the network that do in so many instances – and I have heard others speak about this as well – get passed on to consumers. Network costs make up about 40 per cent of the typical household bill, so we have to be careful in how we approach this framework, notwithstanding the matters that I have mentioned before.

Having improved resilience, having improved safety and making those necessary changes in every possible way goes to what we strive to do – that is, to create certainty in the market, to drive down costs and to be able to do so in many different ways. Reflecting on the minister’s visit last year that I mentioned earlier, the opportunity to have the conversations at the kitchen table and to listen and understand – and certainly all members in this house are paying a range of different household bills – makes for an understanding as to what those bills go to and how the network effectively operates not just across Victoria but across the country.

I think a fascinating conversation that I like to, in many ways, look at from a more scientific point of view goes to how you move energy across the country, how that energy is used and at what time of the day and certainly knowing and understanding the opportunities that are out there and the technology that has come so far even in the last 10 years. Government has a role and a really important responsibility to provide for incentivised research that goes to improving efficiency, and those matters are very important when it comes to the work of the government, knowing that those technology upgrades give us the chance and the opportunity to improve the network and improve safety. When you boil it all down, it is just about improving local communities and their lives and making for a better and more certain place as we grapple with, as I mentioned earlier, the combined forces of increased population growth and differences in the way energy is consumed and used, certainly in the context of things like AI but also with changing climates and how we manage them as we go forward not just as a state but as a nation.

I think for so long we lacked that leadership that we needed in Canberra to be able to deal with some of these matters. Thankfully, I think we have now got that, but we have still got challenges in the way that we approach this. I would love to see everyone come to the table in the spirit of making a safer, more efficient, more effective energy market, which is something that I think we should all be striving for, because when this is politicised the community suffers. When this is taken forward in the right way, it is the right approach. With those comments I very happily commend the bill to the house.

Sitting suspended 1:00 pm until 2:02 pm.

Business interrupted under standing orders.

The SPEAKER: I acknowledge in the gallery the former member for Lara and former minister John Eren.