Gas supply and prices
Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (17:20): (118) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Energy and Resources, recently honoured with the additional title of Minister for Climate Action. It relates to the costings and calculations carried out by her department in last year’s Gas Substitution Roadmap; in particular I am interested to know more detail about the specific cost calculated for the electrification of Victorian suburbs currently using gas. The issue has been brought to prominence recently by figures produced by the federal Parliamentary Budget Office for independent senator David Pocock, which show that it would cost over $11 million to electrify a single ACT suburb of just 1000 houses. While the minister and her colleagues make much of the falling price of electricity – not that we have seen it really, but anyway, she makes a lot of it – in contrast to the rising price of gas, this estimate suggests the capital cost of conversion for the entire state of Victoria would be enormous. Indeed the estimate extrapolated from Senator Pocock’s figures are that electrification would cost more than $66 billion nationwide. I have long thought it was in the minister’s interest and that of gas opponents to restrict the supply of gas and see the prices rise, but in the interests of Victoria, is a transition to purely electric power truly affordable? So the action I seek from the minister is a full disclosure of the costings as made by her department. Without this there will never be sufficient public trust to support this vast commitment of taxpayer dollars.