Grievance Debate

ENERGY PRICES

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite) (15:21): I rise to advise the house of an energy policy announced by the opposition over the weekend, and I hope the minister for energy is able to stick around and listen carefully, because it contains some very innovative ideas on how we might get people's power prices down. The one question that everyone on this side of the house asks when stakeholders come in—

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Point of order, sir.

The SPEAKER: A point of order from the Minister for Transport.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: There is a bill before the house about smart meters, the Statutes Amendment (Smart Meters) Bill, No. 180. The member for Waite is now debating that bill in grievances.

The SPEAKER: Member for Waite, I am not sure if you were pre-empting debate or not, but nothing in the member for Waite's grievance should pre-empt debate on that bill.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH: Thank you, sir. Can I ask that the clock be reset, if it hasn't already. Thank you, sir. Mr Speaker, I think the Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy's interjection just indicates how touchy he is on this. He has no energy policy. The government has announced nothing. There has been silence. But the opposition has an energy reform policy, entitled 'Empowering the Consumer', and we announced it on the weekend. There is one thing that we ask, whenever someone comes into our office, particularly if they are a network company, and that is: how can we get people's power bills down? It is quite apparent, and it is enunciated in our policy, that the first and most important thing that needs to be done is regulatory reform.

The Productivity Commission released an excellent report earlier this year on the need for reform. It is pushing up the cost of energy across the country. The Productivity Commission's work is very, very focusing and compelling, and it points to fundamental flaws in the system that require national and consumer focused measures that remove the interlink regulatory barriers to the efficiency of electricity networks. It is a mess.

I encourage people to look at our report. It is on our websites. There are a number of things that need to be worked through, through the SCER, through the national reform arrangements. What this government should have been doing and this minister should have been doing is showing leadership and pushing for those reforms.

The second feature of our policy is monthly billing cycles. We want to see retailers offer to consumers, on a voluntary basis, an opportunity to see their account on a monthly basis so they have a signal as to their usage and so that they can better manage their affairs.

Of course, it must be an actual usage and, for that reason, in our policy we are getting behind the idea (on a voluntary basis only) of enabling retailers to offer smarter technologies to users in the way of smart meters so that they can better manage their own electricity usage so that all sorts of new opportunities are provided to them in regard to off peak management of their electricity devices—be it the washing machine, the dishwasher, the pump, you name it.

We want to see the same benefits extended to consumers, both households and small business, as are presently enjoyed in the hot water service which is hard wired to off peak. We want to see those benefits passed on. This can be done at no upfront cost to consumers with most of the costs absorbed by the retailers if they had monthly billing because simply they will offer contracts in a deregulated market that make it so.

The fourth point is that we want to abolish the Residential Energy Efficiency Scheme (REES). All the stakeholders agree pretty much that this has run its course. It is pushing up bills by $14 a year. We want to see it gone. There are other measures we will announce later to help those in need. Combined with these measures—abolishing the REES, smart meters, monthly billing and a regulatory form—we think we can deliver benefits well in excess of $200 a year to consumers and possibly better.

In regard to smart meter technologies more generally, I want to bring the attention of the house to work done by Professors Jonathan Borwein and David Bailey and their excellent articles, pointing to the fact that smart meters only transmit data for roughly 1.4 seconds a day at very low wattage. According to BC Hydro in Canada:

Exposure to radio frequency during a 20-year life span of a smart meter is equivalent to the exposure during a single 30-minute cell call.

Even this reckoning is exceedingly generous since the typical cell phone is held to the ear whereas smart meters are typically many feet away from humans. The World Health Organisation, in its report on electromagnetic stations and wireless technology, has completely refuted concerns that these were a health concern by saying there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations of wireless networks cause adverse health effects at all.

No matter how many scare tactics are applied out there, we live in a modern world. We have mobile phones, we have iPads, we have computers, we have modern technologies, and smarter technologies are going to come to the way we manage electricity. This is a great policy. I urge South Australians to have a look at it on our website. We are out there setting the agenda from opposition on energy reform.

Time expired.