Statutes Amendment (National Energy Laws) (Data Access) Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 1 May 2024.)

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (21:20): I take the opportunity today in parliament to speak about the Statutes Amendment (National Energy Laws) (Data Access) Bill and indicate that I am the lead speaker. Rest assured, we should be right in terms of not going too long into the night. We need to be mindful of people staying on late here. This is an important bill and it requires examination, but obviously we want other members of parliament to be able to do that as well.

Similar to other national energy laws that have come through in this place, it is another batch of reforms. This comes from the Energy Ministers' Meeting, where all the commonwealth and state energy ministers meet together and bring forward these bills. This particular bill seeks to amend a number of the national energy laws. We have the National Electricity (South Australia) Act 1996 and also the National Gas (South Australia) Act 2008.

In terms of the particulars of this bill—and there is a fair bit of legislative work in this—principally, if you break it down what it is looking to do is to allow AEMO to share protected data with some trusted prescribed bodies over and above what it already does. This has been in the pipeline for a time now. Back in 2017, this process first kicked off coming through the Energy Security Board, and they worked with the Australian Energy Regulator to develop not just this bill but a data strategy overall, I suppose you would say, for the national energy markets—the gas and electricity markets—and they came up with that strategy.

Even though most people in the real world work at fast pace, these bodies seemed to take a while to get moving. So it was not until 2019 that they actually commenced work on this and, not wanting to set the world on fire, it took until 2021 before they released their final recommendations about what their data strategy would be. It comprised two stages of reform and they had this consulted on.

Another two years down the track, over 2022-23, there was consultation and then here we have the first stage. We do not want to go too quick, we do not want to do two stages at once, so we are just doing one stage. That is what we have here in this bill, the Statutes Amendment (National Energy Laws) (Data Access) Bill before us, known as the initial reforms. That came through in May into this parliament as it does, because of course SA is the lead legislator in terms of dealing with national energy laws, which is good for the state. I think it has been said before that it at least gives the state a look at what is going on in that market, which is important.

So in this case, we see this bill landing here in our parliament. The previous bill, which we were talking about, was taken very seriously. We were sitting late to go through this important work. That is fair enough, but as I said, it has been here since May. It would have been very welcome to have debated it earlier, but here we are now debating this bill, important bill that it is.

As has been said previously with the national energy laws, the convention for changes to the national energy laws is that these legislative amendments are supported by the opposition, so of course I indicate that the opposition will be supporting this bill, because it is an instrument that then allows these laws to come into place not only in South Australia but in the other states in regard to the National Electricity Market. It is of great value and importance to South Australia that we get to be the lead legislator. Certainly, speaking with other members of parliament in other jurisdictions, a lot of this stuff goes through and they really are not aware of what is going on. At least we here in this parliament get to scrutinise what is going on, and I think it is important.

Maybe to underline that or to go through that in a bit of a summary, previously here in the parliament we have considered other reforms to both the gas and electricity markets. Reforms that have come through this place since 2022 include the east coast gas system amendments, consumer data right protection and gas pipelines. We have had reforms around market transparency, ministerial powers and, most recently, wholesale market monitoring.

In terms of the consultation around not only this bill but other bills that have preceded it—just making an observation—you would say that these reforms and the one that we see here seem to have a theme to them. They really continue a trend we see that reform that is being done through these changes to the national energy laws in both the electricity and gas markets seems to be more about delivering market transparency but also giving increased powers to the market bodies that are in charge of the markets. In this case, we have AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator. In other bills, it might be the Australian Energy Regulator or the Australian Energy Market Commission.

You would say it is an attempt to make the market better. It is an attempt to address the supply issues that have built up over at least a decade, maybe a bit more. These reforms, these changes, are telling the market bodies more and more about what is going on, but of course the flip side is that that data has to come from somewhere, and quite often it is coming from the market participants. That provides more of a compliance burden on them, more red tape.

If we are putting more red tape on there, is it going to give a productivity benefit? We talk about that with inflation and the consequences on wage growth. To have a high-performing economy, you want to have growth. You want to have wage growth and at the same time a commensurate amount, or ideally more, in productivity, and that then allows the economy to grow. Certainly, here, it is the same thing. What we would be looking for is: is this going to give productivity gains? For the stakeholders, the jury is out on that. There does not seem to be what you would call a productivity gain here in this situation, a corresponding effort to increase supply.

That might be getting more gas out of the ground and into the gas market, transported through the pipes into the gas market, or, in terms of the electricity market, getting more base load electricity generation into the market. Doing that before retiring some older coal-fired power generation would lead to more efficient markets. As I said, what stakeholders are seeing is that the effort is more in terms of compliance and reporting. When you are explaining that to families and businesses in South Australia—small businesses, big businesses, family businesses—they are struggling and battling with higher power prices and they are looking for relief, they are pleading for relief.

What they would like to see coming out of these energy ministers' meetings is work and legislation. In this case, what do we have? We have 13 pages of legislation. They would like to see 13 pages of legislation that will bring prices down. Instead, this is the legislation that is put before them. They can tell the market bodies what is going on very quickly. They do not need to have copious amounts of data being spat out, to read it, about what is going on: they can tell you. They just look at their power bills. We hear about those power bills in the papers, only as recently as this week, and I will touch on that a little bit later.

In terms of trying to explain what we are getting for putting this through, according to AEMO and the energy ministers, the new provisions put into the national electricity law and the national gas law will allow AEMO to disclose protected information to relative entities for a data sharing purpose. That will include the delivery of government services. Once provided, it will be used to help with government planning, presumably, with government policy, with programs and research in relation to energy.

You have data. In the world we live in now, data has high value. For a lot of these online social media companies, it is the data that is the worth of those companies, that actually becomes an asset for the companies. They give away free services and, of course, nothing in life is free. The reason they give away free services is that they can collect massive amounts of data. They have massive subscriber bases, with many data interactions effectively building up a profile of people. Data is important and has value in the world. Here we have legislation dealing with data, presumably, to try to inform different bodies.

Where will that data come from? The idea is that the data will come from consumers' meters, their power meters, the meter reading that comes through. It will come from distributed energy resources. That could be solar panels on roofs and the batteries sitting alongside houses or businesses. What is the usage of that? When do they turn on? It is really worthwhile taking a bit of time to consider this.

Those consumer meters, where they come out on, is that then fed into everyone's power bill? Power bills have a reading of what is on the meter, and from that both households and businesses have their power bills come out. What consumers and small businesses would have noticed is that when the former Liberal government was in place in South Australia those meter readings, their power bills, would have been coming down for the same meter reading. But now we are in the situation where unfortunately, for the same meter reading year on year, those power bills would be going up—in fact, going up sharply and significantly.

I have spoken previously in this place about the different reports put out around trying to get a feel for what the average power bill is year on year, whether for households or small businesses. One such report by one of the market body operators, the Australian Energy Regulator, is on the default market offer and, of course, there has been much commentary on that.

In the three default market offers that have come out since this government has been in place, March 2022, for the first two years the average household's power bill skyrocketed by $710. That is a 34 per cent increase on that rate. For businesses, it was even more. They had massive jumps in their energy bills; I think it was over 40 per cent in those two years, or upwards of $1,750. That is a massive jump just in the space of two years.

Businesses especially, but also households, set budgets. In the case of businesses, they set up a business plan on the cost of doing business and how they are actually going to make a profit. They build that in in terms of providing an offering to their customers, whether it is a product or a service. When one of their inputs shifts so dramatically, such as electricity prices, it puts businesses under extreme stress. In some cases, it makes them unprofitable. In terms of households, they quite often have fixed incomes, or the ability to grow their income is specified by the profession they are in and their ability for upwards movement. Again, they are having these costs come through.

I have talked about the surges in prices with businesses in my local area. Over time, power bills have become more and more of a significant component of their outgoings to the point now where it is a serious consideration for them, whereas previously it would be a cost they had to put up with but it was manageable. Instead, it is now a significant burden for them.

Thankfully, in the last default market offer prices came down, but probably not by as much as the federal energy minister would have you believe. In the news recently we have had commentary about the imposts on business. We had a spokesperson—so you would say it has come from Chris Bowen—trying to tell people that 'SA households on standard offers are seeing falls in energy bills of over 15 per cent'. I thought that seemed quite a lot, so I went and had a look at the latest standard offer that was released, and we saw that bills came down by between $41 and $63. Now, $63 off of the previous year's total of $2,279 is 2.76 per cent, and $41 off of the previous year's total of $2,787 is about 1.5 per cent.

So we see there figures put out into the media by the minister, who is in charge of what is going on Australia-wide, and you would have to say they are misleading and mischaracterising the effect, the size and the quantum of those releases. Of course, we will leave that to them to explain. It gives a good indication of being cautious about what is being said and what is coming out of the office of Chris Bowen, because there is a fair bit of hot air coming out of there. I think it would be wise for South Australians to maybe not heed that as much.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Come on, mate.

Mr PATTERSON: I think it is an important point to make. We will move on from this point, but we will say that bills overall for households in those three standard offers are up 32 per cent over the three years, and businesses are quite similar as well; they have suffered. That is when you are talking about numbers on a spreadsheet. It is always important to look at individual cases because I think that brings it home when you talk through that. This week is a good snapshot of what is going on. To some extent maybe it has bubbled out. It has been sitting there in terms of inquiries into my office, and this week it has been thrust into The Advertiser.

We have seen local Adelaide business Ballaboosta backing this up and reinforcing these sorts of price rises. The owner there is saying their electricity bill is up 35 per cent, having gone from $5,800 per quarter to $9,200 per quarter. That is a small business. The problem experienced by those businesses where they are relying on their customers is that the customers themselves are feeling the pinch from these big 30-plus per cent electricity power bill rises and they have less money to spend. So Ballaboosta cannot just increase their costs by 35 per cent to make up for this. No, they have to wear it, so it gets harder and harder quite often. They work harder.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Come on.

Mr PATTERSON: I would just like to flesh this out a bit more fulsomely.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Why? This is about data. Come on.

Mr PATTERSON: This was about data and it has now moved on. We are trying to personalise this, and I think it is important we do that to respect the pain that is being felt out there. Yesterday we had Nippy's come out. I remember as a kid, obviously, having Nippy's orange juice. It is an icon of South Australia. Their monthly bill has more than doubled despite, as was said by the manufacturer, using fewer power hours. They gave the specific example where they were invoiced $51,600 last June for 260,073 kilowatt hours of use and this month, despite reducing the number of kilowatt hours used by 6,200 kilowatt hours, the invoice was $109,580. That is a massive surge.

Similarly, we had the Dairyfarmers' Association saying their bills have gone up by 38 per cent. We had almond farmers saying their bills had gone up by 60 per cent. This is hard stuff. Just today a constituent sent through an email, and it is hard to read but I will. He says, 'It is now a situation for small business that is way out of control. An immediate solution is required.' This was forwarded to me. Those words were from the hotel's manager, who was forwarding on the email from the hotel's director. The directors are the ones who are in the boardroom and having to read the numbers. They are going through all the expenses and they are seeing the bills, so they are living it. He says:

I am writing in response to the article in the Advertiser yesterday. I am a director of a small business. Last year my electricity contract with AGL expired. I use a broker through the AHA. The only quote I could get was with AGL. No-one else would quote. They said SA was too hard.

It continued:

My electricity costs per month have almost doubled.

It then went on to say:

We are not alone here. Every day small businesses are doing it tough. With wages and red tape going through the roof, no wonder businesses are closing. It is time for governments to stop wasting money and provide stability for businesses which would flow on to wages. The best a government could do is reduce payroll tax. It gives no incentive to improve your business and employ more staff.

So you can see conflating here is the cost of business, but the principal one that has triggered that email is the electricity bill prices.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis interjecting:

Mr PATTERSON: And I shall.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Good. Keep going.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Minister!

Mr PATTERSON: But what I would say, if we get back to the data, going back to the reports by these market bodies, in terms of, 'Okay, what is the news on the horizon,' it is pretty sobering. We just had the wholesale prices report come out from AEMO for quarter 2 and it showed that wholesale prices were up by $80 a megawatt hour. The AER, which does similar reports, also showed that in terms of the wholesale prices, they were up. It is a different amount but a commensurate big increase. It is hard for businesses to hear that, going forward, wholesale prices are up. Is there a light at the end of the horizon? Not so certain about that.

What I would say in closing is that what we have here is legislation coming through here driven by energy ministers. I hope that our energy minister has a strong voice at the table because, of course, there are other energy ministers there. We have Victoria's Lily D'Ambrosio, and her aversion really to looking after customers, having her say in this. What we are seeing is the reform that is coming through is giving market bodies more power and they are not really trying to address what the fundamental issue is, which is to try to get more supply into the market.

Having said that, we know that South Australia is the lead legislator and so the convention is for these changes to come into effect nationally and they do so, of course, by passing through this South Australian parliament in a quite speedy manner, you would have to say. So, of course, we will provide our support for these amendments to the national energy laws. But, as I said before, we have to make it clear that it continues a trend of electricity and gas market reform delivering increased powers to the market bodies—AEMO in this case, AER and AEMC—to try to solve the problems. It is not targeting the real need for those South Australian families and businesses, some of which I mentioned here before, where the aim should be to bring down energy bills, and that is what the government here in South Australia should be focusing on.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: I thank the member for his lengthy discussion about everything but the bill. I thank the shadow minister for his support, and I look forward to a speedy passage through the house.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (21:49): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.