Power Prices

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (15:01): My question is to the Premier. What is the Premier's plan to reduce power bills for South Australian small businesses? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr PATTERSON: The AER's draft default market offer shows that since Labor came to office, the power bills of a South Australian business—that is, the default market offer—have increased by up to $1,627 or 40 per cent.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Police) (15:01): It is—I was going to say it is like they don't listen, but I will just say they don't listen. It's not a simile, it's a fact. They just don't listen to the information that they seek during question time.

Mr Patterson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Morphett, you can listen to the answer in your office. It's disorderly to be yelling out at such volumes when you have just asked the question and someone is providing the answer.

The honourable member for Morphett having withdrawn from the chamber:

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN: As I said in my previous answer, the government took a very deliberate decision in the context of the last state budget to identify small businesses, in particular, as being worthy beneficiaries of additional support from this government to help them bring down their power bills, not on a one-off or on a temporary basis for a quarter or a financial year but on an ongoing basis for their benefit, and by co-investing with those small businesses in the thousands of grants which the Minister for Family and Small Business and her agency have overseen to support South Australian businesses across our state.

These are realising cost reductions for these small businesses, in some cases in the tens of thousands of dollars a year—tens of thousands of dollars in electricity bill reductions per year. The member opposite makes a claim that power bills are going up hundreds of dollars or even over $1,000. We are investing with South Australian businesses to bring their bills down by tens of thousands of dollars, or by many thousands of dollars depending on what the investment is.

For those businesses that rely on refrigeration—for example catering businesses or food or beverage-related hospitality-type businesses, whether it's manufacturers, whether it's mechanic shops that rely on energy-intensive equipment—partnering with them to make new investments in their businesses to make them more energy efficient is realising these cost savings. So we are helping households and we are helping small businesses and I think that is an appropriate way of providing real cost-of-living relief when it comes to electricity costs here in South Australia.

We welcome the support that's come from the commonwealth, of course, to help households with bill reductions in particular financial years—and they have done that for consecutive financial years and that has come at great benefit to hundreds of thousands of South Australian households—but by partnering with South Australian businesses we are getting them on a more sustainable and cost-effective basis going forward. That is perhaps yet another contributor as to why we see record low levels in the unemployment rate and record numbers of jobs still available here in South Australia.

Despite the claims of the shadow treasurer, in the last two years we have gone through periods of leading the nation in the levels of business investment, although, of course, in the most recent quarters that has come back towards national trends. But we are the best or second-best performing economy in the nation, and we are partnering with small businesses to make sure that they can continue cutting electricity costs for themselves.