Power Outage Compensation Scheme

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (15:00): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Mining. Is the government progressing a compensation scheme with regard to power outages? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr ELLIS: In a letter dated 26 September 2023, addressed to Mr Philip Groves of Glynde, the minister wrote that he was determined to, quote, 'make the necessary reforms' via, potentially, a further quote, 'establishing a scheme which provides a fair outcome for households'. This would be welcome reform for my constituents who have suffered repeated outages, including a 20-hour outage last month.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (15:00): Yes, Liverpool has won the league title and they have now 20 league titles, so we are back on our perch. But I think there was another part of your question about whether we will be introducing a new scheme to allow for compensation for surging, and the answer to that question is yes.

We put out a press release. I held a press conference with the member for Newland in her electorate. She championed this cause after her constituents were subjected to a surge which was no fault of their own. This had occurred under the previous government and under the previous Weatherill government. Through the privatisation of ETSA, SA Power Networks were immune from having to manage some of these surges, if they could prove to the regulator that they had done all that was reasonably responsible to maintain the system in an order where they did everything they possibly could to avoid a surge, but if a surge did occur, through some natural act, people were not covered.

What we are doing now is introducing an insurance scheme which has been publicised. We held a press conference. People will be getting compensated. There is a timeframe, obviously, in place, and I can get the member more information about that. If he would like to give me the information of his constituent, I can ascertain whether that individual constituent is eligible.

I do point out that this is about surges, not about schemes where people have lost power through no fault of the transmission or distribution networks. As frustrating as that sounds for me and the member, we have to operate under the contractual obligations signed by members of his former party who signed South Australians up to a 200-year lease under certain conditions, legislated in this parliament. They give certain benefits to try to maximise the sale price. I don't want to go into too much detail, given the gallery that's here, and I do not want to breach any friendships, but there are some people who gave away a lot to a small group of people for a very large sale price in the former assets.

I am doing all I possibly can to try to rectify some of this for constituents who experienced this through no fault of their own. I congratulate the member for Newland on the hard work she did to lobby the government to get this scheme operational. For the benefit of other members in the house on both sides of the parliament, that now means if there is a surge that's not covered by people's household insurance, that would not be normally covered by the regulator, now that insurance scheme will cover it and those surges can be protected. That does not include people who were subjected to a loss of outages. There are prescriptive policies in place, which I can point the member to so he can be fully aware of what is payable and what is not payable.