Narungga Power Outage

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (15:16): Here we are six weeks on and my community is still awaiting answers when it comes to the power outage that they experienced on Friday 14 March. In the lead-up to that date they had a series of flickerings on and off and the power was unreliable and caused great distress to the community. But on that day, Friday 14 March, we had an outage that extended to almost 20 hours long, causing enormous disruption for households and businesses in my region. Businesses lost stock. One business had a machine that was damaged and they were themselves unable to trade on that day because there was no way to turn the lights on and get the EFTPOS machine working. Similarly, there were residents of my community who had lost the ability to refrigerate their valuable medication, which put them literally in a life or death situation.

Somehow we have found ourselves falling between the cracks. There is no compensation that seems to be available for those businesses or households that have lost stock—through no fault of their own—and it is not something that I am going to let rest and let pass away with the passage of time. It is something that I am going to continue to pursue.

I have talked in this place previously about different examples of loss that has occurred in the community, but I would like to raise two more for the reasons which will become apparent later. Mr Tony Simpson of Port Clinton lost his garage door on that day. The garage door was halfway open when the power went out and when it re-turned on it fried the motor on the garage door and he was unable to then open and close it until he got it replaced. That comes at a significant expense to Mr Simpson. It is something that he will have to replace, likely being in the thousands of dollars to get the whole thing ordered, installed and replaced. That is no small expense for a retired person living in a coastal fishing town.

Similarly, Kerry Dunn, from Tarnasey Farm and Copper Coast Produce, lost a whole refrigerator room full of produce they were hoping to sell the businesses around their service area. That is a significant expense for a small business providing fresh fruit and vegetables to local pubs and different shops and restaurants and that sort of thing. They will have to bear the costs for that.

The reason I raise these two issues is because in question time on 18 March when I asked whether there was any compensation available for an incident like this, one of the recommendations that was made by the minister was to seek out insurance from their personal insurance provider. I can tell you that both of these entities, the household and the business, have sought insurance from their provider and have been rebuffed. In both instances they have been told that it is not something that their insurance will cover and that they need to go to SAPN or ElectraNet to find compensation for the loss that they have incurred. Well, they have tried that and they have been rebuffed there as well. So here we have my community falling through the cracks, not having compensation being made available to them from their insurance company, from their government or from the providers of their electricity. So who does provide compensation?

We know that the guaranteed service level payment is only $100 a year for 20 hours or more outage. That is a really minuscule amount for a significant loss and would go nowhere near covering the amount that people have found themselves out of pocket. So that is not appropriate. Add to that that it is only made available when it is a supply issue, not a transmission issue. This issue on Friday, 14 March was attributed to transmission in ElectraNet and as such the guaranteed service payment, as small as it is, was not made available to people in my electorate.

Yesterday in question time we heard that there is a small claim scheme available, but that is limited to voltage variation. If you are a constituent in my electorate who has lost his garage door because of a power outage, you are not eligible to get it replaced, but if you are a constituent in a different electorate who has lost their garage door because of a voltage variation, you are eligible to get it replaced. I would ask this house in this parliament what the difference is for those people on the ground and why one is eligible and the other is not? It seems an extraordinary thing to me.

I will be writing to the minister and requesting that we consider expanding that small claims compensation scheme to include power outages, because the fact of the matter is if you are on the ground, if you are a small business or a household who has lost money on account of an electrical fault through no fault of your own, then you are just as entitled to compensation as someone who has had a voltage variation. I think that is only fair and I will be pushing this parliament to adopt that same thing.

I would like to reassure my constituents that although six weeks has passed this is an issue that I will continue to progress. Should the government not be willing to come on board, it is something I will investigate putting forward a private member's bill for and attempting to convince the parliament of its merits on my own. It is something that I think we need to revisit and it is a gap in our scheme that I think we need to close so that we all have access to the same compensation schemes for the same problems, no matter how they arise.