Power Prices

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (15:26): My question is again to the Premier. Can the Premier explain why households are paying record high power prices under Labor? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr PATTERSON: The annual Energy Retail Price Offers Comparison Report by the independent Essential Services Commission of South Australia shows that the average residential market offer power bill has risen by $776 over the last four years.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Treasurer, Minister for Energy and Mining) (15:26): If you look at the annual average weighted prices for wholesale electricity prices, and you do a comparison that the Australian Energy Regulator and AEMO do each and every year, in 2024-25, which is the last financial year, which is the average annual volume-weighted price, Queensland was $128, New South Wales was $150, Victoria was $101, South Australia was $132 and Tasmania was $102.

In South Australia, we have these weather events that cause contingency events on the interconnection. You see single-day events. Because there is not forward contracting into the market, it will have a dramatic impact on the forward price, which is then offered to households in retail pricing. What the Tim Nelson review into electricity pricing—and then reform—found was that we need a market-making obligation here, which would increase liquidity in the electricity market.

So what does that mean in terms that the opposition could understand? Deliberately, that energy companies are not selling forward offers into the market because they are waiting for individual events that spike wholesale prices when an interconnector is constrained because of a weather event or there is some event that occurs that requires some storm event, and they price it into their forward pricing when they do their retail offering.

The biggest contributor to that is the cost of gas, and the cost of gas is what's used to firm. These companies are using the exorbitant costs of gas to firm as the reason that they are arguing that they have this forward price, which has seen price increasing. I just point this out to the member. He talks about the previous Liberal government: in their utopia, in their first full year in government, the first full financial year, the average wholesale power price was $128, which was the highest in the country—the highest in the country—yet all you hear from members opposite—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: See? And what sets retail pricing? Wholesale pricing. Wholesale pricing is what informs retail pricing. This is the point. They make these observations in complete absence to their own actions. For example, why is gas so expensive? Gas is expensive because the second largest gas basin in South Australia, the Otway Basin, is precluded from fracture stimulation because of whom? Members opposite. They ban gas extraction, and then they say, 'Why are gas prices so high? What are you doing about it? Fix gas pricing.' And then they ask why electricity prices are going up and when you say to them the firming of gas with our renewables is what is pushing prices up, they just howl into the wind and they take no responsibility for their own actions.

They put all their hopes and dreams into an interconnector to connect to a jurisdiction that last financial year had higher wholesale prices than South Australia, and that was the entire energy policy. The member talks about a wasted four years. It hasn't been a wasted four years on energy policy when your entire policy was connected to a jurisdiction that has got higher power prices than we do. I just think members opposite are lost on energy. They have their federal colleagues in South Australia who are opposed to net zero and their state colleagues here who say they support net zero. There are some of them who say they want more fossil fuels but others who are saying they do not want any fossil fuels. The Liberal Party is confused about what it is and who it stands for.