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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-08-08 Daily Xml
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Clare Valley Waste

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (14:37): Further supplementary: has the minister offered any assistance to Clare Valley Waste to deal with the $60 a tonne extra cost that they are now going to have to deal with moving their soft plastics processing to Melbourne?

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Treasurer, Minister for Finance, Minister for State Development, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy) (14:38): That question says, 'Should we cover the costs of the increase of them moving to Melbourne?'

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Because the question, the way I heard it, was, 'Will the state government—

Mr Gardner: Are you familiar with what has happened?

The SPEAKER: The member for Morialta is called to order.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: —subsidise the extra $60 a tonne that it costs to move to Melbourne?'

Members interjecting:

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: I think that's what he said. I stand to be corrected—I will check the Hansard—but it seems to me that that's what the shadow minister said. No, we won't be subsidising a company to move to Melbourne. What we have got in place is the jobs fund, and the jobs fund is there to offer support to South Australian businesses through low-interest loans or, of course, grants.

There have been a number of businesses that have applied for these low-interest loans and grants; one in particular has been a family company that the shadow minister has lots of involvement with. His own family business is applying through our jobs grant. Good on them, I say, because—

The SPEAKER: Point of order, member for Morialta.

Mr GARDNER: The minister is debating the topic and completely irrelevant to the question that was asked.

The SPEAKER: No, the question is: what assistance is given to companies with energy costs? The point of order is bogus. The member for Morialta is warned. The minister.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: We are offering businesses assistance through our jobs fund. We are also offering businesses assistance through our $31 million grants loan program to help businesses with demand management; that is, we help them with assistance in terms of being able to audit their own business on energy efficiency. Once they have completed those audits, we co-invest with them to try to help lower their energy costs, whether it is in cogeneration or some other form of using their own heat that they generate to store energy so that they can offset high price demands.

We have seen a lot of this being done at Kimberly-Clark in the South-East, and we have seen a lot of work being done at Electrolux here in Adelaide—$31 million goes a long way to helping these businesses. What we want to see ultimately, and what we have been pushing for very hard through rule changes, is the creation of a demand management market where people can use our investments and we will co-invest with them, using the budget surpluses and the proceeds of the major bank levy, to try to help businesses to invest in their own generation on their premises.

At times of high demand, when the national operator comes calling and says, 'Perhaps we should load shed,' if a company has the ability to come off grid and use their own generation, they can be paid by the market at the rates they would have been paying to receive electricity at that time. A demand management market, incentivised by the government by rule changes that we are making—that is what we are doing to help South Australian businesses.

It's called an energy policy—an energy policy through demand management, getting more gas out of the ground, getting more competitors into South Australia, having reserve generation to avoid load shedding, putting our money where our mouth is. That's an energy policy—not sitting on the sidelines and just complaining and offering whingeing remarks with no alternative. What we should be doing is debating policies: our policy versus your policy. That is what we should be having right now. Instead, all it is is complaints, complaints from people who don't know what they are talking about.

The SPEAKER: The minister has escaped the hawser of relevance. The member for Unley.

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