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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-05-18 Daily Xml
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Address in Reply

Address in Reply

Debate resumed.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (17:10): It gives me great pleasure to stand in this place to make my seventh Address in Reply to the house. Well, it is more than seven because we have had more than one Address in Reply per term, but the seventh after an election—it is the seventh occasion of my re-election to the House of Assembly. It is, indeed, an honour; and I am humbled to continue to be Father of the House, an obligation which I take exceptionally seriously, as I did in the previous parliament.

Starting off, Mr Acting Speaker, can I congratulate you on your election to the seat of Florey. I know that you will do that job well and will grace the Public Works Committee with the respect and dignity that that committee deserves, and it is in safe hands with you and the other members who are on it.

I would also like to congratulate all my colleagues who have been elected, especially the new members who have been elected for the first time to the South Australian parliament, especially those on the government benches. Of course, we have spoken often about the seven, and that they are seven remarkable women who will do amazing things in this parliament on behalf of their communities, but I want to talk about three amazing women: my wife and my two daughters.

My wife is long suffering being married to me. It is not easy, let alone that I am a politician. I remember how relieved we were, in a way perversely, that we had lost the 2018 election because Helena had just turned four, and my oldest daughter, Tia, had grown up with dad being a very busy minister, and I missed out on those early years so I got to have a bit more time at home with the girls over the last four years. They are now old enough, I think, and prepared to see dad get busy again—much, much busier than he was in opposition, although we were very busy in opposition.

I also want to thank my staff. I want to thank Betty Livaditis, who did a tremendous job in my electorate office. I want to thank Zoi Papafilopoulos and I want to thank Nick Antonopoulos for the hard work they did, including my team of volunteers. I want to thank the people of West Torrens. The people of West Torrens have been with me since 1997. Indeed, they have been with me since 1971 when I was born in that community.

I was born and raised in the community that I represent, and that is a great honour for me. A lot of people do not get the privilege to represent the community they grew up in. My friends and family grew up in the western suburbs. It is a great honour to know that I have been representing them for nearly now a quarter of a century.

I congratulate my ministerial colleagues on their appointment. I am indeed very proud to see the Premier sit in this chair, and very proud to see the work that he has done and will be doing over the next four years. I wish him the very best, and commit to do my very best to ensure that his Premiership is a success because, in the end, if the government succeeds the people of South Australia succeed. We all want the government to succeed no matter who they are.

I also want to make a point about the former governments: the Weatherill government and the Marshall government. I want to point out very quickly and emphatically that the Malinauskas government is not the Weatherill government reborn: it is a different government. It has different objectives, different agendas. This is not a continuation, with a four-year recess, of the last Rann/Weatherill government. This is a new government, with a new agenda, with a new leader and with a new cabinet. We have our own priorities, and those priorities were argued at the election at length.

I want to thank the former government. I think that the former government had its faults, and I was prepared at length to call them out on their faults, but not everything they did was a disaster. They did good things, and they worked hard for the people of South Australia, and I want to thank them for that. It is not easy. It is not easy to work so hard and lose. I know exactly how they feel, and I do have sympathy for members opposite who did work so hard and have lost and felt as if they have not been rewarded for their hard effort and their labour.

But I just point out that the term 'minister' means 'to serve', and it is to serve without reward. Re-election is not a reward for the previous four years; it is an endorsement of the next four years. While that might not be comforting to members of the former government who have maintained their seats or who have lost them, the point that I am trying to make, ineloquently as I am, is that the election is not a reflection on everything they did over the last four years.

I think South Australians are genuinely grateful that we got through the pandemic as well as we did, and the former government deserves a lot of credit for that. I paid tribute to the former government on election night on the ABC, and I paid tribute to the former Premier, who did deserve credit for the way he conducted himself.

Of course, the other part of that equation is the endorsement of the next four years of the future. The people of South Australia chose a future, and they chose us to lead them in that future, and that is humbling and comes with a great deal of responsibility. The Premier was kind enough to give me responsibility for a number of portfolios. The first one I want to talk about is management of government business in this chamber.

I take this chamber very seriously. I think it is steeped in tradition and convention, and the rules are there for a reason, but so are the conventions, and the conventions are often much more important than the rules. You will not find anything in standing orders about pairs. You will not find anything in standing orders about the way we conduct ourselves outside of here in this building. That is built by convention. again, without wanting to be too disparaging of the previous government, there were some conventions that were thrown out, and that is sad. That was not just in the last parliament; it was in the previous parliament.

The ones I am talking about, of course, are the conventions about passing budget bills and budget measures. That convention had stood in this state for over 100 years, and the former Premier, when then opposition leader, trashed that convention. That convention is now gone, and he saw it in the last parliament, and our state is worse for that. Our state is worse off for the breaking of that convention.

The former Premier also broke the convention on pairs, or his government did, and then that was restored after a long, protracted period, after the former Opposition Whip was betrayed terribly in the parliament by a pair not being honoured. These traditions and conventions are important, and I commit to the house that I will do my utmost, with the Government Whip, to uphold the conventions and traditions of this parliament as well as all our collective responsibilities to uphold the standing orders.

I want to also talk about my other two portfolios. The first one is Infrastructure and Transport. We have a very, very big agenda. The most pressing in transport is public transport policy, where we are attempting to undo a privatisation of our trams and trains and conduct an investigation into the feasibility of returning our bus services into public hands. This is important work. It is important work because I have seen over my 25 years in this place the failure of privatisation.

That is not to say that there have not been some successes, where the government has opted not to continue a service and allow the private sector to do it, but wholesale privatisation has not worked. The most glaring example of that is the ETSA privatisation. I was here for that debate, and unfortunately the minority on that occasion was proved right. It was a disaster and continues to be the worst decision made by this parliament, by a government, in living memory, almost as bad as the State Bank.

If you had to look at two events of the last century, I think, excluding war and depression——that is, policy decisions—the sale of ETSA for me ranks as the worst decision a former government took. That decision still has implications today and will continue to have implications for the next 170 years. South Australia is now at the mercy of monopolies when it comes to transmission and distribution of our power network. They are making a fortune from South Australians.

It is no coincidence that the deindustrialisation of our state is almost inexorably linked to the privatisation of ETSA and the increase in power prices as a result of that. That is why things like public transport are not just an amenity; they are an economic tool to get workforces to and from work efficiently and cheaply and safely. They also save money for the taxpayer. Every single time someone catches a bus, train or tram we all save.

We are spending record amounts of money. The previous government, the Weatherill government and now the Malinauskas government is spending a fortune on what has been called congestion-busting infrastructure works because we are building infrastructure to the peaks when everyone drops their kids off to and from school, everyone goes to and from work. We have more car parks per capita in Adelaide than any other capital city in Australia. We need people back on buses. We need people back on trains. We need people back on trams. We need people utilising public transport.

The best lever to do that is public ownership because when you run these services for profit it is not about the service, it is about the return. For us, if we can get people catching buses, they can pay their mortgages off faster. They will save money on car parking. They will save money on insurance. They will save money on petrol. They will help decarbonise our economy. We will save on greenhouse emissions. We will save on noise and noise pollution. We will improve amenity of our suburbs. We need mechanisms and measures to get people on trains, trams and buses. The first step towards that wholesale reform is of course to bring them back into public hands.

The second part of the agenda within transport and infrastructure is of course the north-south corridor. The north-south corridor is a very important part of the picture. The former government talked a big game. There has been not a hole in the ground, not a boot on the ground, not a shovel in the ground, nothing. It is a shame because it is a lost four years and now we are left to pick up the pieces. I hope their delays have not left this all too late.

The former government had announced some very large amenity-busting pieces of infrastructure such as overpasses alongside tunnels. The whole point of the tunnels was to improve amenity, but of course the former government—in the areas that they did not represent—were quite happy to put up very large structures that would perhaps impose on communities. I am very keen to see if we can remove those.

The next part of the energy picture is a lot more complicated. The former government, the Marshall government, made a promise to lower power prices by $302 compared with 2016-17 prices. That was not achieved. That was not met. In fact, power prices under the former government were on average higher for every year bar one than they were under the Weatherill government. The numbers do not lie.

The ESCOSA do an annual figure and you can compare them. Prices went up dramatically and then they came down over a period of time. As they were coming down they were still higher than they were in 2016-17, so the government's promise was to have power prices this financial year at about $1,600 per year, per family. They did not even get close to that number. In fact, it was over $1,900 and for most of the term it was over $2,000 a year for the average family. Those types of promises, despite the untruths that were told in here about their commitment, really did speak volumes.

What we are attempting to do now is of course to institute a transition, and that transition is to introduce green hydrogen. This is a complex issue, but it boils down to this fundamental principle: South Australians have used their money to build the largest renewable plant in the world, South Australian rooftop solar. If it was a generator in its own right, it would be one of the largest generators on the planet—one of the largest. That creates an oversupply or net negative demand which can destabilise a grid because of the intricacies and the physics of the grid in the way that power is generated and distributed into the system when there is not enough demand to soak it up.

The previous government's policy was to turn those solar panels off. They did not want to increase demand: they wanted to turn panels off. That is not a solution to an energy revolution: that is a step backwards. Our plan is to utilise that net negative demand when prices are cheap and take what is a traditionally expensive form of electricity storage, which is to take water and use electricity to make hydrogen. It only works when power is cheap. Of course, when we oversupply the grid power is cheap, often negative, and we can make green hydrogen cheaply. Then at times of expensive or high electricity prices when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, we have the ability to firm or produce that power using that hydrogen. It is the equivalent of a battery, and it is very exciting.

In fact, it is so exciting that states all across the country are attempting to replicate what South Australia had begun in 2016, 2017 and 2018. I met with a company yesterday who said to me that the Western Australian Minister for Energy told his department that he had one ambition: to overtake South Australia in hydrogen. The truth is that everyone over the last four years overtook South Australia in hydrogen, every single jurisdiction. We went nowhere, did nothing, stood still. The good thing is that now we have a reformist government back in place that is taking renewable energy seriously and is very keen to progress it.

I commend the former government on its expression of interest at Port Bonython. I note that that has taken an inordinate amount of time and has been exceptionally slow, causing a great deal of frustration amongst the participants who have been, quite frankly, very critical, from what I understand, of the process. However, that being said, they did put in a bid for a hydrogen hub and at a federal level both Mr Albanese and the Prime Minister have agreed that no matter the outcome this Saturday that money will be flowing to South Australia, and $70 million is not to be sneezed at. That money will now be spent in Whyalla on building the infrastructure required to deliver a hydrogen hub. I know that members, including members opposite, are very excited about this.

I want to finish up by talking about the former Premier, the member for Dunstan, and why he deserves to be noted in this parliament. Being Premier—and I have seen it up close now on three occasions—is not easy. It is a hard job. There are lots of demands on time. The good thing for the former Premier is that he will have more spare time now.

Four years of working nearly 24/7, not being able to go out and enjoy a drink, not being able to go out and enjoy a nice meal, not being able to go out and enjoy the company of friends, always working, always on the job—you cannot let your hair down when you are Premier. You cannot go out and just enjoy yourself because, quite frankly, the job is just so overwhelming. Regardless, no Premier has the time to do that even if they wanted to. It is not possible.

The one good thing that has come out of this loss is that it allows those opposite to re-engage, and I hope they enjoy that time. For the ones who are planning on leaving, I wish them well. I know that the former Deputy Premier has announced her resignation and will be causing a by-election. I suppose the government's perspective on that—regardless of the legality of it—is that, if there are to be any other by-elections, they be conducted quickly and swiftly and at the same time. That would be the appropriate thing to do now that the member for Bragg has compelled us to do so. With those few remarks, I congratulate everyone on their election.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Brown.


At 17:31 the house adjourned until Thursday 19 May 2022 at 11:00.


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