Mr TEHAN (Wannon) (12:15): I rise today on behalf of every Australian family struggling to pay their power bills—the single mother in Western Sydney choosing between electricity and groceries, the small-business owner in regional Queensland forced to shed staff because energy costs are crushing their margins, the elderly couple in Adelaide rationing their air conditioning because they simply cannot afford to turn it on. These Australians were made a promise—a crystal clear, unambiguous promise—repeated not once, not twice but 97 times. The Prime Minister and his Minister for Climate Change and Energy looked Australians in the eye and pledged that their power bills would fall by $275 by Christmas 97 times. What did they get instead? Their Christmas present this year from the Albanese Labor government will be an increase in their electricity bill of $1,300. Under this Labor government alone electricity prices rose 37.1 per cent in the 12 months to October 2025. There are 200,000 families who are now on hardship electricity plans. Food insecurity is affecting 3.5 million households. Poverty is rising from one in eight Australians to one in seven. This is not a broken promise; this is betrayal. Today I will show you exactly how this minister has failed on every measure that matters—affordability, delivery and basic honesty with the Australian people. The minister loves playing the blame game with the coalition, international markets, anyone but himself. That's the response of a minister working part time. The numbers don't lie. It is Labor's failed energy and emissions reduction policies that have us in this mess. The Prime Minister and his energy minister promised an energy boom. Instead they have delivered an energy crisis that is stealing food from tables and destroying the competitiveness of Australian businesses. This did not happen by accident. It happened because the minister has embarked on the most expensive, most disruptive uncosted and unplanned energy transition in the developed world. His experiment requires billions of dollars in new transmission lines. Network charges, once an afterthought on a power bill, now exceed wholesale energy costs and account for more than 40 per cent of what Australians pay. This is causing real human suffering. Energy affordability is fundamental to quality of life. When energy becomes unaffordable, families are forced to ration its use, and they spend disproportionate amounts of income on bills at the expense of food, health care and basic needs. The Australian Council of Social Service have revealed that, across Australia, half of respondents in their latest survey are going without food, medication and other essentials to try to pay their energy bills. Others are selling belongings or turning to buy-now pay-later schemes. Eighty per cent of First Nations respondents are struggling to afford their bills, and 64 per cent of people with a disability are struggling to cool or heat their homes due to energy unaffordability. By driving energy prices up, Labor has destroyed Australians' standard of living. Poverty has risen from 12.4 per cent to 14.2 per cent under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and this energy minister. That is 3.7 million Australians, including 757,000 children, living below the poverty line. Food insecurity has exploded. For these Australians, the 37.1 per cent rise in electricity prices in a single year, delivered by Minister Bowen, is devastating. What is most shocking is that he knew this was going to happen. Minister Bowen was advised again this year in his incoming ministerial briefing materials that prices would rise. The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water explicitly warned: … the draft Default Market Offer points to a further significant increase in retail electricity prices next financial year. Despite that, the minister presses on with his ideologically driven approach, the department's warnings ignored. The minister repeatedly tells Australians that his ideologically driven, renewables-only approach is the cheapest form of energy. He is deceiving the Australian people. He blames high energy bills on the international volatility of coal and gas prices. But gas is down 50 per cent from the 2022-23 peak, and coal prices have fallen more than 20 per cent this year alone. So, if coal and gas prices have dropped, why are our energy bills still going through the roof? Because the minister isn't telling Australians about the full cost of his ideologically driven, renewables-only approach. He obscures the reality of how wind and solar are turned into electrons. Under the minister's plan, we still need firming. That's how the electricity markets works. When the minister says renewables are cheapest, he is giving a part-time response. He's only counting part of the equation. It's like saying the shoelace is cheaper than the shoe. But, as we all know, Minister, we need the shoe. Australian families pay for the whole system in their bill, and the whole system is getting more and more expensive. Even the energy industry is sounding the alarm. The Australian Energy Council's most recent CEO survey is absolutely damning of this Labor government's energy policy and mismanagement. Australia's largest energy retailers themselves say that the most urgent issue is affordability and that their feeling is that bills will increase for at least 'the next decade'. Retail bills will increase for a full decade. It's not just households paying the cost; industry is collapsing under these pressures. Look at the Tomago aluminium smelter, for instance. Over a thousand jobs could be lost—not viable beyond 2028—with Rio Tinto directly attributing this to soaring power prices. The government is now on its fourth major bailout of the year: Whyalla, Nyrstar, Glencore and now Tomago. The number of workers employed in manufacturing has fallen by 31,300 workers in the last year alone. More businesses entered external administration in the past year than during the pandemic. To June this year alone, nearly 15,000 businesses entered external administration. The minister is harming our economy and sending our manufacturers offshore. He is destroying lives and livelihoods of the Australian people. And after all this pain, all this human impact, what have minister Bowen's emissions targets achieved? Very little. After more than three years of Labor and $75 billion spent, emissions are 28.5 per cent below 2005 levels, not even a measly one per cent decrease since they came to office. When the coalition left office, emissions were 28 per cent below 2005 levels. Minister Bowen has set a legislated 2030 target of reducing emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels. Minister Bowen then set another more aggressive 2035 target of reducing emissions by 62 per cent to 70 per cent from 2005 levels. Under this minister, emissions have tracked abysmally. He pretends things are going swimmingly; they are not. He's underperforming his own targets. Here are some uncomfortable truths. Under the coalition, we reduced emissions on average by 13 million tonnes each year. Under this minister, the total reduction in emissions across his tenure has been three million tonnes—13 million compared to three million. In 2022-23, under him, emissions rose by 12.3 million tonnes. In 2023-25, the decline has been modest. Guess what, Deputy Speaker Young? According to the Climate Change Authority's latest advice to the minister, to reach his 2030 target, he would need 18 million tonnes of CO2 reductions each year. This would be up from three million each year, on average, under this minister. To reach his 2035 target, he would need 20 to 25 million tonnes of reductions per year. His emissions reductions would need to be 18 times as much as his average rate of annual reductions—18 times! At the current rate, we're not on track to reach any of the minister's targets for 90 years. The minister claims his 2035 targets are ambitious but technically feasible. This is bureaucratic double-speak means we can achieve these targets in theory if the economy shuts down. Where will these reductions come from—from which sector, from which fantasy? The Business Council of Australia estimates that achieving the 2035 target would require more than $530 billion in new spending. Where will the money come from? The Australian Energy Council said that its members believe setting ambitious targets without the enabling policy, regulatory and planning frameworks undermines their credibility. These targets are not credible. One generator CEO said: It's one of the biggest things Australia is trying to do in such a short space of time, and having no thought-through, detailed plan on how to achieve it, the cost of doing it, and your backup plan when things don't go your way, as they invariably don't, is probably going to halt the transition at some point in time over the next three to four years when the populace go hell no, can't afford it. We can't afford it. There is no transition plan, there is no substantive implementation policy and there are no costings. Why set, then, these empty targets? Perhaps Minister Bowen set them to impress his buddies at the UN in a bid to host next year's COP31. (Time expired)