Page 2215 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 August 2014
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The day after the carbon tax was repealed, AGL published the following statement in newspapers right across Australia:
Now that legislation has been passed to remove the carbon tax, as an AGL residential or small business customer, you will benefit from reduced electricity and gas prices. That is our promise to you. We will write to you shortly to let you know the details of the price reductions you will get due to the removal of the carbon tax, and you can rest assured these will be backdated to 1 July 2014. You don’t need to do anything. We’ll make sure you receive all your savings.
Hopefully this has not come too late for some consumers. At the Tuggeranong Community Council just the other night I heard the story of an older lady, a pensioner from Kambah, who, after receiving her latest gas bill which had gone up 16 per cent, rang AGL and had her gas disconnected. This resident said that she would go to bed early during winter to keep warm because she simply could not afford her heating bills any longer.
The carbon tax disproportionately affected Canberrans because of the cold weather here. Our heating sucks up a lot of our energy costs. So the removal of the carbon tax will decrease these costs and help any residents who find themselves in a similar position to this lady from Kambah—residents who have to go to bed early just to keep warm because they cannot afford their energy bills. From what I hear, this especially applies to older Canberrans. So now with the repeal of the carbon tax that disproportionately affected Canberrans we will also get a larger benefit than some other states and territories.
I know that the cost of living affects residents of my electorate and the ACT as a whole. I am pleased to be a member of a party that is taking steps to relieve pressures on the cost of living for these families. I look forward to counting and seeing the benefits that will flow to the ACT. I look forward to the cost of living benefits that each and every family, industry, business, producer and organisation in our territory will receive as a result of this repeal of the carbon tax.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo—Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Corrective Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for Sport and Recreation) (4.31): I am pleased that Mr Hanson has raised this issue as a matter of public importance, because it is that: it is an important public matter. That is probably about the only part of this afternoon’s discussions that I agree with him on. Having it on the agenda does give us the chance to remind ourselves about how the carbon tax actually worked when it was in place, what the real impact on household budgets was and what the impacts are of people, communities and countries failing to take action on climate change.
For the benefit of Mr Hanson and his colleagues, I will go through a quick review of the design of the carbon tax in the first place. The actual scheme was cost neutral—that is right: cost neutral. The carbon tax was applied only to the top 300 big polluters, but in acknowledgement that costs would be passed on to householders through the scheme, compensation payments were included in the package. This means that at-risk householders were compensated for increases in electricity prices. This was
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