THE HON DAN TEHAN MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR ENERGY AND EMISSIONS REDUCTION
27 November 2025
Check against delivery
Deputy Speaker, 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 heating 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 ninety-seven times.
The Prime Minister and this Energy Minister looked Australians in the eye and pledged that their power bills would fall by $275 by Christmas.
Ninety-seven times, Deputy Speaker. What did they get instead?
The 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% in the 12 months to October 2025.
Deputy Speaker, 200,000 families 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 a betrayal.
And today I will show 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. The Coalition. International markets. Anyone but himself.
That’s the response of a Minister working part time.
Deputy Speaker, the numbers don't lie. It is Labor’s failed energy and emissions reduction policies that have us in this mess.
Energy Affordability
The Prime Minister and this 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% of what Australians pay.
And 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, healthcare, and basic needs.
ACOSS has 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.
80% of First Nations respondents are struggling to afford their bills and 64% 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% to 14.2% 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% rise in electricity prices in a single year delivered by Minister Bowen is devastating.
What is most shocking, Deputy Speaker, 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 that "the draft Default Market Offer points to a further significant increase in retail electricity prices next financial year."
And despite that, the Minister presses on with his ideologically drive approach.
The department's warnings ignored.
Renewables Are Expensive
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 ideological 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 market works.
So, 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, Deputy Speaker!
Industry Impacts
Industry is collapsing under these pressures. Look at the Tomago aluminium smelter, for instance.
Over 1,000 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 ($2.4B), Nyrstar ($135M), Glencore ($600M), 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.
This Minister is harming our economy and sending our manufacturing offshore. He is destroying lives and livelihoods of the Australian people. Shame!
Empty Targets
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% below 2005 levels. Not even a measly 1 percent decrease since they came to office.
When the Coalition left office, emissions were 28% below 2005 levels.
Minister Bowen has set a legislated 2030 target of reducing emissions by 43% from 2005 levels.
Minister Bowen then set another, more aggressive 2035 target of reducing emissions by 62% to 70% from 2005 levels.
Under this Minister, emissions have tracked abysmally. He pretends things are going swimmingly. They are not. He is underperforming his own targets.
Here are some uncomfortable truths.
Under the Coalition, we reduced emissions on average by 13 million tonnes each year. By 13 million tonnes each year!
Under this Minister, the total reduction in emissions across his tenure has been under 3 million tonnes.
13 million tonnes compared to 3 million tonnes!
In 2022-23, under him, emissions rose by 12.3 million tonnes.
In 2023 to 2025, the decline has been modest.
Guess what, Deputy Speaker?
According to the Climate Change Authority's latest advice to the Minister, to reach his 2030 target he will need 18 million tonnes of CO2 reductions each year. This is up from the average 3 million tonnes just one year ago.
To reach his 2035 target, he'll now need 20–25 million tonnes per year.
His emissions reduction will need be 18 times as much his average rate of annual reductions. 18 times!
At the current rate we are not on track to reach any of the Minister’s targets for 91 years.
The Minister claims his 2035 targets are ambitious but "technically feasible."
“Technically feasible.”
This is bureaucratic doublespeak that 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 this 2035 target requires 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 says:
"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."
There is no transition plan.
There is no substantive implementation policy. There are no costings.
Failure on COP31
Why set these empty targets?
Perhaps Minister Bowen set them to impress his buddies at the UN in a bid to host next year's COP31.
How did that work out for him? Well, his grandiose claims and empty targets fell flat there too.
Despite Prime Minister Albanese and Minister Bowen's aggressive rhetoric and three-year campaign, they could not manage to get Australia to host COP31.
The consolation prize was Minister Bowen being handed the role of leading negotiations at COP31, which will be held next year in Antalya rather than Adelaide.
About this abject failure, Minister Bowen is quoted as that he would be the "president of the COP for the purposes of negotiations."
He then said, "I would have all the powers of the COP presidency to manage, handle the negotiations, to appoint co-facilitators, to prepare draft text, to issue the cover decision."
What vanity!
It’s a wonder he didn’t try and bare his backside when the lights went out in the chamber yesterday.
What confidence can the Australian people have in this Minister's ability to negotiate global emissions reduction decisions?
He couldn't even negotiate for Australia to host COP31!
No Gas
And talking of further failure, let’s turn to gas.
This government has declared war on gas and hasn't released any new gas acreage since 2022.
The ACCC warns gas shortfalls could happen as soon as 2026. AEMO echoes these warnings.
Despite having some of the world's largest gas reserves, we face domestic shortages because this Labor government has refused to release new acreage for exploration.
Not one new acreage released.
Labor's harebrained market interventions have made the situation worse!
Don't ask me, ask the ACCC, who wrote in their most recent gas inquiry:
"The Gas Code and Heads of Agreement have not materially influenced supply and prices, while the changes to the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism may have increased shortfall risks."
Now Labor is doing a gas market review to fix what they broke
The Coalition Plan
The Coalition has a better way.
We will pursue a practical, technology-neutral energy system.
The Coalition's energy plan prioritises affordable power over ambitious emissions targets.
We will deliver real emissions reduction, based on Australian reality and technological maturity, not politically convenient timelines that have no grounding in engineering, physics or mathematics.
Our plan removes the net zero target to focus on affordability, but we commit to reducing emissions on average each year, as fast as technology allows. Upon taking office, we will amend the National Electricity Objective to prioritise price and reliability over emissions.
In the short term, we will work with the state governments to prevent the premature closure of coal plants that provide reliable, steady dispatchable power if they are not at end of life.
We will step on the gas and establish an east-coast gas reservation scheme.
We will lift the ban on nuclear and require social licence for all new energy projects.
We will say yes to affordable, abundant energy, and take a technology-led approach to decarbonisation based on real engineering, not ideology.
We will say no to stealth carbon taxes and replace Labor's punitive Safeguard Mechanism with a voluntary Accountability and Baseline Credits scheme that rewards genuine emissions reductions without punitive costs, keeping industry alive and people employed.
We will refocus the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA to support the scale-up of a broad range of technologies – with a mandate to support R&D that can demonstrate true commercial scalability.
We will reset the climate debate towards rational, pragmatic and sound policy dictated by energy experts, engineers and the people who built this country.
Concluding Remarks
Deputy Speaker, this Minister has failed at every metric that matters. He promised cheaper power and delivered 37. 1% increase in a single year.
He promised emissions reductions, but emissions are flat lining.
He promised 82% renewables and is on track to miss it by a mile.
He has legislated for a 43% reduction in emissions, which he will miss by a thousand miles.
He promised reliable supply and instead is delivering blackouts, grid instability and human suffering.
He promised secure gas supply and delivered shortages.
He promised a $122 billion transition, but we are staring down the barrel of more than a $500 billion bill that we can't pay for.
This is economic vandalism dressed in green rhetoric. The choice is now clear. It is time for a reset.
It is time for common sense. It is time to put affordability first. Australians deserve better.
They deserve affordable electricity.
They deserve reliable electricity. They deserve abundant electricity and thriving industry with responsible emissions reduction.
They deserve a system built on engineering, not ideology. The Coalition offers this affordable option to the Australian people.
