Dan Tehan MP, Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction

Keynote address

Thanks, Claire. And Michelle, can I say thank you to you for putting me on the front page today and giving me some trial questions last night at the dinner, which was, I’ve got to say, a wonderful, wonderful evening. And thanks for your hospitality.

But I got a few messages this morning after the headline in the paper, one from a friend. And for those of you who don’t know, one of the nicknames I’ve got from my friends at school is Texas. I think you can probably gather why. I speak a little slowly.

But he sent me a message saying, “Well, make sure your speech this afternoon is called the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” And I had another one saying, “You should retitle it to Demolition Dan Goes to Town.”

So anyway, we started getting some messages through. So thank you very much, Michelle, and it’s great to be here with you all this afternoon.

Let me start with a simple proposition. Our lives are defined by energy. Everything about the way we live today depends on it. The Industrial Revolution was powered by it, and now the next technological revolution, artificial intelligence, is being built on it.

Look at what is happening around the world. Meta, OpenAI, Alphabet and other technology companies are scrambling to secure access to enormous amounts of energy, and nation states are doing exactly the same thing.

Why? Because they understand something that should be obvious to every government. Energy abundance is the foundation of economic growth and of living standards. And this is not a new lesson.

Cheap, reliable and secure energy can only be guaranteed by one objective, and that is energy abundance.

Somewhere along the way, our energy debate in Australia became distorted. Instead of asking whether energy is abundant, cheap, reliable and secure, we began asking whether it was sufficiently green. And green has now become the overriding and only consideration.

The consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. Chris Bowen’s pursuit of net zero has become a significant cost to Australian households and Australian industry. We now pay substantially more for electricity than the global average.

The number of households experiencing energy hardship has risen sharply. Electricity prices increased 22.5% in the 12 months to April 2026, and Treasury expects electricity prices alone to add another half a percentage point to inflation this year. So it’s a key driver, sadly, of probably our next interest rate rise.

These aren’t just numbers in a Treasury spreadsheet. These are real people, real families, real businesses.

A mother who turns the heater off because she’s worried about the bill, a pensioner who limits the use of their appliances, a small business owner who looks at another electricity bill and wonders whether they can afford to keep the doors open, and a manufacturer asking a very simple question: “Why would I manufacture here if electricity is cheaper somewhere else?”

That is the real consequences of getting energy policy wrong.

So what should we do? We need to take a chainsaw to Labor’s green ideologically driven approach to energy. We need to start using all our own natural resources.

For the Coalition, our energy policy starts with abundance and has three non-negotiables. The focus has to be on affordability, it has to be on reliability, and it has to be on security. And we have four ways that we are going to deliver that.

First, legislative reform under the Scrap Net Zero Cheaper Energy Act.

We need to remove the laws that are distorting our energy market, and if elected to government, we will introduce legislation to do so within the first 30 days.

That means repealing the Climate Change Act, abolishing the safeguard mechanism, repealing the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard Act, revoking four offshore wind energy zones, repealing all legislative prohibitions on nuclear energy, introducing a renewable energy code of conduct, making Commonwealth energy funding to states conditional on prioritising affordability and reliability, and redirecting the Australian Energy Regulator to have primary regard to affordability and reliability.

And to show how serious we are—and Michelle, here’s another exclusive for your paper—when Parliament resumes, I will introduce a private member’s bill to set out exactly how we would do it in government. We are serious about this.

The second thing we will do is we will restructure the energy market.

We need a capacity mechanism that properly rewards firm dispatchable generation. If reliability has value, and it does, then the market must recognise it.

We need to make sure our reliable generators remain economically viable, and we need to do this without simply replacing one set of government-picked winners with another.

We will not dictate the technology. We will allow all technologies capable of delivering affordable, reliable and secure power to compete.

Third, we will discipline network costs.

The poles and wires being built across this country come at an enormous cost, and Australians are ultimately paying for them. We need transparency, we need accountability, and we need a much harder look at who should bear the cost of new transmission infrastructure.

Australian families should not be an unlimited source of funding for an ideologically driven energy transition designed by Chris Bowen.

And fourth, energy abundance. This is the most important.

Australia does not have an energy shortage. We have an abundance of energy resources: coal, gas, hydro, uranium, solar, wind and potentially geothermal. So our approach should be simple: use them. We need an all-of-the-above energy mix.

Energy policy is economic policy. It’s a cost of living policy. It’s a regional development policy. It’s a national security policy.

Australia has some of the greatest energy resources on Earth. Our problem is not a lack of resources. Our problem is that we have made energy unnecessarily green, unnecessarily complicated, unnecessarily expensive and, in some circumstances, unnecessarily unreliable.

We need to get back to basics: more energy, more competition, more investment and more choice.

Because Australians should never have to choose between keeping the lights on and putting food on the table. They deserve both, and we want to make sure they will get both.

And that is the energy policy challenge before us. Not how quickly we can impose another target, not how many more regulations we can write, not how much more Australians should be asked to pay, but how we can harness this country’s extraordinary energy resources to raise living standards, create jobs and make Australian industry competitive again.

The Coalition’s answer is clear. Three principles: cheap, reliable and secure. One objective: energy abundance for Australia.

ENDS

Media contact: Phil Connole E | philip.connole@aph.gov.au