‘Hardest hit’ east coast states to get lion’s share of bill subsidies

Concession holders in eastern states and South Australia will get the lion’s share of the $1.5 billion the government is promising in bill subsidies, after Anthony Albanese said WA, the ACT and NT did not need as much help responding to the energy crisis.

The prime minister also said he would consider whether Australia needed a national gas reservation policy as a longer-term solution to higher prices, after he praised Western Australia’s reserve for insulating the state’s residents against the worst of bill shock.

Parliament will be recalled on Thursday to vote on the Albanese government’s contentious energy package, which will impose a 12-month gas price cap of $12 per gigajoule, create a framework for a mandatory code of conduct for gas companies, and authorise $1.5 billion for power subsidies for households and small businesses.

As the government framed the package as a test of whether the Coalition would support or hinder bill relief, the Opposition on Tuesday accused Labor of trying to rush through an outcome without providing enough detail and risked driving up power prices.

Speaking on ABC radio on Tuesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the assistance would be targeted at those people living in states “hardest hit” by soaring prices.

“We know that are people doing it tough – so Commonwealth recipients, pensioners, people on Jobseeker, people on Family Tax Benefits – will all receive some assistance and that will be targeted particularly towards those states which are part of the national energy market who’ve been hardest hit, so southeast Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia,” he said.

“States like WA, are doing much better because they have their gas reservation policy that they introduced all those years ago. And that’s proven to be quite a wise policy because in WA, Northern Territory, ACT, and Tasmania they haven’t been impacted by exposure to the global price increases”.

In addition to the federal government’s legislative package, NSW and QLD have agreed to cap the price of coal used for electricity generation to $125 a tonne. Taken together, the Albanese government says the measures would put downward pressure on power prices so that the average household would pay $230 less next year than if the government had not intervened. But it has not made public the Treasury modelling behind these claims.

Despite the Coalition’s objections, the bill is likely to pass with the support of the crossbench. While the Greens and independent senator David Pocock have expressed concerns that the bill does not do anything in the longer-term to shift households away from gas, they have kept ajar the door to supporting it, while Tasmanian Senators Jacqui Lambie and Tammy Tyrrell have said they will not stand in the way of cost of living relief.