Electricity Industry Amendment (Capital Charges) Bill (No. 2) 2026

11 August 2026

Cognate debate

Leave granted for the Electricity Industry Amendment (Capital Charges) Bill 2026 and the Electricity Industry Amendment (Capital Charges) Bill (No. 2) 2026 to be considered cognately.

Second reading

Resumed from 16 June.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas (4:24 pm) : Thank you, Acting President. I will have four minutes or so to get some introductory remarks in before we adjourn for question time, so let us see if I can get shouted at in that time.

The bills that we will debate cognately before the house are the government's response to a wholly mismanaged and inadequate transition plan that will deliver, ultimately, on its current trajectory, blackouts and energy insecurity to the state of Western Australia. I appreciate that this is an attempt by the government to catch up, to replace the incompetence that it has delivered over the last four or five years and to get to the point where there might be a chance of an energy transition going into the future. I think it is unlikely, but possibly that might leave us with the lights on at the end of 2029, 2030 or 2031.

That is why we are debating the bills before the house today. We will go through in some detail how the government got to this terrible stage, how it mismanaged a transition that the government itself announced without proper planning and then tried to deliver an alternative system without the plan that it needed to deliver that alternative system.

We will go through a number of key components of this. Why are we discussing the need for payments to extend the distribution system in Western Australia, particularly the transmission system, on which we will largely be concentrating? Ultimately, this government and the departments that have underpinned this process have failed to deliver a process that works. I think that is beyond doubt.

I have had some fun in the last year talking in the media and toying with the fact that we probably will have to extend coal-fired power generation because the government is not ready with its own transition. We will have to build more gas generation because the government is not ready with its own transition. I am really looking forward to, in the next hour or so, talking about how we will need to fund and try and catch up and build transmission lines because the government's plan and its system is not ready.

That is why we need to have this debate before the house today. It is a little bit timely in that the government wants to impose charges that partly already exist on renewable energy projects, starting, I think, next month. There obviously is a sense of urgency here. There is a sense that the government needs to get its legislation through so it can charge the way it goes.

Let us just go through a little bit of the history here, which I no doubt will have to repeat for the benefit of members in just over half an hour. The reality is that in 2022, the government announced a whole new system of energy for Western Australia. The important part was that it had no plan for the transition of that energy. It had no capacity for the transition of that energy.

 It had an ideological viewpoint and advice from a number of public servants that it would work really well, that it could get to an entirely renewable process in the state generation arm by 30 September 2029 and that the government would have the infrastructure in place through transmission for that to occur.

Obviously, we questioned it at the time and it has been proved since that the government was nowhere near. In fact, I think the funniest thing is the government should have had a plan, but the then Premier obviously made a decision. I do not necessarily think that he trusted or was particularly cooperative with his then energy minister, because they were at sixes and sevens. I think the energy minister would have liked to deliver a reasonable outcome, but policy was being run out of the Premier's office and the Premier was captured. Hon Mark McGowan, the then Premier, was captured by the ideology that said, "We'll just announce it and then everybody will have to deliver it."

They announced, "We're going to go renewables for all state generation" and thought it would suddenly be delivered. I felt like I was watching a Yes Minister episode. It was announced. It was on the telly! "It's on the telly", says the minister. "Well," says Sir Humphrey, "I guess we'll have to deliver it then, won't we?" That is exactly what happened to the government's plan back in 2022. It was announced.

Nothing happened for a lot of years, but it was announced. This government is not even as efficient as Yes Minister, because Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister at least was able to deliver the outcome that the minister wanted. This government is substandard to Yes Minister. Yes Minister is the target it should be aiming at. Yes Minister is an aspiration for the Labor government in this state. That is where it wants to get to. If it got that high, it would be a good outcome, but the fact is it could not get to the Yes Minister outcome. That outcome was beyond it.

Debate interrupted, pursuant to standing orders.