Press Conference with Alison Byrnes MP, Illawarra, NSW

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, in the last two years, Australia's made good progress in rolling out renewable energy and electrifying what we can electrify. When we came to office, just over 30% of our energy grid was renewable. The latest figures out in the last two weeks show that that figure is now 42% so that is good progress. When we came to office, one in 60 houses in Australia had a battery, today it's one in 40. A long way to go, but heading in the right direction, good progress.

But to get this job done, to meet our climate targets, we need to be all in governments, not just a whole of government effort, but whole of government's efforts, state, federal and local, industry, unions, business and communities. And I know here in the 2515 community, communities all in wanting to make this journey a reality and wanting to make it a positive one for people who participate to ensure that the country benefits from renewable energy, the planet benefits from renewable energy, but the household benefits as well.

Cheapest form of energy that's ever been known to humankind is what we have the opportunity to roll out more and more across our country. And we are the most renewable rich country in the world, the best solar resources in the world, above average wind, which makes us the best renewable country in the world. But we still have a long, long way to go.

After a decade of missteps and lost opportunities, we're catching up very fast. And as I said, we need to be all in. And when a community is all in, I want to be all in to help that community. So today, I'm very pleased to announce that after long discussions, the Albanese Government, through ARENA is supporting the Electrify 2515 project with a grant of $5.4 million which will ensure the roll out to households who choose to participate smart metering and opportunities to participate fully in electrification, subsidies for batteries and electrification of home heating and other things like Laura's done here today to enable up to 500 households across the 2515 postcode in this magnificent part of the world, which I know so well, across this northern element of the Illawarra to participate.

Now this is a pilot we have made, as I said, good progress, but we’ve got a long way to go, and there's always something we can learn. There's always something we can gather from a big project like this to ensure that the grid benefits. A lot of people say are, how will the electricity grid cope? The electricity grid will cope very well with electrification if it's well managed, as we're doing, but there's always things we can pick up for households, for grids and for communities, and this pilot project will help inform us as we undertake the journey.

A couple of months ago, the state and territory energy ministers of Australia agreed with me that we should embark on what we're calling the Consumer Energy Roadmap to put consumers in charge with the energy more and more that they have on their roof, they have in their driveway, and the biggest battery that they'll have available in their driveway, to make sure that they're in charge and maximising their financial benefit as well as their emissions reduction.

So this is a good day for 2515, it's a good day for renewable energy. Look forward to working closely with all the participants to ensure that we're all gathering every bit of data we can, and that the residents of 2515 are benefiting enormously. Now this project has had a lot of champions. Saul Griffith, you all know, who we'll hear from in a little while. But no greater champion than Alison Byrnes, who has been pushing very strongly for this project to be funded. She's been calling, emailing, texting, signalling and whatsapping me on a regular basis, asking for updates. And I know she's very pleased to be part of this today. I'm very pleased that she's been such a part of it, and I've got to say this, Alison doesn't believe in renewable energy in theory. She believes in renewable energy in practice. She goes out and has difficult conversations in community about the need for renewable energy, the jobs it will create and the great opportunities for the Illawarra and she is an absolute champion. I can think of no one who I rather have by my side as I go around asking for and arguing for and fighting for and pushing for more renewable energy than Alison Byrnes, who is an absolute champion for renewable energy and who has done the hard yards in fighting for it. She's a wonderful member of parliament, and I'm going to hand over to Alison Byrnes now. Then you'll hear from a couple of speakers, and then I'll come back and take questions.

ALISON BYRNES: Thank you, Minister, it has been an absolute pleasure to work with Saul Griffith and his team. Over the past two years, they have put a lot of time and effort into making sure that this project has been funded and they're ready to do the work that we need to make sure that we are rolling out our home electrification across the nation with as few barriers as possible. They'll be looking into that and also how we can do it cheaper for vulnerable families, how we can save on costs.

So it has been an absolute pleasure to work with them, and certainly I am so proud that the Illawarra is at the forefront of this research and this data collection, it is going to mean a lot about how we can progress electrification across Australia and certainly Saul, we are very lucky to have him here in the Illawarra. He is one of the world's leading minds on electrification, and it has been an absolute pleasure to work with him, and I welcome you here now. Thanks, Saul.

SAUL GRIFFITH: This is really fabulous. Too many kind words are going to be said about me. I really, actually want to say, apart from sort of being the spark of an idea here locally, I haven't done all the work here. It's been the community itself, like the origin story here is I have just moved back from the US. I just finished helping the Biden administration write the Inflation Reduction Act, the world's largest piece of climate legislation ever. We worked on the demand side of that. So the clean energy revolution, there's a lot of emphasis on that supply side. That's where are we going to get the clean energy from. The demand side is equally important. You've got to do both at the same time. It's how we're going to use the energy, and that's the electrification of our homes, electrification of our vehicles, in our communities. So we got that into the IRA, and I was like, oh, you know, Australia has an even better shot than the US of leading the world here, because we've, we've had the rooftop solar revolution. Our solar energy is about five times cheaper than it is in the US. That means, if we could use that cheap rooftop solar to power Australian households, their cars and their appliances, we could actually be saving upwards of three, maybe as much as $5,000 per year per household in Australia, it's probably the biggest economic opportunity we have in this energy transition, in the short term. In the long term, it'll be about mining and making all of the minerals needed for this energy transition. But the short term, the opportunity for decarbonisation, the opportunity for lowering the energy bills of Australians, which is so critical in a cost of living crisis, is about electrifying our homes in our communities.

So I knew all that, and we were doing a 50 home project in Georgia in the US with Stacey Abrams, and I was asked by a couple of members of local community they wanted to have coffee with me early, and they said, oh we've been working with Extinction Rebellion, and we're like, a little bit tired of it. Extinction Rebellion is the climate movement that's sort of famous for throwing paint and soup at artwork. They're like, it's a little bit hard to take our seven year olds to the climate movement things if all we're going to do is throw paint. So what could we do that instead of shutting things down on climate is about building and creating. And I said, why don't you see if we could be the world's first all electric community, and we would literally be the postcard for the future. And so those volunteers, some of them, became employees of Rewiring. Many of them still are working as volunteers, led this project got the community on board, and what it means is a couple of things. We're going to be able to push, many of you will have heard the story that the grid can't handle it. This is the test that's going to show that the distribution grid can handle all of this electrification. That's a super important project. That's why one of our project partners is the local distribution company. It's about financing, which is why one of our partners is a company that helps financing and onboarding Australians to this electrification experience. And really, the community should be very proud of what these volunteers have done. We've even put the regulatory and market reform that will make this an even better fit deal for Australian households on the table, so as a sort of lighthouse project that's going to improve the economics of running Australian households and help us deliver near term emissions reductions, I couldn't be more proud of kicking this off today. So thanks everyone. Thanks to our government partners, we've been extraordinary and our technical partners and Dan for running the org. Because anyone who knows me knows I can't tie my shoelaces. Darren.

DARREN MILLER: Thank you everybody. It's a pleasure to be here today on behalf of ARENA. ARENA is providing $5.4 million of funding for this very important project. I’d like to acknowledge Saul, the work that you've done Rewiring Australia, the work that Endeavour Energy is doing in the area, and the work of Brighte who is helping with funding for the project, also just to call out the important work and support that our minister, Minister Bowen, provides to ARENA, delighted to work with you again on another project. And local member, Alison Byrnes.

So we know we're leading the way in rooftop solar in Australia. It's a fantastic thing. The time is now to start to electrify our homes, to take advantage of this amazing resource that we've got on our rooftops. It's both more efficient, it's cleaner, it's safer, and importantly, it's going to be cheaper for everybody. So the revolution that's coming from our rooftops, down into our homes and into our vehicle fleet is a really critical revolution to help people save money and make this big change to renewable energy that we're all undertaking, both in our grids, at the large scale and at the small scale in our homes.

We very much look forward to the knowledge sharing that this funding will produce and this project will produce. It's very important that other communities, other homes around Australia, learn from what's happening here, so that people can accelerate this change without needing this ground up manufacturing of the opportunity in every local community. We want to look inwards to this 2515 postcode and have other communities take on this opportunity for themselves. We need to go at pace. We're delighted to be involved. And thank you all for joining us in this project. Thank you.

KATHERINE MCCONNELL: Hi, I'm Katherine McConnell, the founder and CEO of Brighte. And Brighte is the technology platform and also the funding provider that will be used as part of the 2515 pilot. I wanted to thank Minister Bowen, the Rewiring team, ARENA and also local member Alison Byrnes. Specifically, I wanted to thank Minister Bowen and Darren Miller for seeding the project for funding and also for supporting the vision of the Rewiring team. What I excited about at Brighte is that that funding has been used by us to build a scalable technology platform. What that means is that 2515m whilst it's going to be the first community project, it doesn't have to be the last, because Brighte platform is being built in a way that we can work with 2515 and other community groups to be able to help them harness, you know, harness the power to electrify their homes.The great thing about the platform and the community initiative is it's not just households, it's also tradies. So it's the sellers and installers of equipment. It's the network. So there are so many parties that can be involved, and we can harness their energy and their excitement to drive change. And really looking forward to seeing the outcomes of this project.

At Brighte our mission is to make sustainable energy equipment affordable and accessible for everyone. And this project is exactly going to be living out our mission. And I'm really excited to see this come to life in 2515. Thank you.

GUY CHALKLEY: Hi, I'm Guy Chalkley, the CEO of Endeavour Energy. It's always interesting when you stand here and you follow a federal minister, and you've got a state and a federal MP as well, you're probably in a really important place to understand what's happening in the future. For me, really proud for Endeavour to be invited into this project. Yeah, we've obviously got Rewiring Australia and Brighte to actually do this.

This is a project that will work. And I think really what highlights is you need really good federal backing. You need really good state backing. You need really good partners to make this actually work. And I think you've got that with this project.

I think the other thing you really need is a really good community. And I think we'll introduce Laura in a minute, but you need really good community support to make these work, but they will work. And I think what you've seen really in the distribution network in the last few years is a massive uptake in terms of rooftop solar. Endeavour currently sits with about a 25% average, average for rooftop solar across the whole network. That means some new suburbs are probably 90 plus in terms of where we actually are at the moment. So you can imagine the need to actually harness what is now the cheapest source of generation, to actually make that work for a community, make it socially acceptable for everybody.

So this won't be, you know, one of a few. This will be one of many as we start to roll them out. And I've got full confidence that this will work, and that the distribution network can really take part and really make sure this does happen, and make sure we do get cheaper opportunities to make that electricity cheaper in the future. I think my job is really to introduce the most important person in this and that's Laura, because that's the person and the communities will actually make this really happen. So I give great pleasure to introduce Laura. Thank you.

LAURA SCALAFIOTTI: Hello, everybody. My name is Laura Scalafiotti and I'm one of the residents of 2515. I'm really excited to be standing here today with everyone who's made this possible. It started for us as a small group of volunteers, really excited to decarbonise our homes and our community and move towards net zero, I guess, as fast as possible.

So to be standing here today, it's really it's really special because it shows that the 50-60, plus volunteers have worked every day for their time towards this has gone somewhere really tangible again. And the whole reason why we were really excited about household electrification is that it is really tangible and touches on so many things, from cost of living to climate action to reskilling and new jobs all kept at a beautiful community level. So I'm incredibly proud of our community and very excited to see where he's going to take us. Thank you.

CHRIS BOWEN: Thank you everyone. Over to you folks.

JOURNALIST: Firstly, why Thirroul? It's one of the richest suburbs in the Illawarra. Is there any plans, I guess, to roll out in other I guess, lower socioeconomic areas after this trial?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, this is a pilot. So a pilot means you're trying things. Why 2515? Because 2515 is the community which has put together the most advanced and considered plan to be used as a pilot. We have plans right across the country, which I'll be saying more about in the coming weeks and months. Of course, we've made many, many policy announcements which apply right across the country, but it is appropriate from time to time, just to have a little trial, little pilot of various things in a discrete, particular community. 2515 developed a very strong plan, which was approved by the ARENA board and here we are today.

JOURNALIST: It is the most affluent suburb, I guess, area in Wollongong. How is that representative? You know, how is that going to necessarily, necessarily mean that other suburbs will have a similar uptake?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, out of the 500 houses, I think, with respect, you'll find a whole range of people in different circumstances, apartments, houses, townhouses, different income levels. I know, Electrify and the associated partners will make sure that it's a strong cross section of the community.

You could say, you could say any particular community is not representative of other communities. But I mean, this is not, you know, if I could say this is not Sydney's North Shore. This is, this is here in Illawarra. This is not a community which is not broadly representative of many of the issues we'll be dealing with in other communities right across Australia. When you've got a community like this postcode which has come together, I'm very pleased to support it.

JOURNALIST: Will it be means tested?

CHRIS BOWEN: Yeah, there are various levels of subsidy, and they are means tested. Yes.

JOURNALIST: So five and a half million dollars to cover 500 homes. Is that kind of the spend you'd be thinking when you are expanding it out, or will it become cheaper over time?

CHRIS BOWEN: Oh, everything gets cheaper the more you do it, absolutely. But this is not just, you know, five and a half million or 5.4 I should say, to be technically accurate, $5.4 million is about supporting the entire trial. It's about supporting the data collection. It's about the metering. It's about, you know, the subsidies and rebates for the actual batteries and electrification. So it's the whole kit and the kaboodle plus. It's not, you know, it's not the whole project. It's others are putting money as well.

JOURNALIST: Will the subsidies cover the whole cost of the appliances, or will it just cover a percentage?

CHRIS BOWEN: Not necessarily. It depends on the means test. I had a feeling you might ask that question. So for a family, up to $78,000 a year, it's 70% in the installed cost. Up to $208,000 a year, it's 50% in the installed cost. And there's other means testing, the EFT system.

JOURNALIST: Minister, on household electrification and your Future Made in agenda, it's not a big part of it, yet, despite it being somewhat a response to the IRA in America, so why didn't you include it in the Future Made in Australia?

CHRIS BOWEN: Different programs. Future Made in Australia is about manufacturing. Future Made in Australia is about making renewable energy in Australia, making things that make renewable energy in Australia.

We have a completely different process and project on support for households. Completely different policy, complementary, obviously, you know, it's Australian households electrifying, putting batteries in, complementary. Every country will adopt their own way of doing it.

The Future Made in Australia program, is focused like a laser on making Australia a country of choice and a partner of choice for others and our own needs when it comes to making the things that make renewable energy.

JOURNALIST: Senator Pocock has said it is a glaring omission in the Future Made in Australia package, and that his vote may count on some sort of agreement on household electrification.

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, here we are today, dealing with household electrification. I'm dealing with household electrification in many ways. It's not part of the Future Made in Australia package. It's a different policy.

JOURNALIST: And how confident are you in passing those bills, given you’ve got senators…

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, I just say this, every piece of legislation I've introduced in the parliament, people have said that the numbers aren't there in the Senate. Every piece has been passed, ultimately, but we'll see. No party has their numbers in the Senate. Ultimately though, Senators need to decide: are they for a Future Made in Australia, or are they against it? We're for a Future Made in Australia.

JOURNALIST: In terms of the pilot program, how long will it run? And when will we know whether it will be expanded to other postcodes?

CHRIS BOWEN: It'll run between now and 2027 but we'll start getting data quite soon, and we'll start learning for that data quite soon. And as I said, this is a pilot. You don't need a pilot in every community. You need the odd pilot here or there to learn. And then you can, you can apply those policy learnings across the board nationally.

JOURNALIST: And how will you measure success in this program?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, I mean, I measure success by getting meaningful data, which helps us learn about electrification across the board.

SAUL GRIFFITH: I can give you a slightly more nuanced. Success on this project is really twofold. It's really proving the economic case for the Australian household. Once you've really proven the economic case, we're going to give the banks. We're going to give the banks, we're going to give the government, we're going to give communities permission and encouragement to go harder, go faster, because they'll have higher confidence.
       
It's about lowering the soft costs. So part of the success story of Australian rooftop solar is eliminating the non hardware costs. So the cost of rolling the truck, the cost the tradies, the cost of the permits, etc, etc. So we're going to lower the soft costs on all of the other components, the vehicle chargers this, the smart meters, the heating systems, the cooking systems, so that'll bring the cost down for everyone. So we'll measure our success on lowering soft costs.

And then finally, integration with the distribution grid. I think a lot of people are now coming to this like half the decarbonisation is going to happen on supply, and half of its going to happen on demand and delivery. All of that goes through the distribution grid. It has really not got sufficient attention globally in terms of its role in the decarbonisation we can do in the next decade.

Future Made in Australia, like Australia, has to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to make those investments now to be making money in 2035 but we need to do decarbonisation right away. And where that decarbonisation is economic is at street level, in our communities, in our households, and that needs to be delivered over the distribution grid.

And so what we learn on how we integrate all of this, how we coordinate it through the grid, that's extremely important. And it's not just, you know, novel in Australia, this like is pushing the global limits of what's happening on the distribution grid. So that's extremely exciting.

JOURNALIST: Saul, is there a target for the households involved? Will there be a target in terms of getting them to net zero, or being putting power back into the grid? Is there a target on these individual households in terms of their power consumption?

SAUL GRIFFITH: I'd never want to criticise the funders. We don't have enough money to get the whole community to zero, so we're going to have to make some true choices.

You know, if every country, wishes it was infinitely wealthy, and they could just do it perfectly. That was our original vision, let's be the one place in the world you could have ecotourism now go to a place like this is what a zero emission suburb looks like that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. We hope to get there first, and this is very important step on that path, because once people can see, hey, you know what it turns out, we've arrived in the future, there's zero emissions, and this community looks healthier, happier and has lower cost bills than the neighbouring community. That is a story worth celebrating, and that's really where we're going long term. But, you know, we're doing 500 out of about 4000 households, and we're not doing everything for every household. So we're limited by the money, honestly, the investments that are being made, $5.4 million, we know that these households will see that money return over the 15 years that these appliances will live in their homes. So it's an investment that actually would pay back in the long term. So I think focusing on the number isn't the right thing, but proving that that economics is true gives Australia the opportunity to go to have a lot more ambition.

JOURNALIST: I'm not sure if this is a question for you Saul, or for the minister, but how will success be measured here?

CHRIS BOWEN: I think Saul just answered that.

JOURNALIST: He answered about aspirations. But how will the government decide if this has been a success?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, as I said, I don't know what the learnings will be. I'll regard it a success if 500 houses have had support to electrify and that we've found some interesting data out of it.

JOURNALIST: Saul, can I just ask you again, just on the on the cause you said there's not enough money. Households getting about $10,000 each, means tested, how much would it cost to electrify a house today? I know there's a lot of variables, but can you put a number on that so we can kind of get an understanding of how much it would cost the average person.

SAUL GRIFFITH: So I'm not trying to avoid your question, but you're falling into the trap that's very typical, not only in Australia but around the world, about the cost of the energy transition. So we think about, oh, what's it going to cost for a household? And the answer to that is, every household in Australia is going to buy 1.9 cars in the next 20 years. Every household is going to buy a new stove in the next 20 years. Every household is going to buy is going to buy a new heating system, new solar system, probably a battery. So you're going to be replacing them anyway. We'd like to be replacing all those things with electric, not gas, or with electric, not petrol. That's how you get to zero emissions. You might have to spend a few thousand dollars more on the water heater today, but we know that the water heater pays for itself in three or four years, so you save all that money back. So we shouldn't really be talking about how much it costs, we should be framing this, what is the investment and how much money is it going to return? We know from modelling that an Australian household, if they went all electric today, they'd save $154,000. I'm looking for Josh. He's in the audience. He has the exact number, but you'd save $150,000 over the 15 year expected lifetime of those objects. A really important way to think about this energy transition, right? We buy cheap machines today with a subscription to petrol and gas. That's really expensive when you buy solar, it's like buying 20 years of really, really cheap electricity up front and then using that to power your things will save money.

So really, what we're doing here is proving the investment case that finance of electrification is a cheaper way to run a household than paying cash every week for fossil fuels. And so that's the fundamental learning, proving the economics, making that cost come down, partnering with a grid to make sure it all holds together. So it's like a it's a fairly complicated pilot in that respect, because it's the full picture, but it's the full picture that we need to get to zero emissions.

JOURNALIST: Saul, I understand you have over 1000 homes put their hands up to be part of this. How do you narrow it down to the 500?

SAUL GRIFFITH: I'm going to refer to our experts. There’s some mean testing. We have an excellent team that we've hired. They're really nutting out those details right now, and I wouldn't want to slip up.

SPEAKER: Prioritising people getting off gas appliances, so making sure we get a good cross section of our community. So we’ve got household type targets, we’ve got housing type targets. We got a whole representative of the community.

SAUL GRIFFITH: Yeah, we got about 20% low income households in this community. We've got 20% who are renting. We got another 20% who are in multi tenant housing, and they are really representative of the larger Australian population. So yes, it is an affluent suburb by Wollongong standards, not really by Sydney standards, but we have a broad cross section, and we are absolutely going to try and hit that broad cross section. Success here, to add to your question is really about, what can you prove here that generalizes so that the whole country gets a discount when we go forward on this project.

JOURNALIST: Minister, this morning, we had confirmation that one of the largest proponents for the Illawarra offshore wind, Oceanex, hasn't proceeded, hasn't made a feasibility application. Are you concerned by that, or were you expecting some of these proponents not to proceed to that feasibility?

CHRIS BOWEN: Not only was I expecting it, this was announced on the 11th of June. So newspapers are meant to contain news. I'm a little hardly surprised these days, but I thought I'd said it all. But I wake up on the 15th of October and I read in the Telegraph something that was announced on the 11th of June that Oceanex and Equinor wouldn't be proceeding with application for the Illawarra, they're concentrating on the Hunter and Gippsland.

There are six zones around Australia. Not every proponent has to apply for every zone. The speculation that somehow that might mean there are no applications for the Illawarra zone is incorrect.

JOURNALIST: How many are there?

CHRIS BOWEN: It is incorrect. We're in the middle of a tender process. That tender process is well advanced. The suggestion that there are no applications for the Illawarra zone is utterly wrong.

JOURNALIST: It was suggested that they withdrew because the Illawarra zone being smaller compared to Hunter and Gippsland. Would the government revisit, the size of the Illawarra offshore wind zone if it turns out that developers are dissuaded by its size?

CHRIS BOWEN: No, I made my decision based on a lengthy community consultation process.

JOURNALIST: Can you give an indication of how much this will push back construction?

CHRIS BOWEN: No, because it won't. There are zones with 30 applicants, there are zones with fewer applicants. And then I will make my decision when I'm satisfied with the things I need to be satisfied under the Act about who to proceed with in the Illawarra. I'll come down, I'll make an announcement. You'll have a chance to ask me questions. We're not quite there yet, but it's well advanced. But as I said, on the 11th of June, I was asked questions about at a press conference, this was not a state secret. I've been asked in June about why Equinox wasn't proceeding in the Illawarra zone. So a little surprised to read about it in October. Somehow, this is news. It's not news. This is, this has been public for months.

JOURNALIST: Can you shed any light on how many applicants?

CHRIS BOWEN: No, no, we don't, I don't announce that. We’ve got six zones around the country in various points of preparation. You know, there's one zone that I'm yet to declare. Applications are open in the Western Australian zone. They're closed in the Illawarra. Just appointed a preferred tenderer for a feasibility license in the Southern Ocean zone. Gippsland is much more advanced. They're all at different levels. We don't sort of, I mean, we're in negotiations or assessing, I should say, applications for the Illawarra zone, it would be not appropriate for me to provide further commentary, other than to say I'll be back quite soon to make an announcement, and it won't be zero.

JOURNALIST: So the timeline isn’t affected at all? The timeline is still 2028?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, no, the timeline is whatever the preferred applicant that I choose has as its opportunity to roll out. But we don't do this overnight, because we get it right, there are many more studies to go. When I issue a licence it will be a preferred feasibility licence, it will then have 60 days of further consultation to go through. If they meet those tests, I will then issue a final feasibility licence, and they will have some time then to prepare their application for a commercial licence, which will then take some time to work through the process.

Separately, they'll have to apply for approvals under the EPBC Act. We get this right. I've said all along, there'll be no wind turbines this week, this this month, this year or next year.

Roughly around that 2030 timeline is about what you expect. But this is not related to our 2030 targets. We're not accounting on offshore wind for our 2030 targets. Never have. This is very important for the Illawarra’s energy future. It's very important for Australia's energy future, but we get it right every step of the way. And I just say again, you know, it was announced on the 11th of June, that Equinox, sorry Oceanex, wouldn't be applying for the Illawarra zone. They've applied for Hunter. They've got the Hunter, they're the preferred tenderer for the Hunter. That's great for the Hunter. They've made a decision that they can't play in all six zones that they only had limited resources. Perfectly understandable commercial decision. But the Illawarra zone process is on track.

JOURNALIST: So a question from the local member, we've recently received some reports that of safety issues at the local women's Trauma Recovery Centre, which is a $25 million federally funded centre, they've lost 70% of their frontline workforce shortly before opening, and some of those staff have told me that there are safety concerns for both staff and women seeking services at the centre. What's the government doing to assure that this centre is safe for these vulnerable women?

ALISON BYRNES: Yes, certainly, the Illawarra women's Trauma Recovery Centre is a really important project for our area, and also as a pilot across the country on how we can better help women survivors of domestic violence. And it was developed by women with lived experience.

I understand that the Department of Health and Aging is working with those involved and with the centre to resolve the issues as soon as possible.

JOURNALIST: Will the investigation be independent?

ALISON BYRNES: That's up to the department.

JOURNALIST: Are you concerned by these allegations?

ALISON BYRNES: I think we certainly have to make sure that all the concerns are investigated and also how we resolve them as well, to make sure that this service can continue to operate in the Illawarra.