Craig Kelly stands by his winter deaths warning

NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly has challenged his critics to examine the underlying causes of higher winter mortality rate.

Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly after Question Time in the House of Representatives Chamber, at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture Kym Smith

NSW Liberal MP Craig Kelly has challenged his critics to examine the underlying causes of higher winter mortality rates as he reasserted his provocative warning that subsidies for renewables would result in more deaths.

With residential power disconnections up by 140 per cent over the past six years, Mr Kelly argued that companies such as AGL had an obligation not to turn off the lights for struggling families and pointed to figures showing deaths spiked in winter.

The chairman of the Coalition backbench committee for energy and the environment noted that Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed average deaths per day from June through September were on the rise and had increased from 430 deaths per day in 2008 to 468 deaths per day by 2015.

While Mr Kelly conceded these statistics could reflect population increase, and captured all deaths, he cited a 2011 World Health Org­anisation report which estimated 30 per cent of excess winter deaths were attributable to cold housing.

“The increasing cost of electricity in this nation is a significant cause of the higher number of deaths that we have in winter,” he said. “A substantial reason that we have those higher costs of electricity is because of the $3 billion worth of subsidies that get loaded into consumers’ prices through different green energy schemes.”

Between 2008 and 2015, the average daily deaths per month were 424 for June, 449 for July, 448 for August and 428 for September — making them the four most lethal months over the past eight years.

By contrast, the average daily deaths for the three months of summer were 381 for December, 376 for January and 373 for February. Mr Kelly yesterday used the results to argue that Australians have a “20 per cent greater chance of dying on a day in July or Aug­ust” than on any day in summer.

His decision to link deaths with higher power prices triggered widespread condemnation when he first made the connection on Sky News last week. Opposition energy spokesman Mark Butler accused him of “scaremongering” and called on Malcolm Turnbull to sack him as chairman of the Coal­ition’s energy policy committee.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg also distanced himself from Mr Kelly’s comments, saying renewab­le energy was “not causing the death of Australians”, while Victorian Liberal MP Sarah Henderson dismissed his arguments as “ridiculous”.

But Mr Kelly stood by his comments, arguing that the connection between deaths, rising power prices and renewable energy was “irrefutable”. “I can understand when someone is confronted with that inform­ation they think that can’t be right,’’ he said.

“But when you sit down and look at the ABS figures, when you look at the reports from the World Health Organisation, when you look at the figures from the ­Australian Energy Regulator, the link is irrefutable.”