The Mays own and run Solartec, a boutique renewable-energy company specialising in solar panels. Phil May, a country boy, didn't start out as a "tree-hugging type", according to the company's homey, avuncular website. He more or less blundered into renewable energy as a business after buying a rural property that came with the promise of free electricity from a pre-installed solar-panel system. Within six months, May understood "why solar power often gets a bad rap from some people". The tiny panel array, a couple of second-hand batteries and a clunky 600-watt inverter weren't good for much beyond running a few lights and a small TV for a couple of hours a night.

May persevered, though, and taught himself all about photovoltaic arrays, battery banks, current shunts and regulators. A fitter machinist and licensed electrician, he became so enamoured of the technology that he and his wife set up Solartec, and began changing the roofline of Canberra and its surrounds. They also sell and install wind turbines, solar pumps, deep-cycle batteries and lighting systems. But the big, rectangular midnight-blue modules, the ones that generate electricity from the sun and allow you to sell the excess back into the grid: those were their bread and butter. Until the evening of 13 May. That night, when Treasurer Wayne Swan decreed that the $8000 rebate for installing such systems was being abolished immediately for anyone whose family income exceeded $100,000, he also abolished the May family's business model. Orders collapsed, as they did for solar-panel installers large and small all over the country.

The industry had no idea this was coming. Given the Labor Party's courting of the green vote, there had been no reason to suspect anything untoward might happen. Rodger Meads, the managing director of Conergy, a European solar giant that moved into Australia in 2005, was stunned. There was no warning, he says. No consultation, no plan to phase out the assistance package. The industry simply got it in the neck. "We met with one of Peter Garrett's advisers, and demanded to see Garrett. We wanted to put our position forward. We needed them to understand the urgency of this. It wasn't just me; it was everyone. All my competitors in the industry. We got a group of people together as quickly as possible. We had Garrett, one of his advisers and two public servants there. The upshot was, they were polite, they listened, they said they'd observe and see what happened ... and that's all."

On 11 June, Garret reportedly said that the means test might be abolished "if it causes a dramatic fall in sales", but on closer examination he wasn't promising to do much more than he'd told the industry in private, weeks earlier. According to the Age, he said: "Let's monitor demand so that we have accurate figures ... on the basis of accurate information we'll consider what the right action ought to be."

Of everyone in the industry, Phil May arguably had most reason to feel aggrieved, even betrayed. A lifelong conservative, he had hosted Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett at his business during the 2007 election campaign. Rudd's soundbite for the day? "Solar energy is part of our future response to climate change. Therefore, let's make Labor's solar-home plan one within practical reach of families across the country."

"I told Mr Rudd and Mr Garrett that I never voted Labor in my life before, and if they were going to support renewables I would support them," May said on Canberra's Stateline, three days after the budget. "I did support them and now I feel very disappointed with the outcome ... It's going to do my business a great deal of harm and we will have to put people off if we don't keep getting jobs in. We are going to have to put people off." And eventually he did.

"Phil's was a small, five-person outfit," Rodger Meads says. "Himself, his wife and three employees. He's laid off all three. Before the budget he was getting four to five approvals a week. That was probably the limit of his capacity to install. Since budget night he's had one."