Politicians have been telling us powerful lies for years. It’s about to get worse

Australians have been misled about power prices for years – and the fake claims will get worse now the election campaign is so close.

The price rises unveiled on Thursday are proof of the deception because they show another spike in electricity bills after political leaders sounded so sure they could bring prices down.

The official price update from the Australian Energy Regulator shatters the grand claims about all the action in federal parliament to help households. The biggest claim – but not the only one – came from Labor before the last election.

Albanese was asked point-blank before the last election about his pledge to lower bills. Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Anthony Albanese was definitive about a $275 cut to energy bills, so he will have to carry the political cost of his promise now he is prime minister.

Albanese was asked point-blank about the $275 forecast when he announced the Labor energy plan in Parliament House at the end of 2021, when he relied on economic modelling to forecast that bills would be lower by that amount on average over three years.

“How sure are you that that $275 is robust when you’ve only got three years to deliver it?” a journalist asked. Was he really sure about the benefit?

“I don’t think, I know,” Albanese replied, borrowing a famous line French President Emmanuel Macron had uttered only a few months earlier.

His confidence was badly misplaced. Albanese has one excuse: the Russian invasion of Ukraine played havoc with oil supplies and energy prices worldwide. But this does not wipe away the obvious failure to add enough power to the electricity grid and ease pressure on prices.

If only Albanese was the sole politician to promise more supply and lower cost. But Angus Taylor, now the shadow treasurer, did the same when he was energy minister for more than three years before the last election.

Taylor had to reset government policy after the Coalition civil wars over the National Energy Guarantee and the Clean Energy Target, so he unveiled a Technology Investment Roadmap to lower prices. He was canny enough not to put a dollar value on the benefits.

Taylor also unveiled a $1 billion policy to invest in projects that would add 3.8 gigawatts to the grid – including six hydropower schemes, five gas projects and one coal-fired plant upgrade. In the end, the Underwriting New Generation Investment program did not add a single watt.

To be fair to Taylor, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that annual costs to electricity retailers fell by 8 per cent from 2019 to 2021

But the outlook changed in early 2022, when regulators warned of higher prices. Taylor delayed the release of this information ahead of the election that year.

The political impact is easy to see: Albanese is under pressure to include energy bill subsidies in the March 25 budget to assure voters he is acting on prices. At the same time, Labor has to show it has results, not just another roadmap.

The latest tally shows the government has added more than 4 gigawatts of dispatchable power to the grid since the election, which means it has done more for supply in this term than the Liberals did in the last. Even so, this is not enough to stop the price hikes.

Australians are hearing yet more promises now the election is near. “Power prices will always be cheaper under a Coalition compared to Labor,” said the Opposition’s energy spokesman, Ted O’Brien. If only voters could believe it.

The energy grid is under immense strain. Nobody is willing to build a coal-fired power station, gas is costly. The Snowy 2.0 project is shockingly expensive and slow. There is plenty of solar and wind being built but it is not as reliable as coal. One option is to unlock more gas fields and build more gas-fired power stations but the community is divided on this. Australia appears to be incapable of a political consensus on the grid.

O’Brien has a huge problem with his promise. He cannot point to a Coalition policy that will make a difference to power prices in the next term of parliament. He and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton say nuclear is the answer, but this would require decades of work and an enormous cost.

This makes it difficult for the Coalition to reject the government’s energy bill subsidies in the same way Dutton voted against the last round of energy relief, when the government imposed controls on gas and coal supplies to try to cut the price of these key inputs.

No wonder Coalition MPs are impatient with the long wait for economic policies from Dutton and Taylor. 

Albanese has a problem with his promises. Dutton has a problem with his policies. History tells voters to shrug their shoulders when either one of them offers big claims about energy prices.

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