Vikki Campion: Energy boffins get rich while we get the bill
When do we start to learn the names of the bureaucrats behind tripling power costs and hold them accountable, because some wouldn’t have a job if their pay was based on performance, writes Vikki Campion.
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What do you give someone unable to keep your lights on? A pay rise.
Our federal government is giving five-figure pay bumps to bureaucrats earning squillions, even after their cumulative effort saw power costs triple and one region lose power for a fortnight.
From July 1, your top energy bureaucrat gets a performance bonus of $420 a week to earn nearly nine times the typical Australian: $932,116 a year (a trip to Wilcannia to see the melted ice-creams for anyone who can tell me this superstar’s name since he earns more than the PM).
Since we, the taxpayers, are paying his hefty salary, let’s assist in the performance review.
Is this the pay rise we give the boss of a department after a region like the Far West, among the poorest places in NSW, goes without power for more than 10 days?
Where pensioners lost all their food to starve for a fortnight, Meals on Wheels could not deliver food, families could not boil water to make a baby bottle, and everything in the freezers spoiled?
Employers like the local mine could not operate or process workers’ pay, water pumps could not work, and sewage backed up.
This is a region with 200MW of wind, 53MW of solar, and a 50MWh battery energy storage system, all of which could not be used locally “due to commercial interests and strict energy network rules”.
It’s not fair to say this is the fault of one human being. Let’s look at who shapes those rules because they are getting five-figure pay raises too.
The Australian Energy Regulator, in a review of the Far West power outage, is painted as “largely responsible for enforcing the rules and operations of the electricity network and … expectations around service reliability”.
So what do taxpayers give them for overseeing this disaster? Pay rises between $14,000 and $11,000 each – enough that Australian Energy Regulator chairwoman Clare Savage will be paid $1719 each day from July 1.
Combined with other board members and their pay rises, taxpayers will be forking out nearly $3mn in 2025-26 for the AER chairwoman and members.
This despite their overseeing one of the greatest fiascos in the current economy yet having hardly been front and centre in finding ways to stop it from ever occurring again.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen often talks about taking advice from experts.
That’s people like his nearly $1m secretary and the Australian Energy Regulator, which boasts about being key “to develop and co-ordinate national energy policy”.
Energy prices have increased by 33.5 per cent, yet the clique of people telling us more wind and solar are cheaper are also on the list for a massive pay rise come July 1.
Since 2022, public office holders have had a 12.6 per cent pay rise on already massive taxpayer salaries, with three department secretaries now earning more than $1m a year, despite their peers in the US with far greater assets and risk to manage clearing half that.
If they were doing a good job, bills were cheap, power was plentiful, business was thriving and Australia was becoming more independent, you could easily justify that money.
Should anyone who watched over the Broken Hill fiasco warrant a $20,000 pay rise in the same year as the whole region suffered, some never recovered, and still has no action on the ground? (Meanwhile the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water secretary Anthony Lean deserves some credit for the Far West fiasco, too. NSW secretaries generally earn between $509,251 to $588,250 a year. There’s been nothing determined about a pay rise there, though.)
Should the secretary of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, David Fredericks, who was Penny Wong’s ministerial chief of staff in 2008, be paid $2553 a day when our power bills were promised to drop $275 but have only increased since his appointment?
The Remuneration Tribunal reasoning, tragically, is not tied to any performance review over the past 12 months, but “balancing the need for restraint given economic conditions with the recognition of the upward pressure on household costs”.
I’m not sure what “household costs” someone on $2553 a day cannot afford without a $20,000 pay rise. What are these costs?
When do we start to learn the names of these bureaucrats and hold them accountable, because some of these crew wouldn’t have a job if their pay was based on performance.
THE PEOPLE ARE SPEAKING OUT ON NET ZERO, BUT WILL NATS LISTEN?
The will of the people to abandon net zero has finally risen up against politicians’ policy.
It’s now the rank and file of the NSW Nationals, the NT Country Liberal Party, the SA Liberals, and the Canning branch of the WA Liberals that have, at their base, moved motions to dump net zero while the party leadership stubbornly sticks in the Paris policy bog.
After all this time, we have been told that net zero would make us a “renewables superpower”, and now even Treasurer Jim Chalmers has noted the cost of net zero as a concern of the budget.
The question is now whether the parliamentary teams in NSW, NT, WA and SA reflect the demands of their bases or remain beholden to the grifters. Conferences cannot serve as a cul-de-sac to strangle genuine policy.
NSW Nationals’ motions last year did not attract fulsome responses from elected politicians, with the response 12 months later from the state parliamentary team as short as one word: “Noted”. A call for a moratorium on strategic assets or critical infrastructure, including power generation, to foreign investors in 2024 warranted only a “Noted”.
Since that was moved, NSW has endured a glut of foreign-owned power development in wind and solar over prime agricultural land and causing devastating consequences to neighbours who can no longer insure themselves.
When the elected officials dismiss a motion as “noted”, the rank and file note that they are not listening.
Sitting on parliamentary leather does not improve your IQ, but it does increase your exposure to lobbyists as well as well-funded individuals with particular vested interests. Show me where appeasing the climate zealots and the renewable energy lobby has delivered great swings towards conservative candidates in any election.
The base that has risen against net zero is also the preselectors who give you a job, so dismissing their concerns as merely “noted” to appease your renewable lobby mates is a dangerous kind of arrogance.
LIFTER
The cop who showed immense bravery crash tackling a delinquent running around Parramatta Station with a meat cleaver.
LEANER
NSW Labor trying to erase the second biggest and only state-run boys’ boarding school, Farrer, by forcing it to go co-ed. Build a state girls’ boarding school instead.
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