Katie Bice: We all pay for government’s faulty power play
GREEN schemes are all the rage among governments and companies trying to look like they have a social conscience, but they should never be ham-fisted policies which ultimately hurt consumers’ hip pockets, writes Katie Bice.
Opinion
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THE financial cost of our lame efforts to go green have been laid bare. And it’s a case of the majority shouldering the burden for the few as governments desperate to appease Left-leaning electorates scramble for votes.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission last week delivered its damning report into our broken energy system.
It found the current set-up unsustainable and unacceptable, and blamed, in part, misguided renewable energy schemes for jacking up prices on annual household bills by about $100.
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It was a horrifying example of how we’ve been let down by government green schemes which ultimately do little for the environment and hurt mums, dads and pensioners in their hip pockets.
The basically useless “small scale” plans encouraged people to switch to solar power — at the expense we now learn of the rest of us who had to shoulder the burden of paying the burden of premium solar feed-in tariffs. The scheme has been a massive win for those able to afford the panels, who the report found pay on average $538 a year less than non-solar customers.
This comes off the back of the plastic bag farce which reports suggest will see supermarkets bottom lines benefit most.
Green schemes are all the rage among governments and companies trying to look like they have a social conscience. But they should never be ham-fisted policies which ultimately cost consumers more.
It has become a sore point for Victorians who continue to watch their bills increasing. It requires a national approach rather than the hodgepodge of state government responses we now have.
But predictions of how much our bills would be slashed if all 56 recommendations were taken up should be approached with some caution. They claimed household bills would fall by more than $400 a year — 20-25 per cent depending on which state you live in. The figure for more than two million small and medium businesses was put at an average of 24 per cent.
We all trust their figures are spot on and hope it turns out to be true. But our real-world experience makes us all naturally cynical that we’ll suddenly have an extra $400 in our pockets soon. Never in living memory has the price of anything come down by a quarter. Not houses, not petrol, not insurance, not the price of bread and milk.
It’s not realistic, it sets our expectations too high and it sets a target the electricity market will never be able to meet.
Katie Bice is Sunday Herald Sun Deputy Editor
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