LETTER to the Editor - ACCC vindicates electricity stance

LETTER to the Editor - ACCC vindicates electricity stance

ACCC report vindicates CANEGROWERS electricity campaign

It’s not generally polite to say ‘I told you so’ but in this case… we did tell you so!

CANEGROWERS has been campaigning on the cost of electricity for almost a decade, trying to get government, electricity companies and regulators alike to listen to the facts which point to a broken power pricing system.

CANEGROWERS has shown in countless submissions that prices could be cut by around 30% if some fundamental flaws in the power pricing mechanisms were fixed.

These are fixes that wouldn’t put anyone in the electricity game out of business but would save the budgets of countless Queensland small businesses, farms included, who are struggling.

So last week’s release of an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into electricity pricing was bittersweet.

The ACCC said, “The National Electricity Market is largely broken and needs to be reset”.

It has put forward 56 recommendations which, it says, could cut electricity bills by 25%.

So with the vindication of the ACCC report behind us, CANEGROWERS calls on the Queensland Government to:

  • voluntarily write down the value of the state’s overvalued electricity networks , and
  • have Energy Queensland design modern, efficient network tariffs that reflect the real cost of supplying electricity to users, including irrigators, on non-congested parts of the network.

It’s time for action. We will be watching closely for the fixes, for action on the ACCC recommendations, when the Council of Australian Governments meets next month.

Dan Galligan
CANEGROWERS CEO

 

 

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