The AER has just backed Albo’s dills into a corner:
As many as five million households face big increases in their power bills if taxpayer-funded energy subsidies do not extend into the next financial year, piling pressure on Jim Chalmers to announce new relief in the May 14 budget.
The effect of the subsidies coming off in July would wipe out the predicted drop in power bills, which the Australian Energy Regulator revealed on Tuesday could be as much as 7.1 per cent in 2024-25.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the AER’s release of the default market offer – the maximum price retailers can charge for electricity – showed prices were beginning to stabilise “after the world’s biggest energy crisis in 50 years”.
Rubbish, Mr Bowen. Why did it take most of 2022 for you to impose gas and coal price caps?
If you had done them in week one of your government, Australia would have had NO ENERGY SHOCK.
I rang economics committee member Lord Andrew Charlton and told him this in person that week. I told you again repeatedly in the press.
But Mad King was too busy devouring caviar on an oil rig, Chicken Chamlers was too busy hiding under his desk, Useless Husic was too busy looking out for his career, and Lord Charlton was too busy scouting for a new castle in Palm Beach.
This energy and inflation shock was purely the fault of the dawdling and cowardly Albanese Government.
Now, it’s backed into a corner of its own making. The AER’s grotesquely minor price cuts, most of which are much less than 7%, mean any move to remove subsidies will deliver big bill hikes:
Yet the subsidies are nothing more than giveaways to the war-profiteering East Coast Gas Cartel.
It’s the worst energy policy dog’s breakfast I have ever seen.
