Every Australian household and around a million small businesses will be provided additional electricity bill rebates by the end of this year – and the Coalition is on board.
Ahead of more power price pain for many, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen yesterday jointly announced another $150 in rebates on electricity bills. This is to be delivered in quarterly instalments from July 1 this year to the end of 2025.
The new rebates follow on from $300 for households and $325 for small businesses from the Albanese Government’s Energy Bill Relief Fund over 2024-25.
“Helping with the cost of living is the number one priority of the Albanese Government and the Budget, and that’s what our energy rebates will do,” says the accompanying statement.
Extension of the rebates will cost $1.8 billion over forward estimates, and Treasury says it will reduce household power bills by an estimated 7.5 per cent on average nationally. As for how to get the rebate:
“You don’t need to do anything to receive this. Your electricity provider or embedded network operator will automatically apply the bill relief to your electricity account.”
While the new rebates will provide some additional help, it’s just another breather. With switching energy retailers so simple these days, households should regularly compare electricity plans to determine if there are better deals available and consider energy efficiency strategies; as the cheapest kilowatt-hour from the mains grid is the one that’s not consumed.
Also announced yesterday was the ACCC’s Inquiry into the National Electricity Market is to be extended for 12 months. This is a series of reports examining electricity bills, usage and pricing for residential and small business customers in the National Electricity Market (NEM)1.
Coalition: “Band-Aid Over A Bullet Wound”
In an interview on ABC’s Insiders yesterday, Shadow Treasurer and Federal Member for Hume Angus Taylor said the Coalition will back the rebate.
“We’re not going to stand in the way of Labor cleaning up its own mess. This is a band-aid on a bullet wound here.”
The band-aid-on-a-bullet-wound metaphor has been a favourite of Mr. Taylor over recent years. But electricity price rises were baked in even before Labor won the election in 2022. Going into the last election, the Liberals were crowing about electricity prices dropping.
“We’ve now turned a corner,” the Party stated2.
But what was waiting in the shadows is the Australian Energy Regulator’s (AER’s) Default Market Offer (DMO) pricing for the following financial year in New South Wales, South Australia and South-East Queensland. This sets the scene for market offers in those jurisdictions.
The AER’s final determination was to be published well before the election – on May 1 2022 – but the then-Morrison Government gave the Regulator extra time to release it. The final determination wasn’t published until May 26; five days after the election. It contained bad news, with residential prices going up between 7.2% and 18.3%, and for small business up 5.7% to 19%.
The reasons given for the increases were reductions in fossil fuel-based generation from unplanned outages, higher coal and gas prices due to global instability (e.g. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a couple of months earlier), a slowdown in new capacity investment and increasingly “peaky” demand.
The AER’s determination would have been no different if the Coalition was the victor, and then the Coalition would have had some explaining to do. But the black eye went to the freshly-minted Albanese Government, which had previously pledged to reduce power bills by $275 by 2025 for the average family.
Rebates to offset subsequent power price rises probably weren’t what Labor (or voters) had in mind.
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Meh. A penny pinching effort that Labor hopes will help them avoid losing the election. Factor in their other penny pinching efforts, and it’s like they’re trying to do just enough to claim they’ve done something without really doing anything. Frankly it’s insulting. And it probably won’t make any difference in my electorate.
These power bill relief measures will, if not already, become a permanent subsidy for the grid. It is sold to us as energy bill relief, cost of living relief, etc, to make the politicians look good, but if we dig into the numbers published by AEMO and the NEM, we can see it for what it is.
“Distributed photovoltaic (PV) output was at an all-time quarterly high in all NEM regions, with a NEM-wide average output of 4,054 MW, 18% higher than the previous record of 3,433 MW set in Q4 2023. As a result, average operational demand was slightly lower across the NEM, at 19,683 MW, down 0.3% from Q4 2023.” Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q4 2024 January 2025.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the pollies should come clean about it. Perhaps this is the way that the grid transition must occur to make it fair for all Australians? Perhaps grid subsidies should only be paid to people without solar panels? I don’t know.
NEM . . .
I have never seen any reference to just SE Qld, usually references just the state of Qld (as a whole) ?
Also, ACT and Tasmania are NEM states.
Rebates like this are frankly have a bit of a scammy feel to them, and often lead to higher prices.
You only have to look at almost any govco scheme, rebate, grant, invariably it leads to higher profits for the supplier of whatever service it is for.
Also, it’s a bit scammy taking taxpayer $, and giving it back to make themselves look good.
All as bad as each other.
Hi Les, thanks for pointing out my error re: NEM jurisdictions. I’ve corrected it.