Hate to say we told you so on power cost

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.

Canegrowers has shown in countless submissions that prices could be cut by around 30 per cent if 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 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 per cent.

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.

DAN GALLICAN, CEO, CANEGROWERS.