With Victoria’s declaration of a state of disaster and imposition of Stage 4 restrictions, many Melburnians have returned to panic buying. Supermarket shelves across the city have been stripped of canned goods, fresh vegetables and meat.
The meat buying, at least, makes some sense.
After aged care homes, meat-processing facilities have been a major contributor to Victoria’s COVID-19 outbreak. Hundreds of coronavirus cases have been linked to about a dozen sites, with the biggest outbreaks at those in Melbourne’s outer western and northern surburbs.
There were expectations following the state government’s lockdown announcement on Sunday that these facilities might be closed completely, along with the other business restrictions announced on Monday.
That didn’t happen. But the state’s 70-plus meat-processing facilities will be required to reduce their production capacity by one-third.
They must also implement, in the words of premier Daniel Andrews, “some of the most stringent safety protocols that have been ever put in place in any industrial setting”, including workers dressing “as if they were a health worker – gloves and gowns, masks and shields.”
This is going to affect the supply of meat to Victorian supermarkets, and prices. But thankfully not for long.
Why meat processors?
Processing meat is the opposite of an assembly line. It’s a disassembly line, the equivalent of auto workers pulling apart cars – removing the wheels, doors, seats, engine and so on – to sell the parts. Now imagine each car is slightly different, and must be taken apart in a slightly different way, at fast pace.
Automating such work is difficult. It is complex and intensive manual labour. Lots of people work close together, in a hard environment, for long hours, in cold and dry spaces. These factors make it easy for COVID-19 to spread.
The Victorian government’s directive that meat-processing facilities reduce output by one-third is to ensure workplace changes such as gaps between shifts, more physical distancing, and more attention to measures such as wearing personal protective equipment and not sharing cutting equipment.
So production will go at a slower pace. Output will be lower, and the per-unit cost of packaging meat products for consumers will be higher.
Slaughterhouse meat workers. Shutterstock
Synchronising the system
Quality and price are key purchasing decisions for most meat shoppers, and the meat industry has been geared to providing fresh produce at lowest cost.
Getting your favourite beef, lamb, chicken and pork cuts to your local supermarket or neighbourhood butcher is a complex game. Meat processing and distribution centres work out how much to produce, where to deliver and when to do it with great precision, planning up to 90 days ahead. They must synchronise supplies from farmers with demand from retailers.
Think of the system’s smooth operation as being like keeping a roomful of clocks synchronised.
If one clock fails, no problem. You can fix it. But what if a handful more clocks fail before you can fix it, and then dozens more fail? In a short time there will be so many faulty clocks that coordination is compromised. Eventually you won’t even know what the right time is.
Reducing capacity in one or two abattoirs for a few days could be worked around with minimal effects to consumers. But there’s no quick fix to reducing capacity in all of them for six weeks.
Supplies for some meat products will almost certainly be lower, and prices could increase. This is most likely to occur for the most common and popular meat cuts, like T-bone steaks or chicken drumsticks. If your preference is offal or giblets, though, you may not have a problem.
First, thanks to refrigerated transport, meat processors in other states can help meet lower production in Victoria. The industry has some flexibility to move from north to south, from west to east.
Second, supermarkets have been quick to bring restrictions back to prevent the panic buying and hoarding that make shortages even worse. Coles and Woolworths have already imposed two-pack limits on meat packages (and other products).
Third, to hoard meat you need freezer capacity, and it’s quite possible those disposed to stockpiling still have frozen meat from the first COVID-19 wave.
Fourth, supermarkets and hundreds of smaller operators such as butchers will be affected in different ways at different times. Finding what you want may simply require looking in more than one shop.
Fourth, there are options. Not just between different fresh products such as beef, chicken, pork, lamb and fish, but between preserved, frozen and canned alternatives.
So it might be just a bit harder to have your preferred choice of meat for dinner in the coming days. But the situation won’t be as dire as some fear.
Flavio Romero Macau, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management and Global Logistics, Edith Cowan University and Ferry Jie, Asssociate Professor in Supply Chain and Logistics Management, Deputy Director, Centre for Innovative Practice, Edith Cowan University
We have just witnessed an oil price crash like never before taking prices of West Texas Intermediate into deeply negative territory.
The spot price of West Texas, the US benchmark, reached minus US$40.32 a barrel and the May futures price (which is deliverable in a physical form) went to minus US$37.63 a barrel, the lowest price in the history of oil futures contracts.
There has been no better indicator of the extent of the economic impacts of coronavirus. With borders closed and much of the world’s population being urged to stay at home, transport has come to a near halt.
How can a price turn negative?
Oklahoma’s Cushing oil storage facility, the largest in the world. Crude Oil Daily
The industry has not been able to slow production fast enough to counter the drop in demand. The other mechanism that normally stabilises prices, US oil storage, appears to be nearing capacity.
West Texas Intermediate is typically stored at the Cushing facility in Oklahoma which is on the way to being full.
Cushing is said to be able to hold 62 million barrels of oil – enough to fill all the tanks of half the cars in United States.
That’s why prices have gone negative. Traders with contracts to take delivery of oil in May fear they won’t be able to store it. They are willing to pay not to have to take it and have nowhere to put it.
Not all oil contracts went negative. West Texas Intermediate contracts for June and subsequent months are still positive, reflecting a feeling that the supply and demand imbalance will soon be corrected.
Brent, the international price benchmark, remained positive, dropping to US$25.57 – a fall of about 9%. Unlike West Texas Intermediate, Brent deliveries can be put on ships and transported to storage facilities anywhere in the world.
Not confined to the US
There is no guarantee the problems of storage evident in the US won’t spread to other markets.
This is despite the decision of OPEC-Plus (the mainly Middle Eastern member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries plus Russia and other former Soviet states) to respond to the free fall by cutting output by 9.7 million barrels per day, ending the recent duel over production levels between OPEC and Russia.
Adding another element to the COVID-19 story, on March 9, the day of the Black Monday stock market crash, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange reported a new daily record for West Texas Intermediate trading, reaching 4.8 million contracts, surpassing the 4.3 million recorded on September 2019 following the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
The future does not look good. With rising unemployment, stuttering economies, and collapsing financial markets the prospects for substantial recovery in the oil markets seems far away.
It includes a new plan boasting a download speed of 1 gigabit per second and an upload speed of 50 megabits per second for $80 a month.
These are 20-fold improvements on the maximum NBN speeds now. Almost a decade since the first customers were connected, NBN Co is thinking about a genuinely 21st century offering in terms of speed and price.
The NBN is late, over budget and slow. Australia places 58th globally for fixed-line broadband speed. Not only do the NBN’s advertised speeds lag international standards but the actual speeds often don’t come close to what is promised.
Customer interest as a result has been unenthusiastic. NBN Co may well need to take a massive write-down on its assets because they don’t look like they’re worth A$50 billion.
All of this was entirely predictable, based on politicians failing to remember three basic lessons from Economics 101.
1: Technology often outstrips imagination
The history of innovation is littered with examples of remarkably important things being invented with no clear purpose in mind, or by accident, and then exceeding our wildest expectations.
When the Coalition decided to scuttle Labor’s NBN plan for fibre-optic cable to every premises, on the basis that “fibre-to-the-node” and using existing copper telephone wires to the premises would be much cheaper, this is what the chief spruiker of the Coalition’s NBN plan, Malcolm Turnbull, said about broadband needs in 2010:
There isn’t much or anything you can do with 100 Mbps that you can’t do with 12 Mbps for residential customers.
The breathtaking lack of insight and imagination in this comment is responsible in no small part for the Flintstonian broadband infrastructure Australia now has.
Prioritising speed of roll-out (which hasn’t even happened) over speed of internet (which sure has happened) was a massive mistake.
2: Positives justify subsidies
You having fast internet is good for me when we connect. When consumers can connect quickly to a business’s website that’s good for the business. It makes it more profitable for businesses to invest in their internet operations. This has benefits for other consumers and even other businesses.
A great illustration of this is in Dunedin, New Zealand, where there have been all sorts of business-to-business spillovers from the city having the fastest internet speeds in Australasia. The ABC’s Four Corners program has highlighted how this has revolutionised New Zealand’s video-game development industry, among other things.
Economists call spillover effects to third parties externalities. Pollution is a negative externality, while the benefit of fast internet is a positive externality.
A sound business model for the NBN ought to recognise the positive externalities and ensure they are incorporated into the price mechanism, by offering a partial subsidy to encourage people to sign up. Like the reverse of a carbon price.
One of the NBN’s key problems is the way successive governments structured national investment in it. Setting up NBN Co as a quasi-corporate entity needing to make a commercial rate of return on the roughly A$50 billion investment in the network was a huge mistake. It was the opposite of providing a subsidy.
The telecommunications companies who retail the NBN have complained that NBN Co’s wholesale price points mean it is hard for resellers to make a profit. It’s a kind of quality death spiral: an unattractive product means fewer people buy it, leading to the product getting worse, leading to even fewer people buying it.
3: Uniform pricing doesn’t work
Finally, it’s never a good idea to charge everyone the same price when there are different costs to serve different people.
The idea was that higher returns from easy-to-service city homes would subsidise the higher costs of service homes in regional and remote areas. But city homes, precisely because they are cheaper to service, have other options. If not enough city customers signed up to the NBN, prices would be driven up, making the network even less attractive to city customers. It’s textbook adverse selection, just like in health-insurance markets.
The government tried to get around this by banning competition. But that’s never really possible, especially from technologies not yet invented. Like 5G. The 2010 business case assumed no more than 16% of households would go wireless. Oops.
NBN will never make a return on the cost of its capital or meet its customer targets if it faces competition. Its corporate plan says so, at point 1: “The plan assumes effective regulatory protection to prevent opportunistic cherry picking […] the viability of the project is dependent upon this protection.”
What to do from here
Multiple governments have bungled the NBN. But there is a way to salvage things – a bit.
Holding constant the technology (fibre-to-the-node), the best thing the government could do is write down its investment massively – ideally so low that it can flog NBN Co off to someone who can be subject to access regulation – ensuring, like other utilities, ownership of infrastructure doesn’t stymie competition – and make a modest rate of return.
Our super funds are always sticking up their hands for infrastructure investment. This would be a good one.
Ideally, though, the technology should be fixed. Fibre-to-the-premises was always going to be expensive, but it was also going to be fast, and as future-proof as we could get.
Lack of imagination and inability to think past 12 Mbps less than ten years ago should not hold the nation back now.
The Opal nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney. It does not produce nuclear energy but is used to produce medical radioisotopes and for other purposes. Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Looking at the state of policy on energy and climate change in Australia, it’s tempting to give in to despair. At the national level, following the abandonment of the National Energy Guarantee last year, we have no coherent energy policy and no serious policy to address climate change.
In this context, the announcement of two separate inquiries into the feasibility of nuclear power (by the New South Wales and federal parliaments) could reasonably give rise to cynicism. The only possible case for considering nuclear power, in my view, is that it might provide a way to decarbonise our electricity supply industry.
Activists dressed as nuclear waste barrels protesting at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in 2001. Nuclear technology in Australia has long raised concern among environmentalists. Laura Frriezer/AAP
Yet in a situation which all responsible people view as a climate emergency, we can’t afford the luxury of despair. For this reason, rather than dismissing these inquiries as political stunts, I made a submission to the federal inquiry setting out the conditions required to allow for any possibility of nuclear power in Australia.
The submission was picked up by the national media, which largely focused on my proposal to lift the state ban on nuclear power and implement a carbon price.
The reception from commentators on the right, who want the ban lifted, and from renewables advocates, who want a price on carbon, suggests a middle ground on nuclear power may be achievable.
The three big problems with nuclear power
Three fundamental problems arise immediately when considering the prospect of nuclear power in Australia. First, the technology is expensive: more expensive than new fossil-fuelled power stations, and far too expensive to compete with existing fossil fuel generators under current market conditions.
Second, given the time lags involved, any substantial contribution from nuclear power in Australia won’t be available until well beyond 2030.
Third, given the strong public opposition to nuclear power, particularly from the environmental movement, any attempt to promote nuclear power at the expense of renewables would never get broad support. In these circumstances, any investor in nuclear power would face the prospect of losing their money the moment the balance of political power shifted.
A technician uses a hot cell which shields radioactive material at the Opal nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney. Tracey Nearmy/AAP
On the first point, we have some evidence from the contract agreed by the UK government in for the construction of the Hinkley C nuclear power plant. This was the first new nuclear construction project to be approved in an OECD country for a number of years.
The agreement to construct Hinkley was based on a guaranteed “strike price” of £92.50/ megawatt hours (MWh), in 2012 prices, to be adjusted in line with the consumer price index during the construction period and over the subsequent 35-year tariff period. At current exchange rates, this price corresponds to approximately A$165.
Prices in Australia’s National Electricity Market have generally averaged around A$90/MWh. This implies that, if new nuclear power is to compete with existing fossil fuel generators, a carbon price must impose a cost of A$75/MWh on fossil fuel generation.
Assuming emission rates of 1.3 tonnes/MWh for brown coal, 1 tonne/MWh for black and 0.5 tonnes for gas, the implied carbon price ranges from A$50/tonne (to displace brown coal) to $150/tonne (to displace gas). On the basis that nuclear power is most plausible as a competitor for baseload generation from brown coal, I considered a price of A$50/tonne.
A blueprint for reform
The central recommendations of my submission were as follows:
Nuclear power, while costly, could dramatically reduce Australia’s electricity sector emissions. AAP
Recommendation 1: A carbon price of A$25/tonne should be introduced immediately, and increased at a real rate of 5% a year, reaching A$50/tonne by 2035.
Recommendation 2: The government should immediately adopt the recommendations of its own Climate Change Authority for a 40% to 60% reduction in emissions by 2030, relative to 2000 levels, and match other leading OECD countries in committing to complete decarbonisation of the economy by 2050.
Recommendation 3: The parliament should pass a motion:
affirming its confidence in mainstream climate science and its acceptance of the key conclusions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
legislating a commitment to emissions reductions;
removing the existing ban on nuclear power.
Let’s all meet in the middle
Rather to my surprise, this proposal received a favourable reception from a number of centre-right commentators.
Reaction from renewables proponents, on social media at least, was cautious. But it did not indicate the reflexive hostility that might be expected, given the polarised nature of the debate.
There are immediate political implications of my proposal at both the state and federal level. It will be more difficult for the Coalition-dominated committees running the two inquiries to bring down a report favourable to nuclear power without addressing the necessary conditions – including a carbon price. If the government’s hostility to carbon pricing is such that a serious proposal for nuclear power cannot be considered, it will at least be clear that this option can be abandoned for good.
Former Nationals leader and now backbencher Barnaby Joyce is a strong advocate for nuclear power. Lukas Coch/AAP
In the admittedly unlikely event that the Coalition government shows itself open to new thinking, the focus turns to Labor and the Greens.
Given the urgency of addressing climate change – a task that is best addressed through a carbon price – it makes no sense to reject action now on the basis that it opens up the possibility of nuclear power sometime in the 2030s. And, if renewables and storage perform as well as most environmentalists expect, nuclear power will be unable to compete even then.
Political hardheads will doubtless say that this is all impossible, and they may be right. But in a world where Donald Trump can win a US presidential election, and major investment banks support UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn over Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “impossible” is a big claim
In the absence of any prospect of progress on either energy or climate, the grand bargain I’ve proposed is at least worth a try.
Desperate families are increasingly turning to crowdfunding campaigns to raise tens of thousands of dollars for surgery and other medical expenses. From shutterstock.com
Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy will investigate how to better protect patients from doctors charging “really unjustifiable, excessive fees” of up to A$10,000 or more for medical procedures.
Murphy said it was potentially unethical for doctors to charge such high out-of-pocket fees that left families in severe financial pain, and that contrary to some patients’ hopes, paying more didn’t equate to better outcomes.
The call comes as desperate families increasingly turn to crowdfunding, remortgaging their homes and eating into their superannuation to raise tens of thousands of dollars for surgeries and other medical expenses.
It is perfectly legal for a doctor working in private practice to charge what they believe is fair and reasonable. It’s a private market, so buyers beware.
But that doesn’t mean it’s right, or that it should be allowed to continue.
Not everything is available in the public system
Some patients’ out-of-pocket costs are from the gap between what their private health insurance and/or Medicare will pay for a procedure or treatment.
But some treatments aren’t funded by Medicare or offered in public hospitals because their safety, efficacy and value for money have not yet been demonstrated.
Medical technologies, devices and surgical techniques need to be rigorously tested in clinical trials to demonstrate safety and clinical effectiveness. They will only be widely adopted when they have a strong evidence base.
Out-of-pocket costs can be particularly high for patients with cancer. From shutterstock.com
When the government pays for a health service, value for money is also considered. For really expensive services and medicines that have the potential to greatly benefit patients, the government will try to negotiate prices down, to reduce the impact on the health budget.
While a lack of evidence of a benefit does not necessarily mean the procedure does not benefit patients, the outcomes need to be reviewed and demonstrated to justify its ongoing use.
Sometimes new technologies are adopted prematurely based on weak evidence and strong marketing which can lead to poor investment decisions. This was the case with robotic surgery for prostate cancer, offered early in private practice in Australia, only to find later it was no better than traditional surgery.
If a patient chooses to spend money on a high-risk surgery, is it really anyone’s business?
Sometimes patients will choose to undergo high-risk surgery, not covered under the public system, and are willing to pay out of their own pocket, or raise the funds through crowdsourcing or remortgaging their home.
Some will argue the value is whatever the patient is willing to pay for it and it’s up to the patient’s own risk-benefit preferences.
There are some major problems with this. Patients often make health decisions while distressed, ill and emotional. They may not be able to determine the best course of action or have all the information at hand. They must trust the doctor and his or her superior knowledge and experience.
Health economists call this “asymmetric information”. The doctor has extensive years of training, expertise and qualifications. The patient has Dr Google.
A key reason governments intervene in health care systems is to avoid market failure arising from unequal information and the profiteering of providers.
Our ‘fee-for-service’ system is failing
In the private system, doctors are paid a fee for each service they provide. This creates an incentive for doctors to provide more services: the more services they provide, the more they get paid.
But the high volumes of testing, consultations and fragmented services we’re currently seeing aren’t translating to a better quality of care. As such, economists are calling for major reforms of our fee-for-service private health system and the way that doctors are paid.
This could involve paying doctors for caring for a patient’s medical condition over a set period, rather than each time they see the patient, or charging private patients a “bundled fee” for all the scans, appointments and other costs associated with something like a hip replacement.
Out-of-pocket costs are very high for some Australians with cancer. A quarter of Queenslanders diagnosed with cancer will pay provider fees of more than A$20,000 in the first two years after diagnosis.
While what constitutes “value” will be in the eye of the beholder, a well-functioning and sustainable health system is one that puts patients’ interests above all others and holds health providers accountable.
Australia’s universal health care system is one of the best in the world and we need to work hard to preserve it. Surgeries costing tens of thousands of dollars will continue unless the government regulates private medical practice or reforms the way doctors are remunerated.
It’s time to cap what physicians can charge for services and provide incentives for specialists to bulk-bill their patients.
On January 26, 2011, Coles fired the first shot in what would soon be dubbed the “supermarket price wars” by reducing the price of its own-brand milk to A$1 per litre. Woolworths fired back, triggering seven years of intense price competition.
But now Coles has waved the white flag, indicating a move away from price-based marketing, to a focus on other attributes, such as sustainability, local produce and community.
While operational costs (wages, rent, bills) remain fixed or go up, prices can’t keep coming down. You eventually run out of margin.
Coles recent half yearly results reflect this, with a drop in earnings of 14.1% from A$920 million to A$790 million.
In contrast, Woolworths announced an 11.1% increase in earnings for their supermarket business. But Woolworths dropped their “cheap, cheap” price cutting campaign nearly two years ago.
Other retailers also get caught in the cross fire of price cutting. Case in point is Aussie Farmers Direct, which fell into administration this week saying they were:
…no longer able to compete against the domination of the major two supermarkets.
While it may be overly simplistic to blame the two big supermarkets for the downfall of Aussie Farmers Direct, price conscious consumers and thin grocery margins certainly contributed.
How this strategy came about
Supermarkets are now looking beyond price to stand out.
Both Coles and Woolworths are very similar in the brands they offer, prices, layouts, weekly specials and online channels. The move away from price gets shoppers thinking about what is unique to each chain.
Shoppers who are continually exposed to loyalty program logos, may eventually stop noticing these logos, or “switch off”. This is because of a behavioural tendency called “habituation”.
What these new strategies are trying to sell
So, if Coles are no longer selling themselves on price, what are they selling?
Coles’ new approach is more subtle, selling themselves through aspirational stories and employing classic advertising techniques to do it.
These techniques are used in advertising to convey positive feelings and emotions associated with a particular experience. A simple way to achieve this in advertising is to feature people telling their own stories – as seen in the new Coles advert launched this week.
Woolworths ad campaign.
With the Commonwealth Games near, both supermarkets are also featuring sports stars in their marketing. Woolworths new campaign features athletes and their connection with fresh food, positions the company, once again, as “Australia’s Fresh Food People”.
Meanwhile, Coles have partnered with Uncle Toby’s for their Sports for Schools campaign. Their advertisements feature an array of young, fit, attractive and successful athletes linking the athletic success with the purchase of products from Coles.
By moving away from price and focusing on a story telling strategy, both supermarkets can engage consumers with a process called “internalisation”. This is where people accept the endorser’s position on an issue as their own.
Internalisation is a powerful psychological mechanism because even if the source used in the campaign is forgotten, the internalised attitude usually remains. Price doesn’t create this effect.
While food prices won’t necessarily go up any time soon, consumers shouldn’t expect to see any further significant price drops. Instead, Coles and Woolworths will draw attention to other important attributes.
Politicians are told never to waste a good crisis. Australia’s electricity sector is in crisis, or something close to it. The nation’s first-ever statewide blackout, in South Australia in September 2016, was followed by electricity shortages in several states last summer. More shortages are anticipated over coming summers.
But for most Australians, the most visible impact of this crisis has been their ever-increasing electricity bills. Electricity prices have become a political hot potato, and the blame game has been running unchecked for more than a year.
Electricity retailers find fault with governments, and renewable energy advocates point the finger at the nasty old fossil-fuel generators. The right-wing commentariat blames renewables, while the federal government blames everyone but itself.
The truth is there is no silver bullet. No single factor or decision is responsible for the electricity prices we endure today. Rather, it is the confluence of many different policies and pressures at every step of the electricity supply chain.
Four components make up your electricity bill. Each has contributed to this increase.
How your rising power bills stack up. ACCC, Author provided
The biggest culprit has been the network component – the cost of transporting the electricity. Next comes the retail component – the cost of billing and servicing the customer. Then there is the wholesale component – the cost of generating the electricity. And finally, the government policy component – the cost of environmental schemes that we pay for through our electricity bills.
Each component has a different tale, told differently in every state. But ultimately, this is a story about a decade of policy failure.
Network news
Network costs form the biggest part of your electricity bill. Australia is a big country, and moving electricity around it is expensive. As the graph above shows, network costs have contributed 40% of the total price increase over the past decade.
The reason we now pay so much for the network is simply that we have built an awful lot more stuff over the past decade. It’s also because it was agreed – through the industry regulator – that network businesses could build more network infrastructure and that we all have to pay for it, regardless of whether it is really needed.
Network businesses are heavily regulated. Their costs, charges and profits all have to be ticked off. This is supposed to keep costs down and prevent consumers being charged too much.
That’s the theory. But the fact is costs have spiralled. Between 2005 and 2016 the total value of the National Electricity Market (NEM) distribution network increased from A$42 billion to A$72 billion – a whopping 70%. During that time there has been little change in the number of customers using the network or the amount of electricity they used. The result: every unit of electricity we consume costs much more than it used to.
There are several reasons for this expensive overbuild. First, forecasts of electricity demand were wrong – badly wrong. Instead of ever-increasing consumption, the amount of electricity we used started to decline in 2009. A whole lot of network infrastructure was built to meet demand that never eventuated.
Second, governments in New South Wales and Queensland imposed strict reliability settings – designed to avoid blackouts – on the networks in the mid-2000s. To meet these reliability settings, the network businesses had to spend a lot more money reinforcing their networks than they otherwise would have.
Third, the way in which network businesses are regulated encourages extra spending on infrastructure. In an industry where you are guaranteed a 10% return on investment, virtually risk-free – as network businesses were between 2009 and 2014 – you are inclined to build, build, build.
The blame for this “gold-plating” of network assets is spread widely. Governments have been accused of panicking and setting reliability standards too high. The regulator has copped its share for allowing businesses too much capital spend and too high a return. Privatisation has also been criticised, which is slightly bizarre given that the worst offenders have been state-owned businesses.
Retail rollercoaster
The second biggest increase in your bill has been the amount we pay for the services provided to us by retailers. Across the NEM, 26% of the price increase over the past decade has been due to retail margins.
This increase in the retail component was never supposed to happen. To understand why, you must go back to the rationale for opening the retail sector to competition. Back in the 1990s, it was felt that retail energy was ripe for competition, which would deliver lower prices and more innovative products for consumers.
In theory, where competition exists, firms seek to reduce their costs to maximise their profits, in turn allowing them to reduce prices so as to grab as many customers as possible. The more they cut their costs, the more they can cut prices. Theoretically, costs are minimised and profits are squeezed. If competition works as it’s supposed to, the retail component should go down, not up.
But the exact opposite has happened in the electricity sector. In Victoria, the state that in 2009 became the first to completely deregulate its retail electricity market, the retail component of the bill has contributed to 36% of the price increase over the past decade.
On average, Victorians pay almost A$400 a year to retailers, more than any other mainland state in the NEM. This is consistent with the Grattan Institute’s Price Shock report, which showed that rising profits are causing pain for Victorian electricity consumers. Many customers remain on expensive deals, and do not switch to cheaper offers because the market is so complicated. These “sticky” customers have been cited as the cause of “excessive” profits to retailers.
But the new figures provided by the ACCC, which come directly from retailers, paint a different picture. The ACCC finds that the increase in margins in Victoria is wholly down to the increasing costs of retailers doing business.
There are reasons why competition might drive prices up, not down. Retailers now spend money on marketing to recruit and retain customers. And the existence of multiple retailers leads to duplications in costs that would not exist if a single retailer ran the market.
But these increases should be offset by retailers finding savings elsewhere, and this doesn’t seem to have happened. History may judge the introduction of competition to the retail electricity market as an expensive mistake.
Generational problems
So far, we have accounted for 65% of the bill increase of the past decade, and neither renewables nor coal have been mentioned once. Nor were they ever likely to be. The actual generation of electricity has only ever formed a minor portion of your electricity bill – the ACCC report shows that in 2015-16 the wholesale component constituted only 22% of the typical bill.
In the past year, however, wholesale prices have really increased. In 2015-16, households paid on average A$341 a year for the generation of electricity – far less than they were paying in 2006-07. But in the past year, that is estimated to have increased to A$530 a year.
Generators, particularly in Queensland, have been engaging in questionable behaviour, but it is the fundamental change in the supply and demand balance that means higher prices are here to stay for at least the next few years.
The truth is the cost of generating electricity has been exceptionally low in most parts of Australia for most of the past two decades. When the NEM was created in 1998, there was arguably more generation capacity in the system than was needed to meet demand. And in economics, more supply than demand equals low prices.
Over the years our politicians have been particularly good at ensuring overcapacity in the system. Most of the investment in generation in the NEM since its creation has been driven by either taxpayers’ money, or government schemes and incentives – not by market forces. The result has been oversupply.
Up until the late 2000s the market kept chugging along. Then two things happened. First, consumers started using less electricity. And second, the Renewable Energy Target (RET) was ramped up, pushing more supply into the market.
Demand down and supply up meant even more oversupply, and continued low prices. But the combination of low prices and low demand put pressure on the finances of existing fossil fuel generators. Old generators were being asked to produce less electricity than before, for lower prices. Smaller power stations began to be mothballed or retired.
Something had to give, and it did when both Alinta and Engie decided it was no longer financially viable to keep their power stations running. Far from being oversupplied, the market is now struggling to meet demand on hot days when people use the most electricity. The result is very high prices.
A tight demand and supply balance with less coal-fired generation has meant that Australia increasingly relies on gas-fired generation, at a time when gas prices are astronomical, leading to accusations of price-gouging.
Put simply, Australia has failed to build enough new generation over recent years to reliably replace ageing coal plants when they leave the market.
Is it renewable energy’s fault that coal-fired power stations have closed? Yes, but this is what needs to happen if we are to reduce greenhouse emissions. Is it renewables’ fault that replacement generation has not been built? No. It’s the government’s fault for failing to provide the right environment for new investment.
The right investment climate is crucial. Marcella Cheng/The Conversation, CC BY
The current predicament could have been avoided if we had a credible and comprehensive emissions reduction policy to drive investment in the sector. Such a policy would give investors the confidence to build generation with the knowledge about what carbon liabilities they may face in the future. But the carbon price was repealed in 2014 and replaced with nothing.
We’re still waiting for an alternative policy. We’re still waiting for enough generation capacity to be built. And we’re still paying sky-high wholesale prices for electricity.
Green and gold
Finally, we have the direct cost of government green schemes over the past decade: the RET; the household solar panel subsidies; and the energy-efficiency incentives for homes and businesses.
They represent 16% of the price increase over the past 10 years – but they are still only 6% of the average bill.
If the aim of these schemes has been to reduce emissions, they have not done a very good job. Rooftop solar panel subsidies have been expensive and inequitable. The RET is more effective as an industry subsidy than an emissions reduction or energy transition policy. And energy efficiency schemes have produced questionable results.
It hasn’t been a total waste of money, but far deeper emissions cuts could have been delivered if those funds had been channelled into a coherent policy.
The story of Australia’s high electricity prices is not really one of private companies ripping off consumers. Nor is it a tale about the privatisation of an essential service. Rather, this is the story of a decade of policy drift and political failure.
Governments have been repeatedly warned about the need to tackle these problems, but have done very little.
Instead they have focused their energy on squabbling over climate policy. State governments have introduced inefficient schemes, scrapped them, and then introduced them again, while the federal government has discardedpolicies without even trying them.
There is a huge void where our sensible energy policy should be. Network overbuild and ballooning retailer margins both dwarf the impact of the carbon price, yet if you listen only to our politicians you’d be forgiven for thinking the opposite.
And still it goes on. The underlying causes of Australia’s electricity price headaches – the regulation of networks, ineffective retail market competition, and our barely coping generators – need immediate attention. But still the petty politicking prevails.
The Coalition has rejected the Clean Energy Target recommended by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel. Labor will give no guarantee of support for the government’s alternative policy, the National Energy Guarantee. Some politicians doubt the very idea that we need to act on climate change. Some states have given up on Canberra and are going it alone.
We’ve been here before and we know how this story ends. Crisis wasted.
Faced with the expansion of Aldi 
We’ve been here before and we know how this story ends. Crisis wasted.
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