MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Ms WATSON-BROWN (Ryan) (15:14): I propose this MPI today because Australians are being ripped off, and we're in this mess because of decades of bipartisan agreement between Labor and the coalition on handing our essential services over to private corporations. Who else thinks that private energy retailers are pointless middlemen—scam artists, even, or ticket clippers?

Origin, AGL, Alinta, Energy Australia—we have more than 40 electricity retailers in Australia, but they're all selling the same energy from the same grid. Private retailers are ripping us off, thanks to Labor's and the LNP's privatisation of electricity retail in the early 2000s. Since then, the real price of electricity bills has more than doubled.

In the Queensland LNP government's latest budget they were spruiking cheaper power bills due to a lower default market offer. The problem: if you're in south-east Queensland, you've been forced to use private retailers who have not passed on the lower prices and instead hiked their fees. Only regional Queenslanders are guaranteed a price decrease, because they are serviced by government owned Ergon Energy.

The Queensland government decided to send Origin, one of the retailers that has hiked their changes, a letter asking them kindly to stop hiking their fees. But guess what? They can only ask nicely; they have absolutely no power to force them—because we privatised electricity retail, remember?

In 2024 AGL made $755 in profit per customer per year for household electricity. Origin made around $600 in profit per customer per year. That's you, the consumers, paying not for the electricity you use but instead paying the price of privatisation.

What an absurd system, where we have these for-profit middlemen between often publicly owned electricity generation and the customer, who just wants cheaper electricity bills. Essential services like electricity should be in public hands. You get high bills, poor service, outsourced call centres, and outages, and the CEOs get enormous pay packages.

The Optus CEO is on more than $3 million a year. Telstra's CEO took home $6.8 million last year, an 11 per cent pay rise, despite scandals. The privatisation of telecommunications has been an absolute disaster for everyday Australians.

We have retailers using the exact same infrastructure, just with different branding. Telstra and Optus both make billions each year in profit but cannot provide basic services properly. Optus doesn't even pay any tax.

Across both networks, coverage is really poor, even in areas of my electorate less than 20 kays from the Brisbane CBD, in suburbs like Kenmore and Moggill. Telstra and Optus are among the least trusted companies in Australia—for good reason. Then there's the NBN—same nonsense.

NBN is publicly owned, apparently. So why are there dozens of different internet providers who don't do anything but take advantage of you, rip you off, with different fake deals? The market means you have a choice.

You get to choose between dozens of middlemen offering the same thing and creaming huge profits off the top. This might be starting to sound like an 'old woman yells at cloud' moment, but seriously: what kind of system is this? It's great for the CEOs but terrible for the rest of us.

Its' time for essential services to be returned to public hands. And don't let politicians sell you fake solutions—a little bit of regulation here, a little subsidy there, a little tweak. It's all nonsense.

It's all designed to distract and confuse, to make you feel like nothing can really be done, while companies still rake it in; they keep making record profits. But the solution is staring us in the face. We have to end 40 years of privatisation and corporate rule.

For decades now we've had two major parties giving corporations a free ride. They sold off banking, energy, telecommunications, air travel, pharmaceuticals, public housing and employment services. They set up schemes where private corporations get cushy government contracts and charge the taxpayer exorbitant sums for subsidies rather than do the jobs themselves.

And now we're all paying. This country has got to get real about ending this scam. We've got to get real about bringing essential services back into public hands and putting everyday people back in control.