People want comfortable homes, competitive businesses and bills that don’t make them so anxious that they put off opening them. So, one of the big questions for the ACCC to answer is how to incentivise electricity retailers to help consumers lower their bills with more energy management and lower prices. Retailers have shown little interest in doing this in the past.

It really does tell you everything you need to know about the electricity market that energy companies had to be asked by the Prime Minister to write to their customers to tell them their discount deals had expired. In a competitive market that is working, where consumers are screaming for help to manage their energy consumption, retailers would be fighting for market share by advertising innovative solutions to help them, but in energy we see little of this initiative.

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While the ACCC’s plan for the retail sector will be critical to finding the solutions, we are also at a turning point in how we deal with the dependability of the electricity system. The focus on power outages in the past year has sent many hurtling to solutions that would involve more money spent on network reliability or extra generation.

We cannot have a repeat of the mistakes of the past: we gold-plated the energy network; we must not gold-plate the electricity generation system, because consumers are telling us very clearly that their primary concern is affordability. Not one more dollar than necessary should be spent on making electricity reliable. Every decision by energy market planners, regulators, operators and companies should be made with affordability for households and small businesses the No. 1 priority – affordability must be a constraint on our decisions on this market – not an after-thought.