This message first appeared in our September 2025 newsletter. To stay up to date with the latest news and research on energy issues that impact consumers, sign up to receive our monthly newsletter below.
We’re accustomed to hearing from all parts of the energy sector that the transition must leave no-one behind. Once an essential service, it seems that every day energy becomes ‘essentialer’: our health, employment, transport, education, entertainment, finance and security outcomes are all utterly dependent on the availability and affordability of energy.
It’s sometimes tough to reconcile this fundamental reality of modern life with some of our current policy and regulatory settings.
For the first quarter of this year, there was, on average, one disconnection for nonpayment of electricity or gas every 23 minutes across NSW, QLD, SA, TAS, and the ACT. This rate of disconnection has risen 14% on the same period last year.
I simply don’t know how many infants, elderly residents, sick or incapacitated people were among those disconnected because the households they lived in couldn’t afford to pay. I also don’t know how many people were disconnected on days of extreme heat or cold.
What I do know is that 1 in 5 households are currently vulnerable to, or experiencing, some level of energy hardship. I also know they reported paying more on their energy bills than 75% of other households, often because the homes they live in are so energy inefficient. (This is notwithstanding a COAG Energy Council commitment in 2019 to introduce minimum energy standards for all rental properties, only met by Victoria and the ACT as far as I can tell).
The average debt for an electricity customer in residential hardship has now grown to $1984, so it’s no wonder that 52% of customers experiencing hardship cannot meet their usage costs (worryingly, up from 40% the year before).
And it remains the case that a great many of these consumers are effectively penalised because they lack the language, cognitive or digital skills – or even the available time – to be constantly on the lookout for cheaper energy prices. All too often we see that those with the lowest means are paying the highest prices, and that just shouldn’t happen for an essential – excuse me, ‘essentialer’ – service.
It’s unlikely that much of this will come as a surprise to you. The reason I’m mentioning it is to let you know you’ll soon start to hear a lot more from us on all of these and related topics as we progress two of the Justice objectives under our 3-year plan: ‘Everybody in financial hardship keeps access to energy’ and ‘Measures to assist households in financial stress are delivering effective and sustainable help’.
This work will be a campaign to improve outcomes for energy consumers in vulnerable circumstances, and we hope to involve policy makers, regulators, ombudsmen, community groups and consumer advocates across the country in progressing a series of important and compelling recommendations.
Stay tuned.
