If Anthony Albanese isn’t kicking himself for waiting until the last possible moment to call the election, Labor strategists are surely gathering around to do the kicking for him. The latest possible date for an election is 17 May. Allowing a likely month for a campaign (the longest was Malcolm Turnbull’s six-week marathon in 2016 and everyone was sick and tired of it all by election day), that means Albanese’s window of opportunity has shrunk to almost nothing.
By hanging on so long, Albanese has left himself at the mercy of events and, hoo boy, they are coming thick and fast. Last week, a squib of a cyclone doused what was widely expected to be an election call that weekend. Barely had the rain stopped than the storm over the Trump tariffs broke. While it wasn’t a tempest of Albanese’s own making, his government and his hand-picked US ambassador Kevin Rudd handled it so badly that there was never a hope of gaining an exemption.
Now a long-grumbling storm entirely of the Albanese government’s own making is breaking out with fresh fury.
Electricity bills will rise by as much as 9 per cent from July 1, the Australian Energy Regulator has declared, a draft ruling that will intensify pressure on struggling households and threaten the re-election prospects of the federal Labor government.
This is on top of the previous rises of between 25 to 50 per cent that have already hammered households and businesses. Recall that, in the 2022 election campaign, Albanese promised nearly 100 times to lower household electricity bills. The opposite has happened, despite his panicked throwing of tens of billions of taxpayers’ own money back at them as ‘bill relief’ measures. The reason for the staggering rises is simple: Albanese and ‘Climate Change and Energy Minister’ Chris Bowen’s demented obsession with ‘Net Zero’ and ‘renewables’.
Modest increases had been expected as the cost of producing electricity rose over the last six months amid a spate of coal outages, but the scale of the increases will take some by surprise.
The rises are despite the regulator doing their best to hide the soaring cost of making electricity, thanks to Bowen.
AER chair Clare Savage said the regulator weighed the need for energy companies to recoup their costs against the need to ensure affordability for households.
This type of socialist distortion of the market can only hold the lid on for so long. Sooner or later, economic reality is going to blow the top off political expedience. The pressure is already at boiling point in Australian households.
A record number of households are already struggling to pay their electricity bills, recent data from the AER shows. In an attempt to repair its standing with voters, Labor last year moved to offer all households a $300 energy bill relief, and there is widespread speculation it could opt to extend those despite a weakening economy.
Cash-strapped households could soon be facing even higher electricity costs as data shows about half of Australians have been skipping essential expenses to cover their power bill.
That’s on top of mortgages that are through the roof, thanks to Labor’s addiction to mass immigration. To be fair, it’s an addiction that afflicts the entirety of the elite class, but Labor have really overdosed – importing the equivalent of an entire Adelaide in just two years. Skyrocketing electricity bills are making a dire situation diabolical.
Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) chief executive Cassandra Goldie said survey results by the organisation showed half of Australians were skipping food, medication or other essential bills to pay off their electricity bills.
“It’s a complete travesty that in one of the world’s wealthiest nations, people are getting sick, skipping meals and delaying medical appointments because they can’t afford to cool and power their homes,” Dr Goldie said.
And yet, just a few months ago, ACOSS was also demanding that:
The Australian government […] aim for net zero emissions by 2035.
Do these cretins ever listen to themselves?
