Media release – Josh Willie MP, Shadow Minister for Cost of Living, 28 May 2024
Rising utilities bills adding to the cost of living crisis
May has been a difficult and challenging month for hardworking Tasmanians doing it tough, with new price rises announced for both power and water set to push family budgets to the limit.
Earlier this month, TasNetworks announced it was a proposing a 15 per cent transmission price rise from 1 July, driving up household power bills by $113 on average.
Yesterday, TasWater confirmed they too would be upping prices, by 3.5 per cent per year for the next four years, seeing water bills rise by $46 on average per year.
RTI documents obtained by Labor show that in 2023, 2,569 Tasmanians defaulted on their TasWater payment plans, with 443 of those people holding concession cards.
35 households had restrictions placed on their water services, with two of those concession card holders.
With the rise in the cost of living showing no signs of slowing down, there’s a strong chance the number of Tasmanians struggling to pay their bills will become even greater.
State governments can’t do everything about the cost of living, but they should do everything within their power to ease the burden placed on households and families.
This includes ensuring that Tasmanians pay a Tasmanian price for Tasmanian power, stimulating the economy and supporting Tasmanians into jobs where wages and conditions keep pace with living costs.
However with Jeremy Rockliff already foreshadowing a “difficult and challenging” budget, it looks his mismanagement of the state’s finances will mean he is unable to pull any more levers needed to help Tasmanians.
Ben Marshall
May 29, 2024 at 10:55
TasLabor, like its colleagues across the Chamber, is utterly disingenuous in complaining about the costs of utilities. Labor fully supports the Chamber of Comm … sorry, the Liberal Party, in backing TasNetworks’ Project Marinus – the plan to ‘create investment opportunities’ by offering up the northern half of Tasmania for industrialisation by foreign renewables companies and TasNetworks’ vast new transmission grid to service them.
And boy, that will all cost us dearly!
Marinus Link is just one part of Project Marinus, and at least three other Marinus Links have been planned. The so-called REZs (Renewable Energy Zones) have been decided on by ReCFIT, the PR department for green-washing government inaction on climate, and refined by TasNetworks – the former public utility now gouging us to provide Government with ‘efficiency dividends’ and to pay for the new grid.
ReCFIT and TasNetworks are privately scrapping over whom has ultimate control of the REZs, but either way ‘community consultation’ will continue to be phony and one-way. TasNetworks will continue to bullshit then bulldoze farmers, farms, forests and wild habitat for its cheap overhead transmission lines while worsening the effects of climate, increasing the fire risks and offloading significant costs to communities and small businesses running tourism operations.
TasLabor refuses to acknowledge any of this, just as it refused to listen to community’s issues with it. TasLabor is 100% behind the unfettered rights of foreign corporations and corporatised TasNet and TasHydro (the government-owned power trading company) to use us and our State as as funding sources to make money.
Meanwhile, ReCFIT has launched its latest PR campaign claiming to be open to ‘community consultation’ on decisions already made. This not only ignores the charters of Best Practice community consultation (consult early, consult with, co-design with community) but it’s more taxpayer money being spent on green-washing government inaction on climate. Pretending that giving our wind energy away, and handing foreign and local investors access to vast areas of our State, and then providing them with a grid to ship the energy to the NEM, along with a promise to buy it at a profit to them, is, you’ll be shocked to hear, NOT ‘action on climate’.
Josh Willie, like his colleagues, pretends to complain about Liberal policies – while backing them to the hilt. It’s a game for lazy career politicians on the public purse, and Willie couldn’t care less about truth or, God forbid, decent policy that benefited Tasmanians.