Politicians drive electricity prices through the roof

A few years ago an acquaintance told me he had put solar panels on his houses and how profitable it was. I said you realise that pensioners are paying for this in their increased electricity bills. He said he knew that but when the government made the offer he realised that there would be a lot of money in it. If the government was silly enough to do this he was going to take it.

And that is the problem when politicians get a bright idea. In broad terms electricity bills are likely to rise by about 20% over the next year. About 10% relates to the carbon dioxide tax which the Gillard government introduced in breach of a clear and specific election promise by Prime Minister Gillard and Treasure Wayne Swan that they would not.
This is on top of the increases over the last few years. In NSW prices increased by 70% over the past 6 years.- The remainder of the 20% increase after the new CO2 tax relates to another politicians’ folly. This is the RET, that is renewable energy targets. Labour and the coalition are to blame for this. They decided that coal power which Australians is a very cheap source of electricity should be replaced by renewable energy. But the only renewable energy sources our bright politicians allow are precisely those ones which are abject failures. One is wind farming, the other is solar energy. Incidentally most of the profits from wind farming don’t even stay in Australia - but that's another story. The two forms of renewable energy which work -the ones which are not allowed –are nuclear and hydroelectric power. Hydroelectricity is now I'd banned because the Greens and Labour won't allow it. This is usually because of some spotted toad or something like that which they believe has to be protected.
In addition, Labor in New South Wales police decided that the infrastructure had to be reliable – gold plated as Simon Bensen puts it in the Telgraph (15/6)f. That is power had to be assured at the times of overwhelming demand. For example if there were a heatwave of the severe modern air conditioning would be put on and you couldn't have a breakdown then. So we spent a massive amount of money to take into account unusual periods of peak demand – at most a few days in a year – in some years not at all. Also some state governments had been raiding the profits of electricity companies effectively denying them funds for reinvestment We should have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Instead we're sending out coal to China and other countries so that they can have cheap electricity. With the Labor’s CO2 tax, and both sides RET – as well as gold plating- we look as though we will soon have one of the world’s dearest. Such is the wisdom of our politicians. Irrefutable evidence of a glaring need to make the politicians accountable to the people not every three or four years in too often contrived elections. They need to be accountable on everyday in every week and of every month.