Dan Mercer

We certainly have, Sam.

I mean, conservatively, they've jumped about 40% or $600 for the typical household over the last five years.

Now, it has to be said that much of that increase came immediately in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring all over the world.

Insanely high coal and gas prices had a massive, massive effect on us at that time.

And to be honest, we're still paying for it now because the contracting and hedging arrangements in the electricity market, they tend to take a while to wash through.

Yeah, the federal government intervened in a few ways.

First of all, it stepped into the gas market and put a cap on domestic prices, which is a really big deal.

Beyond that, you're quite right.

In the 2023 budget, the Commonwealth stumped up $1.5 billion in power bill relief for householders.

And that was just the start.

The feds extended that relief program a couple of times and ended up shelling out almost $7 billion by the time it finished last year.

We probably shouldn't forget either, Sam, that some states doled out a fair bit of their own assistance as well.

Queensland one year, I seem to recall, gave every household $1,000 off their power bills.

So a lot of people, if not most people in that state, were actually paying less for power in the end than they had been before the crisis began.

There are a couple of reasons for that, one of which we'll get to later.

But another is simply that gas prices in Australia have stayed remarkably subdued this time around, Sam.

Partly that's because we're not using as much gas to produce power.

But arguably a bigger reason is the threat of a domestic gas reservation policy that's hanging over the producers.

That wasn't a factor last time.

It just wasn't.