Ian Verrender

So essentially, when you can't generate anything more from coal, when your renewables are offline, you switch on the gas to generate that last little bit.

And because it's the marginal cost producer, it actually sets the price.

And so as a result of that, our electricity bill soared.

Now, if you look across the country,

New South Wales and Queensland use a lot less gas than they do in, say, Victoria.

So Victorians use a lot of gas for household heating, for cooking.

And so they were getting the double whammy.

They were getting huge electricity bills plus these massive increases in price for their gas supply.

Now, this time around, it's suddenly not happening.

Not only are we not getting the price hikes that you would have expected if you use the, you know, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a base model, we're not getting those price hikes.

We're actually getting cheaper gas than we had just a few months ago.

They were actually siphoning gas out of the domestic system and then sending it offshore because the prices they could get offshore were just extraordinary.

And so as a result of that, you've got massive price rises here.

But even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was uproar across the country because gas prices...

you know, before on the East Coast, we're talking about here, before the export market opened up in around about 2010, 2012, gas prices were about $3 a gigajoule.

We're now just, you know, in heaven because they're $10, right?

But during that war, they went up to above $20 a gigajoule.

So just massive price hikes.

And

That had three successive prime ministers try to intervene to stop this.