Costs to bleed regions slowly

July 23 2014 - 4:00am

STILL reeling from extortionate price-hikes to bulk water, councils across the region are confronting a fresh assault on their bottom line.

Essential Energy last week lobbed a fiscal grenade at the state’s councils, signalling its intention to overhaul its pricing structure for wholesale energy.

Under the plan, councils would be slugged considerably more for street lighting, amounting to a 102 per cent increase for Liverpool Plains Shire Council and a nearly quarter-of-a-million-dollar annual hit for Tamworth Regional Council (TRC).

Councils, already haemorrhaging under the weight of rate-capping and cost-shifting by the state government, are understandably furious.

And you can bet it will again fall on the ratepayer to carry the can.

Most galling for TRC is that it recently ploughed $140,000, at Essential Energy’s insistence, into upgrading streetlights to long-life, low-energy bulbs to bring down its bills. With the stroke of a pen, the savings from that investment have been obliterated.

Essential Energy’s cost-recovery rationale for the proposal has an eerily similar ring to State Water’s reasoning behind bulk water price increases.

But their skewed logic fails to take into account basic fairness and makes a mockery of the state government’s decentralisation push.

It’s simple: water and energy are necessities and, as such, should be uniformly priced across the state.

The impost of rates, water bills and power bills on the average family is already profound.Those same residents in regional NSW currently pay more for private-sector controlled staples like fuel and groceries – now government-controlled utilities have joined the party.

The Essential Energy proposal still has to be ticked off by the energy regulator, but bitter recent history has taught us how toothless some of these so-called watchdogs can be.

The deeper issue is the economic rationalist mantra that has infected modern governments and can only have one end-game: an unedifying slow death for regional areas.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

$0/

(min cost $0)

or signup to continue reading

See subscription options

Get the latest Tamworth news in your inbox

Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.

We care about the protection of your data. Read our Privacy Policy.