in the last domestic power bill? Its usually the one to panic about, what with it being
the end of Winter and all (all those nights guiltily burning the heater in short sleeves).
But between us we all use numerous different NSW power companies yet the one
constant was a better than normal bill this time.

The cynic in me is looking for answers here and I’m looking squarely at the government’s
recent noise about getting tough on price-gouging in view of the new carbon Tax. Sure
most of us in the know, realise that no Australian political party actually gives two
hoots about global warming. The economy is based around a GST thanks to John
Howard and Meg Lee’s, the only way a GST based economy can work is for the GST to go
up (never down) every so often. Of course what sane politician would actually put the
highly unpopular GST up a few percent? So its dressed up as a green tax and we get much
the same result.

Anyway whether you agree with the elaborate economic theory above (the VAT just went
up in the UK also) the question has to remain why was the first Carbon-Tax-Power-Bill
actually less for a lot of people? Now I’m not saying that Power Companies were
Price-gouging right up until the point the Government at least said it was getting tough
on stopping it, I wouldn’t say that we have been price-gouged for some time now and
only the threat of imminent action by the Government has panicked power companies
into doing the right thing on this bill, I would never say that…

I will be curious to see how this pans out in the years to come. When unpopular things
like this first kick off everyone is on their best behaviour but that quickly falls by the
way. Now of course I would like to see a variant on the East German  Stasi who drag
Electricity exec’s away kicking and screaming in the middle of the night to give this
gouging legislation some teeth, however that is perhaps a little too optimistic (what
about just letting old age pensioners kick them a bit)…