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Chris Bowen and the Labor government promised Australians a $275 reduction in power bills.
Instead, electricity prices have skyrocketed by as much as $1,300 per household.

The latest Australian Energy Regulator (AER) draft pricing indicates that power bills will rise by another $200 per year from July (Herald Sun, March 13, 2025).

Labor’s answer to the cost-of-living crisis it has created is to borrow more money to hand back to households to make us feel good.

But it is la la land stuff.

Driving electricity prices up by pursuing net zero drives the cost of everything up.

Both sides of politics are responsible for this mess.

It was the Coalition under Scott Morrison which signed Australia up to net zero and despite the protestations of lone voices like Senator Matt Canavan, the majority of the Liberals and Nationals party rooms support net zero and staying in the Paris climate accords which are the source of our economic pain.

The fantasy that renewables would bring down power prices has been utterly debunked (The Australian, March 17, 2025). Instead, the mad rush to wind and solar has made electricity more expensive and less reliable. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been funnelled into subsidies propping up unreliable renewables, while families struggle to pay their bills (The Australian, March 17, 2025).

Labor and the Coalition’s obsession with net zero has forced the premature closure of coal-fired power stations, stripping the grid of reliable baseload power.
Meanwhile, the vast web of transmission lines needed to connect wind and solar farms to the grid is costing Australians billions—costs that are being passed directly onto consumers (The Daily Telegraph, March 15, 2025).

The so-called ‘cheapest pathway’ modelling used to justify this energy disaster was always a sleight of hand. These reports ignored the true cost of renewables—the backup storage, the massive land use, and the staggering taxpayer subsidies required to keep them viable (The Australian, March 17, 2025).

Now the truth is out: Labor’s energy policies are a disaster, and families are paying the price.

Family First is standing against this madness. At this election, we are fielding candidates who will fight to bring down power prices.

That means exiting the Paris Climate Agreement, abandoning net zero, and restoring common sense to our energy policy.

We need an energy mix that prioritises cheap, reliable power—coal, gas, and in the long term, nuclear.

Australians deserve affordable electricity, not empty promises and higher bills. It’s time to end the renewable rort and put families first.

The madness of closing coal-fired power stations is finally becoming clear. Reality has caught up with the political fantasy of net zero, and the consequences are now undeniable.

The Victorian Labor government, which once boasted of its aggressive transition away from coal, is now scrambling to keep the Yallourn coal power station open beyond its planned 2028 closure.

Clearly the electricity affordability and reliability emergency is trumping the so-called climate emergency.

This backflip follows last year’s decision to extend the life of the Loy Yang power station. In New South Wales, the Minns government has already been forced to extend the life of Eraring, Australia’s largest coal plant, at a potential cost to taxpayers of up to $450 million.

What happened to all the promises that renewables would be cheaper and reliable? The grim reality is that wind and solar are not replacing baseload power fast enough, and the grid is now at risk of instability, something Family First has been warning for years. Industry experts have warned that Victoria faces blackouts and power shortages, and the Australian Energy Market Operator has been forced to intervene. The Albanese government, meanwhile, remains wedded to a net-zero dream that is crumbling under its own contradictions. Energy Minister Chris Bowen insists Australia will double its renewable energy by 2030, but even his own department knows this won’t be enough to prevent a power shortfall.

Instead of admitting their mistakes, governments are using taxpayer dollars to prop up failing policies. Extending coal plants now means millions, even billions, in additional costs. It never had to be this way. Australia was once a country with some of the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the world. Net zero has turned that advantage into an energy crisis.

Both major parties remain committed to net zero and the Paris climate accords. At the upcoming election, voters must send a message: stop the madness. Family First is standing against reckless energy policies that put ideology before common sense. Vote Family First and help bring Australia back to energy sanity.

As mums and dads struggle to pay their electricity bills, Anthony Albanese today announced another $2 billion of borrowed money would be thrown at windmills and solar farms.

This is for so-called “green energy” to prop up aluminium smelting which is struggling because so-called renewables are expensive and unreliable for manufacturing.

In contrast, Donald Trump will take the oath of office tomorrow vowing no more taxpayer money for windmills.

“Windmills are an economic and environmental disaster. I don’t want even one built during my Administration. The thousands of dead and broken ones should be ripped down ASAP. Most expensive energy, only work with massive government subsidies, which we will no longer pay!”

He plans to “drill baby drill” to unleash the “liquid gold” under Americans’ feet and in doing so slash energy prices.

But everything Anthony Albanese and nine years of net-zero-obsessed Coalition government has done has raised the price of electricity and pushed us into a cost-of-living crisis.

Aluminium smelting didn’t need “green energy” subsidies from the taxpayer when power came from cheap and reliable coal.

“We need to be more than a quarry. We need to be a country that value adds ourselves, not that exports the raw material, waits for someone else to create jobs and value add, and then import the products back,” Albanese said today as he justified his latest election handout.

But if “green energy” was so cheap (remember the $275 reduction in electricity prices?), why does it need to suck on the taxpayer teat?

We were value adding our aluminium very well before the Coalition and Labor started closing coal-fired power stations to “save the planet”.

Australia’s gold may not be liquid but it is gaseous, rocky and yellow caked.

Albo won’t touch any of it for domestic use because he thinks that’s virtuous for the climate.

Hypocritically he’s happy to take the rivers of gold in royalties from coal and gas sent overseas, ignoring that burning it there is still burning it.

As Trump tacks away from the Coalition and Labor’s commitment to the economy-destroying Paris accord and as Australians watch America becoming wealthy again, pressure may well build here for political change.

Family First is standing Senate candidates in Qld, NSW, Vic and SA, supported by a team of lower house candidates, who are committed to cutting power prices by prioritising gas, coal and nuclear.

Family First is pushing for a pause on Net Zero policies until a proper economic and engineering cost-benefit has been produced.

After years of “climate policy”, Australia’s electricity grid is so fragile that even Liberal and National governments are joining Labor, the Teals and Greens in supporting power rationing.

The Third World state of our grid was rammed home in December when 8000 south-east Queensland homes had their air conditioners turned off remotely by government electricity authorities on a typically hot day.

That’s right, things were so bad authorities scrambled to avoid blackouts by logging into people’s homes to disable the compressors on their aircon.

It sounds more like something Xi Jinping would do than something encouraged under an LNP government.

This followed NSW Labor Government urgings during a hot day in late spring for Sydney-siders to refrain from using dishwashers to wash their dishes and washing machines to wash their clothes.

As a small child in the 1970s I remember my grandparents using a fire and a big copper tub to wash sheets outdoors, and of course their wood stove-equipped kitchen had no dishwasher.

I just never thought we’d be returning to those days in metropolitan Sydney or Brisbane in the 21^st century.

Instead of blasting the former Queensland Labor Government’s mismanagement of the electricity grid, which ironically has more reliable and cheap coal-fired generation than other states, the new LNP energy minister wistfully said power rationing on a hot day was better than having the power cut.

I kid you not.

David Janetzki said: “Energex and Ergon Energy carefully manage electricity demand peaks for those who have opted into PeakSmart, to smooth the load and help prevent widespread outages.”

A Minister worth his or her salt would have fired up and said the situation was unacceptable and that the new government was working to shore up the grid to make sure every Queenslander could use their aircon when they needed it without Big Brother’s finger on the kill switch.

Perhaps his sheepishness was because PeakSmart was introduced by the former Campbell Newman LNP government in 2012, according to the ABC.

Today’s LNP Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie, who was a senior member of the Newman Govenrment, flicked his own switch to blast PeakSmart.

“It’s not a solution, and I’m not happy about it,” he said after the Courier Mail exposed the pre-Christmas intervention.

“I don’t think Queenslanders should expect an energy company to be able, at a flick of a switch, to turn people’s aircon for a few hours a day.”

This of course begs the question as to why the LNP introduced it in the first place.

One LNP Senator who speaks truth (which explains why he remains ignored by his party on the backbench) is Senator Matt Canavan.

Putting his LNP colleague Janetzki to shame, he wrote that PeakSmart was more like “Peak Stupid”.

Sure, householders opted in to PeakSmart by signing on to a $400 discount of their aircon unit.

But people doing it tough will sign up for such an Orwellian scheme because they are desperate to get aircon.

Eight thousand of them in some of the poorest areas of Ipswich and Brisbane had their coolers cut by remote control by faceless bureaucrats in a country that once prided itself for its egalitarian ethic.

Now it is only the rich who can avoid the pain of electricity grid-weakening climate policies while the poor are incentivised to make the sacrifices elites won’t.

Our politicians should read Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is a parable of modern Australia where everyone is equal except some animals are more equal than others.

Family First opposes net zero policies which jeopardise our electricity grid and raise prices which in turn show up in ever-escalating household and business electricity bills.

With global emissions continuing to rise and Australia’s efforts of no impact to the “climate crisis”, Family First believes affordability and reliability must be prioritised.

Expensive environment-destroying industrial windmills and solar factories should be halted in favour of a coal-to-gas-to nuclear transition over time.

The grid must be stabilised and prices cut as a matter of urgency.

High electricity prices caused by the “climate” policies of both Liberal and Labor are a major cause of the inflation that is currently crippling household budgets.

Cutting power prices can only be done by harnessing Australia’s comparative advantage of abundant coal, gas and ultimately uranium.

It can’t be done by rolling out more windmills and solar sheets and then bulldozing tens of thousands of kilometres of bush to make way for transmission lines to dispersed intermittent power sources.

It is the folly of this policy that has made PeakSmart part of our political elites’ armoury to make sure those who are less equal do their bit to save the planet.