PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you all for joining us again today.
As you know, too many Australians are paying more for their electricity than they need to. It's our commitment to ensure, working with you, that no Australians pay any more for energy than they need to. But we need your help.
We're very focused on putting downward pressure on energy prices. It's one of the reasons we're working on long-term projects like Snowy Hydro 2.0 but that's years away, six years away Paul promised, and we’ll hold him to that by the way.
But the reality is we need action now.
I want to thank you for the commitments you made at our last meeting. We reached a number of agreements whereby you would contact your customers who had discounted plans that had expired and advise them that they were paying more than they needed to. That's very important.
You’ve given support for a rule change under the electricity law to make this mandatory in the future.
You're taking steps, ongoing, to ensure customers are aware of better offers and giving clearer, more user-friendly information.
So we're looking forward to hearing your progress on all of that but we think there is a lot more than we can do.
It troubles us greatly, it’s very concerning that in addition to those Australians that are on expired plans, there are up to a million households, possibly a lot more, still on standing offers which are often, as you know, the most expensive proposition for a customer.
So we want you to write to them as well and explain to them that they could potentially save hundreds of dollars by switching to a cheaper rate.
As you know, the gap between the best and worst offers can range from $900 to $1,500 depending on the household and even within market offers, the gap between the best and the median offers is up to $400.
So these are very large sums of money for Australian families.
Ensuring that no Australian is paying more for electricity than they need to - in other words, that your customers are getting the best deal you can offer them - is absolutely critical.
We want to address that and I know you’re committed to doing so.
We need to do it urgently and directly.
We've got a lot of good policies underway, we've got a lot of good projects underway but they'll take time to build.
We need action right now in the here and now and with your support, we'll be able to ensure, working together, that Australians are not paying any more for electricity than they need to and that millions of Australian households will be able to save hundreds, in some cases thousands of dollars.
So thanks very much for being here.
We look forward to having a very good and constructive discussion that will ensure we're all working together to make sure Australians get the best deal on energy that they can.
Thank you.
[ENDS]