What keeping Synergy afloat is costing us

You may have seen Matt Mckenzie's report in The West this week laying bare the true cost of keeping Synergy afloat: a staggering $7 billion in taxpayer subsidies this decade, poured into a government-owned monopoly.  All of it masking the true cost of electricity for families and businesses across the State. 

As the article noted, that's enough to build more than 100 primary schools, or to almost pay for half of Metronet. Although households have been shielded from the worst of it, with the Government pledging to keep family price rises below inflation, businesses get no such protection. And as Shadow Minister the Honourable Steve Thomas warned, once Synergy has screwed down business customers as far as they can, households are next. WA now has the most expensive power generation costs in the country.

It has become a grim running joke among small business owners that half of them are drawing up plans to move to Singapore. I spoke recently with a Western Australian businessman who, with a small family company that has turned over more than $100 million and has developed and patented technology now used around the world, still describes survival here as an ongoing struggle. 

Despite constant restructuring and sending roles offshore, as thousands of WA businesses are now forced to do, the cost of doing business here is punishing. 

This is about more than just energy. The whole weight of the regulatory state is bearing down on those trying to build, employ and innovate. Since 2022, the number of ongoing Commonwealth public servants has climbed from around 140,800 to over 184,400, an increase of more than 43,000 staff, a great many of them in regulatory roles dedicated to the additional red and green tape that stifles business and pulls resources away from productivity and innovation.

The Business Council puts Australia's red-tape burden at more than $110 billion a year; the Australian Institute of Company Directors puts the cost of complying with federal regulation at around $160 billion, nearly 6% of everything our economy produces. Duplicated, overlapping rules are driving up costs, delaying projects and strangling the investment we need.

Government keeps getting bigger, and the people who pay for it keep getting squeezed. I'll keep pressing this in the Council because Western Australians deserve reliable energy at a cost that doesn’t send them back to the Stone Age. They deserve a Government that owns the true cost of its decisions, and a light touch regulatory environment that does what is necessary and nothing more. 

Right now, we are taxing and regulating our best innovators and businesses out of the State, and calling it success.