Make power affordable and sustainable

When Victoria’s electricity system was privatised thirty years ago, we were promised lower prices, greater efficiency and reliable supply. The average Victorian household now pays between $1,500 and $2,000 a year for electricity with prices having risen at roughly three times the rate of inflation since privatisation. Private energy companies have extracted profits every step of the way. The poorest households spend a far higher share of their income on power than wealthy households.

Energy is an essential service that people cannot live without and cannot safely stop using even when they cannot afford to pay for it. The result is energy hardship on a significant scale: households going without heating in winter and cooling in summer, rationing power use and going into debt. Energy is also a public health issue — living in homes that are too cold or too hot worsens existing conditions and causes new illness.

Victorian Socialists believe energy is too essential to be left to the market. Public ownership is the mechanism by which the gains of the renewable transition can be guaranteed to reach every Victorian household.

What we think

1. Energy is an essential service. Like water, housing and healthcare, it cannot be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. Energy must be publicly owned, democratically controlled and run in the interests of the whole community.
2. Everyone has the right to heat their home, cool it in summer, cook food and power their life without falling into debt or choosing between energy and other essentials.
3. The transition to renewable energy is both an environmental necessity with public ownership the mechanism that makes the renewable dividend universal.
4. Energy production and distribution must transition fully and as rapidly as possible away from fossil fuels.

We’ll fight to

1. Introduce an immediate cap on household electricity and gas prices, reducing bills to genuinely affordable levels, with the gap between capped prices and market costs funded from energy company profits, royalties and windfall taxes.
2. Wipe all existing household utility debts and arrears.
3. Take Victoria’s energy infrastructure back into public ownership, beginning with distribution networks and progressively extending to generation and retail, with no compensation paid to shareholders for assets whose value was built on privatised public infrastructure.
4. Establish a publicly owned, not-for-profit energy operator responsible for all aspects of energy provision with a charter mandating energy security, affordability, democratic accountability and the full transition to renewable energy.
5. Accelerate the transition to a 100 percent renewable energy grid, with major public investment in offshore wind, utility-scale solar and wind, grid-scale battery storage and pumped hydro as well as exploration of geothermal power.
6. Develop Victoria’s offshore wind industry and local solar panel, wind turbine component and battery manufacturing to supply the domestic renewable transition and create skilled industrial jobs in Victoria.
7. Fund research into marine and tidal energy, long-duration energy storage, and the viability of green hydrogen for specific industrial applications where electrification is not yet feasible with public investment focused on applications with clear evidence of potential rather than speculative large-scale grid use.
8. Expand the Neighbourhood Battery Initiative to provide community-scale energy storage across Victoria, prioritising low-income areas and communities with poor grid reliability.
9. Invest in rooftop solar for all public housing, schools and community facilities, and expand subsidies to support household solar installation for renters and low-income households.