The Costs of Market Experiments: Electricity Consumers Pay the Price for Competition, Privatisation, Corporatisation and Marketization. Discussion paper David Richardson January 2019 ABOUT THE AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE The Australia Institute is an independent public policy think tank based in Canberra. It is funded by donations from philanthropic trusts and individuals and commissioned research. We barrack for ideas, not political parties or candidates. Since its launch in 1994, the Institute has carried out highly influential research on a broad range of economic, social and environmental issues. OUR PHILOSOPHY As we begin the 21st century, new dilemmas confront our society and our planet. Unprecedented levels of consumption co-exist with extreme poverty. Through new technology we are more connected than we have ever been, yet civic engagement is declining. Environmental neglect continues despite heightened ecological awareness. A better balance is urgently needed. 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Level 1, Endeavour House, 1 Franklin St Canberra, ACT 2601 Tel: (02) 61300530 Email: [email protected] Website: www.tai.org.au ISSN: 1836-9014 Table of Contents Summary ........................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 5 The Ascendance of Public Ownership .............................................................................. 6 Early Years: Before 1960 ............................................................................................... 6 The 1960s to the 1990s .............................................................................................. 14 The Market Counter-Revolution: 1990s to the Present ................................................. 15 The Performance of the Electricity Industry Under Privatisation and Competition ...... 18 The Costs of Privatisation, Corporatisation and Marketization ..................................... 24 Falling productivity ..................................................................................................... 28 2016 Census ................................................................................................................ 31 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 37 References ...................................................................................................................... 39 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 41 The Cost of Market Experiments 1 Summary Australia’s Energy Security Board recently acknowledged that ‘the National Electricity Market is not in the best of health’. For consumers who have faced escalating power prices, and never-ending uncertainty about the security and sustainability of electricity supply, that statement surely ranks as a gross understatement. Continued lurches in energy and climate policy by the Commonwealth government ensure that this atmosphere of crisis will continue. For the past generation, the electricity industry has been a key testing ground for neoliberal economic philosophy: namely, the idea that industries function most efficiently, and can best meet the needs of consumers, when the role of government is minimised, and key decisions regarding investment, technology, and pricing are left up to private, for-profit companies. Given the radical extent of the market-driven policy experiments which been applied in Australia’s electricity industry, one would think the sector would today be a paragon of efficiency, stability and consumer well-being. But in fact, the reverse has been true. Prices for electricity have soared faster than almost any other major consumer item. The core economic efficiency of electricity production and distribution has performed worse than any other industry since these market experiments began. And Australia has proven incapable of addressing the fundamental challenges of climate change and pollution control in this crucial sector, so carbon emissions from electricity generation continue to grow in defiance of our international commitments. In short, the electricity industry seems to provide a textbook study in how not to manage the economy. Why do we face a seemingly endless state of crisis two decades after the neoliberal reforms that were supposed to ‘fix’ electricity? Political leaders fixate on specific villains and scapegoats – driven more by short-term political optics than real economic understanding. This includes blaming renewable energy sources for higher prices and supply disruptions (despite mounting evidence that renewables are now both cheaper and more reliable than conventional fossil fuel generation). Curiously, the rhetoric of the Commonwealth government, supposedly committed to the same market-based philosophy that guided electricity privatisation in the first place, has now taken on a populist, anti-corporate tone – with the Prime Minister himself blaming individual corporate executives for the mess, and threatening to intervene with a ‘big stick’ to force still more fragmentation and incoherence in the industry’s structure and direction. This paper takes a deeper look at the core structure and operation of the electricity sector, and finds that the crisis cannot be ascribed to the actions of one or two villains. The Cost of Market Experiments 2 Rather, the inefficiency, rising costs and unaccountability of this industry are the natural and predictable result of the private market structure which was imposed on this industry, beginning in the mid-1990s. This grand experiment in privatisation, competition and marketization, inspired by faith in the supposedly all-knowing efficiency of market forces, has in fact created an industrial structure marked by fragmentation, duplication, and waste. The paper presents evidence to show how the core economic make-up of the electricity industry has been fundamentally changed following the privatisation trend, and has driven the rapid increase in the relative price of electricity. For example, in 1998-99 23 per cent of the cost of electricity was the cost of fossil fuels consumed in generation. By 2014-15 that share had fallen to 7 per cent -- not because of a fall in fossil fuel prices, in fact fossil fuel prices increased, but because other costs rose dramatically. Finance costs during the same period increased from 3 to 10 per cent of the total value of output – more than the industry now spends on fossil fuels. Another unique contribution of the paper is our examination of the occupations that go towards making electricity, based on unpublished custom ABS data. There has been a moderate increase in total employment in electricity over the two decades of data considered. However, sales staff have increased almost 400 per cent. Following the decision to create competing retailers and generators, as well as the NEM, there was suddenly a need for sales and marketing functions – not to mention staff to oversee ‘playing’ the NEM . There are now just 5.8 non-managerial workers employed in electricity for every manager, compared with 13.7 twenty years ago. In other words, the bureaucratic overhead in the industry has become more than twice as large, as a share of total employment. Based on two estimates of the excess labour resources allocated to these unproductive sales, management, and administration functions, along with average wages for employees in electricity supply, we generate estimates of the total deadweight cost of these unproductive functions associated with the industry’s marketization. For 2015-16 we estimate a total cost of these wasteful activities as between $1,030 million and $1,940 million; that is a minimum estimate of the real resource costs required for all the competition, privatisation, corporatisation, and marketization activities that have been introduced to the industry by this grand ideological experiment. On top of those estimates, should be added various non-wage costs that are also associated with the employment of all this excess labour in wasteful marketing and administration. These are conservative estimates of the costs of the new functions in electricity supply for the new occupations required; there are many other costs we could not quantify. But the order of magnitude of our estimates is confirmed by information from annual