This paper traces how Australia offered some of the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the world from the 1960s through to the early 2000s. It warns that this historic advantage has now evaporated. Since the mid-2000s, the paper finds Australian electricity prices have risen far faster than those of comparable economies. 

The paper highlights that Australia’s governments and energy market bodies have failed to maintain consistent, transparent electricity price datasets, making it harder to compare Australia’s competitiveness over time against other countries.

It concludes that only a significant expansion of large-scale, dispatchable, low-fuel-cost generation can restore Australia’s competitiveness. Without this, the government’s ambition for a ‘Future Made in Australia’ will remain out of reach. 

Key findings

• Intermittent wind and solar power, backed by substantial taxpayer subsidies, has failed to replicate the low-cost reliability once supplied by coal and gas.  
• Residential electricity price data stretching back to the 1970s shows Australia shifting from around 30% below the consumption-weighted OECD average to around 30% above it.   
• Smelters that once anchored local economies are now closing, shrinking or surviving only through increasingly large government bailouts.  
• As heavy industry becomes unviable, Australia risks losing not only the smelters themselves but the broader manufacturing and processing ecosystem they support.