Greens to create 5,500 jobs and rollback privatisation of Queensland’s electricity system

2017-04-21

The Queensland Greens have announced the second phase of their Power for People Plan, dealing with Queensland’s electricity generation sector and distribution networks.

“This plan would ensure our electricity system remains in public hands and is run for people not profit,” said candidate for Brisbane Central, Kirsten Lovejoy.

“The Queensland Greens will invest $15 billion over five years building publicly owned, large scale renewable energy generation and storage.

“We will stop the creeping privatisation by legislating a long-term objective to bring our energy system under public and community ownership.

“Behind our backs the State government is privatising our electricity generation sector by only letting private corporations build new clean energy projects without any option for public ownership.”

More than 35% of generation is already privately owned, and it’s getting worse.

“Our energy future must be clean, but it must also be fair. We need public or community owned electricity generation and storage, with secure, local jobs. Privatising our electricity only leads to price gouging and profiteering.

“Our plan will create 5,500 jobs a year, stop private generators ripping off Queenslanders and ensure that Queenslanders retain ownership over our essential assets”

“Our plan also tackles the corporatisation of Energy Queensland and Powerlink, which are currently forced to operate like profit hungry corporations”

“Ergon, Energex and Powerlink pay enormous dividends of up to $1 billion a year to the state government. They make this money by passing on huge fixed costs to Queenslanders in their power bills”

“By building unnecessary power lines they’re ripping off Queenslanders to prop up the State budget.

“This is an unfair, regressive tax on Queenslanders that the state government collects because they don’t want to tax their big business mates properly.”

“Under our plan we would stop Powerlink and Energy Queensland paying massive dividends to the State Government.

“We would cut these dodgy fixed charges and instead put any profit back into making our bills as cheap as possible”

“No price gouging. No massive unfair taxes. Just cheap and reliable electricity for all Queenslanders.”

 
More information available at: http://greens.org.au/energyqld