Cindy McLeish MLA

Eildon MLA Cindy McLeish has spoken in State Parliament about the unreliability of electricity supply locally.

“We have had terrible reliability and we have unacceptably high prices,” Ms McLeish told the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday (Mar. 4).

“We have had constant outages and higher prices, as we have heard from the member for Gippsland South, who mentioned the wholesale electricity prices.

“In 2015 the average price, when Labor came into power, was $28.83, considerably lower than what it is now at $89.47 for 2020—a 200 per cent increase.

“But let us have a think about 2019, where it was up to about $110 as the average. So they are not doing well in terms of power pricing at all.

“In my electorate we have had so many problems, more recently in Alexandra and Mansfield.

“Businesses and families have been hit seven or eight times with long power outages—power outages that they have been unable to work out the cause of.

“There has been very little from the distributor. I am pleased to say that the distributor did come onto local radio, at my prompting, recently to talk through some of those issues so people did understand what was happening.

“Healesville and Warburton have experienced many, many hours of power outages.

“For businesses that rely on fresh produce—they might have dairy, they might have meat, they might have products in an oven and the oven goes off—that produce is lost.

“When you are a small business operator, this hits hard. You lose what you have got and you cannot run your shop.

“I know a lot of small businesses now have small generators which allow them to keep their refrigerators going.

“They have all been forced into buying generators because of the lack of reliability of power that we have in this state at the minute, but it means they do not lose as much product,” Ms McLeish said.