The only good thing about this story about a big company doing the wrong thing by the Aussie consumer is that this business called EnergyAustralia (EA) isn’t an Australian company! At least this is more acceptable when you hear that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is set to take legal action against EnergyAustralia, which the AFR informs us is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong-based energy company CLP Group.
The newspaper’s Queensland bureau chief Mark Ludlow sums up the sad story of how the company
“EnergyAustralia (the third-largest energy retailer in Australia after AGL Energy and Origin Energy) apologised to customers on Friday, but the ACCC is still seeking remedies including financial penalties that could run into millions of dollars.”
Apologies come cheap, but why the mea culpa? Well, reportedly, EA has “failed to provide simple price information to customers so they could compare offers with other providers”.
The story emerged after the ACCC did an audit of energy companies to see if they were complying with the Electricity Retail Code. And EA failed.
ACCC chairwoman Gina Cass-Gottlieb has underlined that the energy suppliers have been instructed to make bills easy to read so people can compare prices, but this is her latest assessment of these pricing notes we get from our power suppliers: “We think it’s still very complex when you look at the material”.
But wait, there’s more!
“The ACCC also alleges EnergyAustralia made false or misleading representations in the estimates of annual costs it provided to customers in price-change notices, in breach of the Australian Consumer Law,” Mark Ludlow reveals.
By the way, this isn’t the first time EA has copped a speeding ticket for bad behaviour towards customers. The AFR says that the Australian Energy Regulator “…hit EnergyAustralia with $406,800 in fines relating to six alleged breaches of conduct in the east-coast gas market” in June this year!
On the plus side, it’s great to see our regulators cracking down on companies taking consumers for a ride. However, given what has happened recently at Qantas concerning the leadership of Alan Joyce and the board, and the admissions of other big companies lately, we have to ask whether we have a corporate governance problem in this country.
And the next big question is how are consumers to be compensated by the failure of EA? Big fines hurt the bottom lines of these companies, but how does that help bill payers who’ve been taken for a ride via apparent misinformation?
This is a job for the Federal Government’s Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones, who also quadruples as Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, as well as Competition and Consumer Affairs!
With a bag of jobs like that, Jones is the country’s, consumer champion. Very clearly, we’re in Jonesy’s hands,but it certainly is time that our big companies (that are often the recipients of plenty of support from governments) started to behave a whole lot better.
