A major blackout that left tens of thousands of homes and businesses without power in Sydney’s north — the second major outage in recent weeks — reveals the NSW Government has lost control of the electricity sector, with consumers paying a heavy price for their failure.
With the latest incident leaving some families without power for nearly 24 hours, the Berejiklian Government has failed to deliver on its promise to get to the bottom of the previous major blackout that cut power to 45,000 properties in Sydney’s east in late January.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian told the public she had demanded answers from Ausgrid — which is still 49.6 per cent publicly owned — yet more than two weeks later she has failed to reveal any details about the cause of the blackout or what is being done to prevent similar incidents occurring.
The Electrical Trade Union said workers reported a lack of vegetation management as a result of staff cutbacks had caused that first incident.
ETU Secretary Justin Page said that the Liberals and Nationals had promised electricity privatisation would deliver cheaper, more reliable services to customers, but the opposite was now occurring.
“Premier Gladys Berejiklian has had more than two weeks to get to the bottom of why tens of thousands of homes, thousands of businesses, and even the children’s hospital lost power in late January, yet she has been completely unable to provide any answers to the impacted communities,” Mr Page said.
“Now, in Sydney’s north, tens of thousands of people have again been left without power following yet-another incident at an Ausgrid substation, and once again the government is nowhere to be seen.
“This is a government that has lost complete control of this essential service, and despite still owning nearly half of Ausgrid they can’t even supply basic answers to the people who have been impacted.
“The Premier failed to respond to reports from workers that staff cutbacks at the privatised company were responsible for the eastern suburbs outage — with cutbacks to vegetation management leading to overgrown weeds that short-circuited a high voltage cable.
“In Sydney’s north we are again receiving reports from staff that a lack of investment in maintenance may be to blame, with suggestions that a failure involving an old high-voltage cable was likely responsible for starting the fire that damaged substation equipment and cut power to the area.
“The Liberals and Nationals promised that privatising electricity would lead to lower prices and better services for customers, but the past four years have confirmed that the opposite is true.
“Households are now paying record electricity bills, they’re seeing longer and more frequent blackouts, and they have a state government that has shown itself completely incapable of getting even basic answers out of the electricity distributors.”
/Public Release.
