ENERGY PROVIDERS

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen) (17:23): This is an unexpected pleasure to have the chance to have an adjournment debate in this chamber. I rise to speak about an electricity provider by the name of Powerdirect. The reason I want to do a little bit of a grievance about them is because I recently had occasion to contact them. I live alone in what is a fairly large house and, of course, in Stirling the weather is cold, so I do not expect that my electricity bill is ever going to be small.

However, a year ago I got my winter quarter bill and it was a very, very high bill—suffice to say, in excess of $2,000. I am not there all day, I do not even have a computer at home, the fridge does not get opened, I only do a couple of loads of washing a week on the weekend and never put on the drier, but I accept that my heating is fairly expensive.

However, I changed from AGL, the default provider, to Origin Energy because they had promised that they were going to be $600 a year cheaper. Instead, they were about $600 a year more expensive. I thought, 'Well, that's not working.' AGL was very expensive and Origin, having promised to be less expensive, was even more expensive.

So, I went on the web, as people are instructed to do, I looked and I thought, 'Well, Powerdirect look as though they will be able to maybe improve my situation.' I am one of the lucky ones who at least can afford to pay my electricity bill. I really feel for those people who, under this government, have had such a tough time in the expense that is now meted out with electricity, water and all the other things.

Anyway, I went on the web and I got to Powerdirect and rang them up. I spoke to someone from Powerdirect, and she said to me—I did not have my bill in front of me, but she told me, 'You are currently paying 30¢ (or 30 point something) per kilowatt hour and we can offer you 27¢ per kilowatt hour.' So, I thought, whatever way you measure it, that has to be an improvement, so I said, 'Okay, I'll change to Powerdirect.'

They said that they would send the stuff out, and when I got it, I would need to read through that, and luckily I did, because when I read the information that Powerdirect had sent to me, it turned out that they were quoting the price of 30¢ per kilowatt hour (and it is point something or other per kilowatt hour) that I was currently paying with Origin, but giving their own quotation for the amount I was to pay, 27¢—yes, it is, plus GST. When you added the GST into the amount, guess what? We were back to the same amount. So, Powerdirect were being deliberately misleading in the way they were going about selling their product.

I made a complaint to the Energy Ombudsman about that and the Energy Ombudsman followed up and said, 'We will get them to ring you within 48 hours.' It took them about a week, in fact, to get them to actually ring me, and then some lowly person in Powerdirect had a fairly uncomfortable conversation with me. Basically, they say that that is not the way they usually do it, but there is nothing they can do about the fact that they put up this terribly misleading piece of information to induce me to take the contract with them.

What's more, they had not mentioned either that, in order to get their supposed 27¢ per kilowatt hour (which actually was 30¢ per kilowatt hour when you paid the GST on it), you had to sign up for three years. So, I was going to be worse off than I am currently with Origin where at least I can cancel the contract at any time. So, I made the complaint through the Energy Ombudsman, but that does not actually get you anywhere, because Powerdirect simply say, 'Oh, well, sorry,' and effectively, I believe, what they were saying is, 'We're sorry that you found us out.'

If I had not taken the time to read in detail the information that these people sent me—and I think that there are probably lots of people who just accept the information package and do not go through it in detail and do not pick up that little sleight of hand that they are practising. Consequently, my recommendation to everyone, not just in this chamber but across the state, very broadly, is: do not deal with Powerdirect. It is, in my view, a deeply dishonest, misleading company.

At 17:27 the house adjourned until Wednesday 16 October 2013 at 11:00.