Australia

Even better, the state government STILL subsidies these private companies that now own once-public property. I am so fucking sick of every bill I get being about $200 before counting any usage I may have had. This is simply not sustainable, and would be easily fixable if all utilities were state-owned.

The SA Libs sold off the rights to charge rent on our electricity grid for the next 200 years to a foreign owned company. Yeah, its not the wind farms and solar panels that are the problem. I want to hate the government that did it but the whole state was plunged into a lost decade after a state government backed bank collapsed and the taxpayer was left to cover their debts. So I should blame the Labor party in government at the time of the collapse? They were cleared by the subsequent investigation. The bank management were the problem.

Most of the blame falls to an establishment private school alumni with a double barrel surname who managed the bank like a personal plaything buying bad assets. They set a whole state's economic and population growth back even further compared with the rest of the country for years and doomed us to paying the highest worlds highest electricity prices for a couple of centuries. Nice. I suspect this is kind of the norm. People gain positions of great trust and responsibility as much by who they know as what they know and then proceed to fuck it up while receiving praise and pocketing bonuses then fuck off with no real consequences and leave the rest of us to clean up.

The worst SA premier imaginable is incomparable to the damage caused to this state by this one establishment idiot.

He got Melbourne the F1 Grand Prix, and then nerfed all public transport to the GP to make room for a bloody casino. It's almost easier to drive to Adelaide.

Oh, and he started that fucking toll road trend that has spread like cancer.

WA still owns its power grid. My power bills in WA are far cheaper than they were in Victoria. These two facts are probably related.

Also, the WA government reserves a stash of gas for local reservation before companies are allowed to sell the rest "at market rate". That gas belongs to everyone, not just the company that extracts it. This policy also helps to keep energy prices in WA reasonable.