Household expenditure survey. Get real. Electricity isn't that expensive

So you reckon you're paying too much for electricity. What if I told you that at the latest official count you spent no more on it than you would have in 1984?

We've become dramatically sensitised to the price of electricity. 

Back then the expenditure survey showed the average household spent 2.9 per cent of its budget on electricity and gas. Three decades on, in the updated survey released this week, the figure is unchanged: 2.9 per cent.

Electricity and gas amount to just $41 of our total weekly spending of $1425.

So why the anguish? The size of the bill has been climbing (it had fallen as low as 2.6 per cent) and it climbed further in July, after the survey was conducted.

Read Peter Martin’s comment in today’s Melbourne Age - “Household expenditure survey. Get real. Electricity isn't that expensive."

(Not for a second would I question Peter Martin's figures - he's an economics editor and I'm not - but I do know why people are seeing their electricity bill as more than the actual number (the bill) as there is clear uncertainty about the future security of energy supplies in Australia. This is odd as the country is awash with energy, it is just that it has simply been badly managed by successive federal governments. Australia is now ideologically frozen into inaction on energy and, of course, the conversation is conflated and worsened by the need for Australia to do something immediately, or sooner, about its national carbon dioxide emissions - Robert McLean)