Over the next few months, most of Australia will be receiving shocking electricity bills. The inevitable tabloid headlines employing that exact pun will only add to our suffering. The inflated power bills will be less shocking, however, for anyone who’s been paying close attention to the National Energy Market (NEM). Since the late ’90s, when Australian electricity privatization began in earnest, the NEM’s complex regulatory apparatus has routinely struggled to protect the public from the market forces it was designed to unleash.

Reliable electricity is the lifeblood of modern society, and it requires careful planning and oversight. The neoliberal transformation of state-owned, vertically integrated utilities into a disaggregated private electricity market has achieved the opposite of this. It’s also failed on its own terms — the NEM isn’t remotely close to a competitive, free market.

Instead, the NEM is a Rube Goldberg machine of tightly regulated, often oligopolistic competition. It’s an opaque system that presents a plethora of opportunities for gaming and profiteering, which flow down to the public in the form of higher power bills.