Enforced commensuration and the bureaucratic invention of household energy insecurity

ABSTRACT

Power doesn't come for free, but who should pay the cost? On the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northwest South Australia, Aṉangu households have not historically been billed for domestic energy consumption. The state government has recently introduced a prepayment regime, ostensibly to curb supply costs. Yet extending the norms of customer payment for domestic energy requires significant administrative labour, with limited potential to recoup costs through billing. This article asks: why is enforced commensuration preferable to the status quo? It describes the invention of household energy insecurity via policy reform, including the establishment of a ‘compensatory bureaucratic infrastructure’ of customer policies, contracts, tariffs, and concessions designed to mitigate the harms produced by the introduction of prepayment. With the status quo deemed untenable and the transition to mainstreaming customer payment apparently inevitable, the article examines how geography and race operate as organising principles for the limits of difference among citizens under late liberal government in remote Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Bureaucracy
• prepayment meters
• energy poverty
• remote communities
• settler colonialism
• policy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Timothy Neale for the invitation to present this work at the ‘Energy, Extraction, Ethics’ workshop at Deakin University in April 2022, Tess Lea for providing comments on a late draft, two anonymous reviewers for their feedback, and the Australian Geographer editorial team for their support.

Disclosure of competing interests statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research. Liam Grealy is employed by Menzies School of Health Research which is contracted by the NT Government to conduct an independent evaluation of its ‘Healthy Homes’ remote housing maintenance program. That role has not influenced the findings of this research.

Notes

1 While it is beyond the scope of this article, further applied research is needed on the promise of solar technologies, at both the household and community levels, to strengthen energy security and even promote energy sovereignty in remote communities on the APY Lands and elsewhere. As with all ‘new’ technologies, the potential of solar technologies to mitigate existing energy challenges is contingent on the infrastructural legacies that any new installation must contend with, such as the capacity and condition of existing electrical grids, and the desire and funding for ongoing maintenance.

 

Additional information

Funding

Liam is employed at the University of Sydney on the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative project ‘Staying on Country: Infrastructure Needs for Remote Community Viability’.

Notes on contributors

Liam Grealy

Liam Grealy is a settler scholar living on Larrakia Country in northern Australia. He is employed as research fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and as senior research officer at Menzies School of Health Research. At the University of Sydney, Grealy works in the Housing for Health Incubator, where his research examines housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote Australia and southeast Louisiana. At Menzies, Grealy is evaluating the NT Government’s Healthy Homes program.