The Nationals Member for Gippsland South, Danny O’Brien, says ongoing unscheduled power outages across Gippsland are not good enough.
Mr O’Brien said he was growing frustrated that local residents across a wide area of Gippsland were facing increasing power outages, not just during storms and heatwaves.
Mr O’Brien has been in contact with AusNet following a number of outages affecting areas including Yarram and outlying areas, Loch, Nyora, Venus Bay and Tarwin Lower, among others and is continuing to seek answers on behalf of the community.
“Reliable power is essential for families, farms and businesses and the repeated outages people have been experiencing are extremely frustrating,” Mr O’Brien said.
“I’ve been in touch with AusNet to raise the concerns of local residents and I understand they are working to improve reliability but I keep getting complaints.”
AusNet has advised that it is working on improvements to parts of the local network aimed at reducing outages and restoring power more quickly for residents.
Mr O’Brien said while that work was welcome, it was important that AusNet strengthens the local network to provide ongoing reliable electricity.
“Parliament has recently passed legislation requiring AusNet to have resilience plans to cope with unexpected outages, but that doesn’t cover general reliability.
“Too often regional areas ours are left dealing with unreliable infrastructure and slow responses when problems arise.”
Mr O’Brien said the outages were also placing extra financial pressure on households and businesses already dealing with rising costs.
“Many farms and businesses rely on diesel generators to keep operating during outages, but with diesel prices currently skyrocketing that proves to be an expensive exercise.
“People should not have to keep footing the bill to keep the lights on because the system isn’t reliable.”