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The Vegemite Curve: A curve becomes an index becomes a policy

As a contribution to Anti-Poverty Week this year, I have invented a new economic concept: the Vegemite Curve.

Economists like curves. There is:

  • The Phillips Curve to tell us about the relationship between inflation and unemployment, except when it didn’t – e.g. 1970s;
  • The Laffer Curve to tell us how lowering taxes can raise revenue – except when it doesn’t;
  • The IS-LM curve to tell us about key macroeconomic relationships, except when it is applied to the real world;
  • Piketty’s elephant curve to tell us by how much the rich have been getting richer; and most obviously,
  • there are the ubiquitous supply and demand curves of neoclassical mircoeconomics which tell us the outcomes of the actions of utility-maximising automatons.

My curve will never be as famous as any of these curves, but it is based on the real-life economics of people in poverty in Australia. It is a graphic representation of a poverty premium – an extra cost that accrues to people in poverty precisely because they are in poverty. If money makes money, then it is equally true that being poor costs more.

The Vegemite Curve

While there are a range of different types of poverty premiums, the Vegemite Curve illustrates the costs of not being able to afford the initial outlay to buy commodities in bulk. It is constructed simply by plotting the unit cost (per 100g) of different size jars of vegemite, and it clearly shows how the unit cost increases with smaller jar sizes. Here it is:

The Vegemite Curve graph shows an upward sloping line of unit price per 100g, with unit costs increasing as jar size decreases.

The Vegemite Curve is not exactly revolutionary – it is standard business economics based on economies of scale, but it does mean that if you can only afford the smallest size jar in your weekly shop, you end up paying 59% more per unit than if you could buy the biggest size.

And as with any economic analysis, it is easy to combine hard data with a few assumptions and calculate a bottom line: in this case, if you are limited to buying the small jar, over a year your total expenditure on Vegemite would be $38.50 more than if you had the money to buy the bigger size. Perhaps not a lot of money, but when the principle of Vegemite Curve is applied to most items in a weekly shop, the impact on those in poverty is significant.

The Vegemite Index

When the Vegemite Curve went through SACOSS’ internal processes, it became an index! This transition was simple in mathematical terms and produced the same shape curve (below), but it was mildly disappointing for me. In economics, curves are causal while indexes are incidental. For example, if you move a supply curve you change the price and demand, while an index like the CPI simply registers the price change after the fact. However, the Index label is probably fair enough given that we were not claiming that Vegemite causes poverty!

The Vegemite Curve turned into an Index of unit prices per 100g, with unit costs increasing as jar size decreases.
Source: SACOSS 2024 Anti-Poverty Week Statement

Implications

The Vegemite Index could have significant ramifications for economics and social policy. It could challenge the costings of Henderson style poverty lines or minimum budget standards, because the average costs of items may be higher for those on low incomes. Similarly it could challenge the appropriateness of the 50% of median income poverty line because the relationship between income and living costs is different for those on different incomes. And perhaps it changes the income elasticities in the demand for impacted items, and creates a different demand curve for poor people.

But in reality, it probably does none of those things!

A bit like some of the curves I mentioned at the top, its explanatory claims are exaggerated. However, what the Vegemite Index does do is to highlight a real and important poverty premium for people living in poverty. They not only have less money than other people, they also have relatively higher living costs – and this can be illustrated in the consumption of an iconic everyday product. Giving it the pretence of an economic “curve” or index is just fun to help get some attention to the issue – and it worked in getting some TV and radio coverage, even getting Allan Kohler’s attention on ABS News’ Finance Report.

But beyond grabbing some media attention, the real point of the Vegemite Index is to use the media attention to argue for government policy responses to address poverty premiums. The SACOSS Anti-Poverty Week Statement highlights a range of ways governments and institutions can address different poverty premiums, but in relation to buying in small quantities, it is hard to directly reduce the poverty premiums because they reflect standard economies of scale. Accordingly, the response needs to be on the income side – which in effect means that the Vegemite Index is yet another reason why we need to raise the rate of the hopelessly inadequate social security payments like JobSeeker and Youth Allowance.

Simple!

Finally, BTW, alongside the Vegemite Curve, I also invented a litter line graph and uncovered some invisibility cloaks hiding the impacts of ambulance charges. But that is a story for another day!

State Tax Reform: A South Australian Perspective

In 2014, I was part of an unusual campaign – to call for increases in state taxes. The SACOSS “Without Taxes, Vital Services Disappear” campaign was a response to the social service sector constantly being told that there was no money to fund the various services and policies to address poverty and disadvantage. This was true in that budgets were in deficit, so the state government was already spending more money than it was getting in through taxes, grants and other income.

Ten years on, the situation has changed. The last state budget brought in an operating surplus for 2023-24 and forecast surpluses across the forward estimates. In this sense, there is money to expand expenditure on addressing poverty and disadvantage, so the issue would seem to be political priority rather than needing to raise taxes and revenue. However, the tax questions remain crucial because, despite the budget surpluses, state debt is increasing and the interest payments on that debt are undermining the state budget.

Opportunity Cost

As SACOSS noted in its analysis of the last state budget, the South Australian government will spend more on interest payments on debt than it will on the Department of Human Services – the department responsible for supporting the most disadvantaged South Australians. The graph below shows the increase interest payments, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of state expenditure.

Graph showing state budget interest expenses going from under 2.25% of state expenditure in 2021-22 to a projected 6.7% in 2027-28.
Source: SA State Budget Papers

The interest payments are growing because of a combination of higher interest rates, and increasing state debt driven by infrastructure spending. Conventional economics would suggest that going in to debt to fund infrastructure is not a problem, and the government argues that the debt is not a problem as the debt-revenue ratio is under control. However, this has always struck me as an apples and oranges comparison. It says little about the capacity to repay the debt or the impact of the debt on the government.

The more important ratio is the cost of debt servicing to total revenue. The red line in the graph above shows that this is increasing as interest rates account for more of the state budget. This inevitably has an opportunity cost as that money is not available to be spent on government services.

This is why the level of debt and deficit matters – not because it shows mismanagement or over-spending, or a need for austerity, but because it constrains the operations of government and their ability to support citizens.

And underlying this is a concern about equality. As I have noted previously, governments have a choice in financing their activity as they can tax or to borrow from those with surplus cash. Taxation represents a flow from those with resources to the common good, whereas borrowing creates a flow from the common treasury to those with capital resources to loan money.

This is not to say that there should never be state debt, but simply to recognise that it comes at a cost – an opportunity cost and a cost to equality. But in light of the rapidly increasing impact on the state budget, there is a fair argument now that we need to raise more state revenue.

Tax Reform Opportunity?

Unfortunately, the record for tax reform in South Australia, at least in terms of increasing taxes or introducing new taxes, is not promising.

The last time there was a broad public review of SA state taxes was in 2015, when the then Labor government released a discussion paper canvassing a range of reform options. The highest profile reform, a proposal to replace conveyance duties with a broad-based property tax – including on owner-occupied housing, was met with a media outcry about a “tax on the family home” (which ignored the fact that conveyance duties are also a tax on the family home). The proposal was ruled out in a matter of days – even before the formal consultation process closed.

Overall, despite the Treasurer publicly welcoming the SACOSS submission (which proposed raising revenue), the 2015 review resulted in the abolition of a range of taxes and decreases in other taxes totalling some $670m in lost revenue over four years to 2018-19 – all in the name of improving the business environment.

Outside of the 2015 review, the record is no more encouraging:

Panel of 8 men speaking at a forum organised by SA Best to oppose tax reform to closing avoidance loophole in land tax aggregation.
Adelaide’s “men of property” at a forum opposing
closing loopholes in land tax aggregation, August 2019.

Of course, over the years there have been changes to rates and thresholds of existing taxes, but these are generally in the direction of tax “relief” rather than revenue raising.

There are two notable exceptions where new revenue-raising taxes have been introduced over the last 20 years. There was the 2017 introduction of the Foreign Ownership Surcharge – a 7% extra stamp duty for foreign owners purchasing real estate, and the point of consumption wagering tax introduced in the 2016-17 state budget. The former had been explicitly rejected in the government’s response to the State Tax Review a year earlier, while the later was flagged but not immediately implemented.

These two examples are telling – not so much because they show that new revenue measures are possible, but because they show the importance of the politics. By definition, the Foreign Ownership Surcharge had no resident vested interests opposed (because they were overseas), while the point-of-consumption wagering tax came at a time when the sports betting industry’s peak body and political lobby was in disarray (and the big companies did not want to risk their own brands in defending registration in tax havens).

Not exactly repeatable examples as a basis for a campaign strategy or a hope of reform.

A similar story could probably be told at the federal level from the experience of mining super-profits taxes, Labor’s 2019 mild capital gains and negative gearing reforms, and more generally in relation to the Henry Tax Review – comprehensive and steeped in Treasury’s market logic and legitimacy, but still largely gathering dust.

Conclusion

The reality is that it is always much easier to oppose a new tax than to pass one. A new or increased tax creates a vested interest in opposition, and they can always find or invent a deserving case study for whom the tax is unfair, or tell us how the tax will cripple the economy. By contrast, the vested interests who will benefit from the tax (the general public who will benefit from government revenue and spending) are too amorphous or too far removed from the specific proposal too mobilise in support.

I think the point of the story above is not to abandon all hope of tax reform and of raising sufficient revenue to fund vital services, but rather to see it as a political exercise rather than a policy one. It will require a long-term shift in public thinking and a mobilisation of political power, not simply a well-researched policy or a polite proposal. It will require political resources to oppose the vested interests, and an appropriate vehicle to drive the change.

In that sense, tax reform is both a part of a bigger project of social democratic renewal and dependent on that project.

If Culture Is Not An Industry, What About Social Service?

Justin O’Connor’s book, Culture is not an Industry, critiques the arts sector embrace of the description of itself as a “creative industry”. The idea and initial adoption was a pragmatic attempt to gain political legitimacy and funding, but it came at a time (in England under Tony Blair, and rolling out from there) when neoliberalism had undone all the structures and legitimacy of industry planning. Accordingly, the creative industry approach commodified culture and functionalised it without arresting any of the impoverishment of art/culture (both in public standing and artists’ livelihood).

I know very little about art and culture, so I do not want to review O’Connor’s book here. Rather, I want to reflect on the relevance of the issues raised to the social service sector where I work.

Book Cover: Justin O'Connor, Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good

Issues in Common

The creative industries frame sees art and cultural work as just one form of “creativity” alongside commercial knowledge creation areas. As O’Connor notes, the creative industry workforce figures drop by more than half when software and industrial design are excluded, and the mantra of creative industries has done little to protect or promote actual cultural industries (live and recorded music, films, games, books, TV and radio, newspapers, theatre, etc). There was never more than token recognition of the unique contribution of art and culture to place, community and the economy, there was no increase in public funding, and art and cultural production became increasingly dominated by the global monopolies of platform capitalism. The result has been a diminishing of creative autonomy, remuneration and security of actual cultural workers.

For its part, the boundaries of the not-for-profit social service sector are similarly hard to define, and the sector often sacrifices the uniqueness of its community base for incorporation into categories which seem to have greater economic importance. For instance, one peak body adopts the ABS-defined “health and social assistance” industry data (which includes public hospitals and health system), while another uses ACNC charities data (which includes universities, environmental charities and cultural institutions). This is misleading, and the claims of economic importance get little political traction anyway.

The parallels in the positioning of the arts and social service sectors can be seen clearly in the following from O’Connor. I have simply inserted alternative text in brackets.

“Anyone familiar with the arts and cultural [social service] sector will know its hand-to-mouth, cunning pragmatism, where one renders to Caesar whatever Caesar wants if it means getting that grant. The grant you need to survive. Given the antipathy to cultural [welfare] funding by many governments, many are content to huddle under the protective umbrella of the creative economy [health and social assistance industry classification], with all those jobs and wealth and innovation metrics, simply in order to keep their heads above water.” [p. 200]

The problem is not simply the need to render to Caesar endless and largely meaningless quantitative data on social and economic impact, it is that this approach fundamentally misunderstands and perverts the mission of the sectors. For O’Connor this means seeing and valuing arts and culture primarily as a contributor to economic growth, rather than as an essential expression of the human experience and a facilitator of a shared cultural citizenship. For the social service sector, it facilitates a model of top-down service provision, rather than a broader agenda of community development and advocacy for structural change.

For both culture and for social service, the embrace of an economic model comes at a cost.

Neoliberalism and Differences in Sector Experiences

For all the commonality above, the arts and social service sector have had a very different experience of neoliberalism’s hollowing-out of the state and abandonment of the public provision of goods and services. These processes impoverished arts and culture, and left cultural workers more precarious, but the not-for-profit social services sector massively increased with the outsourcing of government services (although arguably the demand for and complexity of service provision also increased with the withdrawal of public housing, cuts to public services and the impoverishment of social security payments).

But the differences between the sectors are not just about size.

Another key strand of O’Connor’s book is the analysis of neoliberalism’s privatisation and individualisation of culture. The marketisation of culture along with the growth of platform capitalism leaves us now with mass consumption of cultural product via Netflix, Disney etc. The household, rather than public spaces, become the primary place of cultural consumption as part of a broader neoliberal shift from mass consumption (public goods) to personalised choice (private goods). This shift is based on a false premiss (as even private consumption is socially constructed) and it is damaging to the community as a whole.

This shift is also evident in social services, although the issues and experience may be very different. The much-heralded NDIS is exactly that sort of shift, from the provision of public and institutionalised disability services to a model of service provision as a private good “purchased” by the recipient (or their advisors). The same could be said of the move from institutional aged care to the increased provision of services at home. These systems may not be perfect, but were a necessary departure from their oppressive predecessors.

Of course one should not push this analysis too far. These aged and disability services remain publicly funded welfare supports, and in both culture and social service sectors there has been a common shift from an intrinsic value to a transactional one. Further, as with creative industries, the shift to the consumer model of social service has enabled private profit making and the construction of NFPs as pseudo-corporations – with similar precarious results for workers.

In short, neoliberalism’s reshaping of the cultural sector provides a useful window into what is happening in social services, but the impacts can’t simply be cut-and-pasted from O’Connor’s analysis.

Universality and Social Service Sector Advocacy

The final point I want to consider arises from the above discussion and O’Connor’s passionate advocacy for the provision of social infrastructure and universal basic services (housing, health, education, welfare and transport). This draws on Foundational Economy scholarship that argues that people’s lives and household liveability is not simply based on the market or cash incomes. Rather it is underpinned by three pillars: household income, essential services, and social and cultural infrastructure.

Foundational Economy Diagram of the three pillars of household liveability: essential services, social infrastructure and disposable income.
(Diagram from the FE Collective, not from O’Connor’s book)

Given this, and his concern about the privatisation and the neoliberal fracturing of culture, O’Connor argues that increasing services or supports in a way that further privileges household consumption at the expense of any wider social connection or solidarity is not an unproblematic advance. Indeed, O’Connor is suspicious of calls for a Universal Basic Income, for a variety of reasons, but including because it replaces social activity (work) with atomised individual activity (consumption).

While decent wages and income supports are obviously important, O’Connor’s argument provides a significant challenge for social service advocacy, which over the last decade or more has been very focused on raising the rate of income support payments like Newstart/Jobseeker.

In a world of limited resources (and even more limited advocacy power), there are real policy choices between income supports, essential services and social and cultural infrastructure. Should we be advocating for more public libraries and public wifi, or simply higher incomes so people can better afford to purchase data and devices? Is government housing support better delivered as direct rent assistance payments or by increasing the provision of public housing? Should we be investing in the “communal luxuries” of theatres and galleries, sports fields, public institutions and public spaces, or simply increasing incomes so people can support their own culture and leisure choices?

I saw some of this tension play out in a recent ACOSS Post-Budget Event. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers tried to deflect criticism of the failure to increase JobSeeker by pointing to a range of other budgets measures which would support people on very low incomes. The audience did not buy it and remained focused on income-support payment levels.

Of course, when pressed, our sector would go for the “all of the above” choice avoidance, but in reality, social sector advocacy tends towards income-based solutions to poverty and disadvantage (or small-scale, after-the-fact services) rather than public infrastructure and universal public services. This is not just in what we advocate for, but also how we understand the problem. Our preferred descriptor of “income support” reflects a more individualised focus than the older term of “social security”, while our basic measures of poverty and inequality relate to only to income (e.g. a poverty line of $x per week). This is despite the fact that:

  • the limited data available suggests the inclusion of a range of universal public services as “social transfers in kind” in the income data radically reduces measured inequality, and
  • old ABS data shows that accounting for these service (along with inputed rent) decreases the poverty rate by about two-thirds (from 12% to 3.9% in 2013-14).

This is surely an argument to focus more on collective solutions through universal basic services, rather than only on payments. Yet despite this, and the strength of O’Connor’s arguments, I was surprised that I was still uncomfortable about the universalism and subsequent cost of such service provision. I kept going to the need to provide for the poorest first and to target funding. For instance, free public transport would be a subsidy to middle class office workers, managers and city professionals who can afford weekly tickets. Surely concessions for those on low-incomes would be cheaper and better targeted?

Given that I have just spent three years campaigning for better state government concessions, my head is very much in that income-support space. But O’Connor’s and the foundational economy approach is a useful reminder that a tactical win is not systemic change or the end goal. Some of the best supports we can provide to those with limited income or resources may not be directed to those people at all, but may be about creating better services for all.

Conclusion

I have some quibbles about some of the theoretical propositions in O’Connor’s book, and more questions about the Foundational Economics approach. I may return to these at a later date, but overall I found Culture is not a Creative Industry both readable and challenging. I will be interested to see its reception among arts and cultural practitioners, but for me it was well worth the read for its insights and applicability beyond that space.

Campaigning for Concessions: Reflections on Success and the Bigger Picture

Some time ago, the environment group I worked for engaged in a comparison of the results of campaigning for the protection of land and habitat as against buying tracts of land for conservation. As I recall, the result was pretty stark – buying properties, even with the backing of big philanthropic money, saved far less land from environmental threats (e.g. land clearing, forestry, mining) than could be saved by campaigning to create national parks and/or to stop threatening processes. It was a crude consideration given the complexity of nature conservation, but on a dollar per hectare saved basis, it was not even close. At the time I felt lucky to be working in a campaign organisation.

Now I find myself working in a peak body for a service-provision sector, but I was reminded of those old debates when I reflected on this year’s South Australian state budget. Compared to the environment movement, the social service sector are not great campaigners. Mostly ours is a disempowered sector of professionalised service-providers who do not think in terms of public policy change. Much of what passes for campaigning (although the preferred term is “advocacy”) rarely goes beyond writing to Ministers or responding to government consultations.

A Concessions Campaign

Yet on occasions, I get to contribute to campaign approaches, and in 2021 SACOSS began a campaign to fix the system of South Australian government concessions. Concessions are government subsidies, rebates and payments to help those on low incomes afford essential goods and services, but as our initial State of Concessions report found, the system was fundamentally broken. It included unfair barriers to eligibility, and poverty premiums which meant that those on higher incomes often received greater support than those in most need.

Unlike most sector advocacy, our concessions campaign had a clear path from the beginning. It was not “whinge and pray” advocacy, or a belief that we just need more research and more facts to give to governments. We had a staged plan – what I have been known to call “a plausible path to victory”. It was basic text book stuff, and lots of such plans go wrong. Indeed, it was unusual that this one played-out fairly close to the text book version, but that does not make it magical or unreplicatable.

We began with the research and report showing that the system was broken, but rather than letting the evidence speak (or not), we used the 2022 state election to seek promises for a government review of the system. That was an exercise in publicity and political engagement, not policy. That done, we kept some attention on the issue to see the promise delivered, and then participated in the technical debates and influenced the direction of that review. The goal was always the 2024-25 state budget – a goal happily shared by an engaged Minister and department.

It was not all an inside game, or simply assuming the review would deliver. Given that the Minister was supportive, we directly lobbied other parts of government for funding of the outcomes to improve concessions. We did occasional media commentary to keep the issue in the public (or at least the politicians’) eye, and engaged in opportunistic advocacy in different government processes along the way. All pretty standard stuff, but always with an eye on the formal government process and the campaign strategy.

While the government review proceeded in 2023, we wanted to maintain external momentum – because government processes can bury, as well as facilitate, change. With philanthropic support, we hosted a community panel to consider the issues and feed into the review process. This was an exercise in participatory policy-making which garnered publicity and kept pressure on government, but also ended up substituting for the traditional top-down government consultation.

All up, it was not campaign rocket science, but nor was it mendicancy or reactive submission-writing.

The review resulted in a significant package of measures announced in the 2024-25 South Australian state budget, including:

  • a one-off payment of $243 to existing Cost of Living Concession (CoLC) recipients,
  • one-off discounts for children’s sports fees and school charges for low-income households,
  • doubling the amount of the annual CoLC payment to renters,
  • opening access to more concessions for asylum seekers and share-houses,
  • providing access to more concessions for those in waged poverty,
  • and increasing access and/or payments for some other specialised concessions.
Front cover of State Budget Overview

This amounted to an ongoing $60m increase in expenditure going to people on low incomes, and $130m in one-off payments. At the beginning of the campaign, I would have called $60m for those changes a significant win, even without one-off payments – which will themselves be useful short-term cost of living relief.

Reflections

All that said, these concession changes did not come simply because we campaigned cleverly. Often the best campaigns don’t succeed. While our campaign was broader and more sustained than much sector advocacy in our state, it was still mild and relatively small-scale. And of course we did not get everything we wanted. There were still holes in the government’s package which reflected, in part, our failure to get engagement from a couple of Ministers and departments. Further, the big one-off concession payments announced in the budget were not part of the review or our campaign – but the lasting changes certainly were.

Our campaign could well have come to nothing in different circumstances. Yes, we had the imprimatur of an election promise and a proactive Minister for Human Services driving the review, but the broader political economic context of a “cost of living crisis” was crucial. There was great pressure on the government to “do something” to address the crisis. And when the government needed to act, there was a set of responses where the policy leg-work had been done and could be easily implemented.

[I am sure someone once said that people make history, but not in circumstance of their choosing].

All campaigns need a measure of luck and the right environment, but in this case there was also a fortuitous and useful flow-on. With the government under pressure to address financial pressures on many households, the prior policy leg-work done by the department and prompted by the campaign meant that the government’s cost of living relief package was built around concessions. It was therefore targeted towards those on lower incomes who are likely to be hit hardest by the crisis. That stands in contrast to the federal budget where the energy bill reliefs were delivered to all and sundry, and the bulk of the tax cuts were delivered to – well, it is hard to be polite about the tax cuts, even in their revised form.

I don’t want to get too carried away about a small state-based campaign. Despite the $200m headline, state concession payments are still at the periphery of income distributions, and will make only a marginal difference to households. After all, income and income supports are primarily federal government responsibilities. However, the concession increases are still a win – a distribution from the treasury to those on low incomes. And importantly, I would argue that they will make far more difference to far more households than charity and service provision to what can only ever be a small minority of impacted households.

Bottom Line

It is not that service provision is not important, but the budget win on concessions did remind me of the importance of campaigning. It is why I want to scream every time I hear that I (or at least my money) can change the world “one child at a time” (with said child usually looking forlorn and helpless), or one animal or species (usually cute) at time, or one village at a time. That is the stuff of fundraising and marketing, not of political economy or social change.

Despite it being a hard slog with uncertain and often disappointing outcomes, campaigning for change is crucial because the bottom line is that to end poverty you need to redistribute wealth, not just provide counselling or relief services. To end domestic violence you need to change men’s behaviour, not just provide services to victim-survivors. To end racism, you need to address white privilege and power, not just provide better services to close a gap or support migrant communities.

Of course, we need to fund those services and supports, but we also need social change that will make those services redundant. That said, I know concessions are not revolutionary and systemic change. By definition, they are band-aids on an inequitable system – but the example still makes me (re)believe in campaigning and the possibility of bigger change.

3G Phones, Energy Smart Meters and the Neoliberal Fantasy

Below is a link to an Opinion piece I ghost wrote and which was published today in Adelaide’s online news site, InDaily. It is a critique of the narrowness of industry initiatives and regulatory responses to the impending closure of the 3G mobile network and the roll out of energy smart meters. The response is based almost exclusively around the need to fully inform consumers, rather addressing the fuller needs of consumers and the consequences for people dealing with the technology changes.

While the piece finishes with some implications for how we provide essential services, in a short piece it was impossible to draw out any broader theoretical concerns. However, in the back of my mind was always a critique of neoliberalism.

It is neoliberal ideology that posits people as consumers, makes essential services into commodities and imagines oligopolies as markets. It was in the neoliberal moment of Australian history that energy and telecommunication networks were privatised, and pseudo markets were constructed with rules that reflected the economic fantasy that if consumers are fully informed they will shop around and that this will deliver optimum outcomes. As the article shows,  we are still paying the price for that delusion.

Read the opinion piece here: https://www.indaily.com.au/opinion/2024/04/17/consumers-bear-the-cost-of-essential-service-changes

Image of InDaily page with Opinion piece "Consumers bear the cost of essential service changes"