In July 2024, a family in Logan opened their power bill and felt the maths tip back in their favour for the first time in two years: a $1,300 credit that erased most of a quarter's usage in one line. A year later the same family opened a bill that looked nothing like it — the credit gone, the usage unchanged, and a total close to what they would have paid had the rebate never existed. Nothing about how much electricity the household used, or what it cost to generate and deliver, had moved. What had moved was an election, a change of government, and the size of the cheque the state was prepared to write.
That household's experience is, in miniature, the story of Queensland's two most recent cost-of-living packages. Between 2023 and 2025, both the outgoing Labor government and the incoming Crisafulli LNP government reached for the same lever — a direct credit on the power bill — to answer the same complaint: that living costs had risen faster than wages. What differs is the scale, the timing, and what each government was willing to admit about whether a one-off credit changes anything about the underlying price of power.
What Labor did before the election
Queensland's rebate escalation predates the change of Premier. The Palaszczuk government's 2023–24 Budget delivered a $550 electricity rebate to every household, funded partly by coal royalties and marketed as the largest state electricity relief package in the country (Queensland Treasury, Budget 2023–24). Eleven months later, with an election due by October 2024 and Steven Miles now Premier, the government moved again — and moved early. On 2 May 2024, more than five weeks before Budget night, Miles announced the rebate would nearly double to $1,000 per household from 1 July, saying the situation was "too urgent to wait" (Queensland Government, Ministerial Statement, 2-May-2024). When the 2024–25 Budget was handed down on 11 June, the figure rose again, to $1,300 per household once a $300 Commonwealth contribution was added, with concession-card holders, seniors and pensioners receiving a combined $1,672. The rebate applied automatically, with no means test, to every residential electricity account in the state (Queensland Treasury, Cost of Living Action, Budget 2024–25, 11-Jun-2024).
The rebate was the centrepiece of a $3.739 billion cost-of-living package that also cut vehicle registration by 20 per cent — a $435 million measure from 16 September 2024 — and introduced flat 50-cent public transport fares from 5 August 2024, costing $150 million (Queensland Treasury, Cost of Living Action, Budget 2024–25). All of it drew on an unusually large pool of coal royalty revenue: Queensland's progressive royalty tiers, which apply higher rates as coal prices rise, delivered $10.541 billion in 2023–24, roughly $3.6 billion more than a flat-rate system would have raised at the same prices (Queensland Treasury; Ministerial Statements, 2024, approx.). Queenslanders went to the polls on 26 October 2024 with the $1,300 rebate already in their accounts, and the Miles government lost office to David Crisafulli's LNP.
What the LNP did next
The Crisafulli government's first Budget, handed down on 24 June 2025, took a visibly different approach. It did not replicate a household-wide cash rebate near $1,300; the only broad-based electricity relief carried into 2025–26 was the Commonwealth's own $150 energy bill credit. Instead, it pointed to a structural move: an "Energy Roadmap Price Drop," under which government-owned retailer Ergon Energy passed on lower wholesale and network costs as a roughly 7 per cent cut for regional residential customers and 8 per cent for small business, from 1 July 2025 (Queensland Government, Ministerial Statement, 2025, approx.). It extended Labor's 20 per cent rego discount to 16 September 2025 before it lapsed into a 3.4 per cent rise, and legislated the 50-cent transport fare as permanent rather than a rolling temporary measure. Smaller additions included a two-year freeze on bulk water prices for South East Queensland (~$130 per household), a $150 Back to School Boost, and a temporary doubling of the First Home Buyer Grant to $30,000 (Queensland Budget 2025–26, Budget Overview, 24-Jun-2025).
The strongest case
Two governments answering the same emergency with the tools each had left
Put at its strongest, both governments have a genuine case. Inflation between 2022 and 2024 was not a Queensland invention — it was a national and global shock, driven by supply-chain disruption, an energy-market spike tied to the war in Ukraine, and a housing shortage decades in the making — and a state government facing it has few levers beyond its own budget. Using a genuine windfall, rather than debt or a new tax, to hand relief directly back to households is a defensible response to a shock that was, by definition, temporary in cause even if not in effect. The coal royalty revenue funding Labor's rebate was itself the product of global coal prices spiking well above anything Treasury had budgeted for; returning an unplanned windfall to households, rather than banking it or spending it on programs the state could not sustain once prices fell, is a coherent use of one-off money. Extending the relief to every household rather than restricting it by income also avoided the delay a means test would have introduced when speed mattered.
The Crisafulli government's case is different but not weaker. By mid-2025, Queensland's coal royalty revenue had nearly halved, from $10.5 billion to an estimated $5.5 billion, while the Budget carried an $8.5 billion operating deficit — the fiscal room that funded Labor's $1,300 cheque had largely evaporated (Queensland Budget 2025–26, Budget Strategy and Outlook; Queensland Audit Office, 2025). Declining to fund another headline cash rebate it could not afford, rather than borrowing to match the previous year's figure, is the more fiscally honest choice, even if the less popular one. Locking in the 50-cent fare permanently, and passing through a genuine cost reduction via the Energy Roadmap rather than simply subsidising the existing price, are steps toward structural relief rather than another one-off instrument — and neither was politically costless in a government's first year.
The evidence
Two threads of evidence sit apart from the political announcements. The first is what regulators say is happening to the underlying price of electricity, independent of any rebate. The Queensland Competition Authority's final determination on regulated prices for regional Queensland found a typical residential customer on the standard flat-rate tariff faced a 5.0 per cent, or $96, annual increase in the underlying notified price for 2024–25 — the same year the $1,300 rebate was paid (Queensland Competition Authority, Final Determination, 7-Jun-2024). For South East Queensland, where retail prices are set by the Australian Energy Regulator's Default Market Offer rather than the QCA, the 2025–26 determination lifted the reference price for residential customers by between 0.5 and 9.7 per cent depending on usage and network area, effective 1 July 2025 — after the state rebate had ended (Australian Energy Regulator, Final Determination, 26-May-2025). Neither price movement has anything to do with whether a household also received a rebate; both describe what it actually cost to generate, transport and sell electricity in Queensland.
The second thread is what happened when the rebate was withdrawn. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded Brisbane's electricity subgroup in the Consumer Price Index rising 20.7 per cent in the June quarter of 2025 alone, as households exhausted the rebate credited to their accounts the previous year; stripped of that fading effect, the ABS noted underlying electricity prices in Brisbane would have risen only around 0.4 per cent in the same quarter (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index, June Quarter 2025). That gap — a 20.7 per cent headline move against a roughly 0.4 per cent underlying one — is the clearest evidence available that the rebate suppressed the price Queenslanders saw, without changing what Queensland actually pays to keep the lights on. Brisbane's cost of living kept climbing after that: the city recorded the largest annual CPI rise of any Australian capital, 4.7 per cent to the September 2025 quarter and 5.2 per cent to the December 2025 quarter, with housing costs — electricity chief among them — the largest single contributor (Queensland Government Statistician's Office / ABS, Consumer Price Index, Queensland, 2025 quarterly releases).
The critique
Set the timing and the targeting against the state's own fiscal record, and two problems emerge that steelmanning cannot resolve. The first is targeting. Every one of Labor's rebates, from the $550 relief in 2023–24 to the $1,300 delivered in 2024–25, went to every residential electricity account regardless of income — a household earning $2 million a year received the identical credit to a pensioner on the aged pension. The government's own justification for speed, that a means test would slow delivery, does not explain why concession-card holders, already means-tested and already identified in the system, received only an additional $372 rather than a materially larger share of a $3.7 billion package. A rebate built to reach the households most exposed to rising costs would have weighted the concession component more heavily than the universal one; instead the untargeted component was more than three times the size of the means-tested top-up.
The second is timing. The escalation from $550 to $1,000 to $1,300 happened across three announcements inside thirteen months, the last two — the 2 May 2024 fast-track and the 11 June Budget top-up — arriving five and four months respectively before an October 2024 election the Miles government was widely expected to struggle to win. A Premier is entitled to spend a genuine revenue windfall on relief; the pattern of announcing it early, in stages, each larger than the last, in the year an election was constitutionally due, is difficult to separate from electoral timing. Nothing in the public record proves the rebate was designed only to win votes — the inflation pressure was real, and the royalty windfall was real — but the sequencing does the government no favours in an evidence-based accounting of its motives.
A $1,300 rebate that lands five months before an election and disappears the year after it is a loan against future political capital, not a fix for the price of power.
The deeper problem is structural, and it implicates the LNP as much as Labor. Neither government's headline measure — a universal cash rebate on one side, a modest network-cost pass-through on the other — touches why Queensland's regulated and default prices kept rising through both years: network and generation investment costs, exposure to volatile east-coast gas and coal prices, and an energy transition requiring heavy transmission and generation spending over the next decade. The QCA's and AER's determinations show the underlying price climbing both in the year with a $1,300 rebate and the year immediately after it disappeared; the rebate changed what appeared on the bill, not what it cost to produce and deliver the power behind it. The ABS's accounting of the June 2025 quarter — a 20.7 per cent quarterly jump attributable almost entirely to the rebate's exhaustion, against a roughly 0.4 per cent underlying movement — comes close to a controlled experiment demonstrating that distinction. Grattan Institute analysts have separately noted that broad energy rebates can flatter the headline inflation figures the Reserve Bank watches without addressing what is driving bills higher underneath (Grattan Institute, Energy rebates — in this economy?, commentary, 2024–25). A package sustained for exactly as long as a coal-price windfall lasted, and withdrawn the moment it did not, is relief with an expiry date stamped on the underlying problem, not a repair of it.
The risk to the future
A state that has spent its one-off windfall and still owns the underlying price problem
Queensland cannot repeat the manoeuvre that funded the 2024–25 rebate. Coal royalty revenue, the source of the windfall that made a $1,300 household credit affordable without new borrowing, has already nearly halved — from $10.5 billion in 2023–24 to an estimated $5.5 billion in 2024–25 — and Treasury's own forward estimates expect it to stay depressed, in the range of $5.8 to $6.2 billion a year, through to at least 2028–29 (Queensland Budget 2025–26, Budget Strategy and Outlook). The state is simultaneously running an $8.5 billion operating deficit and a forecast $8.6 billion deficit for 2025–26, with debt projected to exceed $200 billion before the decade is out (Queensland Audit Office, 2025; Queensland Budget 2025–26). The fiscal room for another rebate at anything like that scale has not returned, and on the government's own numbers is unlikely to before the next election, due by October 2028.
That leaves two paths. One is that the Crisafulli government uses the years before 2028 to address what the rebate never touched — network investment costs, exposure to volatile fuel markets, and the pace of the energy transition — so regulated prices stop climbing regardless of who holds office. The Queensland Audit Office's own finding that the total value of cost-of-living concessions fell between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 Budgets suggests that path has, so far, meant less relief rather than more structural repair. The other is a return to one-off relief timed for political effect once revenue allows it — repeating a pattern that, on the evidence here, treated the symptom while an election clock ran, and left the underlying cost of power exactly where the regulators said it was heading regardless.