Power prices are the real killer (followed by insurance) . The ideological stuff you mentioned is that the private sector can do a better job of delivering services like these to consumers. I think that ideology has been showed to be not necessarily applicable considering the rise in prices since privatisation of the power industry.
I won't derail the thread subject given there's already another thread on the energy industry but I'll summarise the basic problem as this:
*It is entirely possible that someone has their home electricity account in Adelaide with Energy Australia and that should they investigate the technical details at a particular time they'll find that the physical source of electricity to their home is being generated by AGL using gas produced by Origin.
*Alinta operates one coal-fired plant comprising two generating units with combined capacity of 1120 MW. Alinta purchases 100% of the coal used in that facility from rival AGL.
*AGL had a monopoly on gas supply in Sydney south of the Harbour for over 160 years indeed they ran thew whole show and built the reticulation network. Adjusted for inflation, AGL's gas prices were lower then that they are today in a competitive market.
And so on. The notion that there's competition and that this will lower prices is substantially an illusion since there's only one grid and ultimately every power station needs to operate. Secondly, the most important aspect in driving costs down is scale and that's directly destroyed by having multiple operators doing the same thing.
What the faux competitive market does do though is introduce a lot of costs which need not be there. For example it used to be that if one steam plant was running low on demineralised water then they'd just send the tanker (same as a petrol tanker) to the other plant 15km away and bring some back. Etc. Same with spare parts when you've got sites with identical machinery. Same with staff if there's a major problem somewhere. And so on, a lot of resource sharing whereas now that everything's separate it all has to be duplicated. So facilities were duplicated, more staff to make sure there' always enough, more spare parts or alternatively much longer outages and so on plus an incredible amount of administration overlaying all that. .
So costs have been pushed up, same with gas and electricity, and the end result is that AGL (always investor owned) charges more now than it did as a monopoly for gas coming through the exact same pipes they used to own and the remaining government entities (eg in Qld, Tas, WA) are likewise burdened by higher costs and loss of efficiency and have also increased their prices in real terms.
It's hard to imagine a less efficient way of going about it but that's what the politicians insist on so that's how it's done. It all comes down to governments insisting that the industry works in a way that it doesn't. Insisting that a square hole is actually round and that the round peg must fit.