It is funny how @SirRumpole sees the root of the issue as market economy aka capitalism when I see the mandated push to net zero, decades old talks of closing coal power stations, subsidies and law bypass to "green" projects while preventing gas exploration and usage the cause of our ills.
I think we can all agree that the current type of neither capitalism nor communism energy economy does not work...
I'll argue the problem is in the detail.
If we look to the past, prior to the present model, then we had not just functional but actually pretty good examples of both government and private ownership between the electricity and gas industries.
AGL ran the gas in Sydney and was always shareholder owned albeit subject to protection by government against being taken over. G&FC in Victoria was 100% state government owned albeit with a privately owned upstream gas supplier (BHP-Esso joint venture). SAGASO in SA was a hybrid - shareholder owned but the state government was the largest shareholder.
They all worked well enough and, crucial point, there was considerable co-operation between them. Among other examples the AGL field service technical manuals were in reality just a reprinted version of the G&FC field service technical manuals to change the company name in the book. Likewise it was SAGASCO that went drilling for gas around Tasmania, thinking it would just sell bulk gas if it found any (which it eventually did, though it's piped to Victoria not Tas).
Similar in the electricity industry. A lot of brown coal tech was actually developed in Victoria under state ownership and it's good enough to have been directly copied by others, indeed there's an actual clone of Loy Yang in the US. Likewise plenty of stuff in Tasmania that was world first when done and which has stood the test of time. WA much the same - Kwinana was actually cited by the International Energy Agency as an example of best practice at one point.
Plenty of co-operation between the states too on technical matters.
So what's gone wrong?
How did we end up in a situation where after adjusting for inflation AGL charges more for gas today than it charged 35 years ago running a monopoly meanwhile the same's happened with state-owned electricity in Tasmania? Ownership hasn't changed so can't blame that.
Ultimately it comes down to the market design being inefficient in multiple ways. It adds a lot of costs at all levels from production to networks to administration. It's a long list of individually small inefficiencies but collectively they're huge, it's big $ all up.
There's a pretty long list of administrative costs which exist today but which didn't previously exist at all. That they exist now is a direct consequence of the market arrangement. Hence it costs your electricity retailer circa $150 a year just to administer a single small account eg household.
Energy cost also has a large administrative overhead now built in. On that I'll simply mention that the volume of electricity traded financially is about 7 times the volume of physical consumption. So there's a huge "big finance" involvement in all this.
Also physical operations. As a random example, 7 small gas turbines in Victoria had a run this evening. Now of itself that seems OK, until I point out two details:
1. The entire output of those 7 turbines could instead have been generated from 2 larger gas turbines that were idle, with that option requiring less fuel and incurring less cost for future maintenance.
2. No it wasn't a test run following maintenance or anything like that. Just "free market" at work noting different owners of different turbines.
Therein lies the problem. Competition and free markets can certainly encourage innovation and lower costs but as with most things that is conditional, it only applies if the cost of having that competition is lower than the benefits it achieves.
When a cost was essentially zero to start with, then no amount of competition can lower it. Instead, the cost of administering a market and multiple participants has to be recovered, that increases cost rather than reducing it.
Likewise if real physical costs are incurred, if real fuel is burned, then there's no way to undo that. Advocates of the market like to pretend that such costs aren't something for consumers to be concerned about, since it's market participants who'll be paying them, but ultimately it's consumers who provide all the money that funds the industry. Burn however much extra gas or diesel and that basically does amount to blowing money up the stack and ultimately consumers pay for that.
So overall yes private ownership can work, so can government ownership, there's firm proof in both cases. Noting there that the historic model of government ownership put engineers in charge not politicians, a point Sir John Monash famously gave an ultimatum over and got what he wanted - he recognised the need to keep politics at arms length from a state-owned utility otherwise it'd be messed up. Over a century later and I think we can say he was spot on correct about that, politicians ought be kept at arms length from technical things.
What's not working is a highly complex "unnatural" market design that comes with high administrative costs and which brings about physical inefficiencies in production. Those costs ultimately can't be recouped from anyone other than consumers.