Origin Energy refund: 4,500 customers owed money back

Power-bill admin sits in the same mental drawer as the insurance renewal and the rego reminder: important, boring and easy to leave until a wet Sunday. That is why Origin Energy handing money back to customers is more than a tidy-up for the business pages. The retailer is set to refund $270,000 to more than 4,500 customers after the ACCC examined claims that its Ongoing Saver plan may not have been cheaper than Origin’s own Basic offer.

The dollars look modest at first. Origin says the average customer was out by about $28, while the average refund will be around $60. Still, the useful lesson is bigger than the refund. If a plan with “Saver” in the name can leave households worse off, the old lazy-tax problem is still sitting in plain sight on plenty of power bills.

The ACCC did not dress it up. If a retailer sells a plan on the promise of savings, those savings have to be real for the life of the plan, not just at sign-up or on a comparison screen.

“Electricity retailers that claim or suggest savings for consumers on their plans, including in the name of the plan, must ensure that the savings are actually delivered to customers for the life of the plan.”

— Anna Brakey, ACCC commissioner

For households, that is the bit worth clocking. Nobody needed a blackout or a wholesale-price spike to get burned here. It was ordinary admin: plan names, sales lines and “cheaper” labels doing the job that only the bill can do once a few months of real usage roll through.

Origin says the affected group represented about 0.5 per cent of its customer base. Fair enough, that is not a company-wide disaster. It is still 4,500-plus households, which is a decent country town’s worth of people finding out that a cheaper-sounding power plan can be the wrong one.

The real household lesson

The refund also lands after Nine reported in December that Origin was taken to court over allegations it overcharged customers by $2.5 million. That earlier case was bigger and uglier, but the pattern is close enough to make this refund harder to shrug off as a one-off admin slip. For blokes trying to keep the monthly damage under control, the play is not to wait for the watchdog. Check whether the switch you made last year is still earning its keep.

That is where the average refund matters. Sixty bucks will not fix a family budget. Twenty-eight dollars of overcharging is not usually enough to make someone ring the retailer in a rage, either. It is exactly the kind of number that slides through because life is busy, the fridge is empty, the ute needs rego and the power bill gets shoved into the “later” pile.

Origin says it has made changes and is already refunding the customers involved. In a statement carried in the Nine report on the ACCC action, a spokesperson said the retailer had improved the way the plan worked and was refunding customers an average of around $60.

“We have since made improvements and are in the process of refunding these customers an average amount of around $60.”

— Origin spokesperson, via Nine

There is no clever hack tucked inside this story. That is probably why it lands. Boring household admin is where plenty of cost-of-living pain hides, and the small stuff is easy to let slide. If you switched power plans on the promise of an easy saving, this is the nudge to open the bill, check what you are actually paying and make sure the “cheaper” option is not just cheaper in the brochure.