Mr BAYLEY - Minister, you mentioned over 14 000 people have been assisted by the YES Program. The 2023 Energy Charter Disclosure Statement reports that there's almost 5000 - 4758 - people on the YES Program. Of your roughly 270 000 customers, that makes 1.76 per cent or thereabouts of people on the YES Program as it stands today. You've detailed the number of people that have been helped, and that's very welcome. Have you got data on the amount of people who didn't qualify for the YES Program? There're obviously people who do work, and yet they don't qualify for financial hardship and they can't nonetheless pay their bills. Have you got data on the amount of people who applied for but actually missed out on eligibility for the YES Program?
Mr DUIGAN - The one thing I would say in this space, we know the earlier people do reach out to Aurora, the better their chances are of staying on top of their energy bills. That would be a point that I would like to make, but noting the operational nature of your question, I will throw to the CEO.
Mr CLARK - I think the easiest way to answer that is there are no criteria that stops someone coming onto the YES Program. That's the whole purpose, is for people to engage with us. What takes people off the program is where they obviously fall away with their engagement and fail to continue to engage with us on the program that they're on. There is absolutely no threshold.
Mr BAYLEY - There's no threshold that a customer must meet to be eligible for the YES Program?
Mr BURKE - Nigel's right, where we have a very broad criteria, that there's not a threshold of debt, for example, that a customer must reach before they're eligible. What we've recognised is there's a number of triggers that might push a customer into vulnerability and over the last 12 months what we actually did was to review our policies around the YES Program to make sure we were doing enough to identify vulnerability early. Not only is there not key criteria that would exclude customers, we've actually been working proactively to identify other ways that we can identify hardship or vulnerability earlier, so that we can proactively engage with those customers before that challenging circumstance gets worse. We're actually trying to broaden the scope of customers that can be on the program.
Mr BAYLEY - Right, thank you. You have a number of other mechanisms, but one of the things that your energy charter notes is that you provide energy efficiency tips for customers, you know, how to manage their energy. Do you have data on how effective this advice is and how effective it has actually been for customers to reduce their energy costs? Do you track that?
Mr DUIGAN - An operational one, and I will invite the CEO to make some comments there.
Mr CLARK - I think we'd have to come back to you on that question. We obviously have a variety of tools on our website: usage calculators, tariff comparison calculators. We have records of the amount of hits we have of people that log on and use those, so we could certainly provide that. As to how they then actually action that, that's fairly invisible to us.
Mr BAYLEY - That is not something you track? You don't track that or survey customers in relation to their use of these programs or anything?
Mr CLARK -We have surveys that pick up much information about the usage of the smart metering technology and tariffs and the like, so we can certainly provide information on that but I do not think we have a question in that survey that specifically addresses what you're asking.
Mr BAYLEY - Energy efficiency.
Dr WOODRUFF - Professor O'Kane, the minister referred to the Aurora+ app before, which is obviously a good service that Aurora provides. Is it Aurora's intention keep that app free, going forward? Or, would that be assessed on a year-to year basis?
Prof. O'KANE - No, it's our intention to keep it free.
Dr WOODRUFF - Okay, fantastic.
Dr WOODRUFF - Great, so sensible. Ms O'Kane, on the app, as I understand it, in order for a customer to be eligible for a concession, the energy account needs to be registered in their name. A lot of young people live in share houses, and indeed, older people live in share houses where that's not possible. In a housing crisis, there's a lot people in desperate situations who particularly need concessions and mightn't have the account registered in their name. Is there any work being done to open up concessions or rebates of some description for people who are in those circumstances?
Prof. O'KANE - I'll have to refer that to Alistair.
Mr BURKE - It's a complex scenario. We do have a very robust concession framework that is administered under government policy and regulations. From Aurora's perspective, we have relationships with customers who are signed up to an account. We have very strict processes around privacy, for example, ensuring we are only engaging with the customer.
It does become very challenging when you start to incorporate other people who don't have a direct relationship with Aurora. There's a significant amount of risk with that. That wouldn't be an easy one to overcome from a retailer perspective, because we do have the relationship with the individual customer. If they're eligible for a concession we absolutely want that customer to have that concession.
