Electricity is cheap. The wholsale price of electricity is currently selling for NSW 4.8, QLD 4.0, SA 2.9, TAS 3.1, VIC 4.0 cents / kWh.
Cheap as chips,

Any extras you pay on top of that is retailers costs, said to be 2 cents / kWh. Retailers profit margin around 32 cents / kWh.

If you want it any cheaper you will have to make some noise.

Even though I am not 579, I would like to put my three pennyworths in on the question below.

how YOU would tackle the problem of electricity for the future.. If you think electricity is too costly & polluting, what do you suggest should be done to make it cheaper & less polluting ?

OK; we live in a climate that it so totally right for alternative energy that it is a crime not to use it.
But first off, all power supply should be government owned. The furphy that privatisation brings lower prices due to competition is so wrong I wonder that "they" had the cheek to trot it out.
Then we should continue to add to the over 1 million houses that have rooftop solar. Pay them a price equivalent to the cost of buying it from the grid.
Then set up concentrated solar thermal power stations with molten salt storage.
Set up as many wind turbines as there is space for.
Lastly encourage research into installing wave power at suitable locations.
Problem solved, except for the coal barons.

That should be 2 million houses with solar.

Coal will demise with wind and solar, they are struggling to make ends meet now. Taking off the carbon tax will only give them extra time. This is why abbott wants to shut down the total solar industry.

The coal generators have been investing heavily in wind. All geo thermal wants is investment, there have been 50 wells been drilled to locate the best positions, so if you have some spare cash it will happen.

By the year 2030 without interferance the coal generators will be idle. You know what Hockey thinks of wind turbines. Pay for an ear.

Robert Le Pagé,
2 million solar panels ? What's the heat reflection rate of a solar panel & how much pollution is involved in producing & replacing broken or out of date panels ?
Why doesn't the subject of clean energy as in hydroelectrics ever get brought up ? It'd help with flood mitigation, irrigation, boost tourism enterprise, we could replenish the aquifers etc etc.
There'd be one winner, the environment, the only one that matters.

Some good information here, some bad information.

There two major sources of reflection off a solar cell. The first is off the top surface metals - both the two thick bus bars and the thin fingers that cover the top surface. All incident light off of those is reflected, so the coverage is the amount lost - usually something like 4%.

The second is related to the index mismatch. Any time light passes through an interface with two different index materials there is a reflection.
A good example is the reflection you see off of a glass or water surface. Silicon (the most common solar material) has a very high index - around 4 - so the amount of reflection is quite high.

This is reduced by an anti-reflective coating with intermediate index. You can also use thin film interference to improve the AR coating even more. This is why solar cells appear blue - it is the same reason that a thin film of oil on water causes colors to appear. In this case, green light, which there is a lot of, is absorbed very strongly, and blue less so

When all eastern states get on board with privatised electricity with cross boarder retailers. You will see a big drop in the price of electricity.

Some privatised countries are as little as a few cents / kWh profit we are around 32 cents profit.

Victoria is the only 100% privatised power.
NSW not far behind.

The Renewable Energy Target is a very powerful instrument for emissions reduction," he told 7.30.

"In the first two years in the current set of policies - carbon pricing, Renewable Energy Target, the whole lot of policies in place - emissions fell by 14 per cent in our electricity sector.

"If the current policies are kept in place for the Renewable Energy Target, given what's happening to electricity demand, we'll find that by 2020 emissions in the electricity sector will be down by well over a quarter."

A number of Government MPs have expressed concerns about the RET, which mandates 20 per cent of electricity be sourced from renewables by 2020.