Canberra Liberals politician Mark Parton has accused Greens minister Shane Rattenbury of sneaking a new $10 tree-trimming charge through the "back door", as Canberrans face increasing power bills.
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The ACT government recently shifted responsibility for lopping trees around powerlines to ActewAGL, a move which Mr Rattenbury told the Assembly would add about $10 onto the average households power bill.
But Mr Parton described it as a "backdoor increase in the cost of living".
"There's nothing backdoor about it, I've been perfectly up front about it Mr Parton, I walked into the Assembly and told you it was going to happen," Mr Rattenbury fired back.
"I've been perfectly clear, consumers are paying for an improvement and that is a judgement that myself and the government have made is that we think it's worth that bit of extra cost to improve the safety and also reliability of the network."
Transport Canberra and City Services were previously responsible for clearing trees off powerlines, but Mr Rattenbury said they "were not adequately resourced" to do it.
Already, the directorate was outsourcing some of its tree-trimming to ActewAGL, and that money would now be rerouted to other projects in its portfolio while ActewAGL passed the cost onto customers.
'The feedback I received was the service was not being done to an adequate standard, there was concerns through the strategic bushfire management process that we needed a higher standard of the pruning of the trees to, as much as possible, ensure that trees don't make contact with powerlines and start fires," Mr Rattenbury said.
"It's a key recommendation coming out of the Victorian Royal Commission into the bushfires from 2009 where a large number of the deaths in that fire were attributed to the powerlines' contact with trees and in order to ensure the work was done properly and essentially improve the service I was advised the better approach was to have ActewAGL distribution undertake the work."
ActewAGL will apply to the Australian Energy Regulator next year to pass the cost of the tree-trimming onto Canberra customers.
However figures from St Vincent de Paul showed Canberra families were being slugged an extra $540 a year already to keep the lights on.
ActewAGL blames trees for causing most power outages in the ACT.
About 23,000 homes lost power in the ACT earlier this year when trees hit powerlines during a storm.
"There is a trade-off there between safety and reliability and cost and we've formed a view and we believe the community will support the view that it's better to do this work properly," Mr Rattenbury said.
