Brett Everett

Brett is an economist at Frontier Economics, working across our financial services, water, energy and natural resources practices in Australia. He has 20+ years’ experience in economic regulation, financial modelling and undertaking investigations into a wide range of economic policy issues for government and regulated businesses.

Economic regulation

Joining Frontier Economics from the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART), Brett’s experience includes price regulation in the water, energy and transport sectors, at both state and federal level. He supports regulated businesses to prepare pricing proposals to economic regulators covering regulatory strategy, operating and capital expenditure forecasts, efficiency strategies and incentive scheme design.

Examples include:

• Supporting regulated businesses to design and prepare price submissions to regulators including Sydney Desalination Plant, Central Coast Council and Essential Water under IPART’s 3C’s framework.
• Undertaking quality assurance and Board attestation support activities for Melbourne Water under the Essential Services Commission’s (ESC) PREMO framework.
• Undertaking an expenditure review for IPART on Central Coast Council’s proposed water, wastewater and stormwater operating and capital expenditure.

Financial modelling

Brett also specialises in regulatory modelling and has provided advice to regulated businesses and regulators on the financial models used to calculate costs, revenues and prices.

He has substantial experience constructing and running post-tax revenue models (PTRM) and building block models and assessing factors impacting the regulatory value of assets. He is experienced in the differences in modelling assumptions applied by different regulators, including approaches to:

• forecasting operating and capital expenditure (such as the Australian Energy Regulator's (AER) ‘base-step-trend’ and capital expenditure forecasting models),
• treatment of inflation (forecast and lagged),
• weighted average cost of capital (pre-tax post-tax), and
• other key cost inputs.

Examples of his work include:

• Supporting regulated businesses in running their internal cost allocation models, building block, regulatory asset base (RAB) roll-forward and PTRM models and ensuring consistency with regulators’ models (e.g. Essential Energy, Central Coast Council and Gladstone Area Water Board)
• Undertaking quality assurance checks for regulators (e.g. ESC) and regulated business (Sydney Water, Melbourne Water, Queensland Urban Utilities) to ensure their models are accurate and produce robust results.

Policy advice

Brett uses his background in the public sector to provide insight into policy and regulatory processes in a range of sectors.

He has experience assessing policies in a variety of industries where economics can be used to inform complex policy issues – for example, houseboats, tow trucks, container deposit schemes and vocational education and training.

He regularly advises on the use of cost-benefit analysis and development of regulatory impact statements (RISs).

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