Before the 2010 election, Julia Gillard only had to say just once, “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, for her broken promise to haunt her out of office. Yet not only did senior Labor ministers make the $275 per household a year cut to power prices their one big commitment, repeated nearly 100 times, but when challenged over whether he thought it could be delivered Anthony Albanese declared: “I don’t think, I know.”
And Albanese went on to justify his complete and absolute assurance by reference to RepuTex modelling that he claimed was the most complete modelling ever done by an opposition. Yet he’s not willing to explain why this very same modelling has been mysteriously airbrushed from Labor’s official website.
Even now, despite the fact household power prices have risen by about $1000 a year, and the benchmark electricity price is set to rise by another 9 per cent in the next 12 months, Labor is in denial about its culpability for a clear broken promise; with the Treasurer this week trying to muddy the waters with an obscure reference to a short-term dip in wholesale power prices last year, even though, at $88 a megawatt hour in the December quarter, they were 72 per cent higher than Labor’s modelled forecast.
Indeed, after refusing to concede the government’s bad faith, the Treasurer continued to insist, in defiance of the incontrovertible evidence of our power bills, that “the only way over the longer term that you get … downward pressure on prices” is introducing “cheaper, cleaner, more reliable” renewable energy into the system.
This is wilful reality denial. It’s invincible ignorance. And it’s only going to get worse if Labor remains in office; and much, much worse if it becomes a minority government dependent on the Greens and the teals.
If renewable power is our energy panacea, why are Labor governments doing secret deals to keep open coal-fired power stations? That the most climate fanatical government in the country, the Victorian Labor government – which wants to make coal use illegal within a decade – is now in urgent talks to extend the life of yet another coal-fired power station shows the utter folly and intellectual bankruptcy of Labor’s energy policy.
Jim Chalmers
As this paper reported on Wednesday, the Yallourn power station, which supplies 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity, may need to be extended well beyond its current planned shutdown in 2028. This is on top of an earlier secret deal to keep the Loy Yang coal-fired power station open, at an undisclosed cost thought to run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to avoid the closure of large industrial power users such as the Portland aluminium smelter. Plus the NSW Labor government’s deal, costed at about $200m a year, to extend the life of the country’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, over similar fears of grid destabilisation and the closure of the Tomago aluminium smelter.
So here’s the madness of Labor’s energy policy: consumers are forced to subsidise intermittent wind and solar power to reduce emissions; the consequent price rises due to the high costs of “firming” plus the required extra transmission lines mean the government is forced subsidise consumers’ power bills (subsidies that will inevitably have to be extended in next week’s budget); meaning that the government then has to subsidise the coal-fired plants that government policy has rendered uneconomic in order to keep the lights on when the wind won’t blow and the sun can’t shine.
It’s a giant money-go-round made necessary by Labor’s ideological obsession with running our power system to reduce emissions rather than to keep electricity affordable and reliable.
Electricity, of course, is at the heart of our modern way of life, essential to everything from cooking our food to heating and cooling our houses, making a transaction at the shops and even charging our ubiquitous smartphones – and if Labor has its way, it will soon also be essential for running our cars, too, even though its EV policy will make the electricity supply steadily more precarious and expensive.
More and more, electricity will be needed in ever vaster quantities to power the AI behemoth that will soon be central to an advanced economy, as shown by Microsoft’s bid to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the US, something that would be inconceivable here because of Labor’s obscurantist set against the only form of reliable, emissions-free baseload power.
Energy policy is the folly that’s behind the nearly 9 per cent decline in household living standards over the past two years (the world’s worst economic performance, by the way) and the cost-of-living crisis that’s the number one, two, three and four voter concern as we go into the election. Along with Labor’s addiction to spending and taxing that’s keeping mortgage costs high.
A coal fired powered station at Yallourn in Gippsland. Picture: Andrew Henshaw
Quite apart from all the other problems that the Albanese government has created or exacerbated – the record migration-driven pressures on housing costs and supply, wage suppression and infrastructure overload; the productivity-crushing advances to union power; the green veto on almost all new resources projects; the explosion of Jew-hatred on our streets; and the reinforcement of indoctrination over education in our schools – this energy insanity alone should be enough to hound the Albanese government from office in disgrace.
That this promise was always utterly implausible gives Labor no “get out of jail” card. Rather, it only compounds the elemental idiocy of a government that made a no “ifs” and no “buts” commitment to cutting power prices that it must have known was false.
Former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
After all, shortly after becoming minister, the government’s chief climate evangelist Chris Bowen proudly likened the energy transition to a second industrial revolution: requiring the installation of 22,000 solar panels every single day and the erection of 40 large wind turbines every single month for eight years – plus the construction of at least 10,000km of new transmission lines – to meet the 2030 target of 82 per cent renewable energy.
The notion that this gargantuan commitment could be funded while power prices fell rather than skyrocketed was always an absurdity (as absurd is giving such a critical portfolio to Bowen after his manifest failures as border protection minister in the Rudd-Gillard era).
Yet such was the government’s brazen insistence on a green jobs bonanza, the chorus of rent-seeking crony capitalists in support, and a media that elevated every weather event into proof of climate catastrophe that this modern version of the emperor’s new clothes has hardly been called out, even by the opposition. And that’s before we even get to the madness of most of our wind and solar assets being imported from China and over 70 per cent of wind farms being foreign owned.
The only one way to end this doom spiral into energy poverty and economic stagnation is to change the government to one that will not need the Greens or teals to survive and to bring nuclear power into Australia’s grid. Because if it doesn’t happen this time, it won’t happen.