Well, this is just getting stupid. We are entitled, after events last week, to ask if the Federal Government has the capacity any longer to act in good faith when the interest of the coal industry is at stake.
Tony Windsor and Barnaby Joyce, whatever their manifest differences, reflected the opinion of local people, the normal application of the precautionary principle and everyday common sense when they protested last week’s approval of the giant Watermark coal mine immediately adjacent to the aquifers and rich farmland of the Liverpool Plains in northwest New South Wales. In any event, no conditions of approval can prevent the destruction on site of 800 hectares of highly endangered box-gum woodlands, their associated rare bird and animal life.
Australian scientists were also correct last week to wearily dismiss the ‘embarrassing’ support offered by Dennis Jensen MP and other members of the Liberal Party for the establishment of yet another ‘review’ of climate science. It is certain that no country representative at the UN Climate Change Summit in Paris later this year will be questioning established climate science.
Indeed international concern about the Australian Governments’ climate policies is increasing and condemnation has been coming from some unexpected quarters for a while now. Lord Deben, a former Thatcher Government Minister and head of the Committee on Climate Change in Britain, said last year that, “Mr Abbott is recklessly endangering our future as he is Australia’s”. A leading advisor to the conservative chancellor of Germany described Tony Abbott’s single-minded promotion of the coal industry as an ‘economic suicide strategy’.
In the last fortnight an exceptionally broad coalition of Australia’s peak business and social groups have come together to support emissions reductions far deeper than anything proposed so far by the Government. They specifically pointed out that “delayed, unpredictable and piecemeal action will increase the costs and challenges of achieving goals and maximising the opportunities” for doing so.
Unrepentant, Abbott Government Ministers last week moved to take unpredictable and piecemeal action to undermine an agreement reached only in May, which had the acknowledged purpose of returning some certainty for investment in the renewable energy sector. Here is the background.
The Abbott Government came to office promising to abolish the demonised Emissions Trading Scheme, actually very similar in substance to the scheme previously proposed by John Howard and in principle advocated by Milton Friedman. Last July it became the only Government anywhere in the world to abolish a carbon-pricing scheme: emissions from electricity generation have begun in consequence to climb again.
Over 60 countries have established renewable energy targets and the Abbott Opposition promised to maintain Australia’s already established, bipartisan 20% Renewable Energy Target (RET) when it came to office. However, in the event it moved quickly to establish a Review of the RET headed by a well-known climate sceptic, an initiative that caused large-scale investment in renewables to freeze almost entirely. Nevertheless, the Review found that the RET was succeeding in cutting emissions and that it would benefit electricity consumers into the future. That is to say, it was made clear that the only beneficiaries of a reduced RET are coal fired generators.
The Government however, would not relent. Without coherent explanation it conducted protracted negotiation over 15 months before the Opposition reluctantly agree to legislate a reduction in the RET from 41,000 GWh to 33,000 GWh, held steady until at least 2018. Australia became the only country in the world to have reduced a renewable energy target but it seemed at least that an industry that already employs 20,000 people could at least resume growth in a more certain investment environment. But not so.
The Gillard Government had established the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) in 2012 for the same purpose: to assist the application of capital ‘through a commercial filter to facilitate increased flows of finance into the clean energy sector, thus preparing and positioning the Australian economy and industry for a cleaner energy future”. The CEFC has typically contributed funds as part of a consortium, encouraging private banks into the field, across a range of technologies, while ensuring a solid return on its own investment. At any other time in Australia’s political history it would have been regarded as a welcome success.
However, it too is a victim of the clumsy mash up of anti-regulation neoconservative political ideology, technical error, inconsistency and idiosyncratic prejudice with which the Abbott government approaches the world. The Government’s free market ideals have not caused it to curtail massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry but it did come to office promising to abolish the CEFC: at first making the demonstrably incorrect argument that its activity crowded out private finance. However, the Senate has frustrated its intention.
Now, unable to delay investment by stalling the RET or abolishing the CEFC, the Treasurer and the Finance Minister are doing what they see, presumably, as the next best strategy to dampen investment in renewables.
They have instructed the CEFC not to invest in small solar or wind technology, the two areas which are at present most easily rolled out on a large scale and therefore most likely to bring about rapid increase in actual renewable energy production. The government seeks to suggest that the CEFC should be used only for developing emerging technologies, but this is disingenuous.
The essential point of the CEFC is to increase the amount of capital investment flowing into technology that increases the production and use of renewable energy. The action of the government is calculated to stop it and if anybody has an explanation that does not involve a breach of good faith I’d like to hear it.
Bob Debus AM was an ALP member of the NSW Parliament and Attorney General, Minister for the Arts and Minister for the Environment. He was also a member of the House of Representatives and Minister for Home Affairs in the Rudd Government.
Robert Debus AM is a former Australian politician, has been a member of the Australian House of Representatives and the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, representing the Labor Party. Robert Debus has been a minister in both the Australian and New South Wales governments.
Bob Debus is the chairperson of the environment NGO, Wilderness Australia. He served for long periods as Minister for Environment and Minister for Emergency Services in New South Wales
Comments
One response to “Bob Debus. A breach of faith on renewable energy.”
In a very good article in The Conversation, Dylan McConnell of the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University of Melbourne made it clear that the Renewable Energy Target has gone through a variety of iterations over its lifetime, but never has it been officially defined in terms in terms of a percentage target. The Abbott Government has deviously used a percentage target to reduce the RET – and the Labor Opposition has never called them out on it.
In 2000, the Howard Government established the first fixed target of 9,500 GWh of new renewable generation by 2010, under the original Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET). This target was reviewed in 2003 by a panel chaired by the Country Liberal Senator Grant Tambling. One of the 30 recommendations of the panel was:
“MRET targets to continue to be expressed in gigawatt hours and not as a percentage of overall electricity demand.”
The panel stated that
“… a fixed target is more compatible with market certainty, with MRET’s industry development objective, which defines a level of renewable electricity generation rather than a percentage of a fluctuating electricity market over which the industry has no control.”
In 2009 the parliament legislated an increase in the MRET to 45,000 GWh (not a percentage) by 2020. There were two parts of this new target: the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) and the Large-scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET), the latter having a revised target of 41,000 GWh. When the Climate Change Authority reviewed this target in 2012, it also recommended that:
“… the form of the target should remain fixed in terms of gigawatt hours … a one-off change to the level of the target risks damage to investor confidence and possibly more so if the target was expressed as a percentage, or in gigawatt hours but adjusted over time.”
It is a pity everyone seems to have swallowed the false line that the Abbott Government has offered.
Mr Debus has made the same mistake. There was never a bipartisan 20 per cent agreement – the agreement (and legislated amount) was for 41 GWh, and we have been dudded on that.