Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before: the Coalition, abetted by News Corp, claims a Labor policy to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy and do more to tackle the climate crisis would trigger a damaging jump in electricity prices.
The full horror was splashed across the tabloids on Tuesday. “Labor’s price surge,” shouted the Daily Telegraph. “Bill shock war,” said the Herald Sun. You get the idea.
The story itself was a bit more nuanced, but emphasised the Coalition’s framing – that government modelling estimated an average annual power bill would leap by $560 over the next decade if the ALP was running the show. No mention was made of what would happen if the Morrison government was returned.
This will all be familiar to anyone traumatised by scare campaigns run in Australia’s decade-plus climate wars. This is how confusion and doubt get seeded – an easy-to-understand claim about cost based on “modelling”, an outraged page one headline, questions that “need to be answered”.
Whatever follows, well argued or otherwise, struggles to compete for attention. Discussion about the cost of delaying action on climate change? Evidence that there are economic benefits in cutting greenhouse gas emissions even more rapidly? Much less likely to get a look in.
But the details should matter, so let’s act like they do. A cursory glance reveals what Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, released on Tuesday did not prove what the story claimed.
No modelling was immediately produced and Taylor did not publicly claim there was any. The word “modelling” does not appear in the two-page press release issued by his office. The release does not go into any significant detail about how the claimed $560 power price hike was calculated.
Taylor’s statement claims there is a “hidden cost” to an ALP commitment to create a $20bn “rewiring the nation corporation” to accelerate new transmission links to allow a faster influx of large-scale solar, wind and batteries.
The corporation is part of Labor’s “Powering Australia” climate policy, which the opposition claims would reduce average annual power bills by $378 and cut emissions by 43% compared with 2005 levels by 2030 – well beyond the Coalition target of 26-28%, but still less than what scientific advice says is necessary.
In his press release and at the media conference that followed, Taylor claimed Labor wanted to increase the value of the electricity transmission network by $78bn by spending big on new connections that were not recommended by the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo), and would be bad for the economy and for consumers. Some experts wondered whether Taylor’s office may have reached the $560 hike just by taking this $78bn and spreading it across the country’s power bills.
If this is right, it is a simplistic back-of-the-envelope calculation. The $78bn claim comes from a line in the ALP’s modelling, carried out by the consultants RepuTex, that says the party’s commitment to spend $20bn would “unlock $58bn of private co-financing”. The Labor policy does not say this would all be spent on poles and wires, or suggest what proportion would be expected to be passed on to consumers.
It also does not say Labor would go against Aemo’s advice, but that it would offer support to projects beyond those earmarked as priorities. Some experts said if investment commitments were made in line with Aemo’s evolving integrated system plan – its blueprint for an optimal grid – an increasing number were likely to make economic sense.
In a clear misrepresentation by the government on Tuesday, Scott Morrison and Taylor attempted to co-opt the views of several experts as supporting their position. All had raised doubts about Labor’s claims, but some made clear that they had been selectively quoted in Taylor’s press release.
At a press conference in Western Australia, Morrison claimed Tony Wood, the energy policy director from the Grattan Institute, had said Labor’s policy was a “mess” that would end up in connections being “at the wrong place at the wrong time”.
Wood later told Guardian Australia that was “not what I said”. “I did not describe Labor’s policy as a mess,” he said. “The regulatory process, the process of building transmission, is a mess. I said putting all this emphasis on lowering the cost of transmission is wrong, and that we need to get the regulation of transmission sorted out.”
None of this is straightforward, and energy market experts say there are unanswered questions about the ALP’s policy.
Some disagree that new transmission links will lead to prices coming down as much as RepuTex found, if at all. While public involvement in driving the investment needed could lower capital costs, and everyone acknowledges solar and wind are the cheapest forms of generation once built, the scale of the proposed spending is massive.
But a key point overlooked in the government’s attack on Tuesday was that Labor is proposing little that would not also be on the table if the Coalition was returned to power.
For all the rhetoric and hot air, the most significant difference between the two is that the incumbents say they will make the change at a slower pace and are taking further steps to put the brakes on. They have not explained how this will lead to Australia reaching net zero emissions by 2050, as promised.
The key questions for all should be to explain how quickly and efficiently they will help drive what is an inevitable transformation, and what they will do to help harness the economic opportunities it can bring. The rest is just noise.
