LIBERAL ENERGY POLICY DIVISION CONTINUES

Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s first foray into energy policy has been met with opposition, ridicule and dismay by senior Liberals and industry alike.

 

The Minister’s insistence that energy policy should ignore the need to transition to clean energy, and that government has no role in supporting investor certainty flies in the face of common sense and basic economics.

 

It’s no wonder it has been called "economically irrational" and "mad" by Oliver Yates, a Victorian Liberal Party veteran and former head of the Federal Government's Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and “a big failing” former Liberal Leader John Hewson.

 

The peak organisation for the energy industry, the Australian Energy Council, has also re-iterated the importance of government doing what it can to implement energy policy that recognises the need to decarbonise our energy system and provide investment certainty for industry, saying “A lack of robust or bipartisan energy policy means there is a lack of investment confidence, which means there is more risk to be managed, and this in turn leads to higher prices,” AEC chief executive Sarah McNamara.

 

The Government has known for years that ignoring emissions reduction in the energy sector breeds investment uncertainty and leads to higher prices.

 

In his initial report in December 2016, the Chief Scientist Alan Finkel stated “an agreed national approach for addressing our emissions reduction commitments in the electricity sector would play an important role in supporting investor confidence”,

 

Even earlier, an alliance of business, energy industry and energy consumers, including the BCA, AiGroup, Energy Consumers Australia, Energy Users Association of Australia, and the Australian Energy Council, released a joint statement saying “Absent a bipartisan approach to the tightly connected issues of energy and climate change, uncertainty will cause essential energy investments to be deferred or distorted, to the ultimate cost of us all.”

 

The simple fact is the anti-renewable, climate-dismissing Morrison Government is incapable of delivering lower power prices or lower pollution, because they are ideologically opposed to the renewable investment that will deliver both.

 

Only Labor has a plan to deliver a 21st Century energy system, the Liberals can only deliver empty promises, division and a war on the future.