The Coalition government has launched a brazen scare campaign, based on recent power outages in South Australia, over energy. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's team is, if you will, playing base politics with baseload electricity, shamelessly seeking to paint the opposition's push for increased use of renewable energy as a route to stratospheric power prices and chronic unreliability.
Mr Turnbull and his increasingly shrill and histrionic colleagues – a Treasurer using a chunk of coal in Parliament is unbecoming and gormless – indeed have a recent political blueprint. Tony Abbott, the man Mr Turnbull tore down by promising, well, to not be anything like Tony Abbott, won government in part by running a similarly ridiculous and untrue campaign. Mr Abbott's was centred on misrepresenting as a "great big carbon tax" Julia Gillard's Labor government's policy of putting a price on carbon emissions, one of the key causes of dangerous global warming and a big by-product of coal-fired electricity generation.
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Pretty much everyone who knows anything about this issue – including Mr Turnbull and his Environment Minister, Josh Frydenberg – knows a price on carbon emissions is a crucial element of any system to reduce emissions sufficiently to ameliorate one of the greatest risks and challenges facing humanity. Curiously, the government's politicians never cease to use the interests of future generations to justify difficult budgetary and other policy decisions, but won't do so on this existential intergenerational issue, even though then prime minister John Howard, a revered figure among conservatives, took a market-based carbon price to the 2007 election.
Should anyone doubt Mr Abbott's campaign scare campaign was without foundation, Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff and now TV commentator, made it clear last week. She said: "It wasn't a carbon tax, as you know ... but we made it a carbon tax. We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics."
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Back to the present and future. The scare campaign by Mr Turnbull, ironically a man who has long supported a carbon price as a mechanism to expedite the necessary transition to renewable energy, is, simply, rubbish. The energy market regulator revealed this week that 60,000 of the 90,000 SA customers who recently lost power did so because of a software failure.
The balance of the fault lay with poor planning and management by the regulator, which apologised to customers. It had nothing to do with SA's relatively high use of wind power, and everything to do with Mr Turnbull's political desperation. Nor did a previous outage, which resulted from infrastructure damage caused by extraordinary weather, and from a breakdown in the grid link between Victoria and SA. Further, there have been recent supply problems in states that rely heavily on coal-fired power stations.
The situation is doubly ironic, when one considers that the government is labelling its opponents as "ideologues" on energy, when, in fact, the people in this debate who are the most ideologically blinkered are advocates for coal.
It is also Orwellian; the government has taken to spruiking "clean coal", despite the technology being unproven and the cost of retro-fitting coal-fired power stations prohibitively high.
Back in the real world, where fresh evidence from Antarctica shows a chilling increase in temperature, power generation needs to shift to low-emissions systems, and this is most effectively and efficiently done by putting a price on carbon. The bulk of our lawmakers on both sides of the political battle know this and are letting the nation down by failing to come up with a bi-partisan policy on an issue that truly does have implications for future generations. And that really is something about which to be alarmed.
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