Probably no area of national policy is in more urgent need of overhaul right now than that of energy – that is, electricity generation and supply, and its associated mining issues.
Barely a day goes by without more headlines about increasing power bills, outages, factory closures and buck-passing between different tiers of government.
Much of the problem, it seems, is the fragmentation of energy policy (and responsibility) between Canberra and the states. As such, it bears similarities to our Byzantine management of the Murray-Darling system – a vital national resource shared by four states, each with its own view of how the precious water should be divided, and used. Australia has abundant reserves of energy resources, and these should be managed to ensure a reliable supply of affordable electricity to all households and industry, regardless of each individual state’s natural endowments. Instead, we have individual (Labor) states setting themselves unrealistic targets for renewable energy supply while allowing coal-fired power stations to close, and electricity costs to soar, all to achieve zilch on the global scene of climate change.
Malcolm Turnbull is right when he says Australia, as the world’s biggest coal exporter, should be at the forefront of the new technology of “clean” coal-fired electricity generation. (With our rich uranium reserves, we should also be adopting nuclear power generation as part of our energy mix – especially in coal-poor South Australia.)
And then there’s the question of coal-seam gas – another resource of which Australia (and especially eastern Australia) is generously endowed – but which has been mishandled from the start, not least by the failure of governments to mandate a domestic supply reserve.
In NSW we blithely opened-up some 60 per cent of the state for gas exploration, only to pare it back to less than 10pc by licence buy-backs when the howls of local protest grew too strong. But much of that protest could have been – and could still be – averted by simply making landholders profit-sharing partners in gas exploration and extraction. This is the line now being taken by Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, who said in an interview last week that farmers “ . . . must get a fair return on their involvement in the coal-seam gas industry”. His rationale is gas is needed to fuel the economy, and provided care is taken to preserve aquifers and prime agricultural land, development of new gas reserves should be possible. The situation has parallels with the tariff debates of the 1950s, when an earlier Nationals (then Country Party) leader, John McEwen, championed his government’s tariff policy against farmer protests, as a necessary spur to post-war growth and jobs.
Then, as now, there are times when a policy unpopular with (some, but not all) farmers can be justified on the basis of “the greatest good for the greatest number” – in other words, “the national interest”.
