Bill Shorten set to announce 50% clean energy target at Labor conference

Extract from The Guardian

New Labor policy would bring Australia’s renewable energy goal into line with those in Denmark and California, but ‘there won’t be a carbon tax’

Wind turbines at Capital Wind Farm, the largest wind farm in New South Wales, in Bungendore, near Canberra. Labor says it would let industry decide which renewable power to invest in. Photograph: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

Shalailah Medhora

Wednesday 22 July 2015 11.21 AEST

Labor will use its upcoming national conference to announce a new climate policy goal of having half of Australia’s large-scale energy production generated from renewable sources by 2030.
The announcement establishes a stark point of policy difference between Labor and the Coalition.

“Labor’s ambition is to see 50% of our electricity energy mix generated by renewable energy by 2030,” the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said. “Boosting renewable energy will be a centrepiece of our response to the challenge of climate change.
“We will take steps to reduce pollution, and we will not be intimidated by ridiculous scare campaigns.”
Shorten, speaking ahead of the party conference that begins on Friday in Melbourne, said Labor would not reintroduce its previously unpopular carbon tax and instead focus on a cap and trade system.
“As we have already announced, an emissions trading scheme using market forces that is linked to international markets will be part of our policy mix,” he said. “Labor knows this is critical for future generations.”
Labor’s spokesman on communications, Jason Clare, said the party had learnt its lesson on the carbon tax.
“I think history proves that the Australian people don’t want a carbon tax. There won’t be a carbon tax under a future Labor government,” he told Sky News on Wednesday.
In 2010, then prime minister Kevin Rudd failed to get bills setting a carbon price through the Senate. His successor Julia Gillard’s broken promise to never introduce a carbon tax dogged her leadership and led critics to question her integrity.
The environment minister, Greg Hunt, called Wednesday’s renewables announcement a distraction, and was not convinced Labor had abandoned the carbon tax.
“Labor is desperately trying to divert from a carbon tax which is their written policy, their spoken policy and it’s still their policy,” he said. ‘What we want to see is the detail about their carbon tax, they’ll pretend it’s not but they call it an ETS [emissions trading scheme]. The rest of Australia knows it is a carbon tax.”
“Everything Labor does leads to higher electricity prices and in the end it’s mums and dads who pay, it’s pensioners who pay, it’s small businesses who pay and it’s farmer that pay,” Hunt said.
The minister criticised Labor for supporting the Coalition in passing a lower renewables target in June, then changing its tune a month later.
Parliament in June reduced Australia’s renewable energy target (RET) from 41,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) to 33,000 GWh by 2020. The new target amounts to roughly a quarter of Australia’s energy expenditure.
The Coalition has since restricted investment by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, banning the funding of wind and large-scale solar projects.
The opposition spokesman on climate change, Mark Butler, said Labor would not restrict which types of renewable energy could be used to achieve its proposed target as the industry knew best.
“I think anyone who says that they can tell you exactly what clean energy will look like in 10-15 years is kidding you,” Butler told ABC Radio on Wednesday morning.
Labor’s target would put Australia on par with Denmark and California, which also have RETs of 50%. But the target would still be lower than those in Germany, Sweden and New Zealand, which all have targets of 60% or higher.
South Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory want the federal government to let them set their own renewables targets.
“Australia has been missing out, carrying around a dirty coal sack while the rest of the world ditches it for clean renewable power and embraces the jobs and cheaper power that comes with it,” GetUp’s acting national director, Paul Oosting, said. “This decision gives Australian voters a genuine choice come election time.”
Friends of the Earth spokesman Leigh Ewbank has also welcomed Labor’s announcement.
“Labor’s leadership position shows renewable energy has a bright future in Australia,” he said. “It shows that the alternative government values renewable energy jobs, unlike the Abbott government, which is actively sabotaging the sector.”
The chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox, warned that any increase to the RET would be a “costly endeavour”.
“It will have consequences for our current energy mix,” Willox told Sky News. “So that will have both cost and employment implications.”
“They need to give us some assurances around the costs to business of a policy such as this, and that’s where we’ll be talking to them, and I’ll hopefully be meeting the opposition leader next week to discuss this proposal,” Willox said.
Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney said a higher RET would mean fewer jobs in mining and fossil fuel industries.
“Down the track, yes, there will be less of those jobs, but I don’t expect that overnight we will see those jobs disappear,” she told ABC Radio.
She said new jobs could be created in the renewables sector if the “transition is managed and done carefully”.
Labor wants the government to announce the pollution reduction target it will take to the United Nations climate talks in Paris later this year.

Butler said Australia was “the only developed economy that has not announced targets that it will take to Paris. That is a gross abdication of responsibility and Tony Abbott keeps kicking this down the road.”
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has said the target would not be revealed until next month, after the Coalition party room had discussed the matter.
Butler admitted Labor had not yet announced its own emissions reduction target.
“We haven’t yet gotten to the position of saying what that would mean, from opposition, for national targets,” he said.