Extract from The Guardian
As
things stand at the moment, I can’t tell you what the re-elected
Turnbull government is about. I don’t think anyone would be able to tell
you. As some pundits would put it, there is no narrative. As I would
put it, there is no coherent agenda.
But what there is, in abundance, is problem solving.
Over the past few weeks, the government has moved with alacrity to clean up various messes: the backpacker tax, the deeply troubled VET Fee-Help scheme, the dangerously internally contested superannuation policy, and even the marriage equality plebiscite – which, on current indications, will finally hit the fence next week when parliament resumes.
There are two ways of looking at this bout of problem solving. The first way could be that this represents, for the government, a strategic lowering of ambition – don’t try to set some grand agenda, just do what the voters say they want, which is to find practical solutions for practical problems, and use that as a basis for post-election recovery.
The second way is to see a prime minister trying to remain one step ahead of people who would do him harm. Putting runs on the board is a practical method of staying a step ahead of Tony Abbott, who is like a mini typhoon, building up ground speed on his Quadrant reunion world tour, throwing bones to the base from the European capitals.
So laser-like has the focus become on problem solving that the government has ticked over and gone one step further in the past week, dusting off the old Howard-era trick of creating a problem to solve.
John Howard was the master of the pea-and-thimble trick, the barbecue stopper, the sudden pull on the handbrake to move the government minibus in another direction to try to deliver some kind of short-term fillip. The deeply inglorious fight about renewable energy that has broken out since the South Australian blackouts has some of the hallmarks of the ageing magician.
Look. Over. There. Tabloid shitstorm. It’s pretty unbecoming.
So let’s not look over there. Let’s look at what has actually happened.
During the Abbott era, the government repealed Labor’s carbon pricing scheme and waged an ideological attack on renewable energy, a protracted bout of warfare that damaged not only the aural sensibilities of ordinary Australians but also, much more pertinently, clubbed an important growth industry for this country at a time when good growth industries can be hard to find.
The absence of federal leadership created a vacuum that various state governments stepped into with their renewable energy targets.
When Turnbull returned to the leadership of the Liberal party, asserting any ambition on climate policy would clearly be incendiary behaviour. So he didn’t express ambition. In fact, he was at pains not to.
He just calmed things down, with similar tactics to those he deployed to calm down the febrile and cartoonish national security debate – it wasn’t an apocalypse, people, it was just a windfarm.
With the apocalypse consigned to the past, Greg Hunt, the then environment minister, fresh from signing Australia up to climate commitments in Paris, gave state governments clear encouragement to develop their own renewable energy schemes. “I have encouraged the states that if they want to do something extra, [they should] apply reverse auctions to the renewable energy target in the way the Australian Capital Territory has done,” Hunt said last December in Paris.
That was 10 months ago.
Hunt was then replaced by Josh Frydenberg. Frydenberg was Turnbull’s most interesting ministerial appointment for a couple of reasons: the prime minister combined the portfolios of energy and environment, creating a long-overdue synthesis, and Frydenberg is someone Coalition conservatives are eyeing off as a future leadership contender, so long as he makes the right gestures.
Frydenberg’s opening signal in his new portfolio was always going to be important, and it was typically well thought through when I spoke to him in July.
Just for the record, on my count, July is three months ago.
The new minister said several things. He said coal was on the way out. He said he was interested in gas as a transitional fuel to safeguard base-load power during the transition. He said a key focus in his work with the states would be “how to ensure we get a greater integration of renewables into the electricity market, and a greater focus on new technologies”. Clear signal: renewables OK.
He was keen to play down a nascent narrative from conservative commentators that power outages recorded in South Australia in 2015 were attributable to that state’s high proportion of wind energy. Frydenberg said there were several factors involved in the blackouts, only one of which was the intermittency of wind. Again, a clear signal. Renewables OK. Chill.
Frydenberg certainly did raise in his opening gambit an issue he had with the inconsistency of the state renewable energy targets. He clearly didn’t care for the patchwork of schemes – but he raised it in neutral terms.
He noted that all the states had different targets and they were at different points of diversification in their respective energy mixes. Tasmania, for example, had more than 90% renewables. South Australia was about 41%, Victoria about 12% and New South Wales about 8% – and then there was the federal renewable energy target.
“The question is how do I integrate the state and the federal policies,” he said – which is obviously a quantifiably different question to how do I get the states to dump their targets.
So the intention three months ago, broadly defined, at the political level, was to calm things down. The government gave the clear impression it was resolved on trying to thread a needle on climate and energy policy. Various stakeholders breathed a sigh of relief.
Roll forward to the past week, and the South Australian storm that has reset the political debate.
Now we’ve entered a period of asserting the inalienable rights of Australians to watch cricket with the lights on at the MCG. The lights must remain on has been the political refrain of the past week, like some kind of primal bringing of the fire moment.
If you were a deeply cynical person, you’d say that maximising a problem, setting off a mini culture war, gives the Australian something to write about on page one other than Tony’s Quadrant tour.
If that was the objective, it has worked a treat.
But of course short-term politics isn’t the only consideration. So let’s take a minute to sort the reasonable from the cynical.
Australia’s energy sector is facing a big transition. We obviously do have to keep the lights on while that happens.
The intermittency issues from technologies such as wind are utterly reasonable for regulators and governments to consider, as are other equally pertinent matters, such as the state of the infrastructure, the sufficiency of interconnectors and the obvious trend towards decentralisation.
It’s utterly reasonable for voters to want power to be affordable, but it’s also reasonable to expect that any debate about affordability will reference the fact that wind and solar costs are falling much faster than forecasters have predicted, and battery costs are also heading lower – and the combination of those two facts spells opportunity. These are just facts, not utopian fantasies from lentil-eating leftists.
We also have to recognise Australia has an obligation to decarbonise, and rapidly, for the health of the planet, and because of specific commitments the Turnbull government has signed Australia up to.
There’s now no credible pathway for the kind of emissions reductions Australia will require to meet its Paris commitments. That’s just a fact, and one that the Turnbull government, thus far, seems very reluctant to face up to, given that doing so will generate another war within its own ranks.
To put this simply: lecturing the state governments about their emissions reduction policies tends to work better if you have a clear medium-term pathway of your own.
On the logic of what Frydenberg has been saying since he took the portfolio, the policy pathway for the government is clear. If the minister wants gas as the transitional fuel to deliver base load, and a nationally harmonised policy structure to help bolt new technologies into the electricity grid, he should lead the discussion about an energy intensity scheme for the power industry, because such a scheme would deliver those eventualities.
He could also put the states back in their box by setting a more ambitious federal renewable energy target, legislated over a longer time horizon, to give certainty to investors, who are again fretting about having to endure another toxic cycle of finger pointing about climate change.
That’s the test of political bona fides.
The rest is really so much theatre.
But what there is, in abundance, is problem solving.
Over the past few weeks, the government has moved with alacrity to clean up various messes: the backpacker tax, the deeply troubled VET Fee-Help scheme, the dangerously internally contested superannuation policy, and even the marriage equality plebiscite – which, on current indications, will finally hit the fence next week when parliament resumes.
There are two ways of looking at this bout of problem solving. The first way could be that this represents, for the government, a strategic lowering of ambition – don’t try to set some grand agenda, just do what the voters say they want, which is to find practical solutions for practical problems, and use that as a basis for post-election recovery.
The second way is to see a prime minister trying to remain one step ahead of people who would do him harm. Putting runs on the board is a practical method of staying a step ahead of Tony Abbott, who is like a mini typhoon, building up ground speed on his Quadrant reunion world tour, throwing bones to the base from the European capitals.
So laser-like has the focus become on problem solving that the government has ticked over and gone one step further in the past week, dusting off the old Howard-era trick of creating a problem to solve.
John Howard was the master of the pea-and-thimble trick, the barbecue stopper, the sudden pull on the handbrake to move the government minibus in another direction to try to deliver some kind of short-term fillip. The deeply inglorious fight about renewable energy that has broken out since the South Australian blackouts has some of the hallmarks of the ageing magician.
Look. Over. There. Tabloid shitstorm. It’s pretty unbecoming.
So let’s not look over there. Let’s look at what has actually happened.
During the Abbott era, the government repealed Labor’s carbon pricing scheme and waged an ideological attack on renewable energy, a protracted bout of warfare that damaged not only the aural sensibilities of ordinary Australians but also, much more pertinently, clubbed an important growth industry for this country at a time when good growth industries can be hard to find.
The absence of federal leadership created a vacuum that various state governments stepped into with their renewable energy targets.
When Turnbull returned to the leadership of the Liberal party, asserting any ambition on climate policy would clearly be incendiary behaviour. So he didn’t express ambition. In fact, he was at pains not to.
He just calmed things down, with similar tactics to those he deployed to calm down the febrile and cartoonish national security debate – it wasn’t an apocalypse, people, it was just a windfarm.
With the apocalypse consigned to the past, Greg Hunt, the then environment minister, fresh from signing Australia up to climate commitments in Paris, gave state governments clear encouragement to develop their own renewable energy schemes. “I have encouraged the states that if they want to do something extra, [they should] apply reverse auctions to the renewable energy target in the way the Australian Capital Territory has done,” Hunt said last December in Paris.
That was 10 months ago.
Hunt was then replaced by Josh Frydenberg. Frydenberg was Turnbull’s most interesting ministerial appointment for a couple of reasons: the prime minister combined the portfolios of energy and environment, creating a long-overdue synthesis, and Frydenberg is someone Coalition conservatives are eyeing off as a future leadership contender, so long as he makes the right gestures.
Frydenberg’s opening signal in his new portfolio was always going to be important, and it was typically well thought through when I spoke to him in July.
Just for the record, on my count, July is three months ago.
The new minister said several things. He said coal was on the way out. He said he was interested in gas as a transitional fuel to safeguard base-load power during the transition. He said a key focus in his work with the states would be “how to ensure we get a greater integration of renewables into the electricity market, and a greater focus on new technologies”. Clear signal: renewables OK.
He was keen to play down a nascent narrative from conservative commentators that power outages recorded in South Australia in 2015 were attributable to that state’s high proportion of wind energy. Frydenberg said there were several factors involved in the blackouts, only one of which was the intermittency of wind. Again, a clear signal. Renewables OK. Chill.
Frydenberg certainly did raise in his opening gambit an issue he had with the inconsistency of the state renewable energy targets. He clearly didn’t care for the patchwork of schemes – but he raised it in neutral terms.
He noted that all the states had different targets and they were at different points of diversification in their respective energy mixes. Tasmania, for example, had more than 90% renewables. South Australia was about 41%, Victoria about 12% and New South Wales about 8% – and then there was the federal renewable energy target.
“The question is how do I integrate the state and the federal policies,” he said – which is obviously a quantifiably different question to how do I get the states to dump their targets.
So the intention three months ago, broadly defined, at the political level, was to calm things down. The government gave the clear impression it was resolved on trying to thread a needle on climate and energy policy. Various stakeholders breathed a sigh of relief.
Roll forward to the past week, and the South Australian storm that has reset the political debate.
Now we’ve entered a period of asserting the inalienable rights of Australians to watch cricket with the lights on at the MCG. The lights must remain on has been the political refrain of the past week, like some kind of primal bringing of the fire moment.
If you were a deeply cynical person, you’d say that maximising a problem, setting off a mini culture war, gives the Australian something to write about on page one other than Tony’s Quadrant tour.
If that was the objective, it has worked a treat.
But of course short-term politics isn’t the only consideration. So let’s take a minute to sort the reasonable from the cynical.
Australia’s energy sector is facing a big transition. We obviously do have to keep the lights on while that happens.
The intermittency issues from technologies such as wind are utterly reasonable for regulators and governments to consider, as are other equally pertinent matters, such as the state of the infrastructure, the sufficiency of interconnectors and the obvious trend towards decentralisation.
It’s utterly reasonable for voters to want power to be affordable, but it’s also reasonable to expect that any debate about affordability will reference the fact that wind and solar costs are falling much faster than forecasters have predicted, and battery costs are also heading lower – and the combination of those two facts spells opportunity. These are just facts, not utopian fantasies from lentil-eating leftists.
We also have to recognise Australia has an obligation to decarbonise, and rapidly, for the health of the planet, and because of specific commitments the Turnbull government has signed Australia up to.
There’s now no credible pathway for the kind of emissions reductions Australia will require to meet its Paris commitments. That’s just a fact, and one that the Turnbull government, thus far, seems very reluctant to face up to, given that doing so will generate another war within its own ranks.
To put this simply: lecturing the state governments about their emissions reduction policies tends to work better if you have a clear medium-term pathway of your own.
On the logic of what Frydenberg has been saying since he took the portfolio, the policy pathway for the government is clear. If the minister wants gas as the transitional fuel to deliver base load, and a nationally harmonised policy structure to help bolt new technologies into the electricity grid, he should lead the discussion about an energy intensity scheme for the power industry, because such a scheme would deliver those eventualities.
He could also put the states back in their box by setting a more ambitious federal renewable energy target, legislated over a longer time horizon, to give certainty to investors, who are again fretting about having to endure another toxic cycle of finger pointing about climate change.
That’s the test of political bona fides.
The rest is really so much theatre.
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