13/10/2019

A Little More Confusion Added To The Climate Policy Debate

Canberra Times - Michelle Grattan

Joel Fitzgibbon was on his mobile at a cafe at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney on Thursday when he encountered Scott Morrison getting a mid-morning coffee.
"You're making a lot of sense," Morrison said to Labor's resources spokesman, who'd set off a firestorm in his party by suggesting the ALP revise its climate policy to adopt the upper end of the government's target of reducing emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030.
"Your love won't help me, Prime Minister," Fitzgibbon shot back.
Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon during question time. Picture: Alex Ellinghausen
He's right there. Fitzgibbon's radical proposal has burst open the conundrum the opposition has in reshaping one of the ALP's centrepiece election pitches.
It's a great deal more complicated than, for example, dealing with the franking credits plan, which Labor can't afford to keep in its present form. That can be restructured, or dumped, without much political angst.
But the climate policy - for a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and a target of net zero by 2050 - has become an article of faith within Labor, and among many of its supporters. It's also a policy that in the election split the voters Labor needed, attracting some but driving away others.
Weaken the policy and there will be a reaction from the ALP's inner city constituents, who tend to look toward the Greens out of the corner of their eye. Keep a very high target and lose people once again - to the Coalition or minor parties on the right - from the traditional base, including in regional areas, especially in Queensland where coal mining is a thing.
Fitzgibbon maintains that by adopting the 28 per cent target, Labor would not just be more acceptable to blue collar voters but would put more pressure on the government to act - although this latter point seems a stretch.
Getting to 28 per cent without destroying blue collar jobs or harming the economy would also provide "a great foundation" for prosecuting the case for further action, he claims.
Among the multiple problems Labor has in reviewing its policy is that it will be considering a more pragmatic, less ambitious approach just when the climate debate is once again taking off in public consciousness.
Protesters take over Commonwealth Avenue in a staged "die-in" in protest of climate change inaction. Picture: Peter Brewer
It's hard to assess precisely the extent to which the step-up in activism represents the wider public view. Indeed the civil disobedience demonstrations are infuriating some people because of the disruption. Nevertheless, the period ahead could see the issue biting more, as the ALP is considering easing back.
Given how quickly things change and the relevance of what other countries do, in strict policy terms Labor arguably would be best not to settle a policy until, say, early 2021, for a 2022 election. But the government (and the media) will be able to exploit a Labor vacuum, so that holding out does carry political cost.
Fitzgibbon, who represents the NSW coal seat of Hunter and experienced voter wrath in May, won't get the ambit claim he outlined this week. That would be going too far for the party, and for its climate spokesman Mark Butler who has a lot of reputation at stake. As soon as Fitzgibbon made public his proposal, Butler said it wouldn't be embraced by Labor, declaring it was "fundamentally inconsistent with the Paris Agreement and would lead to global warming of 3 degrees."
Fortunately for the government, Fitzgibbon's intervention reduced the attention on its energy policy, the inadequacy of which was again highlighted this week.
As the Coalition pushes ahead with seeking to get its "big stick" legislation to deal with recalcitrant power companies through parliament, criticisms of its policy came from, among others, the chair of the Energy Security Board Kerry Schott and the Grattan Institute.
Schott, whose board advises federal and state governments, wrote in The Australian Financial Review, ahead of the paper's energy summit, that "government interventions to cap prices and to effectively subsidise certain generation projects will not encourage the considerable new investment and innovation that is needed".
The Grattan Institute, which released a report on Australia's electricity markets, said the government's "fight to avoid the impending closure of the Liddell coal power station in NSW makes it harder for Australia to achieve its emissions reduction targets, and is likely to increase electricity prices and reduce the reliability of supplies".
The AFR summit saw much finger pointing, with Energy Minister Angus Taylor blaming industry for the lack of investment, and industry blaming the government.
Taylor said dismissively: "Time and again we've seen industry participants and commentators swept up in the excitement of complex new programs represented by the latest fashionable acronym that everyone pretends to understand but few ever do." Origin Energy's CEO Frank Calabria said "the mere existence of the big stick is acting as a handbrake on investment, right when we need investment the most".
In theory, Morrison could have tried to use the great authority his unexpected election win gave him to pursue more appropriate energy and emissions reduction policies. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult, as it would have contradicted much the government had been saying and doing.
But it was never an option. Morrison is either wilfully blind to what needs to be done (although when treasurer he supported the more rational policy of a National Energy Guarantee), or he is afraid to stir those powerful naysayers in his party.
So where are we left?
With a government stubbornly tied to a set of policies that experts insist won't deliver effective results. And an opposition that's in a funk about where it should position itself in the future.
Meanwhile Australia's overall emissions rise (although electricity emissions are down, as some coal fired power goes out of the system); high electricity prices remain a burden on private and business consumers alike; and there is nervousness about the summer power supply.

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The Hot Topic Of Climate Change

The Saturday Paper - Paul Bongiorno



The ghosts of leaders past are haunting the political firmament as climate change, the one issue that played a major role in their demise, flares spectacularly. While Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten ruminate on their contributions to and prescriptions for the nation, fierce unseasonal bushfires are offering a brutal reality check.
The irony is that a former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is most in tune with the thousands of Extinction Rebellion protesters disrupting major cities here and around the world. Turnbull does not baulk at laying the blame for Australia’s faltering response on his own party. He told Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper The Australian, “The failure to have a coherent national energy policy is a major problem but it is founded on this rock of climate denialism inside the Liberal Party and inside the media, including by the newspaper you [the interviewer] work for.”
Turnbull defends himself as a “true conservative” against those who dumped him as prime minister on the pretext he was too left-leaning and “not really one of us”. He says, “There is nothing conservative … [in] denying the science of climate change. That’s not a conservative position. That is just, well, that is just denying reality. You might as well deny gravity.”
His successors in government have no compunction about denying anything that doesn’t suit them. Energy Minister Angus Taylor insists Turnbull is wrong to claim the government’s policy is incoherent, because carbon emissions and energy prices are both falling. Except the government’s own figures show this claim to be wrong, or at the very least a giant fudge. Total yearly emissions have been rising every year since Tony Abbott scrapped Labor’s carbon price in 2014.
On energy prices, Taylor says an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report shows his new regulations forced retailers in South Australia, New South Wales and south-east Queensland to lower their standing offers by $130 to $190 a year. Victoria was the standout, with its retailers decreasing their standing offers by $310 to $430 a year.
Labor’s spokesman for Climate Change and Energy, Mark Butler, rejects Taylor’s argument that electricity bills are shrinking, saying only 10 per cent of households are on standing offers. He quotes analysis by JPMorgan showing wholesale electricity prices rose by 12 per cent from June to August.
On Tuesday, Butler said the latest work from the Grattan Institute reported that under the Coalition the big three private power companies have earned “an extra $1 billion in additional mega-profits … all paid for by Australian households and businesses”. He added that, since the energy crisis sparked by Abbott in 2015, wholesale power prices have risen “by about 158 per cent, and the market expects those prices to continue rising, with forward prices up 29 per cent just in the last 12 months, since Malcolm Turnbull and the national energy guarantee were dumped back in 2018”.
You’d imagine Labor would agree with the Extinction Rebellion protesters … Instead the party is subjecting itself to some very public open-heart surgery on its climate change and energy policy. With interventions like that from the knowledgeable Butler – who’s written a book on the subject – you’d imagine Labor would agree with the Extinction Rebellion protesters, who say there is an urgent need to declare a climate emergency and take greater action to reduce emissions. Instead the party is subjecting itself to some very public open-heart surgery on its climate change and energy policy.
Bill Shorten, in his first major interview since the election, told another Murdoch paper, the Sunday Herald Sun, “It pains me to realise after the election that I’d misread some of the mood in Queensland and Western Australia. There they saw some of our policies as being green-left, not for the worker, not for the working people.” Labor failed to win new seats in the west and saw swings against it of 11 to 12 percentage points in the Queensland coal seats of Dawson and Capricornia. In New South Wales, the  hitherto-safe Labor seat of Hunter had a swing of 9.5 percentage points against the party.
The swing in Hunter has certainly alarmed Joel Fitzgibbon, who managed to hold on by his fingernails. One Labor insider says that, as a result, “Joel has gone rogue.” But Anthony Albanese added Resources to Fitzgibbon’s Agriculture portfolio after the election, and Fitzgibbon has now set about pushing the party to a new climate deal that is closer to the government’s weak ambitions.
Fitzgibbon ventured to reactionary champion Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute on Wednesday to run up the white flag. He largely blames the three consecutive election losses on Labor’s more ambitious climate change policies. “How many times are we going to let it kill us?” he asked, adding, “How many leaders do we want to lose to it?” He said it was time “to reach a sensible settlement on climate change”.
His settlement: to match the prime minister’s 26-28 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030. But, unlike Morrison, he wants to achieve the higher target of 28 per cent. “If we could get to 28 per cent by 2030, and also demonstrate that we could do so without destroying blue-collar jobs or damaging the economy, then we would have a great foundation from which to argue the case for being more ambitious on the road to 2050.” The Liberals’ most strident coal spruiker, Craig Kelly, couldn’t have put it better. How it squares with Albanese’s and Butler’s assurances that Labor will always take climate change more seriously than the Liberals is the question. It sets the scene for a mighty brawl at next year’s Labor Party national conference.
The Greens’ Adam Bandt says the public will never forgive Labor if it abandons climate action. He says if Labor walks away from its already weak target of reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, “it walks away from the Paris agreement goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees”. He accuses Labor of joining the Tories.
It’s a pretty serious accusation on the day Angus Taylor outraged even the energy regulator by announcing he was going to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite coal-fired power stations. Taylor tried to mask his intention by lumping it in with funding for new gas and pumped-hydro plants. He told the Australian Financial Review National Energy Summit there was a need to strengthen the process for retaining coal generators.
The Malcolm Turnbull-appointed chair of the Energy Security Board, Kerry Schott, was unimpressed. She told the same conference, “Government interventions to both cap prices and effectively subsidise certain generation projects will not encourage the considerable new investment and innovation that is needed. The ongoing and costly efforts to keep aged coal plants running for extended periods is also ill advised.”
“Ill advised”, because it also flies in the face of market realities and downgrades the climate change risks that insurers and investors are now factoring into their decisions. And one would think it is ill advised because climate change, according to recent opinion polling, is increasingly seen as Australia’s No. 1 threat.
The yearly Lowy poll published in May found 64 per cent of adults saw the issue as “a critical threat”. It was the first time in the 15-year history of the poll that global warming topped the list of threats. And at the beginning of October, an Essential poll found 70 per cent of Australians thought Morrison was wrong to snub the United Nations Climate Action Summit.
But there is a cynical calculation on the government’s part. Morrison, in the run-up to the May 18 election, pivoted his rhetoric to accepting the science, dressing up his half-baked responses as more serious than they are. This ploy, which he also used in his address to the UN General Assembly, did not survive informed fact-checking. However, at face value it worked at the election. Morrison won. But one veteran Liberal says there were many other factors at play. Bill Shorten’s mea culpa on his tax agenda and having “too many messages” backs this view. You could also throw in Clive Palmer’s $60 million advertising spend, demonising Shorten relentlessly in the final two weeks of the campaign and reinforcing the serious doubts that voters already had about the Labor leader. One senior Labor MP says, “If we’d had $60 million to throw at Morrison, we could have killed him too.”
For the thousands of Extinction Rebellion protesters, all this is fiddling while the planet burns. Former Greens senator Scott Ludlam, who was one of the protesters arrested in Sydney, said calls to shut down the demonstrations were “like turning off the smoke alarm in a burning building”. But that’s not the way Resources Minister Matt Canavan wants anyone to see it. On social media he attacked the Queensland government for sitting “idle for months while it has let a bunch of activists take over the streets of Brisbane”, ignoring the Palaszczuk government’s recent crackdown. He is likely to agree with his colleague Peter Dutton, who believes the protesters should be “named and shamed”, face mandatory jail terms and have their welfare payments stopped.
These “authoritarian populists”, as Turnbull would call them, are desperate for the real message of the protests to be lost in outrage over traffic jams.

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Climate Of Angst Laid Bare Within Battered And Bruised Post-Election Labor

Sydney Morning Herald - Rob Harris

Labor's internal anxiety over its future policy direction - especially on climate - is set to intensify in the coming weeks as the reality of another three years in opposition sinks in for its caucus members.
Veteran frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon, who has been in Parliament for 23 years but has served less than two of them as a cabinet minister, laid the angst bare on Wednesday. The MP, who hails from coal country in the NSW Hunter region, argued the opposition had "confused and scared" voters with its policies at the May election during his speech to think tank the Sydney Institute.


While a review is conducted into the policies taken to the last election, Labor isn't saying much when it comes to the issues of climate change and energy.

The speech, which argued for a "sensible settlement" with the Morrison government on emissions targets, was leaked ahead of time and ran on the front page of The Australian, ensuring a full day of debate before it was delivered.
It blindsided Labor leader Anthony Albanese's office, which only received a copy late Wednesday night - not long before the newspaper's printing presses had started firing up. Billed as "Managing Disruption: Australia's Place In A Changing World", the office had assumed the speech was dealing with US President Donald Trump and global affairs.
In all likelihood Fitzgibbon was never going to seek approval for what he planned to say and requesting Albanese's approval would have left the fledgling leader in the awkward position of having to quash the open and honest debate on policy he had promised.
Joel Fitzgibbon advocated for Labor to wind back its 45 per cent carbon emissions reduction target. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Ahead of the release next month of a review into the party's shock election loss, Fitzgibbon urged the party to revise its emissions target down to match the upper end of the Coalition's goal of a 26 to 28 per cent reduction. "If we could get to 28 per cent by 2030, and also demonstrate that we could do so without destroying blue-collar jobs or damaging the economy, then we would have a great foundation from which to argue the case for being more ambitious on the road to 2050," he said.
His move infuriated caucus colleagues who said there was no need for a public split on climate targets years before a final policy would have to be decided for the next election.
The party's climate spokesman Mark Butler declared within hours that Labor was "unshakeably committed" to the principles set out in the Paris climate agreement. "The government's targets, announced by Tony Abbott, are fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the Paris agreement and would lead to global warming of more than 3 degrees," he said. "For that reason, Labor has consistently opposed Tony Abbott's inadequate targets."
But the angst within Labor as to how it takes action on climate change is more widespread than just Fitzgibbon.
At the height of the election campaign, when the party was being smashed on the front pages of newspapers over economic modelling of its climate policies showing damage to the economy ranging from billions to trillions of dollars and its confusing stance on the Adani mine in northern Queensland, Labor MPs would mutter: "We weren't suppose to be talking about this."
Fitzgibbon's frustration comes from a decade-long climate war which has torn both parties to shreds. "How many times are we going to let it kill us? Indeed, how many leaders do we want to lose to it?" he said on Wednesday night.
Amid rowdy public protests across capital cities and warnings from global bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and International Monetary Fund about the dangers of inaction, Labor is wrestling with how it can attack the government on climate while keeping itself out of the firing line.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese.
Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Framing the argument around jobs and job security will be critical to that challenge, MPs admit, citing the electoral success of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews last November.
"Big transitions are always accompanied by big, defining anxieties," Labor's treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers said as he gave the party's annual Light On The Hill Address in Bathurst last week. "This anxiety has many sources but three are key: stagnant wages feeding declining living standards; fears about the future of work; and a sense that our nation is failing to meet its potential."
Chalmers' comments were mirrored by deputy Labor leader Richard Marles on Thursday night, when he said in a speech to the John Curtin Research Centre that traditional Labor voters felt the party "looked down" on blue-collar workers, especially in the coal-mining regions of northern and central Queensland.
Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek argued the party should be spending its time shining a light on the government's failings on climate policy and ensuring it kept up a focus on jobs in the booming renewables sector.
For Albanese, as he seeks to impose his authority on a battered and bruised caucus, a Honolulu trip to attend the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue was a blessing. His contribution was a tweet from the Pacific saying he was "proud" that Labor has "consistently supported strong action on climate change", but he will be squeezed from all sides in coming weeks and months as party's shock at losing the federal election in May turns into frustration and anger.
As one Labor MP put it this week: "We are miles off reaching a 'political settlement' ourselves before talking about one with the government.

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