As the election campaign draws to a close, it's safe to say both major parties have been quiet on climate change.
Energy policies have featured prominently, which of course carry consequences for climate change, but beyond generalities, climate has been under-represented.
The last election was dubbed by many "the climate election", which saw the teal independents ride a wave of climate frustration into parliament, and a promise from Anthony Albanese to "end the climate wars".
Once again, the independents and Greens have been advocating for stronger climate action, and in the event that Australia has a minority government after May 3, climate change would be a key focus of any negotiations.
During its last term, Labor passed a number of significant reforms, especially focusing on speeding up the transition to renewables.
Many of these policies are under threat if the Coalition wins the next election, promising to scrap or weaken them significantly.
"They have rejected every single policy that's gone through the parliament that would improve tackling climate change. They've just rejected it," Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said.
"There is not a single policy there to cut climate pollution. So what that says to me is they are hell bent on continuing the climate crisis getting worse and worse."
Tony Wood, the Grattan Institute's energy and climate director, said everything the Coalition announced so far would either slow down or curb emissions reduction.
"I think we're at one of those points where what happens at this election will have enormous consequences, not just for the energy system, but also for our emissions more generally."
The Coalition’s climate platform consists of using nuclear energy to decarbonise the electricity grid, despite its own modelling indicating it will result in higher emissions between now and when any reactors would come online.
 CEO of the Climate Council, Amanda McKenzie. (ABC News: Supplied) |
Some of the changes introduced under the last government include: new laws so that Australia's biggest corporations have to disclose their climate risk and actions; strengthening the regulation of Australia's biggest polluters; and introducing emissions standards for cars sold into the country.
At the same time, it continued to approve new coal and gas projects, disappointing climate advocates such as the Climate Council's CEO, Amanda McKenzie.
"It's sort of two sides of the one coin. You've got to grow the good stuff and you've got to stop the bad stuff. We've been doing a lot of the growing the good stuff," McKenzie said.
"We need to continue doing all the good stuff around the clean energy, but we need to work hard on replacing fossil fuels and exiting fossil fuels from our system much more quickly."
Climate policies matter because they send strong signals to investors and companies about the path Australia is on, and also offer the structure for how Australia could bring down emissions across the economy (whether they do lower emissions remains to be seen).
While most of the focus has been on energy in this election, these policies are firmly in the Coalition's crosshairs.
"This is a really interesting fork in the road. And I've never seen a situation where we've had such a divergence of proposals from the two sides of politics," Tony Wood said.
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| Transport makes up more than 20 per cent of Australia's total emissions. (ABC News) |
Last week, the opposition leader confirmed that if elected, he would end a popular tax break for electric cars aimed at reducing the cost of switching to electric.
The car industry told the ABC the policy has driven a spike in EV sales and reversing it would increase the cost for Australians of going electric.
The benefit allows people to lease an electric car through a novated leasing arrangement without paying fringe benefits tax. It's intended to boost the number of electric cars coming into the second-hand market in a few years when the leases end.
Dutton has promised to scrap the penalties under the new fuel efficiency standards, weakening them significantly as there would be no consequences if car makers flout the rules.
Set to come into effect this July, the fuel efficiency standards ensure car makers supply Australia with more-efficient petrol cars and more hybrid and electric cars, which are cheaper to run and better for the climate.
Such regulations are standard in most countries around the world, with Russia being one of the only developed countries without one.
The policy works by setting an emissions limit for each manufacturer on all the cars it sells cars into the Australian market. It means the car companies can still sell any higher-polluting cars they want, but will have to offset them with more efficient models.
Car makers are only fined if they go over their cap for three consecutive years, but Dutton wants to scrap the penalties altogether.
"The policy that Dutton has proposed would totally undermine the new vehicle efficiency standards," the Climate Council's Amanda McKenzie said.
"That policy is intended to reduce climate pollution [by] more than 300 million tonnes. So that pollution would still [go] in the atmosphere."
Australia has been dubbed a "dumping ground" for inefficient cars that can't be sold elsewhere.
Transport now makes up almost 23 per cent of the country's emissions, and — with the exception of the pandemic — have continued to rise steadily as Australians opt to drive heavier, dirtier SUVs and fly more domestically.
The Greens helped pass the legislation last year, at the same time stating they hoped the pollution limits would be reduced further.
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| The climate pact aims to limit global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. (ABC News) |
Australia has a target of a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030, promised by Labor at the last election and legislated by parliament.
The Coalition is critical of Australia’s 2030 target. After statement made in an election debate by shadow minister for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien, the Coalition had to clarify that it was still committed to the Paris Agreement.
In a statement to the ABC, the Coalition campaign said it wouldn’t set any targets in opposition “but we will be required to do so in government” and cast doubt on Australia’s ability to hit the current 2030 target.
“The emissions reduction targets we set from government will consider the impact on the economy, the trajectory of emissions, and our own policies,” the statement read.
 President Donald Trump has wasted no time dismantling climate policies and promising a new era of fossil-fuel dominance. |
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are meant to increase their ambition, not weaken policies, so it's unclear what the consequences would be if the Coalition watered down the targets.
"We think this is a really important election in terms of where it is in timing, because 2030 is very close for major investment. If we start veering off moving towards that target, it's really hard to get back on track," Grattan's Tony Wood said.
In the last term of parliament, the teal independents supported the government in passing its 43 per cent target, while at the same making it clear that they wanted it to be higher. Independents such as Monique Ryan, Zoe Daniel and David Pocock want to see a target of a 60 per cent emissions reduction by 2030.
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| The teal Independents have called for more ambitious climate targets. (Reuters: Simon Dawson) |
The Greens want to see Australia adopt a 75 per cent target for 2030, which is what the Climate Council is advocating for.
In government, Labor held off announcing a 2035 target until it receives advice from the independent Climate Change Authority.
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| Renewable energy is rapidly increasing, with a pipeline of projects under construction. (ABC News) |
Australia has a target of getting to 82 per cent renewable energy by the end of the decade. Currently, around 40 per cent of the electricity system is already renewable, and there is a pipeline of projects already under construction or in the planning stages.
The independent Climate Change Authority reported to the government last year that emissions need to start falling faster if Australia is to hit that 2030 target.
Regardless, the Coalition’s plans to flood the market with gas, as it’s been described, and to also build taxpayer-funded nuclear power plants would both diminish renewables investment, according to energy experts.
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Under the nuclear pathway, renewable energy would only supply around 54 per cent of Australia's energy mix, a small increase from the current 40 per cent.
"What the opposition has put together over the last few months has been a series of policies that would generate a very different mix of electricity generation," the Grattan Institute's Tony Wood said.
"In government, a Coalition government would slow down the move to renewables and the transmission that goes with that. It would extend the life of coal-fired power stations somewhat, and it would introduce more gas generation into the mix so that the system remains reliable until we then had nuclear."
According to the Clean Energy Council, capping renewables at 54 per cent would forego $58 billion of new private investment in large-scale solar and wind projects and Australia would reach the cap in another four years.
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"What's happening now is considerable uncertainty and flip-flopping is not good at all for investment," Wood said.
"We already know that the uncertainty around offshore wind and the uncertainty around some renewable projects has meant that people say, 'well, we better stop, right?'"
In its statement to the ABC, the Coalition referred to modelling from Frontier Economics that shows electricity sector emissions will be lower in the middle of the century.
“... emissions in the Coalition’s plan will drop below Labor’s before 2050, and will generate fewer emissions in 2050 and beyond.”
But because CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere, overall, the modelling shows far higher cumulative emissions for the Coalition’s plan.
That modelling also only accounts for the electricity sector and assumes there's a slower uptake of other clean technologies and a smaller economy overall.
The Climate Change Authority estimates a nuclear policy would add two billion tonnes of climate pollution by delaying the transition. The modelling that forms the basis of the Coalition plan also has much higher emissions.
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| The Coalition proposes to include gas projects in the Capital Investment Scheme. (ABC News) |
The Coalition has focused on gas this election more than the nuclear policy it spent most of last year pitching to voters. In his budget reply speech, Peter Dutton promised to open up the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) to allow gas projects.
The CIS is a government program to boost renewables investment by underwriting major projects, taking some of the financial risk out for investors.
It applies to clean power generation (wind, solar) and storage and has so far secured 32 gigawatt of capacity by 2030.
This policy has allowed the government to secure renewable projects into the grid as the country's ageing coal power stations retire, and to plot a trajectory for how Australia's dirtiest sector — electricity — will reduce emissions.
Labor's plan for the electricity grid still involves some gas, and it has refused to address the issue of Australia's gas export industry despite calls from climate experts.
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| The Safeguard Mechanism aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Australia's largest industrial facilities. (ABC News) |
First introduced under former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott, it sets the rules for how much Australia's dirtiest facilities can pollute each year, and was reformed and strengthened in the last parliamentary term.
It covers just over 200 facilities across industries like mining, manufacturing, waste and gas, which account for almost a third of Australia's emissions.
"The safeguard mechanism is the only policy that we have that regulates fossil fuel pollution from industry. So it's a really important piece of our policy mix," the Climate Council's Amanda McKenzie said.
Each facility has its own cap for annual emissions, called a baseline, which decline at five per cent each year to 2030, plus there's an overall limit or "hard cap" on the emissions across all facilities.
Importantly, the safeguard is set in legislation, so while a sitting government can make some changes, there are fundamental tenets that can't be altered without a vote in parliament.
Amanda McKenzie said the safeguard mechanism was already a flawed policy, allowing polluters to buy or trade offsets to meet their targets.
"It's not a strong enough policy … it includes offsets, which enable companies to have a get-out-of-jail-free card when we need genuine reductions in pollution. So what we'll be advocating for in the next term is to strengthen that piece of reform."
Data from the first year of the revamped safeguard mechanism has just been released and has found that 60 per cent of the facilities used offsets to meet their targets.
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| Rewiring the Nation aims to modernise and upgrade Australia's electricity grid. (ABC News) |
Transmission projects have become a sensitive topic politically, with some people in regional Australia, where most of these projects run, mounting opposition to them.
The Coalition latched onto these concerns, and said that its nuclear policy would alleviate the need for as many transmission projects as electricity generation would remain centralised at the existing coal power stations.
“Renewable energy deployment will still grow responsibly under the Coalition’s plan, but we will avoid the massive overbuild required for Labor’s plan,” the campaign told the ABC.
But energy expert Tony Wood says these projects will be needed before the Coalition's nuclear power stations would start running.
"They are becoming critical to maintaining the current reliability of the system," he said.
"As we find the coal-fired power stations becoming less reliable as they get older, the need to be able to move electricity between states when something does go wrong in one state becomes really important," Wood said.
"I think a Coalition government would be faced with some quite difficult challenges if they were to seriously try and slow down the building of some of those transmission lines."
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| The roll-out of transmission projects has sparked backlash in the regions. (Supplied: EnergyCo) |
Wood says that Australia won't be able to connect enough renewables to meet its other targets without speeding up the transmission rollout.
"We haven't been building the necessary transmission to connect the expansion of renewable energy, wind farms, and solar farms, which have to be built in places we've never had generation before. So to connect those generators to the main grid needs more transmission."
The world is already halfway through what climate experts call the critical decade. In Australia, there are several climate issues that are likely to be prominent in the next parliamentary term.
Labor dumped its plans to introduce a federal environmental protection agency before the election, and held off on proposing a climate trigger into the national environmental laws.
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| The election will have a significant impact on how Australia tackles climate change over the coming years. (Supplied: Spyrakot) |
Currently, major developments can be assessed and rejected if they impact the surrounding ecosystems, threatened species, waterways, but not if they have a significant climate impact.
"It's 2025 and we don't have any way of stopping projects on a climate basis," Amanda McKenzie said.
The Australia Conservation Foundation ranked the major parties and key independents on their climate and environment policies, and gave the Coalition just 1/100, while Labor was rated 54/100.
"Labor scored points for its work on the clean energy and clean manufacturing transition and its strong stance against costly, thirsty, risky nuclear power, but lost points for its commitment to expanding the climate-wrecking coal and gas industries," ACF lead Kelly O'Shannassy said.
If it wins, Labor wants to host the major UN climate conference next year alongside Pacific countries as host, which will ratchet up the pressure on Australia to outline its position on fossil fuels.
In a statement to the ABC, climate minister Chris Bowen said that acting on climate change is in the national interest, calling its reforms “overdue”.
“Australians don’t want to see more tired, frustrating climate wars, that only see us miss the economic opportunities of the global push towards Net Zero."
How Australia faces the climate challenge over the next three years will be different depending on the outcome on May 3. If there is a hung parliament, climate policies will be a strong negotiating point with the teal independents and the Greens.
As Grattan's Tony Wood points out, three years is a long time in a world that's changing fast.
"If the current government was to be re-elected for another three-year term, that would almost make it impossible for the coalition's nuclear plan, as they've described it, to actually be implemented. It would be too late," Wood concluded.
"The renewables would be built. The transmission line, hopefully, would be built. The coal-fired power stations, some of them would have shut down. So this is a really interesting fork in the road."
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