My Daily Advertiser Op Ed coumn for Tuesday 28 June 2022

Five policy decisions that caused our energy mess

The current energy market crisis hasn’t come out of nowhere, though unless you are an energy policy nerd it would be understandable if you thought the recently averted crisis came upon us very suddenly

Indeed, Liberal leader Peter Dutton is framing it as a recent catastrophe, saying it was caused by Labor “transitioning into renewables too quickly. They are spooking the market”.

But this crisis hasn’t just suddenly emerged. As Roger Dargaville pointed out in The Conversation, and reprinted in The New Daily, “We arrived here thanks to a series of policy decisions under previous governments, state and federal, that left Australia’s energy system ill-equipped to cope with the demands placed on it.”

So in this week’s column I will analyse those policy decisions, and note who made them, so we all know where to point the finger. There are five key policy moments that led to the power crisis engulfing Australia recently.

I’ll begin by looking at the privatisation of the electricity sector. To my mind this is the most egregious of these policy failings.

Privatisation is an economic/political process based on the neo-liberal economic philosophy which first swept the world in the 1980s. It argued that public owned enterprises should be sold off to the private sector on the mistaken logic that private industry would run the assets more efficiently and at a cheaper cost.

It was in the 1990s that privatisation really took off, after Hawke and Keating first tested the waters. The Kennett government in Victoria took the lead in privatising electricity generators and transmission assets. South Australia and NSW quickly jumped on board with what became a feeding frenzy of privatising public energy assets.

Of course, the actual focus of privatised industry is not to be efficient but to maximise shareholder profit. The primary role of the energy sector to provide general benefits to the Australian public and businesses was completely lost.

A very close second on my list is that axing the price on carbon, and watering down the renewable energy (RET) target.

Under former prime minister Tony Abbott, the then-Coalition government removed the price on carbon created by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. This was arguably one of the most backward steps in the efforts to rein in Australia’s carbon emissions and did nothing to incentivise renewable energy production.

It also tried very hard to scrap the RET, eventually settling for just watering it down significantly.

The RET required energy retailers and large customers to ensure a share of their energy was derived from renewable sources.

Next on the list is the lack of investment in transmission infrastructure. This is not so much a policy moment, but a lack of one.

Transmission infrastructure is the wires, poles and other bits of the system needed to get electricity from power producers to households and businesses.

Most major transmission projects in Australia connecting coal, gas and hydro projects to the grid have been built by governments and later privatised. Under the current privatised system, getting new transmission lines built is a complex process.

Coming in at fourth place is an effective stop on investment in wind farms in Victoria

In 2011, Victoria’s Baillieu government effectively put a stop to wind farm investment by creating a two-kilometre exclusion zone around existing homes.

This decision, combined with the reduced RET, really slowed down investment in renewables.

Finally, the Gladstone gas terminal agreements also contributed to the problem.

Liquefied natural gas exports began from the Gladstone LNG gas terminal in Queensland in 2015, during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era, connecting the eastern states’ domestic gas markets to the international price.

Unlike Western Australia, there was no domestic reserve for gas set up as part of the agreements. So, on the east coast, we are now exposed to international gas prices. Our gas costs more here than it does in Japan, for example.

The decisions made around the Gladstone gas agreements allowed Australian gas to be shipped offshore and have led to extremely high gas prices domestically.

Of course, other policy decisions have also led to today’s crisis. For example, there’s been limited government policy encouraging the construction of batteries and pumped hydro to store renewable energy produced at times of lower demand.

Without strong government intervention it is unlikely that a prompt and orderly transition to renewables can be achieved.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 21 June 2022

Nuclear not an option whatever the circumstances

This week I’ll elaborate on an issue for which I had only space to mention in passing last week, which is the worrying new campaign to introduce nuclear power to Australia.

Many have no doubt thought that this issue had been firmly rejected many years ago, but two recent developments have brought it back into contention.

The first was the AUKUS deal to equip our armed forces with nuclear submarines, which many experts have pointed out would lead to a nuclear industry here.

More recently, and of much greater significance is that Peter Dutton, the newly installed Liberal Party leader, has said that he is not afraid ”to talk about nuclear energy as an alternative to coal and gas”. But Greenpeace says nuclear energy generates huge amounts of toxic radioactive waste while being very slow and expensive, while nuclear plants are dangerous and vulnerable, as Crikey reported.

Dutton’s shadow front bench, unveiled on Sunday, included two proponents of nuclear energy in key roles: Ted O’Brien, the spokesman on climate and energy, and Hollie Hughes, the junior spokeswoman on climate.

The appointments signal an intent to take an aggressive tack on emissions. His seemingly new willingness to flirt with nuclear power is perhaps a means of bridging Liberal climate divisions. It could of course also stoke further divisions within the party.

Mr O’Brien chaired a parliamentary inquiry that recommended provisionally lifting a ban on generating power from nuclear material and considering its future use.

Meanwhile, Senator Hughes also backs dropping the ban.

The regular Sky News panellist told The New Daily that “we absolutely should be having the discussion”.

The new leader of the Nationals, David Littleproud, is also on board with calls to kickstart a nuclear debate. Advocacy of nuclear power has advanced much further in that party room. Several Nationals MPs backed a nuclear push last Parliament.

The balance of opinion among Liberal MPs has been tilted in favour of nuclear power for some time, a party source said, but had been deemed a nonstarter because of deep fears of an electoral backlash.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison noted that a change of direction on an issue needing such long-term investment could only come with bipartisan support.

In the meantime, Mr Dutton’s shift could revive an issue that has sharply divided Australians.

The new government is projecting more progress towards net zero by the decade’s end and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has pledged $20 billion for upgrading the grid to integrate renewables.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has described the case against nuclear power as “open and shut” on the basis that it is uneconomic.

Two pieces of federal legislation and many state laws prohibit nuclear power, and opposition within the states appears bipartisan.

Former prime minister John Howard has predicted that Australia will be moving towards a nuclear future within a decade. However, in government Mr Howard backed away from taking up the policy.

That was after he commissioned the Switkowski report, which sketched out a future in which up to one-third of power was generated by nuclear facilities, including some close to population centres.

A submission to Mr O’Brien’s 2019 parliamentary inquiry made on behalf of the Queensland Liberal National Party opposition noted major concerns about the political and commercial risks of any nuclear industry.

In 2016, former premier Jay Weatherill instituted a Royal Commission into a nuclear industry for South Australia that found power production would not be commercially viable and could only operate with community approval.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull once called nuclear power a “loopy current fad” prone to distracting the Coalition backbench.

To conclude where I began, Greenpeace has provided detailed analysis of why nuclear power should not be developed in Australia. It examined “six reasons why nuclear energy is not the way to a green and peaceful world”. Space limitations only allow me to list them, without any details.

It will not deliver enough power to make any difference to our carbon emissions. Nuclear power plants are dangerous and vulnerable. Nuclear energy is too expensive. It is too slow to help combat global warming in the time we have left. It generates huge amounts of toxic waste. And finally nuclear energy falls short on its promises.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 14 June 2022

Can a leopard change its spots?

Now that the Labor government has settled in my thoughts turn to the opposition, with particular focus on the Liberal Party’s new leader, Peter Dutton.

As Dutton featured so strongly as Morrison’s head kicker in chief, I’m particularly interested in whether he can become a much more collegiate politician. Can he negotiate rather than act like a Morrison-type bulldozer?

So today my analysis will go beyond the media’s fixation on trivial issues such as whether Dutton can smile or show a kinder side, as his wife assures us is the ‘real’ him, and instead focus on what his history demonstrates, and his post-election speeches tell us.

Early signs are not encouraging. Dutton’s early remarks at his first leader’s news conference made no attempt to sugar-coat his contempt for the new government. He said, “make no mistake, the next three years under Labor are going to be tough for the Australian people”.

As former Liberals leader John Hewson wrote in The Saturday Paper “There was no evidence of the promised ‘softer Dutton’. He was Trumpian, hinting at a leadership style similar to Tony Abbott’s in opposition – more destructive than constructive”.

His history during the coalition government of the past nine years is not encouraging. As The Shovel satirically wrote, “It’s pretty hard for people to judge me on the 80 or 90 times I’ve used asylum seekers as a political tool, or the 400 or so times I’ve made disparaging comments about various minority groups in this country. That was just a two-decade phrase I was going through. It’s hardly a reflection on my character”.

Briefly, he has downplayed the effects of climate change and consistently spoken against marriage equality. Perhaps most central to his reputation is his stint as immigration minister and, later, home affairs.

He was first elected to federal parliament in 2001. He would go on to hold various positions over the years, including minister for sport and minister for health.

In 2008 Mr Dutton was one of seven MPs who boycotted Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations. As assistant treasurer at the time, he was the only front bencher to do so.

Dutton rose to the most senior ranks of the Liberal party room when he was promoted to immigration minister in 2014. During this time he became the face of Australia’s hard-line border policies regarding asylum seekers who arrive by boat.

Also during his time as immigration minister, Mr Dutton received international scorn when he was overheard joking about climate change and meetings in the Pacific.

“Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door,” he told then-PM Tony Abbott and then-social services minister Scott Morrison.

Mr Dutton would later move on from immigration minister to a running the home affairs and defence portfolios.

In 2017, asylum seekers detained on Manus Island and the Papua New Guinea police force accused Mr Dutton of lying about an alleged shooting incident at the camp.

In 2018, he fanned the “African gangs” panic – referring to crime incidents in Melbourne that Victoria Police found to be neither race-based nor criminally organised.

Just months after these comments about African-Australians, Mr Dutton suggested granting humanitarian visas to white South African farmers in the wake of a widely discredited myth that farmers in South Africa were being murdered as part of a supposed white genocide.

But back in 2019, Mr Dutton referred to the Biloela Tamil family’s two daughters – one of whom would go on to contract sepsis on Christmas Island – as “anchor babies”.

Post-election he has been promoting nuclear power and has installed other like-minded MPs in his shadow cabinet.

After two decades in politics, perceptions of Dutton as a political warrior for the conservative Right, a hard-line border protection minister and, more lately, a China hawk have set like cement.

Ariadne Vromen, a professor of political sociology at the Australian National University, says Dutton will have to “heal a divided party and a divided Coalition, and create a new persona for himself” as leader of the party for the Australian public.

But given his track record it is doubtful if this leopard can change his spots. Or to use another old adage, any smiles that appear might just signify that he is nothing more than mutton dressed up as lamb. 

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 7 May 2022

What accounts for the electoral success of the Greens and teals?

Like many people I’ve thought long and hard about the success of the Greens, the teal Independents and Labor’s victory at the recent federal election.

I’ve also thought about Peter Dutton becoming Liberal leader, and Barnaby Joyce losing the Nationals leadership to David Littleproud, but there is only space today for one topic.

While Labor picked up enough seats to govern in its own right, the real surprise of the 21 May election was the success of the Greens and the ‘teal’ independents. It is the success of those two groups that I’ll focus on today.

Of course, some of the Greens and teals’ success would have been due to their policies, particularly action to combat climate change and the need for an ICAC-like integrity commission. The Greens also campaigned hard on free education at all levels, and housing availability.

But there are other reasons. For example, “Voters’ disenchanted with the cynical politics of the main parties were ripe for conversion. They just needed someone to knock on their door and listen” wrote Tori Shepherd in The Conversation. Is she right? Let’s have a look at the evidence to find out.

Professor Susan Harris Rimmer, the director of Griffith University’s policy innovation hub, says she’s not surprised by the success of the Greens and the teals. She lives in the Queensland seat of Griffith, where Labor’s Terri Butler was ousted by the Greens’ Max Chandler-Mather.

“Max came to my house three or four times,” Rimmer says. “He’s at the Mount Gravatt markets, saying hello to everyone.”

The Greens’ “never ending door-knocking campaign” in inner-city Brisbane delivered them three new seats in the House of Representatives.

And they didn’t just knock on doors. Candidates and an army of volunteers delivered care packages during Covid and helped clean up after the floods.

“All politics is local, all the time,” says Rimmer. “You’re going to like the people who’ve come to your house and helped you lift the garbage off your lawn, help with your flood damage.”

Rimmer says “human interaction” is what will change people’s votes, but “Both major parties rolled out a ‘business as usual’ campaign focusing on marginal seats without thinking to themselves that the pandemic, the bushfires and the floods changed people fundamentally.”

A former Labor strategist and director of the lobbying firm RedBridge Group, Kos Samaras, who worked with Climate 200 and the “Voices for” independents, has a brutal take on what changed for the major parties.

“There’s a strong perception now that the major parties are perpetuating a scam,” he says.

Let’s now look at the success of the teal independents. Where did they come from? In 2013 the “Voices for” Indi movement held a series of kitchen-table conversations to find out what the Victorian community wanted. They put forward Cathy McGowan against the Liberal party’s Sophie Mirabella. McGowan won, and again in 2016. She was replaced by Helen Haines, who has just retained the seat.

There are now dozens of “Voices for” groups across Australia. Many of them received funding from Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200.

All this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Samaras tells Guardian Australia that the teals and Greens used research to work out which conversations they needed to be having, and with whom.

Instead of relying on a preconceived notion of the demographics of a seat, he says, the data gave them a broader insight. For example, people thought of Kooyong as a conservative seat, but it has the highest proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds of any seat in Victoria.

The pandemic also speeded up the shift of tree changers and sea changers into different seats, he says, but it also slowed down the movement of younger people. Seats gentrified or became home to more young people or renters.

Samaras says people have a “real hunger” to have a member who represents them, and they “think the major parties don’t”. He points to the success of the local deputy mayor and Vietnamese refugee Dai Le in Fowler, who defeated high-profile former ALP senator Kristina Keneally, who had been parachuted into the seat.

So as the Greens and teals demonstrate, if you engage with the voters, you are more likely to be successful.