Today's review of energy security by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel – commissioned after last year's disastrous South Australian blackouts – is an unmistakeable chance to get policy right. As Malcolm Turnbull told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit in March, Australia is dealing with a national energy crisis. Now Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's offer of bipartisanship on a new, more flexible, low-emissions mechanism may have created a space to get the politics right as well.

After destroying three prime ministers, a decade of policy failures has caught up with us in soaring power prices and then blackouts. Earlier price spikes were driven by gold plating of the distribution network and then by Labor's excessive carbon tax. Now, price pressure such as the ACT's 19 per cent jump in household energy prices announced yesterday are being driven by rising generation costs in the National Electricity Market. As costly wind and solar power have been force fed into the system, cheaper but ageing baseload coal generation is being pushed out. But the expected transition fuel of gas is not filling the gap as the new LNG export industry ramps up while state governments such as NSW and Victoria restrict gas development on fatuous environmental grounds.