Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese breaks pre-election promises to cut power bills
Before the election, Labor repeatedly promised that average household power bills would be $275 lower by 2025. This week’s Budget exposes the truth — that people can expect huge increases instead.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A budget that was supposed to be about the federal government delivering on its election promises has ended up confirming that it’s breaking them.
On 97 separate occasions pre-election, Anthony Albanese and Labor promised that average household power bills would be $275 lower by 2025.
In fact, say the Budget papers, electricity bills will rise by 50 per cent over the next 18 months (some warn as high as 80 per cent) and gas bills by 40 per cent.
So instead of a $275 (or nearly 20 per cent) cut in household electricity costs, what can be expected is a $750 increase.
Trying to justify their broken promise, the PM and the Treasurer have said that it’s Vladimir Putin’s fault, not theirs. But hang on; you can’t blame your broken promise on Putin’s war, when it broke out on February 24 and you were still making your promise right up to polling day on May 21.
The other problem is that wholesale power prices started to surge not in February, when Putin invaded, but in April, when the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW shut down a quarter of its capacity.
Besides, why would Putin’s war have a direct impact on power prices in Australia, when we don’t import gas or any other energy from Russia?
There’s only one reason why power prices are skyrocketing. It’s because we are replacing reliable 24/7 power provided by fossil fuels with unreliable wind and solar power that needs expensive back-up for the 70 per cent of the time when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.
Albanese and his ministers repeatedly claim, as he did in parliament this week, “that the cheapest way to deliver electricity today is not coal, it’s not gas … it’s wind and solar backed up by pumped hydro and batteries”.
Even if this were true, and it’s not, we simply don’t have sufficient batteries or pumped hydro to do the job. The “big batteries” in South Australia and Victoria last less than 30 minutes at peak discharge. And the much-vaunted Snowy 2.0 scheme is still years off completion and billions over budget.
Yet the rest of Liddell is closing down in April next year, and Eraring, the biggest power station in NSW, is closing in 2025.
Put aside the ideology for a moment and let’s just focus on the engineering reality of what’s proposed.
Under Labor’s legislated 43 per cent cut in Australia’s emissions, coal, which currently provides more than 60 per cent of our power, is expected to provide less than 10 per cent in eight years. And renewables, currently less than 30 per cent of our power, are supposed to provide over 80 per cent.
But, for that to happen, as even Labor admits, there needs to be 40 new wind turbines built every month and 22,000 solar panels installed every day, for the next eight years, plus 28,000km of new high voltage transmission lines built at the cost of $80 billion.
Labor is embarked on a horrendously expensive transition to renewable power that simply won’t happen quickly enough to meet the government’s timetable for the phase out of fossil fuels.
Without a Plan B, of which there’s no sign whatsoever, the prospect is not just for even higher power prices but for widespread blackouts. Or the shutdown of heavy industry, because while you can run a house on solar panels and batteries, you can’t run a factory that way.
Combined with the certainty of Labor’s failure to deliver the promised increase to real wages and the likelihood of Labor scrapping or fudging the promised stage 3 tax cuts, this broken promise on power prices will haunt Labor to polling day.
No wonder, for the first time since the election, federal Liberals have a spring in their step.
If Peter Dutton can keep his team together, while also presenting a clear alternative to a government that’s let people down, victory in 2025 has suddenly become a distinct possibility.
GOOD START BUT DUTTON NEEDS TO SPEAK UP ABOUT VOICE
The Opposition Leader’s budget reply this week combined a powerful attack on where Labor was taking the country with some key insights into what makes Peter Dutton tick.
He certainly dramatised the contrast between what Labor had promised and what will actually be delivered on power prices.
And, other than point out that Australia had weathered the pandemic in better shape than many of our peers, he didn’t feel the need to keep defending the Morrison government’s economic record.
Instead, he affirmed basic Liberal values, such as keeping more of what you earn, because the “best reward for hard work is lower taxes”.
He stressed pride in “our wonderful Indigenous history” while also pointing out that “we need to be equally proud of our British heritage and our migrant story”.
It was good to have a senior Coalition MP talking about fundamental beliefs, rather than focus group-driven sound bites, especially as Dutton grounded this in his own personal story as the eldest child of frugal parents, working part-time in a butcher’s shop throughout his secondary school days to save up and buy his first (modest) home at 19. Plus his pre-parliament work as a policeman in the sex offenders squad.
I still think, though, that the Coalition needs to be careful not to concede too much to its political opponents; rather than reflect its own philosophy in its response to the Albanese government.
Even though, as a percentage of GDP, government spending is trending to record peacetime levels, none of Labor’s extra spending was opposed, even though it used to be the cardinal rule of Coalition governments that, economic infrastructure and national security aside, there could be no new spending that was not specifically funded, usually by savings in existing spending.
Indeed, Dutton explicitly backed increases to childcare subsidies, including to households earning over $500,000 a year.
Now, no issue with taxpayer support at the lower end, but given Australia’s trillion-dollar debt, why are we giving people on half a million a year subsidised childcare when pensioners with soaring power bills got nothing?
Also in Labor’s budget was $75 million to prepare for next year’s Indigenous Voice to the Parliament referendum, plus another $16 million for the AEC to enrol more Aboriginal voters (who, if our system had integrity, should be enrolled already).
Then there’s $7 million for a so-called National Indigenous Australians Agency to support the referendum, including special advisory groups to engage with stakeholders; and $6 million to start a “truth-telling” process; for people of today, to rewrite our historical past. As well, donations toward constitutional recognition will be tax deductible.
Don’t hold your breath for anyone who opposes Labor’s Voice to get the same advantage.
The Coalition needs to make clear where it stands — does it support dividing us by race and cementing that in our constitution? Or does it believe, in Martin Luther King’s immortal words, that it’s the content of our character that matters, not the colour of our skin?
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
Originally published as Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese breaks pre-election promises to cut power bills
Bolt: Albanese doesn’t have much further to fall
Voters are no longer going to buy the idea that Anthony Albanese knows their struggles as he relaxes in his new home with its magnificent ocean views. For the first time his own ministers are telling journalists he has no judgment.
Maiden: Cashed-up Albo is rubbing young voters’ noses in it
It’s one thing to be loaded after decades in parliament but it’s another to flaunt it so close to an election, writes Samantha Maiden.