Andrew Bolt: Watchdog echoes Tony Abbott solution to power crisis
AUSTRALIA’S competition watchdog has echoed Tony Abbott’s recommendation to buy, build or subsidise coal-fired generators, so why not finally tear up the Paris deal, too, asks Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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AUSTRALIA’S competition watchdog on Wednesday gave Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the media a slap: stop your anti-Abbott hysteria.
Just because Tony Abbott suggests something, don’t knock it. In this case, Abbott’s right.
True, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s report on soaring electricity prices doesn’t put it like that, but that’s its clear take-out.
ACCC REPORT RECOMMENDS OVERHAUL OF ENERGY MARKET
First, it says, global warming schemes and deals like the Paris agreement “have been problematic” and at times “have hurt consumers”, especially when coal-fired power stations have shut.
Hasn’t Abbott, the former PM, said exactly that, and called for Australia to tear up the Paris deal? And hasn’t the media pack abused him as a wrecker?
But the ACCC goes even further in backing Abbott. Remember Abbott’s call — backed by his Monash Group of MPs and the National Party — for the government to invest or subsidise new coal-fired power stations to cut prices?
As Abbott put it: “(One) alternative might be to go the market seeking the best bids for … baseload power for the next 30 years, with the government bearing any carbon price risk.”
The ACCC recommended something similar — that the government guarantee to buy the electricity of new, cheap generators after their first six to 15 years to “encourage new entry, promote competition and to enable (commercial and industrial) customers to access low-cost new generation”.
The most likely new generators of steady electricity at the ACCC’s recommended price — no more than $50 a megawatt hour — are coal-fired. Well, well. Naturally, this was jumped on by coal supporters such as Resources Minister Matt Canavan, who tweeted: “The ACCC has recommended the government underwrite baseload power investments. Once again common sense of The_Nationals is vindicated!”
Yet when Abbott first urged the government to buy, build or subsidise coal-fired generators, he was savaged by the same haters who attacked his equally sensible call for cuts to immigration.
Turnbull mocked him as a socialist: “I’m leader of the Liberal Party. You remember the Liberal Party, that’s the one that believes in free enterprise.”
Commentators sneered. Peter van Onselen mocked Abbott’s Monash Forum as “reactionary” and “uninspiring”. And now? The ACCC has echoed what Abbott recommended, so Turnbull said he’d now study the idea.
Good. How about tearing up the Paris deal while you’re finally at it?
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Watchdog echoes Tony Abbott solution to power crisis