Tony Abbott accuses Malcolm Turnbull of failing to listen to his own backbench
TONY Abbott has accused Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of failing to listen to his own backbench, saying former leader John Howard would never have forged ahead with a major policy so many MPs disagreed with.
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TONY Abbott has accused Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of failing to listen to his own backbench, saying former leader John Howard would never have forged ahead with a major policy so many MPs disagreed with.
In an escalation of his attack over the National Energy Guarantee, Mr Abbott said his Coalition colleagues had described the policy as “putting lipstick on a pig” and urged Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg to “go back to the drawing board”.
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“If John Howard’s ministers had brought a submission to the partyroom that had at least six MPs threatening to cross the floor and at least a dozen more expressing deep scepticism, along the lines that “this is putting lipstick on a pig”, they would have been sent straight back to the drawing board – and this is where the energy minister should go,” he said.
“The last thing MPs want to do is fight their own side. If the PM had been as attentive to his own backbench as he is to the senate cross bench, the government would not be in its current fix.”
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Changing direction on energy policy was critical for winning the next federal election, Mr Abbott said.
“A government that wants to win an election, but has lost 38 successive Newspolls, must focus on price.”
Writing today in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Abbott has laid out a seven-point plan for a new energy policy that aims to cut electricity bill, based on the ACCC’s recommendations.
His plan includes keeping open the Hunter Valley-based Liddell coal-fired power station by “using competition law to stop anti-competitive conduct.”
Mr Abbott also says he would “end the legal ban on nuclear power. It’s not currently economic here but it might be soon and it is the only practical way for Australia to have fully emissions-free baseload power,” he said.
The former Prime Minister argues the federal government should “fight with the states over their bans on gas exploration and extraction” to show their support for “struggling families while Labor is in the pocket of the green left.”
Taking aim at renewable generators, whose unreliability led to state-wide blackouts across South Australia, Mr Abbott said it was integral they provided 24/7 power.
“This stipulation in the scheduling rules should never have been removed during the Rudd-Gillard era government, and reliability is the only part of the NEG that’s worth preserving,” he writes.
This seven-point plan, Mr Abbott argues, is one “that builds on things that the government has already said it supports and that avoids the showdown over the Paris targets that is otherwise looming.”
Mr Abbott said it was clear that voters wanted lower power bills, not lower Paris emissions targets.
“The NEG legislation seeks to turn the non-binding, aspirational emissions target agreed to at Paris into L-A-W law, backed up by $100 million fines,” he said.
“Given that emissions targets and unreliable wind and solar energy have helped to double power prices over the past decade it’s very hard to see how even more renewables and even higher emissions targets could possibly lower them.”
