Peta Credlin: It’s time our politicians saw the light
THE next election won’t come down to harbourside mansions, writes Peta Credlin. It will turn on who will keep our lights on and power bills down.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Forget the Coalition’s devastating Newspoll, Cory Bernardi’s split or the PM’s spray at Bill Shorten, the standout political event last week was the focus on power prices.
That’s because the next election won’t turn on whether owning a harbourside mansion qualifies you to be prime minister, it will turn on who is most likely to keep the lights on and power bills down.
Right now, the cost of electricity is going through the roof and power supply is more likely to fail than ever before.
Growing up in country Victoria in the ’70s, our power went out regularly and we got by with candles stashed throughout the house. I thought those days were over but instead of advancing forward, decisions based on green ideology have got us going back to the dark ages.
Last September, the power went out across South Australia for 24 hours and there have been more since, including one that recently cut power to nearly 100,000 homes.
A power failure in Victoria — which is about to lose 20 per cent of its baseload supply when Hazelwood closes — badly damaged the Portland aluminium smelter.
And this weekend’s heatwave has produced warnings of power failures up and down the entire east coast.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claims it’s all the result of Labor’s obsession with renewable energy.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says it’s all because the federal Energy Market Regulator failed to order SA’s mothballed gas-fired generator back into action (begging the question why SA mothballed it in the first place).
The truth is that interrupted supply and skyrocketing bills are the result of the renewable energy target that both sides of politics currently support.
The target grew rapidly during the Rudd-Gillard years and while the Abbott government is the only government to ever cut it back, the best deal it could get was a reduction from 27 to 23 per cent. I regret we couldn’t cut further but getting it through the Senate was the challenge. When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, renewable energy doesn’t work.
On some days, SA gets more than 80 per cent of its power from wind turbines. On other days, it gets less than 2 per cent. So there always has to be back-up power from old-fashioned coal and gas-fired stations, the very same power generators that the renewable energy target is designed to put out of business. Yes, that’s right, the policy is that stupid.
We all know the SA Labor government has a 50 per cent renewable energy target. But its current heavy representation of wind turbines is almost entirely the result of the federal scheme that forces power generators right around the country to buy renewable energy certificates from wind farm operators — for example the power station in Victoria buys its permits from SA.
Most of the wind farms happen to be in South Australia because that’s where the wind is most reliable. Most of the wind-generated power is then used in SA because you lose power in transmission.
But it’s the federal government-imposed need for certificates that’s one of the culprits here, not merely Bill Shorten’s green dream of going much, much further down this disastrous path.
Sure, it would be much worse if federal and state Labor had its way. But there’s bipartisan agreement on the system that’s produced the current mess. And under the system that both sides have put in place, there is supposed to be a near doubling of wind generation in the next four years.
Labor’s nationwide 50 per cent renewable target will require $50 billion of new wind generators to be built in the next 14 years (all subsidised by taxpayers I might add).
But the bipartisan 23 per cent target will require the building of $10 billion worth of new wind turbines by 2020. That’s $5000 per household in capital costs that you will pay over the next 15 years under Labor versus $1000 per household in capital costs that you will pay in just four years under the Coalition.
Then there’s the extra cost associated with running back-up systems for when wind and solar generation doesn’t work.
So it’s not much of a choice.
No one cheered louder than I did when Turnbull told the Press Club recently he wanted more coal-fired power stations.
After all, we have plenty of coal, workers who want to keep their jobs and a desperate need to arrest this move away from reliable baseload power.
Surely if China and India can generate cheap and reliable power using clean Australian coal, why can’t we?
The answer is no one will lend money for any new coal-fired power stations in Australia due to fears that existing and foreshadowed environmental rules will make them uneconomic when they need a 30-year return on investment.
This won’t be an easy fight since the Coalition is up against Labor and the Greens, and climate change zealots.
But for a government mired in bad polls seeking a platform that’s relevant to ordinary people, this is a no-brainer.
Fighting for the lights to stay on and power to our hospitals and businesses is about as good as it gets. It also exposes Shorten’s hypocrisy when he talks about cost of living far better than a rant about rich people and harbourside mansions.
Catch Peta Credlin on SKY NEWS: The Bolt Report, Paul Murray LIVE and David Speers’ PM Agenda
We’re replacing the kangaroo with this? What a waste of $10m
What happens when you get a self-serving mining billionaire whose fortune depends on the Chinese Communist Party to help rebrand Australia? A national symbol that looks like a COVID-19 cell, writes Miranda Devine.
Sorry for the scare campaign, the planet is fine
When a climate activist apologised for how environmentalists had misled the public over climate change threats, the fearmongers were not happy, especially when Greta is upping her fight, writes Miranda Devine.