Credlin: Anti-coal politicians have no alternative to keep lights on

Why do we allow politicians to madly rush to eliminate coal-fired power before there’s a reliable alternative, asks Peta Credlin.

Too often in politics, the urgent drives out the important. It’s the political equivalent of the captain of the Titanic worrying about the drinks service while the ship is steaming into an iceberg.

At no recent election, state or federal, has either big party made security of the power supply an issue, yet without policy change it’s all-but-certain that the lights will start to go out in the absence of electricity rationing.

As South Australia discovered in late 2016, during a 24-hour blackout because storms had shut down its wind turbines and taken out the inter connector with Victoria; without electricity, traffic lights don’t work, people get stuck in lifts and no one can actually buy anything given how technology dependent (and cashless) we’ve become.

This week, the Liddell coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley will close down and NSW will lose 10 per cent of its power supply. Despite knowing this was coming, there’s no replacement baseload for Liddell.

What’s worse, in just two years’ time, in the absence of government intervention, NSW will lose a further 25 per cent of its power supply when Eraring on Lake Macquarie, the country’s biggest power station, also closes down.

NSW will lose 10 per cent of its power supply when the Liddell Power Station closes down this week. Picture: Roni Bintang/Getty Images

All in the name of averting the “climate emergency” that we’re supposed to be in the grip of despite the fact we’re only around one per cent of the globe’s emissions problem.

The Australian Energy Market Operator, a body hardly given to scaremongering, warns that for several years from 2025, these closures will jeopardise security of supply. AEMO maintains that “firmed renewables”, that’s wind and solar energy with batteries and gas-fired power as back-up, will eventually fill the gap. But the new Hunter Valley gas “peaker” that was supposed to be operational already, is still at least 12 months away. And the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, that was supposed to be operational last year, is some five times over budget and at least five years behind schedule.

The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project under construction. It was supposed to be operational last year, but is some five times over budget and at least five years behind schedule. Picture: Webuild

Imagine for a moment life without electricity: there would be no TV, no refrigeration, and no mobile phones once the batteries had run down. Yet a power supply dependent on wind and solar means that we can’t be sure of keeping the lights on when the breeze drops or the clouds come in because even the biggest batteries can’t keep the power going for more than an hour or two, and because green activism has made new gas fields almost impossible to develop.

I can’t fathom why we are allowing politicians to madly rush to eliminate coal-fired power before there’s a reliable alternative. On the Labor side, they’ve long put climate zealotry ahead of sensible policy that balances the environment with economics as they chase their voter base moving to the Greens.

But what’s the Liberal Party’s excuse? At last year’s federal election, the Coalition offered no real challenge to Labor’s plan to accelerate the end of fossil fuel and refused to even debate nuclear power. And at both last year’s Victorian election and the recent NSW election, the Coalition’s emissions reduction policy was to go even further and faster than federal Labor (and no surprises here, they lost).

But last week, not before time, there were finally a few notes of sanity. In a major speech in Adelaide, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton promised that the Coalition would shun a “cowardly small target strategy”, and “offer Australians a clear choice” with policies that are “necessarily different from those of the Labor Party”.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in Adelaide. Picture NewsWire/Dean Martin

Dutton said that Labor’s new carbon tax on Australia’s biggest emitters would, among other things, drive the cement industry offshore. There would be “no net benefit to the environment, no net reduction in emissions … only economic self-harm and … a de-industrialising effect … A loss to the Australian economy … a loss of Australian jobs and all we will do is import that cement back into Australia”.

He also pointed out that far from cutting power prices by $275 per household per year, as promised, Labor’s green fiddles were driving energy prices up and up. So rather than the government’s insistence on installing 22,000 new solar panels every day and erecting 40 large wind turbines every month for the next seven years, plus building 28,000 kilometres of new transmission line by 2030, to get renewables to over 80 per cent of the power supply – instead – the Coalition would consider “next generation, zero emission, small and micro-nuclear technologies” so that we could get to net zero and keep the lights on.

USS Ashville in Perth following the international AUKUS announcement. If we can have nuclear submarines based here, why not nuclear power plants?

That’s the craziest aspect of the Albanese government’s energy policy: the notion that we can readily have multiple nuclear reactors on board submarines at bases just south of Perth, and somewhere on the east coast, but that any nuclear power plant on land would be technologically impossible and an unacceptable safety risk.

All the while, countries like China open more and more new coal-fired generators as we weaken our energy security and standard of living. You can’t make this up.

VOTERS WANT SPINE IN FACE OF INTELLECTUAL COWARDICE

But while Peter Dutton seems determined to push back against political correctness, the Victorian Liberal Party keeps genuflecting to it. Last week the Moira Deeming saga took a new twist with Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto refusing to guarantee that Deeming would be re-admitted to the party room once her current suspension ends in nine months’ time.

It was always wrong to blame Deeming for the neo-Nazis who gatecrashed the women’s rights rally that she attended. What could possibly be objectionable in a Liberal MP asserting the right of women to have their own facilities, free from the presence of biological males claiming to be women?

Yet Pesutto was bluffed by Premier Daniel Andrews into treating a perfectly reasonable and measured defence of women’s rights as an exercise in hate speech. This is the kind of intellectual cowardice that makes people despair of the Liberal Party and turn to minor parties of the right, even though this just guarantees even worse Labor governments.

Moira Deeming. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Ascui

It’s hard not to feel Deeming has been scapegoated to save Pesutto’s leadership after his move to expel her collapsed the moment she told her colleagues that her own personal history as a child sex abuse survivor was what motivated her to protect the rights of women and girls. Add in the fact she was part-raised by a Holocaust survivor and Pesutto’s charge that she had neo-Nazi sympathies was dead. By the end of the meeting, the expulsion motion was withdrawn and, instead, the party room resolved that Pesutto and Deeming would issue a joint statement exonerating her of the charge of bringing the party into disrepute, and that she would be automatically re-admitted once her suspension period was up.

I know this to be true because I have confirmed this account with over 10 witnesses in the room, and a member of the party room had read me the official minutes.

Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Luis Ascui

When I interviewed Deeming last Tuesday, in her first and only television interview about her suspension, I was surprised to find no joint statement has ever been issued. And on radio last week, Pesutto refused to confirm Deeming’s right to return to the party room at the end of her suspension. To say Liberal Party supporters are angry is an understatement.

If the Liberal Party wants a policy that would impress both philosophical liberals, who believe in free speech, and instinctive conservatives, who object to the denial of biological facts, it would declare that all government documents and all public institutions would stop cancelling women.

There would be no more weak capitulation to the trans-lobby with official references to “persons who menstruate” and “chest-feeding”. There would continue to be “women’s” hospitals and “maternity” units. Without any discrimination against trans-people, we would keep women’s toilets and changerooms for the exclusive use of women and girls. And our education system would respect biological fact, not activist fantasy, as would our sporting competitions, prisons and more.

Naturally, any such declaration wouldn’t absolve the Liberals from the need for strong and effective policies to tackle cost of living, grow the economy and keep the nation safe. But it would show the world that the party still has a spine.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Credlin: Anti-coal politicians have no alternative to keep lights on