Turnbull could learn a trick or two from Trump’s tough talk

US President Donald Trump’s bluster seems to be serving him well, and Malcolm Turnbull could learn from this approach.

The entrepreneurial bluster used by US President Donald Trump to talk over the heads of the media and foreign policy establishments seems to be serving him well, despite left-wing media opprobrium. Polling shows his support at 48 per cent, much better than any Australian leader.

Trump has forced a tariffs backdown by China’s Xi Jinping and made North Korea’s Kim Jong-un put his nuc­lear program on the table ahead of talks. There also is a school of thought that Trump is forcing the hand of militant Palestinians by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and threatening to cut Palestinian aid.

Malcolm Turnbull, a successful businessman like Trump, could learn from Trump’s tough approach, however much the media hates watching the swamp drain.

Look at the debate over a push for the federal government to build a coal-fired power station to protect against power shortfalls after AGL’s foreshadowed shutdown in 2022 of the Liddell power station in the NSW Hunter Valley. Imagine the reaction from Trump to a suggestion Washington start building power stations.

This sort of interventionist thinking goes back to Kevin Rudd’s Labor win in 2007. It was Rudd in late 2006 who raised the idea of ending the “blame game” between the states and Canberra. This ended in wasteful federal spending on health and education bureaucracies when Canberra runs no public hospitals or schools.

And remember failed federal interference in broadband ser­vices, school halls, pink batts, local road building, welfare housing, services to Aborigines and eight years of inept interference in the electricity market. Remember too that until the privatisation of the electricity industry from the early 2000s, power was a state function.

While I’m not a fan of left-wing University of Queensland economist John Quiggin, he had a point on The Conversation website in March last year when he said the promises of privatisation — “cheaper and more reliable power, competitive markets and ra­tional investment decisions” — had never looked so impossible to achieve. More than ownership, it is policies to reduce carbon dioxide and the politicisation of coal and renewable energy sources, often as symbols of political difference bet­ween leadership rivals, that have corrupted electricity markets.

When Barnaby Joyce says you can’t change the temperature of the planet from a desk in Canberra, he has a point — and many supporters in the media, led by Sky News host and News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt and many in the popular tabloids.

But when Rudd in his first term as prime minister pronounced climate change “the great moral challenge of our time” and Turnbull as opposition leader declared in 2009 he would back Rudd’s proposed emissions trading scheme, both found lots of support at our ABC and in the “unpopular tabloids” at Fairfax Media.

Even if they privately differ on climate change, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg and Turnbull probably would agree today that Australia, which earns $80 billion a year as the biggest exporter of coal, simply cannot walk away, as Trump did, from international agreements such as the Paris Agreement, to which even former prime minister and coal-fired power station propon­ent Tony Abbott planned to sign up.

Not for the Coalition the duplicity of Labor leader Bill Shorten, a critic of the proposed Queensland Adani mine when campaigning against the Greens in a Victorian by-election but a supporter of the industry and the many coalmining members of the Australian Workers’ Union, which he used to run, when speaking in regional Queensland.

So what should the government do? Like Henry Ergas, I think Turnbull’s national energy guarantee is on the right track if the states come on board.

Politically, the government should resume the “blame game” and sheet home responsibility to the states for the electricity mess, which it did well after the 2016 South Australian blackout. Why was so little said about Queensland Premier Annastacia Palasz­czuk’s commitment to 50 per cent renewables at the state election last year when Queens­land has the world’s largest coal reserves?

The government also should wise up about public polling that appears to support renewables. This paper’s former environment writer, Matthew Warren, once a staunch critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, now represents the Australian Energy Council. He asked in an opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review last Thursday why any politician would imagine coal popular.

Yet polling shows while people support renewables in principle, they are not prepared to pay much to get them. A Newspoll in February last year found 45 per cent of voters did not believe renewables should cost any more, and 26 per cent said they were willing to pay $10 a month. Prices have almost doubled under the renewable energy target first introduced by John Howard.

The government needs to ram home to voters the reliability and cost downsides of renewables. And if, as left-wing academics argue, renewables are cheaper than coal, why subsidise them?

The government also should publicly out the lies of Germany and China, as Trump does, rather than accept false claims both are shutting down coal. The New York Times last July cited data showing China was building or planning to build 700 new coal-fired power plants, even though it made much of a decision to scrap 100 plants, largely in already polluted regions.

Eminent US magazine Foreign Policy last November attacked Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel for lifting CO2 emissions in 2016. Germany has said it is building coal-fired plants because it closed nuclear capacity after the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. In truth, the magazine said, Germany was supporting coalmining jobs, expanding mining of high-polluting brown coal, winding back subsidies for wind and rooftop solar, and almost certainly failing to meet its 2020 and 2030 carbon dioxide reduction targets.

It pointed to Merkel’s hypocrisy in slamming Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement while winding back her own green commitments. Yep, Merkel did politics. When Trump talks about draining the swamp he easily could be talking about the bankers across the world who have made a fortune from renewables subsidies while the poor struggle to afford heating in winter.

Supporters of a federal coal plant are wrong: it would take years, cost between $2bn and $4bn, and join the growing list of Canberra white elephants led by the National Broadband Network.

But Abbott was right when he told Sydney radio 2GB’s Ray Hadley last Monday that the government had power enough to force AGL’s hand on Liddell. And his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, was correct on Wednesday night on Sky News when she likened AGL’s fly-in, fly-out chief executive Andy Vesey to American former Telstra chief Sol Trujillo.

Trujillo left Australia with a publicly owned broadband network his company really should have built for a fraction of the price. He fulfilled Rudd’s private threats that the NBN could depend on the “dead hand of socialism” if Telstra did not play ball.