Angus Taylor cements government’s position on climate change
The government’s position on climate change is built on respect, says Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor.
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Angus Taylor has worn many hats in a corporate and political career spanning more than three decades but chief “cat herder” is the most unlikely of all.
The Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister believes in the power of the “global innovation system”, which developed Covid-19 vaccines faster than anyone thought possible. He now wants to harness the same research and industrial might to speed up the delivery of low-emissions technologies.
“It has grown at a phenomenal pace now for a long time. And its greatest weakness is that it’s fragmented and sprays off in many different directions. But when it’s aligned and goal-focused, it is unstoppable,” Taylor says.
“This is an incredible machine. But it’s flat, across so many different organisations, the universities, think tanks, private-sector research, and departments. It’s a network, not a hierarchy.
“It is herding cats, but cats can be herded if there’s a clear goal. This is the key. If there’s clear goals, you’ll see this innovation system ... just throwing the book at it [outdated emissions technologies].”
When the government announced its goal to drive clean hydrogen production costs under $2 per kilogram, Taylor noted an immediate shift in focus across CSIRO, universities, the private sector and business leaders, led by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, to achieve it.
“There will be lots of different approaches. Some will be right, some will be wrong. But it doesn’t matter. What you’ve got is a contest, and the contest gives the outcome,” he says.
“That’s really the essence of what we’re doing. I’d like to see this adopted more formally at a global level. The US and UK have adopted similar targets and, if we win government, we’ll work towards highlighting this approach at the next COP [UN Climate Change Conference] in Egypt. I’ve spoken with the Egyptian COP president about exactly this.”
Taylor, an Oxford graduate and Rhodes Scholar, rose through the ranks at McKinsey & Co to become partner in the 1990s before joining Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims as a director at Port Jackson Partners, the consulting firm founded by McKinsey veterans Terrey Arcus and Fred Hilmer.
He was born in the New South Wales country town of Nimmitabel, and raised on his family’s historic sheep and cattle property Bobingah before attending the The King’s School in Parramatta (Liberal Party figures Mike Baird and Michael Photios are also alumni). His farming roots were a constant thread throughout his private-sector career, with Taylor founding Farm Partnerships Australia and Eastern Australia Irrigation before entering parliament in 2013.
I learnt very quickly, you can’t change things without bringing people with you. and if you don’t bring people with you ... you can forget about it.
As the representative for the electorate of Hume, which encompasses the farming regions of Goulburn Mulwaree, Upper Lachlan and Boorowa, Taylor is alive to concerns of Nationals and regional Liberal MPs about adopting a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.
After years spent fighting Labor’s carbon tax and emissions trading scheme, regional and conservative MPs reported an avalanche of furious emails and phone calls about the Coalition’s shift on climate change.
Painstaking negotiations with Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals eventually led to a last-minute deal on the net-zero target, days before Taylor and Scott Morrison flew to Glasgow for the COP26 summit in late October.
Taylor says the plan, which resisted calls to increase Australia’s Paris commitment to reduce emissions by 26–28 per cent on 2005 levels, strikes the right balance in protecting regional communities and industries.
It also provides the Coalition with a political shield to sandbag metropolitan seats and repel swings to Labor and a coordinated group of independents backed by the cashed-up Climate 200 movement, set up to target inner-city Liberal MPs.
As markets, trading partners and business accelerated investment and focus on climate action, Taylor and Morrison orchestrated a shift inside government to implement a practical plan they could sell to voters.
“You need to look for a solution that allows for hope and a future, and if you don’t do that, it’s not going to succeed. I think that’s the key with any change. And the change has to be framed in a way which is sensible, which is well paced and which respects the role of people at the coalface. We’re not forcing people to do things that are not right for them,” Taylor says.
The government had pinned its hopes on Anthony Albanese overreaching on climate change after Morrison eviscerated Bill Shorten’s ambitious emissions reduction plans at the 2019 election. Shorten’s 45 per cent target by 2030 and electric-vehicle strategy forcing more Australians into low-emissions cars helped the Coalition win a swathe of regional and suburban seats across the country.
Albanese waited until after the COP26 summit and final parliamentary sitting weeks of 2021 to unveil his 2030 plan to reduce emissions by 43 per cent. He learned from Shorten’s mistakes and was armed with “independent modelling” to back up his climate strategy and promised heavy industry and regional Australians that Labor would not abandon them.
After a one-in-100 year pandemic, neither Morrison or Albanese believe climate change will decide the election. But they need plans that are believable and can resonate in both regional and city electorates.
Taylor’s strategy is driven by personal experience. He recalls spending 18 months “on the coalface with steel workers” early in his private-sector career, tasked with improving performance at the Port Kembla steel mill.
“I learnt very quickly, you can’t change things without bringing people with you and if you don’t bring people with you … you can forget about it,” Taylor says.
“I learnt that in the dairy industry. I went around every major dairy shed and processing area in New Zealand for months helping drive reforms which set up that industry for real global domination back in the late ’90s. You’ve got to bring people with you and you only bring people if you genuinely show respect for them.”
When Taylor quit his corporate career ahead of the 2013 federal election, he was earmarked by Tony Abbott and Liberal Party heavyweights for big things. After joining a conservative revolt against Malcolm Turnbull in 2018, he was elevated into cabinet by Morrison.
While Taylor’s nose for policy serves him well, his tenure in cabinet hasn’t always been smooth sailing. With his private school, blue-blood background, he was targeted by Labor and the Twitter “water drops” over his office’s botched hit job on Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and “doctored” travel expenses document and so-called “watergate” scandal involving claims surrounding his former association with Eastern Australia Agriculture.
Morrison’s decision to install Taylor in the Energy portfolio, a poisoned chalice for predecessors caught up in the climate wars, was pragmatic and political. Across the Coalition and Labor, the role had been filled by city MPs and moderates who tried and failed to advance energy and climate-change reform.
In addition to driving down power prices and securing the grid, Morrison wanted to plug policy gaps and formulate a long-term emissions reduction plan he could sell to colleagues and voters. As a leading conservative and regional MP, Taylor was Morrison’s best bet to carry support from those who spent years fighting Labor on climate change.
Taylor’s work at McKinsey & Co, the firm hired to model the government’s long-term emissions reduction plan, and Port Jackson Partners, where he acted as strategy and business adviser on the resources, agriculture, energy and infrastructure sectors, was also viewed as a positive in tackling one of the most technically difficult cabinet portfolios.
After more than three decades following the energy and climate-change debate, Taylor says he’s now “convinced it’s heading in the right direction”.
“I came to realise that carbon taxing was the wrong answer over time because it’s the classic economics 101 solution but it’s naive in understanding the impacts you’re going to have on people’s lives and how energy permeates everything. So if you whack a tax on it, you’re driving such a cathartic change that people, for good reasons, are not going to accept.”
“Carbon tax doesn’t work unless it’s global. Otherwise you just get carbon leakage. And we’ve seen this time and time again. ... There are some in this country who would like to see industry gone because that’s not part of their political tribe and I get that. But you’re not solving the emissions reduction problem.”
Taylor, 55, points to the shifting of carbon emissions from Europe to China as an example of carbon leakage: “China is now a third of global emissions and that’s happened very quickly. Between China and India they’re responsible for the vast majority of growth in emissions.”
“Carbon taxes will lead to carbon leakage unless you have massive tariff systems and then you’re into a global trade war and I know the OECD don’t want that. That’s the challenge and why technology will move faster than taxes and it should because it’s a much better answer.”
Taylor says India and China, leading consumers of Australian coal and iron ore, will play “huge” roles in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
“Part of what will get us to the next stage is 500 gigawatts of solar being built in India. That’s their commitment for the next few years. In the entire human history, we’ve only built 1000 gigawatts of solar.”
“That gives us an opportunity to drive a huge amount of research and development. Drive the cost down to the next stage. Get people like Martin Green at the University of NSW right at the forefront again in driving the efficiencies of solar cells, the installation costs.”
On nuclear energy, Taylor says “we want every horse in the race” and agrees with former chief scientist Alan Finkel that “this is too hard a problem to cut technologies out unnecessarily or pre-emptively”.
Offshore wind farms loom as our most immediate low-emissions energy source after parliament recently signed off on the technology.
“It hasn’t been as necessary here until now because onshore opportunities have been available but they’re getting harder. And they’re getting harder because the turbines are getting much bigger, which means they’re more intrusive. You’re also getting higher utilisation offshore so the economics improve as you go offshore subject to your cost of construction.”
The roots of Morrison’s “technology, not taxes” mantra took hold in the weeks following the Madrid COP25 summit in December 2019, Taylor reveals.
As bushfires raged across the country during the 2019-20 summer, he put technology at the heart of the government’s climate-change strategy in an opinion piece published by The Australian on December 31.
Taylor wrote of the “enormous potential in established and emerging technologies” including hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, biofuels, lithium production and waste-to-energy, which would form the basis of the Coalition’s Low Emissions Technology Roadmap and net-zero plan. “The best way to deliver on and strengthen these [Paris] commitments is through new productive technologies and practices that deliver emission abatement while maintaining or strengthening economic growth,” Taylor wrote.
“In most countries it isn’t acceptable to pursue emission reduction policies that add substantially to the cost of living, destroy jobs, reduce incomes and impede growth. The same is true in Australia. That’s why we won’t adopt Labor’s uncosted, reckless, economy-destroying targets that will always result in a tax on energy, whether it is called that or not.”
In a National Press Club speech weeks later, Morrison declared the Coalition’s climate-change agenda would be “driven by technology, not taxation”. The slogan stuck. The “noise” around climate change, which reached a crescendo during summer’s bushfires, had put the Coalition on an unlikely path towards net-zero.
Taylor says he was surprised to receive messages from all sides of politics come Christmas last year.
“There’s a real sense now that people want to get on with it. They want sensible investment to happen and they want less partisanship and a less tribal approach ...”
“We’ve put in place a policy which Liberals and Nationals can support because it’s in keeping with our beliefs and principles. It’s working closely with the private sector to get the job done.
“It’s not about raising costs and taxes. That’s a pathway through which people who otherwise mightn’t have been sympathetic can be sympathetic. Saying that technologies that are coming down in cost and working should be part of the answer – it’s hard to argue with that, it’s sensible.”
OUT THIS FRIDAY: The List - Green Power Players 2022. Don‘t miss your copy of the 112-page inaugural edition.