After more than three years of sticking to Labor’s most famous promise of the 2022 election campaign – that electricity prices would fall by $275 by 2025 – Anthony Albanese has abandoned the numbers and basis for the promise because “circumstances” have changed.
Apart from making a political misjudgment by not dumping the now infamous $275 promise much sooner and waiting until day four of the 2025 election campaign, it’s reasonable to say things have changed and the promise can’t be kept.
But what’s not reasonable is to dump and walk away from half the proposition and not the rest.
The Prime Minister wants to throw out the bath water and save the baby. The flashy promise has failed and gone, but the far more important renewable energy policies remain in place.
The unfulfilled $275 power cut promise was based on RepuTex modelling adopted by Labor, and so, too, were foundation carbon emission reduction plans through to 2030.
Albanese, when asked, perhaps trying to deal with the failed promise early in the campaign and switch the energy attack to Peter Dutton’s gas and nuclear proposals at a time Labor has picked up in the polls, denied thrice that RepuTex’s modelling was Labor’s and that circumstances had changed.
“It’s RepuTex’s modelling based upon the circumstances at that time,” Albanese said as he continued to defend renewable energy as the cheapest form of energy.
But if the circumstances have changed so dramatically to justify the failed promise, why does the Albanese government stick to its core renewable energy plans using the same modelling?
Long accused of breaking the $275 promise and now being accused of putting up a “white flag” on cutting carbon emissions, Albanese has tried to hold on to the targets for renewable energy expansion and reducing carbon emissions under the same changed circumstances.
The original claim of changed circumstances, including the invasion of Ukraine, which was before the last election, was always dodgy, but it’s doubly dodgy to say those circumstances don’t apply to the other half of the equation of another $100 price cut between now at 2030 and Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target and 82 per cent renewable energy penetration also by 2030.
The $275 broken promise is an obvious symbol of failure, but Labor risks that figure being used to crystallise in the public mind the far greater need for changed policy to match the changed circumstances in the fundamental energy debate.
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