Coalition rows over energy a gift horse to opposition

Disunity within the Coalition over energy policy has become so embedded that Scott Morrison and his team have been rendered unable to fight Labor on a key issue — the affordability and reliability of power supply. Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce set a match to simmering tensions on Monday in an interview in The Australian by raising the prospect of terminating the Coalition. He hit back after the Prime Minister rejected Mr Joyce’s push to fund a new coal-fired power plant in central Queensland. Yesterday, former deputy prime minister Mark Vaile and deputy Nationals leader Bridget McKenzie slammed Mr Joyce. Mr Vaile said Australians were “screaming out for stability” and Mr Morrison invoked Liberal Party founder Sir Robert Menzies to highlight the value of “Coalition partnership”. Eleven days before the NSW election, Deputy Premier and Nationals leader in the state John Barilaro warned his federal colleagues, in understandable frustration, to “shut up”. Disunity, he said, “damages election hopes for us’’.

It should never have come to this, two months before a federal election when the government is on the ropes. Last week, this paper argued the need for a national energy plan that was “clear, pragmatic and integrated rather than extreme or ideological’’. It should have been settled at least 18 months ago. Given competing sensitivities over coal between Coalition voters in seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and those represented by six regional Queensland Nationals MPs who want Mr Morrison to underwrite a new power generation facility, most likely a cleaner coal plant, compromises were always going to be unavoidable. The collapse of Malcolm Turnbull’s convoluted and much-hyped national energy guarantee set the stage for the current problems. In the national interest, an effective policy should have been bedded down. Doing so would have allowed the Coalition to make the case against Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target.

On Monday, Simon Benson reported that coal-fired power generation would fall by 60 per cent within the next decade to meet Labor’s target, leading to the likely closure of more than half of Australia’s existing east coast plants. That was the conclusion of independ­ent modelling by one-time government scientist Brian Fisher, the former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. The report found the retirement of coal assets would also be inevit­able under the Coalition’s Paris target, but on a smaller scale than under Labor. Blackouts that placed South Australia and parts of Victoria on a par with Third World economies and the price and supply squeeze caused by the closure of Victoria’s Hazelwood plant underlined the weakness of Labor’s policies. The costs to households, businesses, jobs and investment nationally would be daunting. But as Labor blithely presents itself as the party of affordable renewable energy, divisions within the Coalition, which came to the fore under Mr Turnbull, create the impression it is too disunited to govern, let alone run a national energy policy.