Labor’s pre-election green washing is all about deception

Donald Trump’s second coming will have many impacts on Australia, all of them problematic for the Albanese government, but none more so than on energy policy.

With Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and his one-time Liberal sidekick Matt Kean in Azerbaijan for the climate COP right now (alongside the Taliban, it’s worth noting) and lobbying for us to host the 2026 version, Labor is doubling down on its climate crusade just as the world’s three biggest emitters – China, India, and now the US too – are adamant they won’t accept any limits on emissions that impact on their economic strength or national security.

For all China’s and India’s enthusiasm for other countries to limit their emissions, they’ve never been serious about restricting their own; and now, with Trump back and vindicated, the US has joined them. The appointment of climate sceptic Lee Zeldin to head Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency reinforces the US president-elect’s recent statement that climate change “is all a big hoax” and his expected move again to repudiate the Paris climate targets. Even the EU is rowing back its earlier climate zealotry by officially declaring that nuclear power (which produces 26 per cent of Europe’s electricity) is a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.

Yet by pushing on with its bid to host this expensive and futile COP climate gabfest, as Labor royalty Jennie George said in these pages this week, “the Albanese government will have failed to read the room in pursuing a vanity project in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis”. Ouch.

In her latest dissent, the respected former ACTU president and former Labor MP lands hammer blow after hammer blow on her party’s current energy policy.

George says the “pervasive” effect of Labor’s plan to boost renewable energy has been “continued price hikes”.

She says: “Who could have imagined growing queues of people in energy poverty in a country blessed with resources that are the envy of the world?” – resources the current government would prefer were no longer ever used.

George says the “only relief from escalating energy bills has been in taxpayer-funded assistance”, which means taking money out of one pocket, only to put it in the other, as compensation for what was always clearly a government mistake in the first place.

She says planning for an “orderly transition” was a “casualty” of “the rush to meet the 2030 targets”, yet despite the government-mandated disruption and the policy-ordained impact on cost of living, our emissions are now actually edging up while the government’s renewables push is well behind target.

While dutifully taking a swipe at the Coalition’s failure, so far, to provide a costed energy policy of its own, George zeroes in on her own side’s failure to be upfront about its promised 2035 targets, its failure to be upfront about its draft 2025 power price increases and its epic sustained failure to provide whole-of-system costings for its own energy policy.

Effectively, George is calling out the failure of the Albanese government, despite all the resources at its disposal, to do precisely what it’s demanding of the resource-starved opposition.

And she warns voters about the need to “be alert to the possibility of missing crucial information about the energy transition during the caretaker period”, which she clearly expects to start in February, before a March federal election, to give the Albanese government cover to hide from the public even higher future energy costs.

It’s noteworthy that in response to West Australian Labor Premier Roger Cook’s bid to put off his state’s scheduled March election – lest it clash with the federal poll – the Prime Minister on Tuesday at a press conference in Tasmania insisted that the election “will be called in April or before”. Note that “before”, which is the clearest indication yet that voters might be sent to the polls without the information they need about their future energy costs under a re-elected Albanese government.

Plus going to the polls in March avoids a pre-election budget that exposes a looming decade of deficits and denies the Coalition the updated budget figures that are essential to finalise its policy costings. Instead, all it will have will be the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook numbers that arrive 10 days after the writs are issued.

Labor’s energy deception is staggering and its attempts to avoid accountability before the next election are shameless, but unless these issues about pending new targets and prices are exposed the government will get away with it as it pushes its energy transition nirvana.

According to the Liberal turncoat Kean, hand-picked as Labor’s new Climate Change Authority head, Trump’s re-election actually makes Australia’s emissions reduction task “more urgent”. As if somehow our continuing to commit economic harakiri will somehow shame the ever-increasing group of climate laggards into changing their minds.

But just as Labor has underestimated the ramifications for us and for the wider world of the Trump comeback, there’s also some over-estimation of what it means on the political right. There has not been an overnight shift of the majority of voters from soft-left to hard-right. The iron law of politics that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them has not been repealed.

Trump’s win was less an endorsement of all his positions than a rejection of the price hikes and border chaos under the Biden-Harris administration. Trump’s killer question was “Are you better off than four years ago?” – a question Peter Dutton has already been asking here, to much the same response. And it is on this question that Labor will fall.

Matt Kean

The Prime Minister’s key promise at the 2022 election was to cut household power bills by $275 per household a year, only to have bills rise by an average of about $1000, which means energy policy will be the key to winning the cost-of-living battle that will decide the election.

Committing to net zero by 2050 undermined Scott Morrison’s 2022 campaign against Labor because it removed much of the policy contest in energy.

The Opposition Leader has already restored the contest by pledging to use the emissions-free nuclear power Labor furiously rejects to get to net zero and keep the lights on. Let’s hope Dutton doesn’t fall for the trap of keeping legislated interim targets, that he will pledge to develop the new gas fields that even the Australian Energy Market Operator says are needed, and will repeat the new Queensland Premier’s pledge not to close coal-fired power stations until there’s a reliable alternative.

If Labor does succeed in securing the 2026 climate COP for Australia, Dutton will have a further point of difference between an energy realist Coalition and an emissions obsessive green-left Labor Party. Unlike Labor’s cancelling the Commonwealth Games, which cost Victorian taxpayers $600m, cancelling the COP would save taxpayers’ money and be a clear statement that a Dutton government won’t let green ideology play havoc with families’ cost of living.

And after 20 years fighting to keep Afghanistan free from Taliban control, do we really want to roll out the red carpet for them here?