When ALP national secretary Paul Erickson told the National Press Club last week it was Labor’s embrace of renewable energy that had won the election, he might have believed it, even though Labor had hidden Energy Minister Chris Bowen throughout the campaign. But it certainly wasn’t the Liberal Party Erickson was trying to help, and the Liberals would be fools to take advice from their enemies.
Party secretaries doing election post-mortems in public are trying to justify what their party did; they’re certainly not intending to offer useful tips to the other side. If they’re thinking at all about the other side, they’re trying to lay traps for it. That’s why all the Liberals rushing to agree that the election result proves the folly of not adopting Labor’s energy policy are modern versions of Lenin’s “useful idiots”: the capitalists who would sell the communists the rope by which they are hanged.
Since the election rout, there has been a veritable cavalcade of left-wing Liberals trying to insist the party lost because it was too right-wing. One, former MP Jason Falinski, who lost his seat to a teal in 2022, even claimed the Liberals have been losing because the National Party has forced them to be “hard right”, even though it’s the Liberals whose primary vote has collapsed while the Nationals have largely maintained their support.
Notwithstanding these left-wing Liberals’ claims, can anyone point to a specific policy that qualifies as “hard right”?
The strongest policy position the Liberals adopted under Peter Dutton was to oppose the Prime Minister’s voice, which would have entrenched race in the Constitution. It turned out to be so “right-wing” that Dutton’s view was ultimately supported by 61 per cent of all voters.
Likewise, supporting nuclear power can hardly be “right-wing” given that it’s shared by the British Labour Party, the US Democratic Party and even by the ALP itself, provided the nuclear power is at sea rather than on land.
In the end, the main evidence for the Liberals being “right-wing” at all, in the sense of being different from Labor, was their support for renewables plus nuclear as opposed to just renewables to provide Australia’s electricity in the absence of the fossil fuels that once gave us the cheapest and most abundant power in the world. Again, this can hardly be especially “right-wing” given that a bit of nuclear plus renewables is the long-term goal of most of the social democratic governments in Europe.
Dutton’s weakness was not that he was “too right-wing” – or that he was too left-wing for that matter. His problem was that, nuclear aside, the Coalition was a policy-free zone and instead tried to win with mere announceables and handouts.
On nuclear specifically, the problem was not its supposed unpopularity but that it could not come into play soon enough to make a difference to power prices now. And it was falsely demonised by Labor as costing $600bn, and that Medicare would be destroyed to pay for it. The Liberal campaign barely raised a whimper to quell this attack.
The Liberals currently bidding to make their party less right-wing really want to make their party more left-wing. Their objective is not, fundamentally, to make the Liberals more electable but to pressure the party to adopt Labor’s renewable energy policy – which just so happens to be in the financial interests of some of the party’s key factional operatives.
There’s actually a long history to this, and what’s playing out now is just the latest chapter.
Malcolm Turnbull, who, post-politics, has become a significant investor in renewable energy, tried to get the Liberals to embrace Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme in 2009.
In 2018, as prime minister, Turnbull tried to get the Coalition partyroom to embrace the emissions-focused National Energy Guarantee policy that was supported by all the Labor states; and when this led (again) to him being dumped, he blamed it on “political terrorists”.
As energy minister in the former Coalition state government, Matt Kean was responsible for NSW adopting a 75 per cent emissions reduction target by 2035, a more hardline position than federal Labor. Unsurprisingly, as soon as Kean had announced his decision to quit parliament, the Albanese government appointed him to head the Climate Change Authority. He’s also involved with a business promoting renewable energy that he justifies by claiming any conflicts of interest are all fully declared.
Imagine the uproar if an energy regulator had interests in coal-fired power, publicly supported the subsidised expansion of coal-fired power, and excused any conflict-of-interest challenge by asserting it was all fully declared.
Then there’s Michael Photios, the NSW Liberal “moderate” string-puller whose lobbying business, PremierState, lists as clients most of the country’s renewable energy providers, including the Smart Energy Council that authorised Labor’s claim that seven nuclear power plants would cost $600bn.
It’s a Photios protege, Senator Maria Kovacic, who declared immediately post-election that the Liberals must abandon support for nuclear energy, at the same time expensive ads started appearing, purporting to come from a hitherto unknown body, Liberals Against Nuclear, with thus far undisclosed funding sources.
Seriously.
The problem with rolling over and supporting Labor’s energy policy is that the Liberals would become complicit in its consequences: the much higher power prices that are inevitable given the colossal investment required to move from an electricity system that’s still 60 per cent coal-fired to one that’s only 10 per cent coal-dependent in just five years.
The Liberal Party would effectively have to join Labor in making excuses for each bill hike and blackout. By rolling over as the Liberal “modernists” want, the party would surrender what’s likely to be the chief popular grievance against Labor at the 2028 election.
In the end, though, it’s not just the engineering reality that a renewables-only power system can’t deliver affordable and reliable electricity.
Those calling on the Liberals to “me too” Labor’s energy policy are neglecting the first duty of an opposition in a two-party system: namely, to contest the policies of the government; support what is good and oppose what isn’t.
Even if renewables are electorally popular (and they wouldn’t be if voters hadn’t been fed a diet of climate alarmism), political leadership means offering voters what is in the national interest and convincing them of its merits.
Many of those urging the Liberals to adopt Labor’s energy policy care more about their own vested interests than about giving Australia the energy security it must have to prosper in the decades ahead.
Those Liberals who think Labor’s energy policy makes more sense than their own, to the extent this is their policy judgment as opposed to just a downcast response to perceived electoral reality, need to reconsider their political allegiances.
When most of the world is rethinking net zero and embracing nuclear energy as part of their energy security mix, and when Australia refuses even to have an adult debate about any of this, despite record exports of coal, gas and uranium for others to use to build their prosperity, you have to wonder if we’ve gone from being the Lucky Country to the stupid one.
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