Shorten’s blunders deplete his charge

Bill Shorten desperately needs to regroup after a disastrous first week of the federal election campaign.

Bill Shorten takes questions in Darwin on Thursday. Picture: AAP

The Easter break won’t have come soon enough for Bill Shorten. He desperately needs to regroup after a disastrous first week of the federal election campaign.

The Opposition Leader misled the nation about $30 billion worth of additional superannuation taxes, refused to answer questions, made factual errors and launched into a paranoid media conspiracy.

Public broadcasters and other left-of-centre media are riding shotgun for Shorten but in an election campaign they cannot shield him from mainstream Australians. These voters see through the confected rhetoric on policies such as Labor’s electric vehicle plan.

Last year more than 1.1 million new cars were sold nationally and fewer than 3000 of them, or 0.25 per cent, were electric vehicles. Shorten’s policy is to penalise petrol-driven cars and/or support electric vehicles so they increase to be half of all new car sales by 2030 — so Labor wants a 19,900 per cent increase to 600,000 in a decade.

It is about as plausible and likely as the multifunction polis, creating an inland ocean or a bridge to Tasmania. No wonder Shorten is backtracking, now talking about this as an aspirational target rather than a true policy goal.

Last week he said electric vehicles could be fully recharged in “eight to 10 minutes”, which missed the mark by only about seven hours and 50 minutes, or 4800 per cent — unless, to be kind, he was talking about special fast-chargers, in which case he missed by about an hour, or 600 per cent.

On Monday Shorten said “from 2025, big companies like Toyota are only going to be making electric vehicles”. He was 1000 per cent wrong on that, too.

The Japanese giant quickly repudiated his claims, pointing out it does not even have plans to “introduce a plug-in battery electric vehicle” here. The company also says not only does Australia need better “charging infrastructure” before the “mass introduction and adoption of EVs” but that there need to be “solutions to power supply issues”. You don’t say.

A power grid rendered expensive and unreliable by climate policies now needs to be buttressed if it is going to support another arm of climate action.

Shorten’s campaign mistakes are deeply troubling. He proposes to mandate that half the government’s car fleet be made up of electric vehicles by 2025, tax breaks be given to businesses switching to electric cars and new emissions standards imposed on internal combustion engines to make them more expensive, helping to drive people to electric vehicles.

The cost impacts of all this on government, business and households have not been quantified and those who dare ask such boring questions are labelled Lud­dites. The ALP prefers to watch the ABC roll out a never-ending procession of enthusiasts and vested interests to say this revolution is happening and we should all get on board via public funding.

As always with this sort of cargo cult logic — think green car fund, NBN or cash for clunkers — the question should be: If the revolution is coming, why not let the market players roll it out rather than gamble with public money?

If Labor wins government and implements this plan, I predict a new period of peak electricity demand. It will be on the Friday mornings before long weekends, when our public servants charge up their government electric vehicles to take off early for a break.

In the unlikely event Labor’s plan comes to fruition, there will be another dilemma. The federal government would start to surrender billions of dollars in revenue from petrol excise forgone — which is one of the reasons we are starting to hear more about road access charges replacing excise. Whatever the problem, someone will propose a tax to fix it.

Shorten and his team also will spend at least $200 million on charging infrastructure and pass new laws imposing obligations on developers to supply charging stations in new buildings. Public money and government interventions providing distribution dev­ices for private power suppliers — what could possibly go wrong?

This is just one aspect of Labor’s climate policy that is designed to double down on Australia’s carbon emissions reductions, almost doubling them from the 26-28 per cent target issued under the Paris Agreement to a 45 per cent target designed, primarily, to demonstrate a greater commitment to tackling climate change. Neither target, of course, will actually improve the environment because under either scenario global carbon emissions will continue to increase each year by more than our nation’s total emissions.

The climate debate and the policies designed to manage it are all an exercise in economic pain for no environmental gain — studies in futility. But neither of the major parties will acknowledge this reality. They prefer to pretend they are making a difference.

Shorten even says he is going to save the Great Barrier Reef, stop droughts, end floods, reduce bushfires and cool our “angry” summers. This stuff insults voters.

An opposition that has spent six years untroubled by scrutiny, suddenly is being interrogated. And, surprise, surprise, its unlikely set of policies — a vast collection of tax-raising and government interventions — looks wobbly.

Regular readers will know I’ve been frustrated about the Coali­tion’s unwillingness or inability to prosecute the case against Labor’s reckless plans from long before the 2016 election. Most of these policies have been around for more than three years and we can only wonder what would have happened if the government had attacked Labor last time.

Labor seems to have been lulled into complacency and is unskilled at dealing with probing questions.

This is a trap the Coalition seldom falls into — under constant attack from the gallery, it sinks or swims. The challenge for Scott Morrison’s team is to maintain the attack and avoid mistakes.

If Shorten makes more mistakes the voting dynamic can change quickly. We had a dramatic reminder of that last month when then NSW opposition leader Michael Daley’s disastrous final week decided the election.

If you doubt my analysis that Labor could lose this election, then look at the desperation already being shown by the ALP and its fellow travellers. Shorten tried to blame his woes on a conspiracy, referring to “these News Corp climate change deniers and of course their ally the Prime Minister”.

Now that the alternative PM is being asked about his plans he sounds unhinged as he blames News Corp (the ultimate owner of The Weekend Australian). The ABC echoed Shorten’s complaint on its TV news while its political editor, Andrew Probyn, shared his opinion (editorial guidelines, anyone?) that the Opposition Leader’s gaffes had “energised” him. On that analysis, Shorten is only a few blunders short of romping it in.