Chris Bowen leaves door open to more net-zero expense

Chris Bowen has refused to rule out additional spending to meet Labor's new emissions target as poll shows only one-third of Australians believe current goals are achievable.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has left the door open to increasing government spending to hit Labor’s 62-70 per cent 2035 emissions reduction target and played down the prospect of a fresh renewables goal, as a new poll shows just one-third of Australians think the lower 2030 climate commitment will be reached.

Mr Bowen also distanced the government from all of the Climate Change Authority’s assumptions that made up its recommendation for a 62-70 per cent target, including that more than 90 per cent of electricity had to be generated by renewables and half of new car sales would be electric.

Mr Bowen signalled the government was unlikely to set a 2035 renewables target, with Labor coming under scrutiny for falling behind on its 82 per cent by 2030 renewables commitment.

He said two reports released last week – the Net Zero Plan and six sector plans – suggested how the government would progress to hit net zero, while pointing to future reviews of the safeguard mechanism, the vehicle emissions standards scheme and the electricity sector.

“Now, of course, over the next 10 years, we’ll keep looking at how we’re going and we’ll keep updating what is done,” Mr Bowen told the ABC. “I wouldn’t pretend to you that I know exactly every movement between now and the next 10 years and every bit of technology and cost and stuff.”

Mr Bowen is meeting with Turkish officials in New York this week as he seeks to strike a deal that would pave the way for Australia to host next year’s United Nations COP31 climate change conference in Adelaide.

The outcome of the latest meeting between Climate Change and Energy Minister and Turkish counterpart Murat Kurum slated for Monday (AEST) in New York would determine whether an agreement could be reached at a leader level between Anthony Albanese and Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Asked if he had locked-in a meeting with Mr Erdogan, who will meet with Donald Trump at the White House later this week, Mr Albanese acknowledged that if Turkey did not pull out of the bidding process for the COP31 summit, the climate change conference would be moved to Bonn by default.

“I’ve had a discussion previously already with President Erdogan and with his Foreign Minister. I will advocate in good faith for Australia and the Pacific’s position. I think the fact that it’s a joint bid and there’ll be a range of Pacific leaders here this week who will be advocating as well, with these things quite clearly. If we’re going to see our way through to a common position, it is highly likely that there will need to be compromise,” Mr Albanese said. Standing at the front of the UN Headquarters, Mr Albanese said it was all about “diplomacy”.

Grattan Institute energy and climate senior fellow Tony Wood said the government needed to provide more detail on how it would reach the 2035 target, saying there was a lack of specifics in the reports Mr Bowen was referencing. “There is not a lot of substance in there, and that is where the hard yards are going to be,” Mr Wood said.

“They have got a report from the CCA, they have accepted the target, but now they have got to do the hard work in identifying how we are going to achieve that target across all the sectors. So far, the sector plan is still too high level.”

After Mr Albanese on Friday said his government would not need to provide any more funding to reach the 2035 target than the $8.3bn announced last week, Mr Bowen on Sunday said there was no need for any further taxpayer support “at this point”.

“We just put $8bn out the door, a little bit more. That takes our total investment to $75bn. That’s a lot,” he told the ABC.

“That’s what we think we need to do at this point. We haven’t announced the health or educational, defence budgets for the next 20 years either.”

When asked whether the government would need to spend more than the extra $8.3bn committed last week to hit its climate goals, the Prime Minister on Friday was emphatic.

“No,” he said.

“What we did in the press conference yesterday was outline our funding that we will commit, have committed going forward.”

Mr Albanese used a recent report by the Business Council of Australia to declare a target in the government’s range would “see between $400bn and $500bn of private sector investment”.

On Sunday, Mr Bowen said Mr Albanese was right in arguing the vast majority of the cost of the transition would be funded by private industry.

“We certainly see the vast majority of investment coming from the private sector,” he said.

However, energy economist Bruce Mountain has declared government spending would need to increase and said money spent by businesses on the energy transition would be passed on to consumers through higher electricity bills.

The $75bn figure outlined by Mr Bowen and backed by Mr ­Albanese did not include funding for the commercial-in-confidence Capacity Investment Scheme, which is bankrolling the renew­ables rollout to underpin Labor’s 43 per cent 2030 target.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Ted O’Brien said the government was signing up to a target “without knowing how they’re going to be met, how much it’s going to cost, or who is going to pay”.

The debate over Labor’s target comes as Tony Abbott urged Sussan Ley to dump net zero without delay. Mr Abbott said Labor was vulnerable over its 2035 target if the Coalition took up the fight on the issue.

“It has to be dropped – and the sooner the better,” he told a CPAC conference at the weekend. “At one level, an argument about what might happen 25 years hence, or at least eight elections away, is an exercise in political theology.

“But keeping such a commitment, while opposing the government’s current reduction target, just means even more Herculean measures will be needed later.”

SEC Newgate’s Mood of the Nation report to be released this week found just 33 per cent of Australians were confident the government would hit the target to lower emissions by 43 per cent of 2005 levels by 2030, leaving Labor with an uphill battle to convince voters its 62-70 per cent 2035 target is “achievable”.

The poll of more than 1200 people, taken before Mr Albanese last week unveiled the 2035 target, also found 30 per cent of people were confident Australia would reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

But with Coalition MPs pushing Ms Ley to exit Paris, the polling also shows a majority of Australians in every age group support the 2030 and 2050 targets, including 51 per cent of ­people in the regions.

Sixty per cent of people back the 2030 target and 58 per cent of people support net-zero by 2050.

Treasury did not reveal the expected budgetary cost of the Albanese government’s turbocharged climate policy but it last week released modelling claiming that Labor’s 2035 and net-zero by-2050 targets would lower wholesale electricity prices by 10 per cent and contribute to the economy being $2.2 trillion bigger by the middle of the century.

The Treasury modelling – which assumes the US stays in the Paris Agreement despite US President Donald Trump leaving it – argued that an ambitious 2035 target would cause a $1.2 trillion hit to the economy by 2050.