Andrews won’t abandon Victoria’s RET target

Daniel Andrews has ruled out abandoning Victoria’s 40 per cent renewable energy target.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: AAP

Daniel Andrews has ruled out abandoning Victoria’s 40 per cent renewable energy target in favour of a national approach, arguing the nation should be following his state.

“We won’t be abandoning action on climate change and securing our energy future in our state,” he told ABC radio.

“In better circumstances we’d have national leadership on these issues and then you wouldn’t have to have states doing their own thing. That’s a perfectly logical point to make.

“We have a strong system in place at the moment. I expect Mr Finkel today is going to recommend that that is essentially the principles of that become a national scheme. Let’s get on and build that.The ball really is in the Prime Minister’s court. Is he going to keep denying that these changes need to be made or are we going to adopt them?”

Ahead of the upcoming Finkel report ahead of today’s COAG meeting, Mr Andrews stressed politicians should stop arguing about energy policy.

“Hopefully from Professor Finkel’s report and today’s meeting, we can agree to have more detailed work done. This is a very complex area but a simple step that we can take. Stop arguing. The simple step is to stop arguing and start working together on these issues and I’m quite confident that we can do that today.”

“The key point on energy is - let’s do the work together, because I think that Australian businesses and Australian consumers are sick and tired of us simply arguing endlessly about the issues. Let’s get on and put them first.”

Ahead of the COAG meeting, Mr Turnbull said it was important that the government commits to ensuring they deliver investment certainty which will enable Australians to have affordable, reliable, secure energy.

“Again it is important that we commit to ensuring that we deliver the certainty, the investment certainty, that will enable Australians to have affordable, reliable electricity and, of course, meet our emissions reduction targets, so we look forward to Dr Finkel’s report,” Mr Turnbull said.

“The important objective we have is to take the ideology and politics out of this issue.

“As I have said for a long time now, my approach to energy policy, my government’s approach to energy policy is grounded in economics and engineering, not in ideology, not in politics, not in partisanship.”