Bill Shorten’s boost for the Balranald B&B

Every Christmas my family and I drive from Sydney to Adelaide for our summer holiday. We enjoy the long drive as a chance to decompress from a busy, city life. We often break it up with a night in Mildura on the way there or Wagga Wagga on the way back.

Imagine the prospect of the same trip in an electric car. With the airconditioner on full bore in the December heat perhaps we’ll be able to cover 250 or 300 kilometres at a time. With a succession of three-hour stops for recharging and extra stopovers in Narrandera and Balranald we might make it across in four days.

Bill Shorten’s big push for electric cars might drain the pockets of taxpayers and motorists but it will line the pockets of electric car retailers and motel owners in Balranald and other plug-in points around the nation. Either that or it will boost airline profits as we abandon the roads.

This nonsense about an “electric car revolution” puts the lie to Labor’s massively ambitious and reckless climate policies and demonstrates why I have always argued this election is up for grabs. For all the Coalition’s leadership shenanigans and confusion over climate and energy policy, it simply will never bring itself to introduce grandly delusional emissions reductions schemes on the scale of Labor.

And for good reason. These policies clearly will provide significant additional upward pressure on electricity prices, transport costs, business inputs, agricultural produce and the full range for consumer goods.

The former head of the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics, Brian Fisher, has modelled the cost of Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction goal as a $472 billion hit to the economy over a decade. He says it will push power prices up by 50 per cent.

Labor’s changes to motor vehicle emissions standards alone will add at least $1000 to the price of petrol cars. Figures from Norway suggest the annual taxpayer subsidy required for electric cars could top $3000.

A study has suggested more than $3 billion will be needed to install charging points for Australian cars just to get started. All this at a time when our push for renewable energy has already created an electricity supply and reliability crisis.

Small and medium businesses are already struggling with power bills, hindering their investment and expansion plans. Big business also is hit and now faces the additional burden of a cap and trade emissions reduction regime. Farmers face additional costs and more regulation over how they can manage their own land.

Costs across all sectors will flow through to consumers and, in relative terms, lower our standard of living as we diminish our own economic performance compared to the rest of the world. Additional taxpayers’ funds will go on solar, battery and renewable energy subsidies. There will be winners, losers and grifters.

This was always going to be the case. Indeed, it is already the case under existing climate and energy policies. Labor’s prescription is essentially for more of the same — using some of the same policy mechanisms — but with the whole thing on steroids to more than double the renewable energy share and almost double emissions reductions.

So this election, like 2007, 2010 and 2013, will be a climate and energy policy election. Only the first of those worked out well for Labor.

The scale and cost of what Labor is proposing is too vast and speculative for most of us to grapple with, so there will be much argument over competing models and forecasts. Much of it will sound unreal.

Attempts to link these policies to our ‘angry summer’ should be exposed as nonsense because global carbon emissions continue to rise sharply and no matter what policy action is taken to shape or reduce Australia’s 1.3 per cent share of world emissions there will be no climate or environmental improvement.

In such an emotive and volatile policy debate many crucial facts will be lost or fudged in favour of fanciful forecasts such as a promise to ensure half of all cars sold in a decade will be electric. Sure, we all know electric cars will be useful for many, especially in the inner city — but really.

This is why the pure silliness of how Bill’s plan will boost business for the Balranald bed and breakfast is important. Labor’s plan sounds so ludicrous and out of touch with reality that it is laughable. And that might cut through more readily and expose the implausibility of Labor’s plan more widely than just another big economic scare.