Shorten admits he hasn’t read the ACCC energy report

Bill Shorten has admitted he has not yet read the ACCC’s energy report as he attacked the PM for placating the “cave-dwelling right of the Liberal party”.

Mark Butler. Picture: AAP.

Bill Shorten has admitted he has not yet read the ACCC’s energy industry report while accusing Malcolm Turnbull of trying to use the report’s recommendations to placate the “knuckle-draggers of the cave-dwelling right of the Liberal Party” with coal-fired power stations and calling for greater investment in renewable energy.

The consumer watchdog’s scathing review of the national energy market, released yesterday, recommended that the government financially guarantee baseload power generation for industrial and commercial uses.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reiterated today that he would not exclude any particular fuel source, including coal, from providing that baseload power, but Labor energy spokesman Mark Butler says he does not believe the report justifies the building of more coal-fired power stations.

National Party MPs say the report has “vindicated” their calls for investment in baseload power.

Mr Shorten said Labor would study the ACCC report in detail, but he had not yet had a chance to do so.

“In terms of their proposals to give taxpayer money to new coal-fired power generators, I think the government should be investing in instead in encouraging renewable energy,” he said during a visit to the Queensland seat of Longman, north of Brisbane.

“A lot of people here on Bribie Island have turned to solar panels on their roofs, and more and more are installing batteries.

“The problem with coal, new coal, is that it is more expensive energy. At the same time we have renewable power which is getting cheaper every day.

“It’s as simple as this: Malcolm Turnbull promised to decrease power prices. Families are paying higher power prices. Families are paying for Malcolm Turnbull’s failures.

“The big problem in Australia is that families and businesses are paying bigger power prices to big power companies.

“Mr Turnbull’s answer is to give more taxpayer money to big power companies. Doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

Mr Shorten said it would take a long time to build a coal-fired power station. “Mr Turnbull’s offering solutions which are expensive and will take many years,” he said. “I was a union organiser on Loy Yang B. You don’t just go down to Kmart and just get a coal-fired power station off the shelf. It takes years.

“So what we’ve got is we’ve got a debate which is about placating the knuckle-draggers of the cave-dwelling right of the Liberal Party, promising mirage coal-fired power stations which cost billions of dollars, all because Mr Turnbull hasn’t got the intestinal fortitude to back in renewable energy as part of the energy mix.

“And by the way, if we want to talk about how long we have to live with higher prices, the Liberals have been in power for five years. Tony Abbott said that he would reduce power prices by over $500. He’s gone but the bills have gone up.

“Mr Turnbull’s done more press conferences announcing mission accomplished on lower power prices than most people have had hot dinners, and every day, people don’t need an ACCC report to tell them about power prices. You know how they find out? Every time they get a bill.

“I do think you’re going to some of the bigger questions. Has privatisation worked? When will Mr Turnbull admit that privatisation of some of the power assets in this country hasn’t been quite the Nirvana for lower power prices that we were promised.

“The ACCC report’s come out. It’s a valuable addition. It’s got to be studied very carefully.”

Asked whether he had read the report, Mr Shorten said: “No, I haven’t read the report.

“Somehow I think the questions you’re getting at are saying, ‘should we just grasp at this straw as we face higher power prices?’” he said.

“The problem is that Abbott and Barnaby Joyce and the right wing of the Liberal Party are throwing bricks to the drowning man of Turnbull on energy prices trying to rescue him.

“Why can’t we just actually deal with the facts? The facts are, Labor doesn’t support nuclear power in Queensland or on Bribie Island.

“The fact is we’re not convinced that a promise of building coal-fired power stations, which will take years to come online, is going to actually be a cheaper solution, and another fact I think we should work with is that renewable energy is becoming cheaper every day, and for me, I don’t need an ACCC report to tell me, I just look at the rooftops of over a million Australians who have put solar panels on their roofs, including the Prime Minister, and obviously that’s a good way to go.”

Mr Shorten said he had read some of the 58 recommendations in the report.

‘Has there ever been a more stupid energy policy?’

Resources Minister Matt Canavan hit out at Mr Butler and Labor for their preference for renewable energy over coal.

“What is @Mark_Butler_MP afraid of?” the Nationals senator tweeted.

“If renewables are cheaper than coal they will win the race. The ACCC is right that all power sources should be on the table. Labor has just again deserted workers for the Greens.

“According to @Mark_Butler_MP and the Labor Party it’s OK for the rest of the world to use our COAL but we can’t even consider using it ourselves.

“Has there ever been more a STUPID energy policy?”

‘Prices are already coming down’

Mr Turnbull, who is also campaigning in Queensland, said his policies had already resulted in a fall in energy prices and that trend would continue.

“The ACCC estimates that across the national electricity market (a reduction of) about 24 or 25 per cent by 2020-21 if all the measures are introduced,” Mr Turnbull said.

“I think they’ve made some very good recommendations there, and we’ll be working through them with the states, because you know energy policy is very much a partnership between the federal government and the states.

“I’ve already shown how determined I am with the retailers.

“I’ve hauled them in twice and I’ve required them to contact all their customers and tell them whether they have got better deals, whether they’re on the right deal or not.

“There are thousands of families around Australia, including here in Southeast Queensland who are now saving hundreds of dollars a year, $300, $400, sometimes $500 a year, simply by getting on the right plan.

“One of the very good recommendations that he ACCC made was that there should be one default plan that is standard, and that when retailers offer discounts it’s referenced to that one default plan, because at the moment as I think we all know the electricity offerings can be very confusing, and that does not help the customer, so we need clearer competition, it’ll be much more of a level playing field and there are a lot of good recommendations that the ACCC have made to ensure that.”

Mr Butler has attacked the government for claiming that the ACCC’s recommendation that it underwrite ‘power capable of providing a firm product’ was effectively calling for the underwriting of baseload power.

Mr Turnbull said he did not believe it was an unfair interpretation.

“What they’re talking about is firmed or dispatchable power, so that means that is power that is available when you want it, so yes you could describe it as baseload power,” he said.

“Baseload is really a description of demand. You have baseload customers like an aluminium smelter or a big corporate customer, so dispatchable power is what you want.

“It’s the power that can be delivered as and when you need it.

“It’s a vital part of the national energy guarantee, the NEG, and what that will require when it’s adopted is for retailers to have a necessary percentage of their energy mix in dispatchable power.”

Asked whether the recommendation for baseload power would justify government investment in coal, Mr Turnbull said the government was not in the business of subsidising one technology over another.

“Frankly there’s been too much of that has been done, but let’s not get into energy history here,” he said.

“Going forward the subsidies should come to an end, and they’re winding down, including the renewable energy target, and we should simply allow the technologies to compete, and what we want to have is the outcome of lower prices.

“There’s a lot of debate about the imports, this technology, that fuel, this fuel. They’re all inputs.

“What we’re focused on is the output: reliable and cheaper energy.

“That’s what it should be all about, and I can tell you, what Labor has got is a set of policies that have been proved to deliver unreliable and expensive energy, and you only have to look at South Australia, an extreme case, where Labor policies resulted in the least reliable and the most expensive electricity in the country.”

ACCC report ‘hijacked by zealots’

Mr Butler said he did not believe the ACCC had given the government cover to build a new coal-fired power station, saying the consumer watchdog had not used the word “baseload”.

“I don’t think it has. It’s doesn’t use the language ‘baseload’,” Mr Butler told ABC radio.

“I know Tony Abbott does and Barnaby Joyce and others, but what it says is that there’s a bit of a market failure in the system in the sense that new generation finds it very hard to get into the market.

“What Rod Sims and the ACCC have wisely said is that there might be a case for the government essentially to underwrite confidence in some new entrants coming into the market.

“The real thrust of this report is that there’s too much market power held by just a few companies. What we need is more competition in the system to provide better outcomes to consumers.

“Now unfortunately what’s happened is that again, the coal ideologues of the Coalition party room have effectively hijacked what is quite an important, serious recommendation and pretended this is going to deliver new coal into the system.”

Asked whether the ACCC report was referring to baseload power, even if it did not use the word, Mr Butler said it was not.

“The words that the ACCC uses are ‘power capable of providing a firm product’ — very different to the idea of a simple baseload generator that operates 24/7, just a simple generator, which is essentially the 20th Century model of the coal-fired generation sector,” Mr Butler said.

“What the industry and what business generally is looking at here is the sort of suite of products we saw discussed with AGL’s replacement of the old Liddell coal-fired power station.

“It will almost certainly be renewable energy that is firmed up by a mix of batteries, perhaps pumped hydro and also gas-fired peaking generation.

“That will deliver the cheapest power, about 25 per cent cheaper, for example, than simply even extending the Liddell Power Station rather than building a brand new coal-fired power station, and it will deliver, to use the language of the ACCC, ‘power that is capable of providing a firm product’. That’s what consumers need.”

Mr Butler said MPs who believed they had been vindicated in fighting for coal to remain part of the energy mix were “dreaming”.

“I’d say they’re dreaming and they haven’t read the report properly and they haven’t talked to businesses who are really trying to come to grips with this challenge of getting power that provides a firm product, rather than trying to find the 20th century solution to this challenge, which is essentially what Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Tony Abbott and others are doing,” he said.

“They need to recognise the reality that what businesses are looking at is the sort of product I just talked about — renewable energy that is firmed up with this, in some cases very new technology like batteries, and in some cases quite old technology like pumped hydro.”

Green scheme price hike ‘due to old technology’

Mr Butler conceded the ACCC had found that green schemes such as rooftop solar subsidies had increased the cost of energy, however, he claimed technology since evolved to a point where renewables were affordable.

“I think what the ACCC was doing was to look back at a period where around the world there were I think about 174 nations that essentially had schemes that were described as subsidised as technology pull-through schemes,” he said.

“These were schemes that subsidised a technology that was very new and needed to get to a scale where it could stand on its own two feet, and I think everyone in the industry recognises that that is where renewable energy is up to now.

“I think it’s quite clear, there was an impact on prices here as there was frankly in all of those other countries that engaged in this, and what we’ve achieved is we now have a relatively mature technology that is able to be deployed at scale across the globe, and we see it being deployed at scale across the globe, delivering cheaper power than new coal-fired power or even existing coal-fired power generators that have their lives extended.”

Mr Butler said he did not accept that Australians faced a choice between lower prices and low emissions, and did not believe the industry did either.

“I think the industry recognises now that the cheapest form of power into the future, and in many cases right now, is going to be, as I said, that sort of mix of primary generation coming from renewables, firmed up by batteries, by gas peaking plants and by pumped hydro,” he said.

“When I go out and talk to people in the community I think they recognise that the future of electricity is renewable.

“It’s not only going to be a future that provides much less pollution, but it also will provide lower cost.”

Mr Butler said he would be “amazed” if the states and territories agreed to a national energy guarantee which included the underwriting of coal-fired energy generation.

“I’d be amazed if they did, because I think that would absolutely put the lie to what Malcolm Turnbull continually tries to say, which is that this model is supposed to be a technology-neutral one,” he said.

Mr Butler said Labor backed the “general thrust” of the ACCC report, which found power bills could be slashed by as much as 25 per cent if all 56 recommendations were implemented.

“I think the general thrust of the report is a really important one, and I think the work the ACCC has done over the last 15 months has been excellent, because what this report confirms is that the system is fundamentally not working in the interests of consumers,” he said.

“It’s a system that instead is working in the interests of big power companies that were handed control over the system by a series of disastrous privatisation decisions over the last couple of decades.

“So the thrust of the report is a really important one. I think there is good reason to believe that if implemented it will deliver significant savings to consumers because it will start to break up that market power, that market dominance of just a very small number of companies.

“Obviously we’re working through the precise recommendations as I think people would expect us to and as I think the government is doing, but I really do welcome this report and I think it’s a very strong piece of work by the ACCC.”