From Domainfax:
Soaring electricity prices under Labor’s green energy agenda, a new attempt to legislate “job-creating” company tax cuts, and new savings to fund more affordable childcare are shaping as key government battlelines in the political contest this year as Malcolm Turnbull prepares to outline his strategy on Wednesday.
The Prime Minister, under growing pressure from voter disaffection and simmering discontent on his right flank, will unveil his objectives for 2017 at the National Press Club in Canberra, hoping to regain the political initiative, silence internal critics, and lay bare the dangers to growth and household budgets of the Labor alternative.
In a keenly anticipated nationally televised speech pitched as “optimistic but realistic” in tone, the embattled Prime Minister plans to pit his recipe for jobs growth, lower business costs, and cheaper energy prices, against Bill Shorten’s plan for increased business regulation and an unaffordable 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030.
“This isn’t an abstract issue. Higher electricity prices mean more pressure on household budgets and businesses. That’s why energy will be a defining debate in this Parliament. We’re determined to help families and businesses by making electricity affordable and reliable; Labor’s policies mean higher power prices and energy insecurity,” he will say, according to notes provided.
Quite right. So why is the PM doing nothing on the real cause of the price spikes? It’s not the RET, which has flooded electricity markets with excess supply. It’s the east coast gas gouge that is to blame.
By that I mean the gas cartel that is exporting Australian gas at huge losses while cross-subsidising that cheap gas for Asia by charging like wounded bulls at home. It is gas generation that sets the marginal cost of electricity in the National Electricity Market not renewable power.
Moreover, every time the PM ramps up his “energy insecurity” narrative, for which there is little evidence and many potential solutions, he increases the political pressure to add yet more gas generation as the answer to a largely fictitious problem (as has already happened in SA) thus embedding even higher energy costs as more gas that we don’t have is needed. At the same time he has no answer to the gas shortage, relying on already failed PR campaigns to liberate fracked gas in eastern states even as AGL mulls importing the stuff at phenomenal cost.
This is some kind of political Enron, exacerbating energy shortages so you can blame the political opposition.
The answer to the chronic east coast power crisis is as obvious as it is out of fashion: install domestic reservation for gas. There was no power crisis before we gave it to Japan for nothing and there will not be one after we stop doing it.
