Lol, a presser this morning announcing the Do-nothing hydro-scheme has gone horribly wrong as Energy Minister Josh Frydenhydro was gate-crashed by SA premier Jay Weatherill, via AFR:
It all began when Mr Weatherill, who had been standing alongside Mr Frydenberg hearing him speak about the need to cooperate on renewable energy, exploded at Mr Frydenberg in front of the cameras.
In unprecedented scenes, Mr Weatherill called a planned $2 billion expansion of the Snowy Hydro scheme, to be announced today by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “a white knuckled panic about national energy policy” and an act of hypocrisy.
“It is a $2 billion admission that the national energy market has broken and there needs to be public investments to actually fix it up. That is exactly what was at the heart of our plan,” Mr Weatherill said of his own energy plan announced on Tuesday.
“We had a Prime Minister that came in here to this state during the course of the last federal election campaign, celebrating our leadership in relation to renewable energy and then taking credit for it through his own Renewable Energy Target,” he said.
“For you to then turn around within a few short months, when there is a black-out and point the finger at SA for the fact that our leadership in renewable energy was the cause of that problem is an absolute disgrace.
“For you to be standing here, sitting next to us trying to take credit for some small scheme which goes nowhere near fixing the size and the extent of the problems that have been created in this State, it is an outrage.
“Let’s just think about this $2 billion investment. It is going to be in four to seven years time. It will probably only just pick up the natural growth in demand that will occur over that period of time. It barely will pick up the loss of power generation in relation to Hazlewood”
As Mr Frydenberg stood poker faced, Mr Weatherill lacerated him over the lack of federal leadership in energy policy and he belittled Mr Frydenberg for being sidelined over his support for a emissions intensity scheme.
Mr Frydenberg returned fire, accusing Mr Weatherill of gate-crashing the press conference and of failing SA over energy.
“The Premier made a $550 million admission of failure a couple of days ago,” he said of Mr Weatherill’s energy plan announced Tuesday.
It’s the Commonwealth’s job to co-ordinate shit not the states. Instead it played petty politics and now it gets what it deserves.
