A rudderless Coalition could find destructive purpose in energy and climate crisis

One of Angus Taylor’s final acts as energy minister was delaying the release of the ‘Default Market Offer’ electricity pricing update by a month, until after the 2022 federal election. It didn’t save the Coalition, but it did reveal that somewhere inside the minds of that government there was an acute conscious knowledge of the freight train of an energy crisis barrelling towards whoever ended up in power after May 21st.

That electricity prices were on an upwards future trajectory was not some sort of elite secret. Energy analyst Dylan McConnell had been sharing the rapidly rising curves of future price projections for several months before the election campaign even began.

Electricity has, of course, been a central topic in the hearts and minds of the former Coalition government. Scott Morrison described himself and freshly-anointed “Energy and emissions reductions minister” Angus Taylor as the “Minister(s) for getting electricity prices down” in August 2018. Taylor promised a neat $70/MWh wholesale NEM prices by the end of 2021. At the end of their tenure, they’ve left the new Labor government with what could end up being the worst energy price crisis Australia has ever seen.

A collection of reasons exist for this. Failing coal plants, unprecedented flooding damaging coal mines, are leaving the price-setting stage open to gas, which is itself seeing record high international price spikes. These prices would be significantly worse, had people like Tony Abbott succeeded in axing the renewable energy target entirely. They would also be significantly less bad, had the Coalition government and various groups such as the Business Council of Australia and Origin Energy, who were essentially calling for a 20% hard cap on renewable proportion, failed to bring about a real reduction in the renewable energy target.

This, paired with the rising costs of methane gas used in households and petroleum fuels should have been central to the election. It is the coalescence of every single little bit of rhetoric the Coalition party deployed on the biggest issue of our time. What they called “reliable and affordable” turning out to be severely unaffordable thanks to its own stunning unreliability. While they bragged about having boosted clean energy, they glossed over their own failures to accelerate growth, and their own successes in stifling it. The broad and barely-criticised assumption that fossil fuels are cheap and reliable has been shown to be wrong in a precise and absolute way, as has the assumption that clean energy is expensive and unreliable.

The Labor party’s Jim Chalmers has described the circumstances leading to this crisis as a ‘perfect storm’. That invokes a sort of rare, random coincidence of variables. But the reality is that Australia is shockingly reliant on fuels – coal, oil and gas – that are vulnerable to wars, pandemics and of course the consequence of their own use, climate change. There are a range of multi-directional feedbacks that come together to tell us that Australia’s going to be getting a “perfect storm” very regularly, and with increasing frequency. That means the move away from fossil fuels isn’t just urgent in the context of climate impacts – it’s urgent in the context of living, day-to-day, and getting through the coming weeks and months.

Despite this, and despite the clear warning signs about the crisis, the rising costs of energy barely featured during the election campaign. Save for an AEMO QED report in late April, there were nearly no mentions of rising energy and electricity costs. Partly thanks to Taylor’s decision to delay the Default Market Offer update, there was a flurry of coverage after the election. But even beyond the direct coverage of the DMO, the media mentions of the energy crisis have been sustained at a level much higher than during the election:

It might be tempting to muse about a conspiracy theory that ‘MSM‘ were running protection for an exposed and vulnerable Coalition government. I think the reality is that they mostly reported on whatever’s was placed onto the agenda through the releases and speeches from the two major parties. Climate, energy and costs didn’t feature in the election because neither party wanted them to.

For some reason, during election campaigns, normally-reasonable journalists become a pack of kittens leaping at laser pointer dots shone by the major parties. Once the election wrapped up, this dynamic shifted and media outlets went back to reporting on issues of relevance. It’s still an unacceptable state of affairs, of course.

One worrying consequence of this is the blank slate that’s left here for a dazed and reproachful Coalition party looking for some meaning and direction after their stunning defeat.

There is a long and terrible history of conservatives in Australia trying to blame crippling prices on climate actions such as the growth of renewable energy. Patient zero was the wildly successful effort to blame the introduction of carbon pricing on the massive costs imposed by a ‘gold plated’ grid expansion in the early 2010s.

The follow up was a deflated sequel that tried to pin electricity price rises on the renewable energy target (RET). Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott commissioned a review of the RET, which amusingly found that scrapping it would lead to higher bills. Yet, the climate skeptic they tasked with the review still recommended it be scrapped.

Later, Taylor insisted Labor’s 50% renewables by 2030 target would cause a price apocalypse, despite his party’s own projections showing that was actually an unrealistically low projection for 2030. And of course at the most recent election, a dodgy back-of-the-envelope calculation was deceptively passed off as “modelling” to incurious conservative media outlets more than willing to repeat the Coalition’s talking points – suggesting Labor’s renewable policies would cause massive rises in electricity prices.

While the opposition is still obviously figuring itself out, there have already been several instances of their members trying to blame the crisis on Labor, climate action, renewables or all of the above. Peter Dutton, of course, is warning of high prices under Labor. Senator Amanda Stoker blames “extreme climate ideology” for the massive failures in coal, gas and petroleum and their consequent crippling impacts on Australians.

But at the same time, every attempt to run a scare campaign around climate action and cost-of-living has fallen spectacularly flat, for at least half a decade. The tactic has lost a lot of steam, but does cause damage by distracting us from real and serious pathways to solving the energy crisis. Will the Coalition bother?

Chances are: they’ll give it a red hot go, and they don’t care all that much how much damage they cause along the way.