Dutton goes full Trump on climate, energy and industry as Albanese sets May 3 election date

There was a moment in Coalition leader Peter Dutton’s pitch to voters on ABC TV on Thursday night when the full Trumpian catastrophe of his climate, energy and industry policies could have been exposed for all to see.

Dutton had earlier – in his Budget reply speech – presented a carbon copy of Donald Trump’s cynical vandalism of climate and energy initiatives – promising tear up the Rewiring the Nation program, disrupting the roll out of large-scale renewables, and betting the whole economy on fossil gas and the magic pudding of nuclear power.

In an interview on ABC’s 7.30 program immediately afterwards, Dutton sought to justify the plan this way:

“The smelters in our country are talking about closing. In Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen’s world, we’re going to pretend that we don’t need aluminum in our society, in construction and across the building sector. It’s nonsense. We are going to need it. I want to revitalise that industry, and we can do that if we’ve got secure 24/7, permanent base load power.”

Here was an opportunity to call out Dutton’s own nonsense right then and there, to point out that if those smelters are to close, its precisely because the Coalition wants to force feed them fossil fuels which are both too costly, and too dirty. Not because they are turning to green energy.

Rio Tinto, the owner of the giant aluminium smelters in Gladstone in Queensland and Tomago in NSW has made it very clear that it’s not wind and solar that will kill those massive industries and job hubs, it’s the dependence on fossil fuels promoted by the likes of Dutton and the LNP.

Rio Tinto has signed the country’s three biggest power purchase agreements for wind and solar, including a landmark solar and battery deal just this month, precisely because it says it will lower costs and improve reliability for the smelter and refineries in Queensland.

And Rio Tinto makes clear that renewables and storage – the very technologies that Dutton says do not work and wants to stop – are only way to guarantee their future.

“These agreements are integral to repowering our Gladstone aluminium operations with affordable, reliable and lower carbon energy for decades to come,” Rio Tinto Australian chief executive Kellie Parker says.

“For the first time, we have integrated crucial battery storage in our efforts to make the Boyne aluminium smelter globally cost-competitive, as traditional energy sources become more expensive.”

But Dutton wasn’t challenged on this on the ABC – and even he knows that he is talking rubbish. As Ketan Joshi writes on these pages today, the closure of the country’s giant smelters – the biggest energy users – is built into the assumptions that justify the Coalition’s misleading and nonsensical gas and nuclear plan.

The Frontier modelling that it relies upon, based around Australian Energy Market Operator scenarios, assumes a dramatic fall in electricity demand in Australia, driven by the shutting of those very same smelters in 2030. That is the plunging orange line in the graph immediately above.

You would think that someone in mainstream media might be alert enough to pick this up.

But if even the most experienced journalists allow this nonsense to be uttered unchallenged, it means that the Coalition – like the Trump administration and its right wing cronies in the US – will continue to serve it up for our daily consumption as we head towards the May 3 election that has now been called.

The one thing that the Coalition has learned from Trump is that if you keep on saying something often enough – even if it is complete nonsense – then it will stick.

So Dutton can get away with claims, made on the ABC, that nuclear can be delivered within 10 years, that it will save $260 billion, that Labor’s plan requires 28,000 km of new transmission, that having more gas will reduce electricity prices. Ask an expert, and they will say bollocks to the lot. But they get a free pass on social and mainstream media.

It is interesting to note that nuclear got just two mentions in Dutton’s Budget reply. One of them was the lie about Australia being the only one of the G20 nations not embracing nuclear. Simply not true.

The other highlighted Dutton’s and the Coalition’s contempt for renewables: “Nuclear power’s high yield of energy and small footprint means there’s no need to carpet our national parks, prime agricultural land, and coastlines with industrial scale renewables.”

The new Coalition governments in Queensland and Northern Territory have very much set the scene for a Dutton government, and mean that the electorate can be in no doubt about their intentions.

Both have ripped up the renewable targets of the previous Labor governments, and are blaming renewables for their energy woes, even though both Queensland and the NT are still more heavily dependent on fossil fuels than other states in Australia.

Queensland sources 70 per cent of its electricity needs from coal and a little bit of gas and has the highest wholesale electricity prices in the country. The NT gets more than 80 per cent of its power needs from gas and diesel and it, too, would have the highest bills in the country were it not for a direct subsidy of $1,200 a year for each household.

In his Budget reply speech, Dutton mentioned gas an awful lot – 23 times. Perhaps that is acknowledgement that the nuclear plan was never really about nuclear, but a Trojan horse for fossil gas.

Dutton now talks of a National Gas Plan, and he wants to jam gas generation into the Capacity Investment Scheme. He claims that a gas reservation policy will lower the cost of gas from around $14 a gigajoule to $10, although even at that price it will remain by far the most expensive power source in the country.

Dutton’s policies of destruction will extend to the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation fund, and the $14 billion production tax credits for green hydrogen. His party, and the Nationals in particular, have delighted in their repeated threats to tear up contracts for wind and solar written by the government in its Capacity Investment Scheme.

His vision of the economy is pointedly Trumpian – a fossil fuel economy that disregards climate science, sound engineering and sensible economics. Donors such as Gina Rinehart might be ecstatic. The rest of us will be forced to suffer slowly.

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