Government-funded nuclear is fine for Dan Tehan, but not renewables or climate initiatives

From the party that promised seven taxpayer funded nuclear reactors, now comes a call to enforce pure free-market economics on all things renewable and climate related, at least according to new shadow energy minister Dan Tehan.

Tehan’s speech to the Carbon Market Institute’s emissions summit in Melbourne on Thursday was a pitch for renewable energy and climate initiatives to be turned over to competitive markets.

But mentions of the Coalition’s former plans for state-funded nuclear power plants, or the removal of the $14.5 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies were conspicuously absent.

And while Tehan was keen to adopt Ross Garnaut’s contention that Australia will struggle to achieve its 82 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, he did not also reference in his markets-led speech Garnaut’s contention that oligopolistic gas participants are using their market power to drive up prices. 

Playing to his role as a free market champion, Tehan opened his talk with a gentle neg at the audience about why he thinks the entire premise of the conference founder is wrong.

“I called it the so-called carbon market, for a reason,” he told the crowd, saying markets are defined by transparency.

“Australians deserve clarity about costs, trade-offs and pathways in our energy transition. At the moment, this has been hidden, and we need to know why.” 

In a speech that repeatedly referenced the cost blowout of the VNI West transmission line, called for CSIRO to “release its code, data and assumptions in full” for the GenCost report, and demanded to know how much the beneficiaries of electric vehicle incentives are earning, Tehan’s pitch was that governments are too involved in the economy-wide changes currently underway to reduce emissions. 

“We will push for transparency. We will analyze publicly and make decisions on the premise of openness,” he said. 

“We want the books opened up, commercial-in-confidence use limited but used when required, so that you can test and critique modelling and assumptions and agreements that governments and agencies are making about our energy system and decarbonisation initiatives.”

Part of the reason why governments in Australia are so involved financially and structurally in the energy transition is that previous attempts to create market-led frameworks were voted down by Tehan’s party.

Kevin Rudd tried to pass a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), but that was shot down by the Coalition who had shaped the final proposal, and then by the Greens.

Julia Gillard’s government then introduced a carbon price, with the help of the Greens and independents, but that too was scrapped by the following Coalition government.

Tehan also claimed the Coalition would have a “laser like focus on energy security”.

Currently, the Coalition still can’t agree on what kind of energy they’d like in Australia. 

Two weeks ago, Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan from the Nationals were again calling for more coal fired power stations to be built, and last week Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie came out against a too-quick transition from fossil fuels, 

Energy is one of the five issues Liberal leader Sussan Ley has put up for negotiation. 

Tehan listed eight different areas where the federal government should bring in more market-based measures rather than an approach marked by “ideology, energy constraint and emissions reduction through a high cost de-industrialisation”.

As well as the demands on CSIRO and EV owners, Tehan’s eight calls included radical transparency in the Capacity Investment Scheme by not allowing information to be hidden behind commercial-in-confidence terms. 

Tehan also wants soil carbon trading to be based on open baseline data rather than estimates, and the public release of data about why transmission costs are rising.

He also wanted a whole-of-economy costings analysis of the journey to net zero, “full transparency on terms timing and triggers” of Clean Energy Finance Corporation deals, and a market-based analysis of whether the Gas Market Code is stifling competition.