The home stretch of the energy election: Coalition chooses to gaslight as Trump, Musk loom large

In an interview on Easter Monday, Peter Dutton’s general tone – scaremongering about crime and immigration – revealed something important that this election campaign. The Coalition’s message on energy has utterly failed to find any purchase.

It has been muddled from day one, despite the party having had years and years to plan for it. Despite having leaned hard on nuclear power advocacy over the past few years, the party decided to unceremoniously dump the theme from its election platform, having barely mentioned it over the past weeks.

It is not likely that this is due to all of the massive errors and flaws in the party’s nuclear platform. Their own modelling relies heavily on the collapse of Australian industry, and seemingly excludes the costs of insurance from the future vision for nuclear.

All of this in the face of the fact that the Coalition spent nearly a decade in power in Australia, and put precisely zero effort into actually pushing for nuclear power whilst they had the chance.

The reality has always been that their claims about nuclear are insincere: an indirect, gaslighting tactic for their real goal, which is advocating for increasing coal and gas in Australia over the coming years.

Gas has thrown up at least one surprising curveball: Dutton proposed a gas reservation policy not too distant from what has been requested by organisations like The Australia Institute or Independent Senator David Pocock.

But he packed it with a poison pill: an unprecedented deregulation and red-tape-slashing frenzy for new gas fields.

While it’s likely that domestic gas reservation of Dutton’s style would have a small impact on gas prices domestically, it’d barely be noticeable for most consumers, who aren’t out buying industrial quantities of fertiliser.

Dutton assumed the gas industry would be pleased, but the gas industry is fragile and easily insulted, and they’ve been promising to fight back. In trying to please everybody, Dutton ended up somewhere between uninspiring and self-sabotaging.

Dutton’s promise to subsidise transport fossil fuels is a tax break that only benefits richer households, given their significantly higher fuel consumption. And perhaps more importantly, it’d subsidise and encourage greater use of fossil fuels, worsening climate change.

And their party’s promise to ditch Labor’s fuel efficiency standards has fallen flat, with EVs rising in popularity and acceptance, and Dutton’s scare campaign around ‘choice’ not really finding any purchase with voters.

A lot has been made of the geopolitical factors in the unprecedented slump in the Coalition’s popularity in polls, during this election campaign. Trump and Musk putting a blowtorch to the functions of government, and Trump’s mafia-boss ruling style have provided a glimpse into what a modern right-wing government looks like. Instability, chaos and the active destruction of the green transition.

But it is worth noting that Labor have essentially had no real opposition from the opposition party, this campaign.

As was highlighted over at The Guardian, the Coalition’s only climate policy promises have been the abolition of climate policy. The closest thing they had to their own policy proposal – the nuclear power plan – was quietly dragged into the recycle bin in the first days of the campaign.

The Labor party have carefully done all they can to take advantage of the good political weather – a deeply unpopular Trump regime and a flailing, badly direct Dutton campaign. Most of their climate and energy policies have been inoffensive structural extensions of their existing policies.

Nothing new or surprising has emerged, and likely won’t in the last few weeks. But from a global perspective, Australia remains below the pack on climate performance, and Labor’s plans are seriously insufficient.

It is a good time to re-scrutinise the government from a climate perspective, highlighting where they need to improve and where they’ve underperformed in their first term.

If they win an election thanks to circumstance and luck, it’ll engender a complacency on climate and energy that’ll require much firmer and stronger criticism from climate groups.

The election costings for each party are still due before the May 3rd poll date. A third leader’s debate is due Tuesday night, and a final debate will come on 27th of April. There will still be time for plenty of sparks to fly, and plenty of misinformation to be spouted by politicians of all stripes.