Two weeks from polling day, energy policy has emerged as a key battleground between Daniel Andrews and Matthew Guy, with the Liberals pledging to ‘turbocharge gas production’ at their pitch to party faithful on the weekend.
But what does that actually mean, and is it plausible – or even desirable? To assess this vision of Victoria’s energy future, we need to take a look into our past.
Victoria got hooked on gas through an accident of geology. Historically, the vast gas reserves in Bass Strait guaranteed a steady supply that made gas heating an attractive option for Victorian homes.
But times have changed. Bass Strait is running out. And even before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine propelled gas prices into the stratosphere, wind and solar were already far cheaper and cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
We’re now in the position where we need to get Victorian households off gas as quickly as possible for a range of reasons – to save money, to reduce emissions, and to free up some of our remaining gas for industries that will take longer to switch to electric power.
Doing this requires considered intervention from a forward-looking government that understands the complex dynamics of the gas market. What Matthew Guy has announced is the opposite – an impossible promise that will slow down the shift to renewables, hurting low-income households the most.
We know switching homes from gas to efficient electric appliances will deliver enormous savings and health benefits (recently published research found that growing up in a gas-fired home is as bad for childhood asthma as passive smoking).
But upfront cost is a barrier and if you’re retrofitting an existing home it can be complicated too.
So unless government leans into the challenge with a program to bring down the cost and simplify the process of electrifying homes, we will end up with a two-class society where Victoria’s poorest households will be left behind, hooked to an increasingly unaffordable gas network that those with a bigger bank balance have been able to escape.
Which is what makes the Coalition’s recently position on gas so impossible to justify. Launching his campaign last weekend, Matthew Guy promoted what can only be described as a hoax. The thrust of the plan is to quarantine new Victorian gas for Victorian use.
The problem is the gas he’s talking about might as well not exist. The gas industry has spent decades looking for new reserves and the only commercially viable stuff they’ve found is the last skerrick currently being extracted off our southern coastline and onshore reserves that require fracking – the latter thankfully now banned in the constitution.
The Andrews government even spent over $40 million of public money using all kinds of fancy sensing technologies searching for new gas. After four years all they came up with was such a small amount that Ernst & Young found it would have no meaningful impact on supply or price.
No wonder the sensibly centrist Grattan Institute described Guy’s gas policy as “bordering on silly.” In reality, Guy doesn’t have a gas policy, he just has a gas election slogan.
Which brings me to what may be the poison pill in Guy’s gas hoax. Over the past fortnight I’ve spoken at candidates forums in Hawthorn, Malvern and Kew. All up more than a thousand voters attended in person with even more watching online. And they were presented with a frankly quite impressive array of candidates of multiple hues – red, green, blue and teal.
Each had a good story to tell when it came to shifting Victoria off coal and showering households with solar goodies. And wary voters were, I think, initially impressed with the Coalition’s newfound positivity when it came to climate action, such as legislating a target to halve Victoria’s emissions by 2030, and pledging to support one million homes to install solar panels and batteries.
But each night there came a point where the questions turned to gas, and the Liberal candidates had little choice but to trot out tired industry lines about ‘gas as a transition fuel’. And with that, the Liberals lost the room.
As we saw in the federal election, huge swathes of voters in pivotal seats are deeply concerned about the climate crisis, and they’re also aware that gas is a polluting and expensive fossil fuel. Many might also suspect that any plan to ‘turbocharge’ gas actually means fracking.
Which means Matthew Guy is crossing his fingers behind his back when he says he will keep the frack ban, or he’s hoping nobody will notice that he’s promising something he has no hope of delivering.
Either way, the core problem remains. Victoria’s next government needs to focus on getting the state off gas, not making dubious and dangerous pledges to burn more of it.
Jono La Nauze is CEO of Environment Victoria
