Well, you have to give credit where it’s due. The Coalition has actually adopted a marginally better climate position: instead of a CoalKeeper tax, which would force households to fork out up to $400 a year to prop up economically unviable coal-fired power, now it only wants a GasKeeper Tax, which would force households to fork out an unspecified amount a year to prop up economically unviable gas-fired plants.
Oddly, the burden on taxpayers to bring gas into the capacity investment scheme failed to get a mention in some media coverage of the Coalition’s proposal.
The fossil fuel industry, naturally, thinks it’s a great idea to receive yet more taxpayer largesse on top of its price gouging of consumers and businesses, the handouts it’s already receiving from federal Labor, and the petroleum resource rent tax scam.
The only reason we avoided CoalKeeper — an idea Angus Taylor and Scott Morrison conjured up in their rage at the way unviable coal-fired power plants kept being shuttered without their knowledge or approval — was not because federal Labor prevented it. It was because NSW and Victoria, in the form of Matt Kean and Lily D’Ambrosio, vetoed the inclusion of fossil fuels in the capacity investment scheme developed as a means of funding firming capacity for the east coast energy grid.
Since the unfortunate demise of the Perrottet government in NSW, Labor in that state has re-embraced its own version of CoalKeeper, handing nearly half a billion taxpayer dollars to Origin Energy to prop up the unviable Eraring power station — a decision that will lead to more than 170 more deaths.
NSW Labor’s embrace of taxpayer-funded carbon emissions and lethal particulate pollution is one more example of how, when it comes to climate and energy regulation in Australia, we’ve developed a highly arbitrary and complex interactive system that for efficacy depends on not merely which party is in power at which level of government at any one time, but also the individual inclinations of responsible ministers and senior bureaucrats.
The best example of this was the contrast between Matt Kean and Angus Taylor when both NSW Liberals were ministers in state and federal governments respectively: Kean got on with delivering a real and effective transition to renewables as part of an aggressive but economically effective emissions reduction strategy, while Taylor devoted himself to supporting fossil fuels as much as possible, reflecting the interests of his party’s donors and the toxic influence of the Queensland LNP within the federal Coalition.
A different version of that dynamic is now playing out with Chris Bowen as federal climate and energy minister — who has derided the Coalition’s GasKeeper tax proposal — and the Western Australian Labor government.
WA under Labor is the twenty-first-century equivalent of WA Inc, a rotten petro-state controlled by fossil fuel interests via its politicians, media owners and business interests. In WA, what fossil fuels want, fossil fuels get, sooner or later. And what fossil fuel interests have wanted for some time is the destruction of one of the few effective mechanisms of climate regulation in the west: its Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). The WA EPA has long called bullshit on the discredited Gorgon carbon capture project, insisted on rigorously applying environmental protection laws to fossil fuels ventures, and been the only agency prepared to stand up to fossil fuel giants.
As the handmaiden of fossil fuel companies, WA Labor naturally wants to gut the EPA. Last year it commissioned a “review” of the agency, and in August it announced plans to end the independence of the EPA by expanding its board to include hand-picked industry representatives. This week, under the guise of ending “duplication”, WA Labor announced plans to strip the EPA of any greenhouse emission regulatory power. Instead, large fossil fuel projects will only be regulated under federal Labor’s “safeguard mechanism”. Unsurprisingly, the fossil fuel lobby, led by Australia’s worst climate criminal, Woodside, thinks that, too, is a great idea.
The safeguard mechanism allows unlimited carbon offsets (in the form of Australian Carbon Credit Units, 30% of which are highly suspect, being based on so-called “human-induced regeneration“) for big polluters. In effect, WA Labor would remove the last remnants of proper climate regulation and shift responsibility to federal Labor, which is relying heavily on dodgy carbon offsets to reach its climate goals. And WA is doing so knowing that federal Labor by now has a strong record not merely of waving through new gas projects but also of committing large sums of taxpayer money to fossil fuel export infrastructure.
And that’s under a government notionally committed to serious carbon abatement goals. The return of the Coalition to power in Canberra would see the abandonment of Labor’s abatement goals and even Tony Abbott’s pathetically low emissions targets. Which, from the point of view of WA Labor and its fossil fuel paymasters, is even better.
None of this will be addressed until a minority government is in place in Canberra, and one or other of the major parties is compelled to take serious climate action as the price of being in power. It can’t come soon enough.
