Prime minister says Paris targets will be met partly by renewable energy targets and partly by other measures

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Malcolm Turnbull has branded Labor’s position on renewable energy as ideology and “political claptrap” while attempting to brush off a question about why he praised South Australia as a leader in renewable energy during the federal election but castigated the state over its reliance on wind power last month.

The prime minister was asked on Monday by the shadow climate minister, Mark Butler, why he championed renewable energy in SA during the campaign “only to use an extreme weather event to play politics after the election?”

Turnbull doubled down on his political attacks, telling parliament Labor treated renewable energy as an “ideological” issue rather than a technological issue.

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“The bottom line is simply this: there are many sources of electricity,” the prime minister said Monday. “There is intermittent renewable, there is hydro, we have many forms of fossil-fuel generation.

“All of them have different characteristics. What we have to do is take away the ideology and the political claptrap that the Labor party surrounds all of their policies and focus on these objectives.

“What we need to do is ensure that we keep the lights on, something the honourable member’s Labor colleagues in South Australia demonstrably failed to do.”

Labor’s pursuit of the prime minister in question time on Monday follows his decision to link the statewide blackout in SA explicitly to the state’s use of renewable energy, calling it a “wake-up call” for state leaders who were trying to hit “completely unrealistic” renewable targets.

A preliminary report from the Australian Energy Market Operator about the event pointed to extreme weather as the prime cause of “multiple transmission system faults” which resulted in the statewide blackout.

Labor then followed up by asking the prime minister to spell out the government’s policy to support the development of renewable energy projects after 2020. The government is treading water on various elements of its climate policy framework over the medium term because of a commitment to review its Direct Action policy in 2017.

The environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, and the prime minister have dead batted questions on where the scheduled review might take the government.

At a conference in Canberra on Monday afternoon, Frydenberg described the 2017 review as a “sit rep” – meaning a situation report – that would guide the government to ensure there was a suite of policies to ensure energy security, affordability and emissions reductions.

Turnbull, in response to the question about the renewable energy target post-2020, said Australia’s commitment to the Paris treaty wouild require substantial reductions in emissions up to 2030. He said the Paris targets would be met “partly” by renewable energy targets and partly “by other measures such as the emissions reduction fund”.

The prime minister said the national RET was “set at 2020” and “the whole climate policy will be addressed and reviewed in the course of next year”.

In the lead-up to a special meeting of energy meetings last Friday, held to consider the blackouts, state governments made the point they were acting to bring on low-emissions power sources because the national RET only ran to 2020.

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They said they had implemented ambitious renewable energy targets in part because the Abbott government had effectively derailed the industry by creating prolonged uncertainty over the future of the national RET.

SA, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory say they have taken leadership by putting in place RETs that will allow Australia to meet its international emissions reduction commitments, in essence because the commonwealth declined to take that leadership.

The ACT and Victoria add further that they moved ahead with their renewable energy schemes because the former environment minister Greg Hunt explicitly encouraged them to do so after he signed Australia up to the Paris agreement last year.

On the sidelines of global climate talks in Paris last December, Hunt clearly urged the states to adopt reverse auctions, following the model developed in the ACT to drive the uptake of renewable energy.