Tony Abbott says the Coalition should dump the clean energy target to create political opportunity at the next election to sharpen a point of partisan difference with Labor.



The former prime minister made the frank remark in response to an observation by the 2GB radio host Ray Hadley on Tuesday that “punters on ... the street, up the pub, up the club that I go to” think the power policies between the major political parties are identical.

Abbott empathised with Hadley’s point, arguing there was very little difference between a clean energy target of 42% and a renewable energy target from Labor of 50%.

He said that, “to his credit”, Malcolm Turnbull had begun to get the political rhetoric right, by referring to the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, as “blackout Bill” but he said the government needed to back up the rhetoric with policy.

“This is an opportunity for us to sharpen the difference with Labor on a issue which is of deep concern to the public, on a hip-pocket issue, where we can be on the side of voters and Labor is on the side of green extremists,” Abbott told Hadley. “We’ve got to change the debate.

“Let Labor be the party of renewable energy and us the party of reliable energy”.

After wresting the Liberal party leadership from Turnbull during an internal battle over emissions trading in 2009, Abbott ran a successful political campaign against the Gillard government’s clean energy scheme, which contributed to the Coalition winning the 2013 election.

His chief of staff, Peta Credlin, later admitted the Coalition had transformed a carbon pricing mechanism into a “carbon tax” in a bit of “brutal retail politics”.

“Along comes a carbon tax. It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax,” Credlin told Sky News in February 2017. “We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and, when he cut through, Gillard was gone.”

In the same interview, Credlin also questioned Turnbull’s capacity to sell a complex policy such as a renewable energy target to the public.

Abbott has been front-running the government’s fraught internal debate about energy policy for months, amplifying concerns some government MPs have about the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel.

He contends Australia risks de-industrialising our country “in our obsession to drive down emissions”.

On Tuesday he was asked by Hadley whether he regretted not being “stronger” as prime minister in resisting policy moves to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Abbott was prime minister when Australia signed up to the Paris international climate agreement and he kept the renewable energy target, albeit at a lower level.

Abbott told Hadley his government was the only government in recent history to lower power prices when it repealed Labor’s carbon price.

He said he would have like to scrap the RET altogether “but I had to deal with the Senate and I had to deal within a cabinet and, when you are the party leader, as opposed to a backbencher, you are inevitably a little more constrained.”

Later in the day, in a separate radio interview, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull emphasised the fact the RET had been settled during Abbott’s prime ministership.

“We have a renewable energy target that was actually put in place by Tony Abbott in 2015, it is legislated. And that is in place until 2020”.

Turnbull said the government was not proposing to disturb what Abbott had put in place, but was considering what policy to put in place beyond 2020.

Labor’s current policy is not a hard renewable energy target, as Abbott suggests, but a “goal” that 50% of Australia’s electricity be sourced from renewables by 2030.

Finkel did not recommend a 42% clean energy target. The chief scientist did not set hard parameters for the clean energy target but his report modelled a scheme with an emissions reduction target of 28% on 2005 levels by 2030, with a linear trajectory to zero emissions by 2070.

Modelling undertaken with the Finkel review indicates that either a clean energy target or an emissions intensity trading scheme – which is a form of carbon trading – would see renewable energy make up 42% of Australia’s power generation mix by 2030.

The Turnbull government has continued over the past fortnight to pivot away from the specific clean energy target modelled in the Finkel review and lay the groundwork for a new energy investment mechanism that will be friendly to coal-fired power.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has made it clear it wants an overhaul of current market rules to create a day-ahead market, which allows better planning to ensure sufficient quantities of dispatchable energy are available in the system.

There is also talk around the government of a shift to a capacity market, which exists in Western Australia.

The toxic, decade-long climate wars have contributed to a strike in new investment in base load power and a range of groups – business associations, the energy sector, climate groups and state governments – have called on Turnbull to use the Finkel review to settle the conflict.

Some interest groups issued a pointed warning last week that it was time to stow the partisan politics and get a durable outcome on climate and energy.

The Ai Group chief executive, Innes Willox, said last week the business community was “pretty much appalled by what they are seeing and hearing” in the current energy policy debate and he put the Turnbull government on notice that business saw the Finkel review of the national electricity market as “a way out of a dark tunnel”.

The Clean Energy Council also warned the government that walking away from the Finkel recommendation of a clean energy target would be “a clear step in the wrong direction”.

