Prime minister says Neg will not be going any further but Australia still committed to meeting emissions targets

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Australia remains committed to meeting its Paris emissions targets even as it moves to dump its national energy policy, Scott Morrison’s government says.

The prime minister will propose ditching the national energy guarantee in a party room meeting when parliament resumes next week, also ruling out enshrining Australia’s Paris agreement commitments in law.

“The government remains committed to meeting its Paris targets,” a spokesperson from the prime minister’s office said on Saturday. “Our commitment stands but we won’t be legislating it.”

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Earlier, Morrison confirmed to the Weekend Australian that the energy policy formed by his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, would be axed.

“The Neg is dead, long live reliability guarantee, long live default prices, long live backing new power generation,” Morrison said. “Largely, we are in that position already anyway, so it’s not a major shift. But we just need to put to rest any suggestion that this legislation is going ahead.”

Speaking to the ABC, the Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman conceded he was sorry to see the Neg go but said that all its energy reliability guarantees would remain.

“The first thing to say is we’re not tearing up the Paris targets,” he said, following internal division within the Coalition over whether to legislate them or not. “But our commitment to fulfil them remains.”

Even with the dumping of the Neg, Zimmerman said the government still had a strong energy policy focused on driving down prices. This included giving new powers to the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission to sanction and divest energy companies not playing fair. It also included an investment guarantee to support dispatchable power.

But the Labor MP Linda Burney criticised Australia’s new energy minister, Angus Taylor, for playing down the importance of the Paris agreement.

“I’m astounded that the government would walk away from trying to land a national energy policy,” Burney told the ABC. “If the government says they’re moving to lowering power prices, forgetting renewables, forgetting the national energy guarantee, I think it is really fraught.”

Morrison’s comments on the Neg are a continuation of the Coalition’s position at the end of Malcolm Turnbull’s time as leader of the Liberal party.

Late last month the then prime minister announced the Neg – the policy his government had argued for months was necessary to create investment certainty in Australia’s energy sector – had been shelved indefinitely because he could not proceed with it in the face of opposition from within his own party.

The move triggered anger among business groups that had lined up publicly for months to support the Neg.

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Earlier this week Morrison was insisting Australia would meet its Paris climate commitments “in a canter”, which contradicted advice from the Energy Security Board that said business as usual would mean the electricity sector would “fall short of the emissions reduction target of 26% below 2005 levels”.

A summary of modelling undertaken by the ESB and released only a month ago said if no policy was put in place in the electricity sector, emissions would fall initially, then flatten out and rise towards the end of the decade to 2030 as forecast demand increased, then dip again in 2029-30.

The ESB said if the national energy guarantee wasn’t implemented, the national electricity market would “fall short of the emissions reduction target of 26% below 2005 levels”.

Australian Associated Press contributed to this report