The federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has attempted to extend an olive branch to his furious state counterparts, inviting their input into modelling energy regulators will carry out about the impact of the government’s proposed national energy guarantee.



Frydenberg emailed his state counterparts on Thursday inviting their comments on instructions the government has drafted for a detailed modelling exercise on the new policy.

He told them he looked forward to “working constructively … in the lead-up and at the November meeting to deliver this important policy for Australia”.

But Frydenberg’s friendly overture has a very short shelf life. The states have only 24 hours to provide input before the government sends instructions to the Energy Security Board about what factors it needs to consider in undertaking the more comprehensive modelling exercise.

The clock is now ticking because state and federal ministers will meet to discuss the government’s proposal in a month.

A range of stakeholders have called for a cooperative and bipartisan approach in resolving the new energy policy but tensions are high. The South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, has excoriated the Turnbull government for leaving the states out of the loop in developing the new energy proposal.

In an interview with Guardian Australia on Thursday, Weatherill declared the Labor states had no interest in “solving Malcolm Turnbull’s political problems” and said the expectation of the premiers was that Bill Shorten would hold firm in opposing the national energy guarantee outlined by the prime minister on Tuesday.

Weatherill said that if Turnbull was serious about getting an outcome, he would have included the states in the process, as they were included in the Finkel review of the national electricity market earlier this year.

The premier said any prime minister serious about getting an outcome would have presented state leaders with a detailed plan and all the modelling associated with it “rather than boxing them into a corner with some sort of fait accompli”.

The government’s policy assumes the states will implement the change.

With South Australia leading the public backlash, Frydenberg has spoken to the state’s energy minister, Tom Koutsantonis, in the past 24 hours in an effort to defuse the row.

In Canberra meanwhile, Labor also kept up the political attack on the new energy policy.

In question time Turnbull faced a series of questions about whether his new policy was an effective price on carbon, which is the view of a number of analysts.

Referencing some of the language the former prime minister Tony Abbott used in a recent speech to climate sceptics in London, the shadow climate change minister, Mark Butler, asked the prime minister: “Given [the policy] looks like a goat, walks like a goat and bleats like a goat, will the prime minister now accept the reality of his own policy or will he continue to pay homage to the volcano gods on his backbench?”

Frydenberg took the question and chastised Labor for playing political games.

“For all those people listening at home that are struggling with their power bills, particularly in South Australia, the pensioners, the workers at the steelworks, those at the smelter, those in the member’s own electorate, what do you think they are thinking about the political games of those opposite?” he said.

The government is proposing to ask the Energy Security Board to model a “least cost trajectory” assuming an emissions reduction target for electricity of 26% on 2005 levels by 2030, and a “constant target post-2030”.

It is also proposing to ask for analysis on “an optimised non-linear trajectory” for emissions reduction – which is in line with a signal Turnbull has given publicly this week that the government might look to back-end load emissions reduction commitments to the latter half of the decade between 2020 and 2030.

The direction on the modelling also suggests the government wants the new reliability and emissions reduction obligations in place by 2019.