This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Queensland energy minister has declared it is “not helpful” for his federal counterpart, Josh Frydenberg, to attack the Labor government about power prices in the state if he wants a cooperative agreement on his new national energy guarantee.



Mark Bailey told Guardian Australia Frydenberg’s criticisms at the weekend were “very strange behaviour for a federal energy minister” who was hoping to persuade the states to sign on to a new framework imposing reliability and emissions reduction obligations on Australia’s electricity retailers.

“Where’s his head at?” Bailey said. “One day he says he wants an agreement and then the next he attacks us on spurious partisan political grounds.”

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Bailey said it was too soon to say whether Queensland would sign on to the new policy, because there wasn’t enough information in the public domain yet to form a view, but he repeated it was “not helpful to have Josh Frydenberg bashing up the Queensland government in a party political way”.

He said it was possible a cooperative agreement could ultimately be reached, but he said the commonwealth’s behaviour over the past few weeks had been “pretty slap dash”.

With the state on the brink of an election, the Queensland government at the weekend threatened to re-enter the electricity supply industry if power companies don’t cut bills for consumers in the state.

But Frydenberg declared on Sunday the threat from the Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, was a “smokescreen” to divert from reports government-owned generators were price-gouging by bidding at uncompetitively high prices.

“The real issue has been the gouging by the government-owned generators, which are CS Energy and Stanwell, which have been bidding in at uncompetitively high prices, and lining the budgets and the balance sheets of the Palaszczuk government to the tune of $1.5bn while Queenslanders have paid on average 30% more for their wholesale electricity prices as a result of that,” the federal energy minister told the ABC.

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“So, the Queensland government’s got a lot of explaining to do to its own public as to why it’s been happy to put this electricity tax on its own people and now this is a bit of a smokescreen.”

While the national energy guarantee has been positively received by business and some energy analysts, the government needs the backing of the states to implement the policy, with the issue to be discussed at a Council of Australian Governments meeting next month.

On Monday Malcolm Turnbull said he had spoken to “several” of the premiers, and Frydenberg was also speaking to his state counterparts ahead of the November meeting.

Publicly, a number of premiers have been hostile about the national energy guarantee, particularly South Australia’s Jay Weatherill, who has urged federal Labor to hold the line against the policy, but Turnbull suggested state leaders were adopting a more conciliatory tone in private.

“Well, the conversations I’ve had, they’ve been very receptive,” Turnbull said. “But there’s often, as you know, a mismatch between the private conversations and the public rhetoric.”

At estimates hearings in Canberra on Monday, it became clear the Turnbull government worked up its national energy guarantee concept in a very short timeframe.

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The Energy Security Board, which proposed the model as an alternative to the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, met with Turnbull and first proposed the guarantee on September 19.

On 3 October, Frydenberg formally requested advice that resulted in the eight-page letter which the government released publicly when it confirmed the policy last week.

The final advice was provided on 13 October and the government unveiled the policy on 17 October. The Finkel review, by contrast, spanned more than six months.

A number of energy agencies said they had not been consulted before the government’s announcement.