Malcolm Turnbull says the Coalition’s position on the RET was settled 18 months ago under former prime minister’s leadership

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Malcolm Turnbull has dismissed Tony Abbott’s latest criticism of the Coalition’s renewable energy target, reminding Abbott that the target was settled under his leadership just 18 months ago.

Abbott warned at a Young Liberals conference at the weekend that power was getting more expensive and less reliable because the Turnbull government was making it “harder and harder” to use coal and gas through the renewable energy target.

He said he had managed, while prime minister, to reduce the RET from 27% to 23%, but regretted it was “still too high” because Alcoa, Arrium, Port Pirie and Roxby Downs were all in trouble.

He pointed out the apparent absurdity of subsidising Alcoa to keep it viable while simultaneously imposing a RET, saying the Coalition should not congratulate itself for having a policy that was only slightly better than Labor’s.

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“Rather than making power less expensive, our own policy is to subsidise Alcoa to keep it in business,” he told the audience. “Our own policy is to lift renewable power from 15% to 23% within four years at the cost of $1,000 per household.

“This is where the public are not mugs … this is why our first big fight this year must be to stop any further mandatory use of renewable power.”

Turnbull rejected Abbott’s advice on Monday, saying Abbott’s restructuring of the RET had been beneficial for the industry.

“It will not be changed,” he said. “The renewable energy target is about 18 months old. It was restructured under the government of my predecessor, Mr Abbott, and as a consequence of that, as he said at the time, it created certainty for investment in the renewables energy space.”

Liberal frontbencher Simon Birmingham also rejected Abbott’s advice on Monday.

“The renewable energy target was only settled and amended around 18 months ago under the Abbott government,” he told ABC radio. “We have no plans to change it.

“The real focus of debate around the renewable energy target shouldn’t be our 23% target by 2020 … it should be how Bill Shorten is going to actually address the 50% target the Labor party’s announced.

“What on earth that will cost? How on earth it will be implemented? None of those sorts of details have been outlined by Mr Shorten.”

Abbott told the audience that Labor’s plan to lift the RET to 50% would lead to a $50bn overbuild of “unnecessary wind turbines” that would cost every household $5,000, but he provided no evidence for the claim.

That figure was at least $10bn less than he was claiming in 2015.

Less than two years ago, Abbott warned Labor’s policy would cost “perhaps $60bn or more”. When his office was asked to produce evidence, it pointed to comments by Paul Hyslop, the chief executive of ACIL Allen, who was reported in the Australian as saying that if Labor’s policy was met by wind power “it would require 10,000 to 11,000 additional turbines … with capital costs for the turbines alone of $65bn”.

But Hyslop told Guardian Australia at the time his $60bn-plus cost estimate was based on a quick calculation of how much extra renewable capacity would be required, and the cost to deliver it through wind power.

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His ACIL Allen colleague Owen Kelp had told Sky News the $60bn figure was a “fairly simplistic, back-of-the-envelope calculation” from internal analysis that was not publicly available.

Hyslop also said an emissions trading scheme like the one the Abbott government had abolished would be more cost-effective than either the Coalition’s Direct Action plan or Labor’s 50% renewable energy goal.

On Sunday Abbott also pushed the Turnbull government to keep cutting public service jobs, claiming that his government had cut 14,000 commonwealth jobs “without any obvious complaint except from unions”.

Last year the head of the Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch, told a Senate inquiry into the ABS’s bungled 2016 census that his agency’s resources had been reducing over the last 15 years. “Its staff numbers have fallen by 14% and the budget appropriation (in real terms) has also fallen by 14%,” he said in a submission.

“In contrast, the demands on the ABS to properly measure the economy, society and the environment, and respond to the requirements of governments, has increased and become more complex.”

Complaints to the Australian Taxation Office have increased by more than 40% in the past three years, following 3,347 job cuts by the Turnbull and Abbott governments since July 2014, and after serious IT system failures left taxpayers without key services in December.



