One Nation has dealt a blow to the Turnbull government’s hopes of getting a clean energy target through the parliament, confirming it will vote against it in the event the Coalition has to try and broker a deal with the crossbench.



The Turnbull government is under pressure from industry stakeholders to reach a bipartisan position with Labor on the Finkel review as a first resort to end the decade-long climate wars, and to give investors policy certainty.

But is unclear whether a bipartisan deal can be achieved.

The Coalition party room is currently debating whether a clean energy target is the way to go, and there is pressure to ensure any new system is legislated with a high enough baseline to allow coal-fired power in the mix.

Labor has been signalling that coal is a bridge too far.

In the event the major parties can’t come to agreement, the government would have the option of trying to legislate a new energy policy with the support of the Senate crossbench.

The government needs 10 of 12 crossbenchers to pass legislation if it is pursuing that pathway.

But One Nation declared on Monday it would not support a new clean energy target under any circumstances – which is a fatal blow to a viable crossbench pathway.

“There won’t be any support for a clean energy target,” a spokesman for the One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, told Guardian Australia. A spokesman for the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, confirmed the party would vote as a bloc on the Finkel response.

The government also doesn’t have a viable parliamentary pathway with the Greens. While the Greens are yet to reach a definitive position on the Finkel review, the party’s climate change spokesman Adam Bandt has been saying publicly that a “clean” energy target should not include either coal or gas.

The likelihood that the government will have to come to terms with Labor, or go back to the drawing board, came as the Minerals Council released a new report taking issue with the economic modelling associated with the Finkel review.

The assessment, from BAEconomics, says important assumptions in the economic modelling underlying the Finkel report “tend to increase the costs of dispatchable coal generation, and underestimate the cost of renewable generation”.

The Minerals Council is using the material to lobby government MPs against the Finkel recommendations.

The chairman of the Turnbull government’s backbench environment and energy committee, Craig Kelly, has been critical of the clean energy target since the release of the Finkel report.

On Monday, he said the government needed to give priority to energy security and ensuring there was a workable scheme to deliver sufficient quantities of dispatchable power.

He said the government needed to consider implementing a scheme of “reverse auctions” to deploy dispatchable power into the grid.

Kelly said the “reverse auction” scheme would be set with an emissions intensity threshold to allow high-efficiency coal to bid into the system, but he said coal could be outbid by wind power with gas back-up, or large-scale solar with battery back-up.

The Liberal MP dismissed recent suggestions from Nationals, including the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, and the backbencher George Christensen, that the government should bankroll the construction of new coal plants.

Asked whether that was a good idea, Kelly said: “No, not at all.”

“I’m sure [the Nationals] would like to see more coal, and people put me in the pro-coal camp, but I’m actually in the low prices camp”.

The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, was also cool on government funding for a new coal-fired power station on Sunday.

While noting coal would be part of Australia’s energy mix for “decades to come” Frydenberg said he wouldn’t “jump the gun” on government financing of a coal-fired power plant.

He said he would have no issue “if somebody out there in the market” wanted to build a new plant, because that would add to Australia’s baseload power supply.

“As for government decisions, you are asking me to jump the gun there,” he said.