SYDNEY, Aug 17, 2018 – With members of the Coalition in open rebellion, talks of ministerial resignations, a leadership coup and the Energy Security Board flagging more last minute changes to the NEG, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull must abandon this dodgy deal.Yesterday, Queensland MP George Christensen said he could only support the NEG with a 17 percent emissions reduction target, while his WA counterpart Andrew Hastie said he cannot even support his government’s inadequate 26 percent target.
“Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has always had poor political judgement but even he should be able to see that the NEG has exposed the deep divisions in his party and it should be dumped before it costs him his job,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific Campaigner Alix Foster Vander Elst said.
“Without doing anything Australia will already get to 26 percent emission reduction by 2024, Christensen’s NEG proposal would actually see pollution increase by the government building a coal-fired power plant. As it stands the NEG will already slam the brakes on the growth of renewables, and as a direct result will increase power prices, pollution and do nothing to stop climate change that is already devastating Australia with bushfires and drought.
While still inadequate, Shadow Climate Change and Energy Spokesman Mark Butler knows that Labor’s 45 percent target will bring down power prices by 25 percent and finally begin the long-overdue process of decarbonising the electricity sector. There is no way he can square his policy with the Coalition’s NEG that will push up prices, destroy the renewables industry and devastate our already badly damaged environment. [1]
“Turnbull has nowhere to turn but the Labor Party, which must now push for the ambitious climate action that Australia needs and sticks to its condition that not a cent of taxpayer money go towards coal. Butler and Bill Shorten must now withstand the pressure to do any deal and instead seek to deliver the right deal for Australia,” Ms Foster Vander Elst said.
“With Victoria and the other Labor states remaining firm in their opposition, there is now an opportunity for Labor to help usher in the reform that Australians desperately need to protect their environment and the budgets of families struggling with high power prices.”
If Coalition disunity doesn’t kill the NEG, the last minute tinkering with the mechanism could deliver the fatal blow. Yesterday the ESB indicated it was open to further amending the reliability mechanism of the NEG, throwing yet another spanner into the works unnecessarily.
The ESB is drafting a new options paper to examine changes, including replacing the 3-year notice for triggering the reliability obligation with a 5-year notice and options that may allow the market operator to invoke a one-year notice trigger at any time without first exercising the three-year option.
“What this means is that the goal posts are still moving at this late stage of the game,” Ms Foster Vander Elst said.
“Turnbull and Frydenberg have been negotiating in bad faith from the very start by asking the states to approve something that their own party room had not approved and that was lacking key details. Victoria, Queensland and the ACT must protect their own thriving renewables industries from the climate denialists in the Coalition and stay strong in their rejection the NEG.”
Notes:
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org.au/research/neg-report/
For interviews:
Martin Zavan, Greenpeace AUstralia Pacific Communications Campaigner
0424 295 422