EDITORIAL: Honesty desperately needed in energy debate

The network of power lines that lie across Australia’s cities and towns are more than just infrastructure.

They are this nation’s circulatory system, bringing to us the electricity we need for every aspect of our lives.

And our energy generation systems are our country’s beating heart. Without them, everything stops.

Every aspect of our economy depends on reliable, affordable energy.

That makes the price of energy fundamental to this election and central to every Australian’s life.

A key plank of Labor’s 2022 election platform was Anthony Albanese’s pledge to bring down household power bills by $275 a year by 2025.

We know how that turned out.

Instead of coming down, the cost of generating power has shot up, with customers on the east coast slugged with price hikes of up to 40 per cent in two years

Desperate to contain the damage wreaked by their broken promise, the Labor Government has shovelled billions into so-called “cost-of-living relief” electricity rebates designed to artificially lower the cost to households.

And although these sugar hits may soften the blow for voters, they’ve done nothing to actually address the underlying reasons for the cost blowout.

At least Labor has learnt one painful lesson from all of this: predicting power prices in a volatile world is a mug’s game.

During a debate with his opposite number Ted O’Brien on Thursday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen refused to put a figure on what the impact of his party’s power plan would be to residential consumers.

“The pledge I give is that energy prices will be cheaper under us than under Mr O’Brien. That is the pledge,” he said

That response was illustrative of Mr Bowen’s performance throughout what was the most interesting match up of the election to date: smug, supercilious and needlessly pugnacious.

Labor has long been promising a cheaper, greener energy future. So far, that’s failed to materialise.

Yet Labor continues with its disrespectful gaslighting of Australians by telling them that renewables are the only way to bring power prices down, in defiance of the lived experience of those Australians: that their electricity bills are climbing ever higher even as the network becomes less reliable.

One of voters’ key complaints about the state of politics today is there is little difference between the two major parties.

In the area of energy policy — on which Australia’s future prosperity so heavily relies — that’s not the case.

Labor’s plan is to have the electricity grid powered almost entirely by renewable energy by 2050.

In contrast, the Coalition’s plan is projected to draw 38 per cent of its power from nuclear energy, 54 per cent from renewables, and 8 per cent from storage and gas. Both parties say their plans will allow them to meet the net-zero target by 2050.

The reality that Mr Bowen is unwilling to confront is that renewables are only the cheapest for of energy when they are running. But they don’t always run. That means the substantial gap is still being filled by coal.

So let’s inject some honesty into this important national debate about our energy future and work out how to make the most of our advantages and drive prices down.