PAUL MURRAY: Federal and State governments’ pursuit of batteries and renewables are expensive waste of energy

After its emphatic return to government last weekend, Labor is set up to remain in power in WA for at least eight years.

With the WA Liberals adrift in a sea of their own irrelevance, the only thing on the horizon that threatens Labor’s tenure is its disastrous energy policies.

The next State election will be fought during the year that Labor has promised to end WA’s use of coal-fired power and become reliant on renewables and batteries with gas as a last resort.

That’s unless the Greens manage to force Labor to shut down gas as well, which they have promised to do and will soon have the leverage to succeed.

This week, electricity market operator AEMO’s website showed that when the sun went down the south-west power network was still up to 80 per cent reliant on fossil fuels. At least 20 per cent of that was coal.

As peak evening demand hit just 2500MW during mild weather this week, the WA Government’s $2.3 billion big battery system was able to meet briefly a maximum of just 7 per cent of the domestic demand.

But the batteries were often only delivering just 1 per cent of demand by 8.30pm and they only have a daily discharge life of four hours. Then they need sunny and windy conditions the next day to fully recharge them.

So whoever becomes the new energy minister next week will need a magic pudding from which to deliver a massive amount of generating capacity over the next four years. Some 1200MW of coal-fired generation is slated to be closed by the end of 2029.

As The West Australian’s Ben Harvey wrote on Wednesday, switching off Collie by 2030 “is the mother of all stretch targets” requiring “more wind turbines and solar farms than you could possibly imagine”.

Not only will the adequate supply of replacement electricity be a critical issue by polling day in 2029, but its cost is likely to have soared as well.

Rolling blackouts and unaffordable electricity would make potent election issues.

In the last week of the State election campaign, an important report appeared on the ABC’s website. Peculiarly it did not make the evening TV bulletin, despite it being the biggest scoop of the election period.

Reporter Dan Mercer broke the news that Synergy is so financially crippled by Labor’s renewables transition that Energy Minister Reece Whitby asked Cabinet for a $1b bailout late last year.

Yes, it’s amazing that a government so addicted to pumping out media releases couldn’t stretch to sharing that vital information before people went to the polls.

However, Mercer reported, Cabinet had knocked back the request and instead directed Synergy to add to its massive debt burden by taking on a further $500m to keep its head above water.

That revelation once again raises the issue that Labor has never put a figure on how much taxpayers will pay for the renewables transition.

Or what price we will eventually be paying for electricity. Surely that modelling exists.

“The financial difficulties come as the costs to WA of the energy transition mount and as Synergy labours under a government-imposed cap that forces it to sell power to most of its customers at a loss,” the ABC reported.

The Liberals didn’t lay a glove on Labor during the campaign over the looming power crisis.

“They have also prompted warnings that customers not shielded from the true cost of generating power — medium and big businesses — are likely to face major increases to their energy bills.”

Mercer noted an earlier report that the Government was running 60 per cent behind its target for new wind generation.

But the sting is that Labor has already spent 90 per cent of the $3.7b set aside for wind farms and big battery projects to replace its retiring coal plants.

Despite this reality, Premier Roger Cook was still living the dream in Collie on the election trail in February: “Western Australia will be a renewable energy powerhouse. We are the only state in Australia who will be out of coal by 2030.”

The Liberals didn’t lay a glove on Labor during the campaign over the looming power crisis. The Government was wide open on cost, energy security and its lack of progress in rewiring the State, but the Liberals failed to hit the target.

Labor has been forced to rely on subsidies to domestic users to keep them quiet about the real nature of their soaring power bills.

Synergy customers have received $1200 in cost-of-living handouts since Anthony Albanese promised renewables would lower their bills by $275.

The big problem with handouts is that people get used to them — and then depend on them.

If it is true, as Newspoll reported this week, that 80 per cent of Australians support further government handouts to help battle cost-of-living pressures, then this country has a grim future.

Those politicians who have doled out the cash — to the extent that so many people now expect it as a natural role of government — will likely not be in office when their profligacy eventually crashes our economy.

It was no surprise that the strongest support for more handouts came from Greens voters, mainly young people who represent a growing cohort.

And they were also the biggest group that didn’t know if handouts had an inflationary effect. Thirty-five per cent of all people polled said it did, but most of them clearly didn’t care.

The Reserve Bank’s admonitions about rampant government spending at a State and Federal level perpetuating Australia’s inflation problems is clearly falling on deaf ears. The handouts supercharged the problem.

The slow decline of Australia from a prosperous example of sound economic management to a pandering welfare state now seems inexorable. A society infatuated with consumption is unlikely to be attracted to any political party that tells them belt-tightening is needed. So none does.

Hopefully Peter Dutton will have more gumption during the Federal election campaign to push the values of personal responsibility and economic rationalism that were not apparent in the contest for government in WA.

An analysis of the State election results by the Police Union suggests Dutton’s focus on the concerns of Australians living in outer metropolitan areas could reap rewards, even though the State Liberals picked up only a measly proportion of the bounce back from Labor’s unprecedented polling in 2021.

The analysis showed the swing away from Labor in Perth’s nine inner-city electorates was only 8 per cent. They are increasingly tiger country for conservative parties.

But in the 21 middle-suburban electorates the swing blew out to 11.4 per cent and it expanded to 16 per cent in the 14 outer suburban electorates. They encompass the Federal seats of Bullwinkel, Moore, Pearce and Hasluck that Dutton has in his sights.

In WA’s 10 regional electorates the swing away from Labor was 14.2 per cent, which bolstered the Nationals’ impressive lower house results.

As I pointed out in an election night commentary for The Sunday Times, unless the Liberals and Nationals fix their relationship, Labor will continually dominate them with the support of the Greens.

However, both remain blinkered to the much better performance of the amalgamated LNP in Queensland than either of them individually can show at a State or Federal level.

The inability of the two parties to come to any sort of a deal last year over the status of Opposition Leader and a joint Upper House ticket was mainly due to obstinance within the lay Liberal Party.

That party’s focus after this latest drubbing is again on the Liberal leadership. It should be on linking with the Nationals.

And the leadership issue is far less pressing than attending to the new Upper House voting laws which have virtually disenfranchised regional people, with the single statewide electorate forever limiting the Nationals to two MLCs when they have previously had double that number.

The new laws have also cost Labor its majority, leaving the government hostage to the Greens — who will expand their numbers from one to four — and an unstable hotch-potch of minor party representatives.

Cook gormlessly says Labor is used to being in the minority in the Upper House. That trashes the work of generations of Labor MPs who fought to change that unfair situation.

Balance-of-power horse-trading corrupts principled decision-making. The Greens are already throwing their weight around, threatening to “force” Labor to negotiate on issues where they say it has “dropped the ball”.

Like not stopping the use of gas or banning its future development.

It would be in the interests of the Labor, Liberal and National parties to amend the badly-devised electoral laws before the terms of current members expire on May 21 and the minor party deluge eventuates.

That delay provides an opportunity to increase the ridiculously low new quota of 2.7 per cent which will make the council a self-perpetuating dogs breakfast of fringe-issue arm-twisters.