LEAN Pickings

A confidential submission from the Labor Environmental Action Network tells the party what voters already knew: Bill Shorten should have costed his renewables policies. By Nick Cater.

The postmortem to Labor’s election loss could have been written before voting began, such was the party’s determination to pursue goals on climate change that it would never be able to sell to the voting public.

This week a confidential submission to the party’s post-election review from the Labor Environment Action Network blamed Bill Shorten’s defeat on his inability to answer questions about the cost of his 45 per cent emissions reduction target.

“Labor was unable to put a price on its climate change action plan,” a LEAN member says in the submission. “It couldn’t say how much it would cost, where the money was coming from or what economic dividend it would deliver or save. It is basic Australian politics — how much, who pays, what does it save. We had no answers.”

The credit for the climate change discussion from abstract morality to an economic challenge must go to Angus Taylor, the Energy Minister, who was determined to expose the cost in jobs, wages and economic growth of pursuing an over-ambitious target.

Not everybody in the Coalition leadership was convinced that climate policy could be an election winner. Well-funded, orchestrated attacks against high-profile Liberals in wealthy metropolitan seats led some fear that a robust stance on energy policy would lead to the loss of seats.

For Taylor’s strategy to succeed, two things were required. First, Labor’s policy would need to be reliably costed, meaning that the Coalition’s policy would have to be costed too. The Coalition’s target of a 26 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 would not be entirely without costs.

Second, the party would have to find an agreed position on this perennially divisive policy where views within the party room differed widely.

The Menzies Research Centre began working on climate policy towards the end of last year, helping to pave the way for Brian Fisher’s definitive costing of climate policy that provided the ammunition to discredit Labor’s agenda. We also analysed polling discovering a clear consensus of public opinion among those we have come to know as the quiet Australians. Most wanted Australia to meet its international commitments but not at the expense of jobs or wages.​

When politics resumed after the Christmas break, Shorten’s climate policy seemed to be working well for Labor. The question of cost had been largely overlooked by journalists who, stifled by the conventional wisdom on climate, were broadly sympathetic. 

Once Fisher’s findings began to emerge, the debate was transformed. Shorten and his climate and energy spokesman Mark Butler were completely unprepared. Once journalists saw the whites of their eyes, the attack became relentless.

This week’s admission from Labor’s environment policy ginger group was vindication for Taylor, who faced baseless, personal attacks on him and his family led by climate ideologues who had business connections with the renewable energy industry. They stood to gain financially from the subsidies Taylor was determined to abolish, not that they would openly declare the conflict.

The degree of self-interest on behalf of many advocates of “real-action of climate change” (read: real subsidies for rent-seekers) is seldom acknowledged in this debate.

Behind the moral posturing, the result of Labor’s policy would have been a crude transfer of wealth from customers and taxpayers to renewable energy providers. Implicit subsidies, paid in the form of higher bills or taxes, would be extracted from the relatively poor to relative wealthy investments and corporations.

“Labor’s policies were generally well received by the climate change, environment and - renewables ‘industries’,” the submission notes, without irony. “This support, however, didn’t translate to the voting public. While we have walked away from the policy purity of a carbon price across the economy, our policies are still in the technocratic and market mechanism sphere.”

For all its new found openness, however, Labor remains hemmed in by the delusion that it was not the policies that were at fault, but its inability to sell them.

Party leaders are reluctant to conclude that in the end the public may be right, and the ideologues who formulated the policy might not have factored in that the cost was simply unacceptable.