The political cost of keeping the lights on

There was a timely warning from Labor’s national president on the day the party, and the country, was remembering not only our war dead but also the convulsions caused by the ousting of the Whitlam government.

Fifty years on from the Dismissal, the “born to rule” ethos of the conservative parties appears to have long been dispatched, but Wayne Swan says “the vested interests” that brought down Gough Whitlam “are just as active now”.

In an address to the Chifley Research Centre to mark the anniversary, Swan said the Coalition’s “parliamentary representatives may appear enfeebled and weak”, but those who continue “to sustain the far right are now richer and much more politically active than they have been at any time postwar”.

Electoral funding disclosure laws – which reveal just the tip of the iceberg – show, for example, that Gina Rinehart is a big donor to the Coalition, particularly the Liberal Party, through her company Hancock Prospecting. In the 2023/24 financial year, Australia’s richest person channelled $500,000 to them, and earlier this year she hosted fundraisers for then opposition leader Peter Dutton, charging guests $14,000 each – just below the disclosure threshold.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Sally McManus, criticised Rinehart for acting “like an oligarch” to “influence politics and to scrap workers’ rights”.

Rinehart’s opposition to multi-employer bargaining and labour hire restrictions, backed by the Coalition, failed at the May election. The opposition parties are still pushing her antipathy to meaningful climate change action, however.

She is not alone, of course, and some of Australia’s biggest business identities are bankrolling the right-wing activist group Advance. Ahead of the Liberals’ partyroom meeting midweek to thrash out a policy on net zero emissions by 2050, the lobby group launched a last-minute email campaign to pressure the politicians.

Swan says there’s a growing group of oligarch-type figures who are determined to use their powers “to set the clock back to the last century and create a new establishment based around their interests”.

Malcolm Fraser won the 1975 election in a landslide on the slogan: “Turn on the lights.” His successors decades later are just as focused on the lights, only this time it is about the cost of turning them on.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s number-cruncher and éminence grise, Alex Hawke, signalled before he went into Wednesday’s meeting where it was all heading. A commitment to an emissions reduction target by a set date was “a major mistake” responsible for pushing up energy costs.

The Ley-initiated brainstorming session was designed to keep the party and the Coalition together, and still come up with a “sellable” policy, even if it meant ditching the target and the date.

Hawke said Labor’s policy meant electricity prices have gone up 40 per cent since the 2022 election. Hawke claimed “all the modelling says Labor will never meet these targets” of net zero in 25 years’ time.

Irrelevant to this framing is the science warning that unless Australia and the rest of the world urgently reduce emissions, catastrophic global heating is inevitable. The trend is already perilous.

Ley’s problem is she has left all the reasserting to her rivals and even allies in the party room. Tim Wilson … is clearly exasperated. He is calling for “leadership” to bring the warring factions together and to acknowledge the electoral realities in urban Australia.

Ditch the target and you are sending an unambiguous signal that you are ignoring or denying the science. That’s the view of Keith Wolahan, who lost his Melbourne seat of Menzies in this May’s Albanese landslide.

It’s much like the party’s aversion to targets for female parliamentary representation. The result speaks for itself: six women MPs in the House of Representatives, compared with Labor’s 50.

Undaunted by this logic was the member for the outer-Western Sydney coal seat of Lindsay, Melissa McIntosh. She conducted a survey of more than 1600 people in her electorate and says 65 per cent do not support net zero by 2050, and 89 per cent “are suffering under higher energy prices”. They want the country going in a different direction, she says.

McIntosh, unwittingly or otherwise, put the whole argument in the context of the Liberal Party leadership. On ABC TV she said she is focusing on getting through the net zero issue and will “reassess where we’re going after that”. She also said “it would be the greatest honour to lead the Liberal Party and indeed our nation at some stage”.

McIntosh’s survey is far from representative nationally, however.

A Resolve Political Monitor poll in The Age found not quite one in three Australians wants the government to dump its target.

An Ipsos poll cited on the ABC website finds support for climate action has fallen slightly in Australia and comparable countries since 2022 in a context of high inflation. Support still remains high, however, and higher still among urban and younger voters.

The reignition of the energy wars within the Coalition looks set to claim yet another Liberal leader; it’s just a matter of when. The prospects of the opposition mounting a successful campaign against the government’s climate policies are bleak in any case.

In the 12 years since Tony Abbott’s claims that climate change is “crap” and dealing with it is an unwarranted cost, the equation between energy prices, renewables and fossil fuels has changed dramatically. It is something the Nationals and their conservative allies in the Liberal Party refuse to acknowledge, and they peddle gross misinformation to make their case.

In parliament last week, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen demonstrated how the Nationals’ Matt Canavan had misrepresented a Net Zero Australia report on the cost of going to all-renewable energy by 2050, which he claimed to be $9 trillion. The calculation was investment or capital outlays and not costs to consumers.

This week Bowen and the minister for industry and innovation, Tim Ayres, hosted 13 top American clean tech manufacturing companies “to showcase the immense opportunities in investing in Australian projects”. The Liberals’ and Nationals’ readiness to undermine that investment by creating uncertainty on targets is, according to the government, grossly irresponsible.

Michael Keating, the former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet under Paul Keating, is exasperated that the government has not mounted a stronger campaign against the false linking of the renewables rollout with escalating power prices.

In an article for the Pearls and Irritations website, he cited analysis from Australia’s leading energy and science bodies, which “consistently shows that renewable power, backed by storage like pumped hydro and batteries, is the most cost-effective way to keep reliably powering Australian homes and businesses”.

Research from Griffith University shows that “because gas is so expensive, gas prices drive 50-90 percent of pricing periods in the National Electricity Market”. In addition, outages at coal-fired power stations are responsible for some of the most severe power price spikes in recent years.

This dovetails with a report from The Australia Institute (TAI) linking high export gas prices with huge effects on the domestic market, including the tripling of wholesale east coast gas prices, and the doubling of electricity prices, since exports began in 2015. This is because gas power stations often set electricity prices.

The shadow minister for energy and emissions reduction, Dan Tehan, sees more gas as an essential component for power price reduction. However, TAI’s principal adviser Mark Ogge says Australia has tripled gas production in a decade and “we are still having rolling shortages and high prices”.

Ogge says “new gas projects just mean more gas is exported and result in net zero additional gas for Australians, unless we cut exports”.

The Albanese government in 2022 introduced a wholesale gas price cap, opposed by the Liberals, and extended it to this year. At $12 a gigajoule, some critics still argue the cap is too high even though the government says the cap has helped lower energy bills.

According to Liberal partyroom sources, Wednesday’s five-hour debate saw a clear majority call for a scrapping of the net zero target. A recurring theme in the party room was that rather than try to match their opponents, Liberals should take the fight up to Labor, as they had successfully done with their opposing position on climate.

Driving this behaviour is what RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras calls “defeat denialism”. After the May 3 election shock, instead of “rethinking”, the party believes it needs to “reassert” that the old model wasn’t wrong, the Coalition just “didn’t try hard enough”. Returning to a cultural proxy like climate feels safe, he says. The fact that it stirs media attention is taken as confirmation they are “still king and queens” of the political realm.

Ley’s problem is she has left all the reasserting to her rivals and even allies in the party room. Tim Wilson, who won back the seat of Goldstein from independent Zoe Daniel by the slimmest of margins, is clearly exasperated. He called for “leadership” to bring the warring factions together and to acknowledge the electoral realities in urban Australia.

After the meeting, Tehan, in a brief doorstop, said this goal had been reached and all sides united behind two guiding principles. The first was energy affordability and reliability, and the second was being serious about emissions reduction.

On Thursday, Liberal shadow ministers, in a fraught four-hour meeting, decided to have their cake and eat it too. Gone: a formal goal to achieve net zero. Kept: a “welcome outcome” if somehow their new stance, more favourable to fossil fuels, achieves carbon neutrality by 2050.

This weekend, an accommodation with the climate deniers and coal champions in the National Party is expected to be reached. The cashed-up vested interests Wayne Swan talked about will be happy, but convincing urban and younger voters that their interests are served will be difficult.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 14, 2025 as “The political cost of keeping the lights on”.

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