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Questioning the National Party's Approach to Energy - (Howard S. Emanuel)

Pardon me for being a little confused with the approach to energy production in Australia and Victoria by the National Party at present, but it seems to me that the policy just does not fit with the professed mandate....

By Howard S. Emanuel - 21st November 2006 - Back to News

QUESTIONING THE NATIONAL PARTY’S APPROACH TO ENERGY

26 OCT 2006

Pardon me for being a little confused with the approach to energy production in Australia and Victoria by the National Party at present, but it seems to me that the policy just does not fit with the professed mandate. That is, the rhetoric seems to over rule the reality.

The professed mandate of course being that the Nationals are the intrinsic voice of rural Australia, pretty much the only voice we are told that rural people need to represent their needs in the parliaments of this country, almost to the exclusion of any other party, organisation, body or individual.

If this is the case and personally I don’t think it is, but if it were, why then do the Nationals not support more fully a policy of embracing alternative energy sources to satisfy the energy needs of the nation. Currently the federal government of which the Nationals are a coalition partner refuse to increase the capacity of the Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets (MRET) scheme, thereby slowing if not altogether blocking a move toward the embracement of energy sources such as Solar, Wind, Wave and Tidal energy to name a few. The current MRET agreement suggests that just 2% of Australia’s energy needs must be met through the use of alternative energy sources and indeed the scheme is just about fully subscribed meaning that a wholesale shift toward alternative energy sources is just not viable nor possible at present. There are companies wanting to develop wind, solar, wave energy facilities in this country at present that cannot because the subsidies available through MRET are fully subscribed. Their products are in no way flawed and this is demonstrated by the fact that these companies are winning contracts overseas to develop alternative energy systems.

So the move or shift toward energy sources other than fossil fuels cannot in one sense happen. Not very progressive when you consider the global shift that is occurring away from burning fossil fuels to create energy. But even more damming is this intransigence, when one considers the implications of climate change for Australia. Many it now seems are beginning to accept the reality of climate change as an occurring event, rather than some notion driven by the intellectual left that was occurring within closed circles of boisterous academics, doomsayers and the like. If climate change is occurring then we are told we can expect a dramatic shift in climate regimes in this country. There will be we are told, less rain and warmer temperatures as a general impact of such changes. When one looks at the unfolding drought across much of Australia, supposedly the worst ever recorded in modern times even the cynical among us has to start to accept that something is happening, that some shift is occurring.

And where are the effects of this current drought being felt most severely, in rural Australia of course. (Sure there will be substantial impacts of climate change felt in major cities but if water conservation measures such as the compulsory installation of water tanks on every dwelling and factory and grey-water recycling systems were installed, Melbourne for instance would have plenty of water. The issue is management of the resource, not necessarily the quantity of the resource.)

And we are told that some of the main causes of climate change are greenhouse emission from motor vehicles, industry and the like. One of the major sources of greenhouse emissions in Victoria at present are the brown coal or lignite fuelled power stations of the Latrobe Valley, indeed Hazelwood power station in the Valley is one of the dirtiest power stations in the world, not just in Australia, but the world. Dirty of course meaning that Hazelwood pumps more greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere than any other power station in Australia. The recently announced targets for reducing emissions from the station are wholly inadequate and in fact quite insulting.

So what are we doing to change this situation, why are we not moving away from a reliance on coal for our energy needs? Well partly it is to do with economics and partly to do with politics.

Economically it is far simpler to continue to produce energy from coal because most of Victorias power stations are set up to burn coal and Victoria has an estimated 500 years of coal reserves, at current usage levels. Never mind that most of these reserves are of the brown coal variety that when burned create much greater volumes of green house gases than does black coal. Fact is, it is cheaper to leave all as is at present rather than face the huge costs of building new power stations that can be fuelled by other sources such as gas, which of course is still a fossil fuel and still produces green house gases. So we just ignore all the signals, all the signs and bowl on merrily as though nothing is really happening, as though the 10 year drought in Victoria is some sort of apparition that will surely fade into oblivion soon, one day, next year for sure or maybe the year after, or at worst the year after that. Sounds awfully like sitting on ones hands to me.

The political reasons for leaving all as is are simple. The community has not in one sense been in a position to embrace the knowledge that underpins alternative energy sources and is therefore want to believe what they are told. And right now there are a great many who are telling the community a whole range of explanations to do with alternative energy sources, some accurate, some anything but. So the community is wondering just why it is that we need to go to all the fuss and bother of changing over our system of coal fired energy production to other means or methods.

So it entails that the majority view seems to be, "well we should just leave as is and don’t bother us with all this fuss about wind energy and solar power". More than this when proposals are put up to develop alternative energy facilities across Victoria and Australia, local communities look at some of the localised impacts of these facilities and they don’t like what they see. They see large industrial infrastructure, dominating what were quite pristine local scapes up until this point in time. They see the impacts of what are essentially industrial facilities on the value of their real estate holdings, whether they be houses or hobby farms or farms. It seems and rightly so that no- one wants to wake up one morning and see themselves staring at 30metre plus towers and all other manner of things. So what is going on here and indeed what is going wrong here?

If we can just take a look specifically here at the wind industry at present as it is this industry which is beginning to grow faster than other alternatives at present, we can see that the current state planning guidelines for example are not only a mess but are in one sense of a very retrograde nature from a social viewpoint. Little or no concern has been given to the regards of people living within close proximity to one of these proposed development sites. Little or no concern it seems has been given to the values of local amenity and indeed the "bank-ability" of this amenity when one considers that tourism flourishes in areas that have natural assets in abundance. Conversely tourists, often from the developed urban centres are not likely to be too interested in seeing more development by the way of major industrial faculties plonked fair in the middle of pristine views; may as well go elsewhere they reason, and they do and the local economy suffers and so do the local citizens.

To buttress this situation we need proper planning controls that alleviate impacts on communities, we need developmental caveats that protect communities and individuals from severe impacts. But we don’t have this at present so it is natural for local people to get upset, in fact to be distraught when they see years of work that has gone into establishing a haven for themselves, blitzed in one fell swoop by some pretty shoddy state planning controls.

The net effect of all this is of course to make alternative energy proposals very unpopular in the areas in which they are to be placed. With wind in Victoria of course that is along the coastline and given its reputation for almost constant wind the South Gippsland coastline has come under immense pressure to accommodate wind power facilities.

The whole thing is an utter mess. An extremely worthy cause such as the move away from coal fired energy to more passive alternatives is being stymied because our governments are lazy and riven by ideology. Too lazy to do the work first, to lock-in caveats that protect both the environment and communities, to ensure that passive energy production is embraced by the broader community not rejected, as is currently the case.

The ideological bent of course is that the current federal government it seems is wanting to embrace the "Nuclear Option" and is bent it seems on ensuring that as time goes by and the need to change wholesale increases, it will only be nuclear that can fill the void and meet the needs of the nations energy requirements, quickly. (Never mind the immense cost that will surely be passed onto consumers). The other obvious political considerations are of course, given that most proposals for wind energy facilities are in rural areas, it is local National Party members who are feeling the heat from an electorate not happy to be the dumping ground for massive infrastructure projects, dumped willy-nilly it seems without due consideration for any thing or anybody.

So at the state level the local National Party members are telling the community what they want to hear, they are railing against the state Labor administrations, being very specific in the science they produce to underpin their arguments, condemning as a total violation any alternative energy proposal that falls within their bailiwick and frankly doing little if any thing else. Their own policy work in this area seems to have taken a very distant second place to the bellicose, bale-full and demonstrative rhetoric that is the common fare of their contribution at many a local community meeting, organised to discuss the matter at hand. Populism it seems rides roughshod over policy.

At a National Level they too are feeling the heat and what they do here is once again by stealth via the oversubscribed MRET scheme, block any capacity or opportunity for alternative energy facilities to flourish and tell their communities that alternatives are not viable, that they are evil in manifest ways and that not to worry, it is better to stick with coal for now rather than be confronted by all the challenges of something new. And when the new is eventually needed, the Nationals as they do at present in Canberra will support the ‘Nuclear Option’.

If the federal Nationals don’t use this approach they do as was recently done at Bald Hills in South Gippsland; they create an utter debacle and call in the federal minister in charge of this policy area and encourage him to use federal powers to veto state planning controls, thereby attempting to derail the project. Sounds pretty much like populism to me, pretty much like all they really care about is protecting the local coalition member and ensuring their policy reflects the will of the community. No thought it seems as to whether the view of the community is either fully informed or morally right, just say what the people want you to say and worry about the current electoral cycle. The difficult questions? Well they can wait for some time in the future. Only trouble with this approach is it seems that the future is suddenly very much upon us and we are still engaging in politics instead of progress.

So just where does the community think that the impacts of climate change driven by greenhouse emissions are going to be felt most severe. In the rural sector of course, in rural Australia where drought is ravaging the land and ravaging the livelihoods of many rural families and communities. And that is precisely my point. The National Party by their gross intransigence and vulgar populism are stymieing the way forward in controlling greenhouse emissions and thereby negating some of the stimulus of climate change, which is beginning to have a disastrous impact in the bush. Livelihoods are being lost and in extreme cases lives are being lost, leaving all manner of devastation in its wake.

And the Nats just don’t get it. They tell us they are the voice of rural Australia, that they care for country folk, but in reality it is they, through their lack of political courage and policy nous who are ensuring that the emerging hell that is rural Australia will continue on long after it should be dealt with, by way of beginning to address climate change.

For those of us that used to think that climate change was a furphy, that myth has now been well and truly debunked. The next mistruth that needs to be exposed is the mythology that insists that the National Party has what it takes to support rural Australia. Clearly it does not, it lacks the courage to act and I wonder truly apart from a few obvious exceptions whether in fact the current parliamentary membership of the National Party at National and Victorian state level really do have a firm grasp of the issues, or whether they are in fact a relic of an old Australia, an Australia that was more certain than it is today, an Australia that was more cloistered and buttressed than it can afford to be today.

Wake up rural Australia, your being conned, wake up and lets begin the battle to underpin our future viability, wake up and demand that those who represent you understand the issues at hand an posses the courage to execute the necessary actions.

Crass and rank populism have prevailed for too long, indeed inaction and a wringing of hands has been the approach of the Nationals as they cow-tow to their senior coalition partners and watch the rural sector decline into the shame that it is today. It is only going to get worse and as this little essay shows you, the Nationals are about the past, at best about the present, but in no way it seems, about the future. And it is the future that is looking very challenging for this nation indeed. In the final wash-up, its your choice, and it will be your fate.

Regards,

Howard S. Emanuel

E-mail: howard@howardemanuel.com

Web: www.HowardEmanuel.com

Source: http://gippsland.com/

Published by: howard-emanuel@hotmail.com

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