Treasurer Jim Chalmers has slammed the Coalition’s proposal to keep all coal-fired power plants open, saying it will keep the economy under pressure for longer.
The government this morning released economic analysis suggesting the Coalition’s policy to keep all coal-fired plants open for 10 years from 2028 would cost the budget more than $17 billion.
Appearing on ABC Radio National, Chalmers said the opposition’s approach to net zero was “hare-brained”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Credit: Matt Jelonek
“It would push up power prices and swing a wrecking ball through the budget and the economy,” he said. “The thing that’s putting the upward pressure on energy prices in our grid is not the new, cheaper, cleaner, renewable, reliable energy that we are introducing. It’s the fact that the older, traditional sources of energy are becoming less reliable as they get closer and closer to closure.”
Chalmers said the Coalition’s decision was “driven 100 per cent by the internal party politics of the Coalition party room” and that didn’t stack up economically.
“The reason why it is insane from an economic point of view is because it says that the most expensive part, or the biggest part of the upward pressure on power prices, which is the unreliability of the ageing fleet, they want to extend that for longer and put people under pressure for longer,” he said. “The consequence of all of that would be power prices which are higher, not lower.”
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