Page 2599 - Week 07 - Thursday, 2 August 2018
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(b) the Federal Government’s proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) has been broadly criticised for:
(i) its weak emissions reduction target that is incompatible with the Paris Climate Agreement commitment;
(ii) its predicted negative impact on the renewable energy sector;
(iii) its failure to recognise the additionality of state and territory renewable energy targets;
(iv) its likely poor economic outcomes for Australian consumers and the Australian economy; and
(v) the likelihood it will be used as a “Trojan horse” for policies to prop up Australia’s coal industry; and
(2) calls on the ACT government to:
(a) use the upcoming Energy Council meeting to advocate for improvements to the NEG; and
(b) only support a national energy policy that addresses the above shortcomings, and that will genuinely help the National Energy Market transition to a more modern, sustainable, affordable, and reliable system.
The national energy guarantee—as it is commonly known, the NEG—is a policy proposed by the federal government, supposedly as a way to improve the reliability of the national energy market, to reduce costs for energy consumers, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is also supposed to provide investment certainty to the electricity generation sector. These are indeed noble goals. Unfortunately, in its current form the NEG is largely false advertising. It will not achieve what it promises. In fact, it is likely to have a negative impact in all of the areas it claims it will improve.
This motion therefore calls on the Assembly to endorse the ACT’s position at the upcoming COAG Energy Council meeting to seek improvements to the national energy guarantee. At the meeting we will advocate for improvements to the NEG in an attempt to make it into a workable energy policy. The motion calls on the ACT to support only a national energy policy that will genuinely help the national energy market transition to a more modern, sustainable, affordable and reliable system. We do not believe the current NEG proposal will achieve this.
Members may have noticed that last year the NEG policy suddenly popped into existence. Its speedy appearance was particularly suspicious given that the NEG is supposed to fix one of the most complicated and difficult problems on the policy landscape: the array of challenges facing Australia’s electricity sector.
The NEG’s strange arrival and its strange form make sense when you look at the environment in which it was born. The federal government had already rejected previous promising energy policies such as the carbon tax, the emissions intensity scheme and, most recently, the clean energy target which was recommended by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, leading a panel of well-recognised leaders in energy policy and other fields who spent many months working on that policy, engaging with stakeholders and travelling overseas to look at what other jurisdictions
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