The Treasurer has looked into his crystal ball to summon a vision for the nation that reinforces all the destructive net zero policies that made us vulnerable to economic decline in the first place.
While Treasurer Jim Chalmers correctly observed this week that the world is becoming a more dangerous and less stable place, his department’s Intergenerational Report reinforces all the wrong steps the government has taken to make Australia more vulnerable to global shocks and economic decline.
The latest Intergenerational Report, released by the federal government on Monday, outlined a 40-year economic projection for Australia.
Unfortunately, it reads more like the Albanese government’s vision for the future.
The report, correctly, points out that “strategic competition between major powers, combined with increasing global conflict, is driving geopolitical fragmentation.”
This should be seen not only as a threat but an opportunity for the Albanese government to restore the nation’s sovereign capability and withstand the uncertainty of global markets.
This would be a real “future made in Australia” – not the government’s scheme to subsidise renewable energy which is reinforced by the Intergenerational Report – but one in which policy supports the nation’s self-sufficiency in key sectors like energy, food, industry and defence.
Rather, the report spends an excess amount of time evaluating the growth of artificial intelligence as an industry over the next 40 years and what we can do as a nation to adapt.
While AI may become increasingly important to our economy, we still need to have key industries which AI can actually improve, such as energy, mining, agriculture, and manufacturing.
We must as a nation reflect on the reality that supply chain stability, whether global or regional, cannot always be guaranteed.
This has become obvious this year in the fallout from the conflict in Iran.
Unfortunately, Chalmers’ report fails to advocate for what is required and reinforces the government’s belief that our long-term economic and national security problems can be fixed with renewable energy, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Net zero has led to our energy grid becoming unreliable, and power prices increasingly unaffordable.
This is a future we should be avoiding, not projecting for.
Net zero has led to Australian industries becoming increasingly unviable, and making us more vulnerable as a nation to global pressures, as gas and oil price shocks over the last four years have revealed.
Australian industries becoming less competitive is a direct result of the policy of net zero and the renewable transition.
The biggest net zero lever the government uses is the Safeguard Mechanism, a carbon tax targeting emission intensive projects and facilities such as mines, power plants, and smelters.
Previous IPA research found that facilities will incur a safeguard carbon tax cost between $7.1 billion and $11.7 billion by 2029-30.
Facilities that fall under the Safeguard Mechanism include the recently bailed out Tomago Smelter and Whyalla Steelworks, which recently cut more than 500 direct jobs.
These industries are the ones that provide the energy, fuel, and manufactured goods we require to survive as an independent nation.
The Albanese government’s current policy position is exacerbating our reliance on increasingly uncertain global supply chains and undermining our economic resilience and independence.
This is most obvious with fuel security, in which our final two refineries face a carbon under the Safeguard Mechanism, and we have gone from a country that imported 11 per cent of our refined petroleum in 2002, to about 90 per cent today.
This was why the Prime Minister made his successful, if mildly embarrassing, begging tour for more fuel in Southeast Asia.
We as a nation need to halt and reverse these policies which have lowered Australian living standards and made us vulnerable, not surrender to a vision for the future in which they become the norm.
