“Today, the PM said business and workers have ‘common interests’; they sure do, for every renewable sector job created in the decade post 2009, five manufacturing workers lost theirs. Not only is net zero destroying Australian businesses, but also the future of working Australians,” said Saxon Davidson, Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Following the Prime Minister’s address to the National Press Club today, the IPA released new research analysing net zero’s five key federal legislative pillars. These policies are inflicting significant economic and social costs on Australians, the five pillars of net zero are:
- The Climate Change Act 2022, entrenching the Paris Agreement in federal legislation.
- The ‘Safeguard Mechanism’, imposing extra costs on large projects by requiring them to cut emissions or purchase carbon credits, threatening jobs.
- The Future Made in Australia Policy, subsiding the financially unviable renewable sector.
- The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, forcing the electrification of Australian life.
- The Large-scale Renewable Energy Target, which in 2024 saw Australian energy users pay $1.7 billion in secret charges to prop up Australia’s largest wind and solar projects.
“You cannot grow productivity and manufacturing in Australia when energy prices, already at record levels due to net zero, keep rising,” Mr Davidson said.
“Yet the more net zero fails, the more the federal government chooses to dig Australia into a deeper economic and energy hole by adding more pillars to the policy in an effort to mask its defects.”
As the Prime Minister said today, the federal government still clings to the impossible folly of trying to turn Australia into a ‘renewable energy superpower’. This at the same time an outage at Victoria’s Yallourn power station has occurred, which will remain offline for weeks, and will put the National Energy Market under further stress.
“Decades of poor decision making based on flawed and misleading advice and ideology has produced a legislative framework that is pushing up power bills, degrading our energy reliability, and crushing the most productive sectors of Australia economy,” Mr Davidson said.
“The five pillars of net zero have been deliberately designed to bind future governments to the Paris Agreement. On top of this, many more radical environmental policies are being proposed to ensure the policy of net zero will survive because it is entrenched in a spider’s web of laws.”
“There have already been calls for the reintroduction of nature positive laws, designed to lock up a third of Australia’s land and sea areas, as well as the establishment of a federal EPA, which will just duplicate the role of state-based bodies and delay nation building projects,” Mr Davidson said.
The Prime Minister’s speech follows the release of IPA research that shows mainstream Australians still do not believe net zero is in their interests. At a time of record and rising energy bills, 79 per cent want affordability and reliability as the government’s focus.
“As Robert Bryce – who is touring Australia for the IPA at present – has said, it doesn’t have to be this way. Australia is an energy superpower, but it’s acting like an energy weakling. We need to pull the plug on net zero,” Mr Davidson said.
To download the IPA’s research click here.
To get your tickets to see Robert Bryce in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney click here.
