In this interview Adam Creighton appeared on Sharri Sky News Australia to discuss the IPA’s research on Net Zero.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Sharri Markson:
Well, to discuss, let’s bring in now Victorian Liberal Party President, Michael Kroger, and IPA Senior Fellow, chief economist Adam Creighton. Great to see you both. Michael, what’s your reaction to this? Do you think the laws need to be changed if a minister like Anika Wells can just get away with this?
Michael Kroger:
Look, of course they do, and I think the first political party which says this sort of wholesale rorting of the public purse has to be stopped and proper guidelines need to be put in place. The first party that does that will win huge community support. People are outraged. Albo is saying, “Oh, he doesn’t know what happened with the comm car.” Who keeps a car waiting for seven hours for $1,000? Would you do it if it was your money, Anika? No, of course you wouldn’t. The restaurant in Paris at the public’s expense and on and on and goes. How do people like her turn up for work each day with a straight face and not be humiliated and embarrassed that they’ve plundered the public purse to the extent she has and has no shame whatsoever?
Any normal person, any normal middle class person would’ve simply said, “I’m sorry, I stuffed up. I’m going to resign.”
Sharri Markson:
Or at least offer to pay it back, but Adam, she hasn’t even done that.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. Well, look, she’s digged in, and I’m not really surprised. My view on here is slightly different. I think the rules are far too generous. I agree with Michael, they should be changed, but the reality is both sides do this. We had the Bronwyn Bishop helicopter, we had Susan Ley. Both sides have done this for years, and I just think there’s so much hypocrisy on both sides with these sorts of scandals. I understand why it’s a political story, I understand why the media loves it, but we’ve spent a week talking about this and we’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars. This is small beer in a budget of $752 billion, and I just think, sure, this is wasteful, but the whole edifice of Canberra is extremely wasteful. The ministers all have-
Sharri Markson:
Adam, if you put all these expenses-
Adam Creighton:
… 22 personal staff, they have…
Sharri Markson:
Sorry to interrupt, but if you put every politician’s… If you put them all together, the expenses of the hundreds of politicians, that will be a decent size money, especially the international travel for the Albanese government ministers. And the difference with Bronwyn Bishop and Susan Ley is that they actually had to resign and pay back the money. We’re not seeing this accountability from Albanese.
Adam Creighton:
No, look, that is true and that is an interesting point, but I also would say that the opposition, the coalition have been relatively reticent in their attacks, I would say, on the minister, because they’re all worried, I think, that journalists will scrutinise their travel. Because let’s face it, most of them… Start again, I’d be surprised if an MP could put the hand on their heart and say that they’d never booked travel for personal reasons and arranged work stuff around it, work meetings around it. It’s fairly common in my understanding, and it’s part of the perks of the job. We might not like that, but that’s the reality.
Sharri Markson:
Well, that’s why we’re all saying change it.
Adam Creighton:
And the story, as fun as it is, it’s distracting from the NDIS and tens of billions wasted on everything else.
Sharri Markson:
You really have left journalism, Adam, if you think this is a distraction, that’s for sure, but I want to turn to the Greens now because they’ve actually had taxpayers pay to fly their family members to Palestinian protests and music festivals. This was in The Australian’s front page today, and The Oz reports that the relatives of the Green senators, Mehreen Faruqi, Sarah Hanson Young, and David Shoebridge have all benefited from these taxpayer funded perks. The Oz reports that Faruqi had taxpayers pay for family members’ return flights from Sydney to Melbourne in November 2023 where she attended a pro Palestinian protest. And then the revelations this afternoon that Sarah Hanson Young charged taxpayers $50,000 for her lobbyist husband to fly from Adelaide to Canberra where he works for his own company as a lobbyist. Michael, what do you think? Are either of these examples appropriate?
Michael Kroger:
Well, the Ben Oquist one is quite serious because as you say, he works as a lobbyist in Canberra. Apparently, most of these 78 trips were during the sitting week, so as Kevin Miller has just said, I hope he was just sitting in his hotel room for the days that he was in Canberra. Interesting to know when he arrived and when he left. He must have just been sitting in his room in the hotel because he certainly couldn’t have been doing any lobbying work whilst he was there, because that would raise a whole series of questions about the use of these entitlements because the taxpayer paid for his airfares. Really? Sarah Hanson Young, really? She needs to give a full explanation of this. If he did any lobbying work, Sharri, whilst he was there, an unkind person might think that crosses the line between family reunion and something else.
Sharri Markson:
No, it is disgusting. It actually makes you sick of the whole lot of politicians, at least those who take the Mickey like this out of the taxpayer.
Let’s turn now to the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO. It’s released a report today that you would have heard of by now on Sky News. In its report, it warns that coal will still be needed to secure the energy grid until 2049, 12 years longer than planned, and Adam, it also revised the cost of the net-zero transition to $128 billion.
Adam Creighton:
Well, this was just a fantasy document really of what the government would like to happen, and even in the fantasy document, what’s extraordinary is coal is still required until 2049 by the experts. But you have states like Victoria who’ve actually legislated to close the lawn power station in just three years, in 2028, which is 16% roughly of the energy of the entire state, and also it supports South Australia as well. And then in 2035, Victoria has said that it’s going to close down Loy Yang A, which I think is the second-largest power station in the whole country. So you’ve never seen in the history of Australia such a big gap between economic and scientific reality and political rhetoric. Basically, this is not going to happen.
That report said we had to have basically a doubling of solar and wind in the next five years. That’s just not, sorry, physically possible. It’s not going to happen. So basically, the government is going to end up with mud on its face, it’s going to look extremely embarrassed, I think. And privately, I’m sure you know this, Sharri, talking to people, I think the government has gone way too far in on these emissions targets. They’re not going to happen and they’re going to look really stupid.
Sharri Markson:
Yeah, I think that’s true. They can’t possibly meet the 2030 or 2035 targets. Michael, Chris Bowen was of course asked about this report today and he tried to put a positive spin on it. He was saying that Australian households are leading the charge with solar batteries and electric vehicles, but he ignores the substance of the report.
Michael Kroger:
Well, he talks about Australian households as if they’re soldiers at the Russian front. You should feel good about your batteries and your solar panels and all that stuff, you’re doing great things for the country. Sorry about the electricity bills that you can’t possibly afford. Look, let’s be frank, this is a complete mess in this country. This whole change is a complete mess.
Years ago, three, four, five, six years ago, people thought, right, renewable energy is going to be the cheapest form of energy. It’s clean, it’s very low emissions. We’re making a contribution to lowering the world’s temperature, we’re a great global citizen, and away we go. That’s what people thought they were signing up for. Now what we’ve got is knowledge that they’re no change to the world temperature. This is all symbolic. We’re not making any difference whatsoever to what’s happening in the world, it’s costing a fortune to the average householder.
Chris Bowen, one of the most unsuccessful ministers in the history of the Commonwealth has been given a blank check of hundreds of billions of dollars to transform the energy sector. Sharri, haven’t we been told for months that the coal-fired power stations have to close because they’re at the end of life, the end of life and therefore, they have to close. And of course, no board wants to put money into something because the wind is blowing against coal anyway from a political point of view. Now we have this-
Adam Creighton:
They’re actually not at the end of life, by the way, Michael. Just to interject, they’re not at the end of life.
Michael Kroger:
But that’s what we keep getting told, and we get the government involved-
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, indeed, indeed.
Michael Kroger:
They get people money rearing to keep it going for just a few more years, a few years. Who is going to pay, Sharri, for the next 20 years of band-aids for coal-fired power stations to stay open? We’re subsidising them too?
Sharri Markson:
I know, subsidising continuing the lifecycle of the coal-fired power stations, subsidising the renewables. The private market should just be sorting this out without any government subsidies for electricity.
Michael Kroger:
Correct.
Sharri Markson:
All right. Michael Kroger, Adam Creighton, thank you both so much.
This transcript of Adam Creighton speaking on Sharri Sky News Australia from 10 December 2025 has been edited for clarity.
