SYDNEY, Aug 14, 2018 – Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been forced to reveal that there is no evidence to support his claim that the National Energy Guarantee will reduce power prices.Turnbull and Energy Minister Frydenberg have been hiding the modelling behind the NEG for weeks as they seek to con state leaders as well as their own colleagues into supporting their policy – which independent modelling has shown will actually increase power prices. [1]
“Today’s non-revelation is telling, in that it shows the government is relying on a single Excel spreadsheet to justify their claim that the NEG will reduce power prices”, Greenpeace Australia Pacific Campaigner Alix Foster Vander Elst said.
“Either that or the government is covering up the full report on the impact of the NEG because they have taken the political gamble that risking a cover-up is better than making the modelling and assumptions behind it public.
“There is not a single reference to a $550 price drop in this document. The government is just plucking random numbers out of the air.
“It’s time for the Prime Minister to come clean and admit that more renewables will reduce power prices. He has to stare down dinosaurs on his back-bench and put in place a half decent pollution reduction target. That’s what industry needs.
Already-public data was reshared this morning in response to a Senate motion passed yesterday, demanding the government publish the information as the Coalition party room debates the federal NEG legislation ahead of a phone conference with the states to discuss the mechanism.
What the government does not justify their claims that the NEG will reduce power prices and raises further questions about how they came to make such a claim that they have consistently failed to back up.
“If someone had told me the government was using a single spreadsheet to support its fabrications about the NEG reducing power prices I probably would not have believed them,” Ms Foster Vander Elst said.
“But in the wake of the Great Barrier Reef funding fiasco it seems that truth is stranger than fiction. Turnbull and Frydenberg have been trying to cover this up for weeks and we now have further evidence that the government is treating taxpayer money like its own private ATM – withdrawing money and dishing it out how it wants, in the shadows and without oversight.
“Turnbull and Frydenberg have treated their own Coalition colleagues and the states as mugs, by negotiating in bad faith from the get-go. They refused to show the states the legislation they were asking them to sign up to and eventually had to be forced by the Senate to publish the spreadsheet, that doesn’t even support their demonstrably false claims.
“Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and other states leaders were right to try and ameliorate this dog of a policy with their moderate demands but the government’s deception should lead them to re-evaluate their positions entirely. If Victoria and the other states remain serious about only supporting a credible climate policy that won’t slam the brakes on their renewables then the government has just dealt itself out of the game.
“The veil has now been lifted on the Coalition’s power price lies. The NEG is a failure on every metric the government has used to justify it. Those within the government’s own ranks and the states duped into backing the NEG are really left with no choice but to pull their support of a scheme that the government’s own numbers confirm will do nothing to reduce prices or emissions.”
Notes:
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/research/neg-report/
For interviews:
Martin Zavan, Greenpeace Australia Pacific Communications Campaigner
0424 295 422
