The government’s energy policy hinges on some tricky wordplay about coal’s role

The most important thing to understand about the federal government’s new National Energy Guarantee is that it is designed not to produce a sustainable and reliable electricity supply system for the future, but to meet purely political objectives for the current term of parliament.

The new policy could end up feeding demand for coal. 

Those political objectives are: to provide a point of policy difference with the Labor Party; to meet the demands of the government’s backbench to provide support for coal-fired electricity; and to be seen to be acting to hold power prices down.

Meeting these objectives solves Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate political problems. But it comes at the cost of producing a policy that can only produce further confusion and delay.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a professor from the School of Economics at The University of Queensland, John Quiggan - “The government’s energy policy hinges on some tricky wordplay about coal’s role.”