Rudd Govt’s Climate Poor Budget

Last week’s federal budget was a bad one for all Australians wanting action on climate change. The Rudd government failed to include the renewable energy investments needed to drive the transition to a zero emissions economy. The budget will be remembered as another missed opportunity to make a down payment on Australia’s renewable energy future. 

At face value, Labor’s budget measures for renewable energy sound impressive, but they are miserly when compared to other expenditures. As Dan Cass pointed out recently, the $652 million allocated for a Renewable Energy Future Fund over four years pales in comparison to the $27 billion that will be spent on roads over the next six years.

The move might also be considered a cynical attempt by the government to confuse Australians genuinely concerned about climate change. The money for the Renewable Energy Future Fund, which was initially meant for establishing the government’s now dropped Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), has been added to the existing Clean Energy Initiative (CEI). By combining the ETS savings to the existing CEI program the government can claim to be investing $5.1 billion in clean energy.  So while the investment sounds large, the bulk of the CEI funding is towards carbon capture and storage technology and not renewables.

The Rudd government’s inadequate budget measures were announced just one day after a broad coalition of prominent Australians and organisations signed an open letter to the Prime Minister. Signatories expressed their concern that the Rudd government had still not proposed or implemented measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and called for a massive increase in investment for renewable energy and climate-friendly infrastructure. The letter asked the Prime Minister and Treasurer to match the level of investment in climate initiatives with their government’s $22-42 billion commitment to the National Broadband Network. 

In the lead up to the budget, Matthew Wright, Executive Director of Beyond Zero Emissions said that:

“Most Australians would be shocked that the Rudd government is investing up to 28 times more money in the [national] broadband rollout (A$42 billion) than in renewable energy (A$1.5 billion) and climate-friendly infrastructure."

In response to the budget, Wright had this to say:

“The Rudd government plans to maintain the gulf between broadband and renewable energy investment, confirming the suspicion of many that he considers slow internet more of a moral challenge than climate change.” 

If the federal budget is any indication, decarbonising the Australian economy is not a priority for the Rudd government.