Australian federal election outlook: A renewables boom for the regions?

360info

"If we get it right, we've got the lowest cost renewable energy of any large country. And that could be the basis of strong competitiveness in a wide range of industries that use a lot of energy. Most of these — and the jobs in them— are based in rural and provincial Australia.   In fact, the economic growth in the next half century in Australia will be disproportionately in rural and provincial areas because that’s where the zero-carbon industrial growth will be."  Economist Ross Garnaut AC, who is Professor Emeritus at both the Australian National University and The University of Melbourne, explains where renewable energy is at in Australia in the lead-up to the federal election.

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00:00Renewable energy is the lowest-cost form of energy.

00:03There's lots of smoke screens written about that,

00:05but serious people in business who work on these things

00:08know that you wouldn't invest now in a coal-based power station,

00:14even if there were no concern for climate change.

00:17That's a great boon to Australia because we can, if we do it right,

00:22I mean, we're not doing everything right at the moment,

00:24but if we do it right, we've got the lowest-cost renewable energy

00:27of any large country,

00:29and that can be the basis of strong competitiveness

00:32in a wide range of industries that use a lot of energy.

00:36Most of these are based in rural Australia,

00:39rural and provincial Australia,

00:41the Midwest of Western Australia,

00:44the Central West of Queensland,

00:46provincial areas that will do very well

00:49if the world succeeds in getting to net zero.

00:52We're talking about far more jobs than in the coal and gas industry.

00:55It's a very important paper that the Superpower Institute

00:58released in the Parliament last November

01:01called the New Energy Trade.

01:03It goes through the arithmetic.

01:05We're talking about something very large in scale,

01:07something that can transform the prospects of the Australian economy,

01:12many more jobs than in coal and gas.

01:15We can be a great exporter of processed minerals,

01:20of transport fuels that embody biocarbon

01:26made from plants grown in rural Australia,

01:29a lot of chemical products that we currently import,

01:33which we will be a big exporter if the world goes to net zero.

01:37For example, urea, that big farm product,

01:40we would be making that in Australia

01:43and exporting it to the rest of the world in huge quantities,

01:46probably the world's biggest exporter in a zero-carbon economy.

01:49Certainly the mood has moved in a way that weakens the barriers

01:56to Australia increasing emissions and not meeting its emissions targets.

02:01Both government and opposition are committed to net zero.

02:06If we have too much gas development,

02:09it will become impossible for us to achieve net zero.

02:14That was a constraint on gas developments.

02:17It may be a less powerful constraint in current circumstances,

02:23but that depends on our own political choices.

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