The Liberal Party’s new energy policy recycles discredited claims and fossil fuel talking points, undermining public trust and delaying the essential task of real action.

A Senate committee is currently investigating the integrity of information around climate and energy in Australia, and it’s unveiled some disturbing and frankly shocking examples of misinformation and disinformation.

There are hundreds of submissions, ranging from the downright batty, to the entirely self serving and the very imaginative. I, for instance, am accused in one submission of being a 40-year old funds manager in England with a full head of hair.

But perhaps the perfect amalgam of all this misinformation and disinformation and its impact on Australia’s social and political discussion is not in front of the committee at all – although it should be: It’s the newly released Liberal Party energy policy.

The Liberals have managed to pick out some of the worst memes around energy and climate, and the fossil fuel industry’s talking points, put them in a single document, and declared it to be policy.

It might have been useful had it been titled “climate and energy myths.” Instead it is described as: “Affordable and responsible: The Opposition’s Plan for affordable energy and lower emissions.”

We don’t have the time to go through all the untruths and misleading statements, so we are going to focus on the big ones – the ones that underpin the Liberal contention that renewables cannot power a modern economy, are too expensive, will lead to blackouts, and the lie that its policies are consistent with the Paris climate treaty.

Can’t power a modern economy?

The Liberals continue to spread nonsense about the ability of renewables to power modern economies. Liberal leader Sussan Ley, as written here, even claimed that a single solar PV inverter was responsible for the dramatic blackout in Iberia in late April. Her argument is that there was too much wind and solar in the system.

The blackout was not about renewables at all, but the protocols for managing the grid. Australia learned a lot about this in the South Australia blackout in 2016 – the state now has the most reliable grid in the country and its share of wind and solar has nearly doubled since then to a world leading 75 per cent (yearly average).

Wind and solar reach more than 100 per cent of South Australia’s electricity demand on a near daily basis, and excess power is stored in batteries or exported to other states. Ley insists that the grid can only be maintained with “baseload”, but South Australia hardly has any and soon will have none.

Technology has changed. The market operator has adapted.

In Western Australia, the world’s biggest isolated grid, with no connections to other states, the share of wind and solar has reached a remarkable peak of 89 per cent. No problems for the grid: It requires a different management approach to the old fossil fuel based system, and the speed and versatility of batteries helps a lot.

Spain is now committed to building a lot of big batteries. It probably should have done that a few years ago. It turns out that big batteries are not as useless as former Liberal leader Scott Morrison would have had us believe.

Too expensive?

The Liberals, and the Nationals, and many conservative commentators, like to use scary numbers to back their claim that the cost of reaching net zero is crippling. Their favourite number is the $9 trillion published a few years ago by the Net Zero Australia report.

That claim has been debunked, by the very authors of that report, who point out that the “additional cost” of net zero according to their modelling is $300 billion over 25 years.

It’s a shame they didn’t make that abundantly clear at the outset. Some may contest that new number, but it is not $9 trillion. That is mostly the cost of the money that has to be spent regardless of any net zero target.

But this is what Coalition MPs have been sending out to constituents this week. “The Coalition’s Cheaper, Better, Fairer Energy plan is far cheaper than Labor’s $9 trillion net zero plan, which would put Medicare and the NDIS at risk.” The Liberals’ claim is not a mistake. It’s not opinion. It’s a lie.

Blackouts?

Let’s go back to the issue of renewables, and the ability to support a modern economy. The Liberals deliberately misrepresent Labor policy, saying it is “all renewables.” It is not, it includes a fair amount of gas, although the expectation is that it will be rarely used.

And to justify their claims of imminent blackouts, the Liberals write in their policy document: “All mainland states on the National Electricity Market are expected to breach the reliability standard in the coming years.”

The Liberals cite as their source the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest Electricity Statement of Opportunities, its 10-year planning document. In short, the Liberals say, there will not be enough electricity to power the economy, or your home.

But this is simply not true.

This is what AEMO actually says: “AEMO forecasts sufficient generation capacity to meet growing electricity demand within the relevant reliability standards in most regions and years in the next decade so long as these investments are delivered to schedule.”

The Liberals publish a graph in their document, the one above and to the right, to support their claims. But as AEMO makes clear, this graph is only produced because it is required to under certain definitions. Those assumptions include only projects that have reached a certain stage of development.

If you include all the other projects that will be built under state and federal schemes, then there is no predicted reliability shortfall at all (see graph on the left that the Liberals did not publish). The same scare tactic about these forecasts is used on an annual basis by the Murdoch and other conservative media.

Of course, it does depend on the new capacity being built. And what might be the biggest threat to that? The Coalition, of course, either through its offshoots such as the new LNP government in Queensland which is tearing up planning approvals and state renewable targets, or the scare campaign being led by key Coalition figures.

Consistent with Paris?

The treaty makes it very clear. There is no rowing back, or diluting of targets. Every five years, each country must find a way to do better. Action needs to be accelerated, not slowed down. The target is as close to 1.5°C as possible.

That actually requires a rich and highly polluting country like Australia to reach net zero well before 2050, not afterwards.

The science is clear. And the Liberals are deliberately ignoring it.

It is astonishing that the Liberals say they can scrap the net zero target and pretend that it remains consistent with the Paris climate treaty, to which Australia is signed.

“The Paris Agreement does not mandate net zero for Australia. Countries choose their own path, their own policies and their own targets,” the Liberals’s climate and energy spokesman Dan Tehan wrote in The Australian on Friday.

Republished from RENEW ECONOMY, November 24 2025.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

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