Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government is reported poised to axe the primary agency supporting clean energy in a move that would break a pre-election promise and send investment offshore according to industry sources.
A number of news media have reported today that the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will be abolished in tomorrow’s federal budget.
ARENA has $2.5 billion budget to fund renewable energy projects, support research and development activities, and support activities to capture and share knowledge.
AAP Newsagency reports The Australian Financial Review and other outlets, including Fairfax Media confirmed today the agency is on a list of scores of agencies to be axed or merged in a plan to save $470 million over four years.
The recent government-appointed Commission of Audit recommended that ARENA be dissolved and its activities rolled into the Department of Industry.
Last week in a speech ARENA’s chief executive, Ivor Frischknecht, indicated that his organisation may find itself forced by legislation to operate in defiance of the government, if the forthcoming federal budget were to slash its funding.
Fairfax Media reports the Liberal-National government, which had already sought to cut ARENA’s budget back to $2.5 billion to 2022, will reportedly strip the agency of the $1.3 billion in funding that it has not already allocated to renewable energy projects.
That money would be booked as a saving to the budget and legislation would be moved to dissolve ARENA as an independent agency, New Corporation papers reported.
About $1 billion in existing contracts currently managed by ARENA would still be honoured.
The agency, established through the combination of other bodies in July 2012, aims to increase the supply and competitiveness of renewable energy such as large-scale solar photovoltaic plants and other emerging technologies.
“What’s disappointing here is that the Coalition really went out of its way prior to the election to restate their commitment to ARENA,” Kane Thornton, deputy chief executive of the Clean Energy Council told Fairfax Media.
Finance Minister Senator Mathias Cormann rejected suggestions any of the planned closures are ideologically driven.
“Government has become way too big and way too wasteful,” he told ABC Radio on the eve of Tuesday’s budget.
The government was simply assessing whether some functions could be merged or farmed out to the private sector, he said.
“There have been too many agencies responsible for the same area of government,” Senator Cormann said.
“This leads to blurred lines of accountability, it leads to uncoordinated action.
“And we think by doing what we’re proposing to do that we can make government decision-making and government service delivery more effective.”
The Liberal-National government also supported the Renewable Energy Target (RET) before the September election.
It said it would support the existing goal of supplying 41,000 gigawatt-hours of clean energy, such as from wind farms and hydropower, by 2020.
It has since set up a review of the target led by businessman and climate change sceptic, Dick Warburton, which the renewable energy industry fears will dilute or delay the RET goal.
ARENA chairman Greg Bourne warned that if the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) was axed as promised, major changes were made to the renewable energy target, and ARENA’s unallocated funds was returned to consolidated revenue, then the government would be ‘‘clearing the decks’’ of support for renewable energy.
Mr Bourne told Fairfax Media there had yet to be a formal notice from the Abbott government that it would move new laws to repeal ARENA’s legislation.
Until any repeal was successful in parliament, management would have to continue to run ARENA according to the legislation that is in place, which also sets out the agency’s budget, he said.
One Response
Every other OECD country (with perhaps the exclusion of Canada) is taking action on climate change.
Abbott and these insufferably infantile, anti-intellectual conservatives who now occupy our government, have an opportunity to skew the economy such that future generations do not do the “very heavy lifting” of living in perilous, climactic conditions.
To axe renewable energy programs is an ecocidal action which is not unlike trading with the enemy in a time of impending war.
Unfortunately, the language around climate change has to change to a more urgent and violent nature if we are to galvanise people into action.