Barnaby Joyce wants the Coalition to ditch support for net zero target

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Australia is being urged to remain ambitious in its bid to reduce carbon emissions as former Nationals Leader Barnaby Joyce pushes his nationals colleagues to scrap net zero. It comes as the CSIRO's final GenCost report shows renewables still have the lowest cost range of any new electricity generation. The coalition's nuclear option - which it took to the last election - remains the most expensive.

Transcript

00:00The CSIRO's report says that for the seventh year in a row, renewables are the cheapest

00:08form of energy.

00:10It says that solar and wind, backed by storage and transmission, remain the lowest cost new

00:16build electricity generation technologies.

00:19That's followed by black coal, then large scale nuclear, and then the most expensive

00:24option it says is small modular reactors.

00:27And that is similar to the policy that the coalition took to the last election.

00:32The Albanese government is being pressured this week in Canberra to do more and push further

00:38on renewable energy on its net zero emissions targets.

00:42One of the UN's top climate officials is in Canberra this week for meetings with people

00:47like the Environment Minister, Chris Bowen.

00:50He's talking about some of the economic benefits, he says, related to a net zero future.

00:57The government has committed to net zero by 2050.

01:00What it hasn't committed to yet is a number that it wants to get to by 2035.

01:05And we're expecting that the government will announce that nearer term goal in September.

01:10And so the coalition remains split on the issue.

01:13What are they saying today?

01:14It is an issue that has been carried over from the last term of parliament, from the last

01:21election.

01:22They can't escape the publicness of this debate.

01:25Last night in the Senate, One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson put forward a motion to essentially

01:30scrap net zero.

01:31And it was interesting to see who from the coalition side voted with her.

01:37National Senator Matt Canavan voted with her.

01:39So did the Liberal Senator Alex Antig.

01:41Those are two people you would expect to be pretty vocal on this issue.

01:46But it shows that the coalition still has some way to go here in determining what it

01:51thinks about net zero by 2050.

01:55Also this week, we've seen Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce put forward his own private members bill,

02:00which would also scrap net zero by 2050.

02:03It's not going to get up, but it does keep that debate going.

02:06Our deputy leader of the Nationals, Kevin Hogan, was asked about what he thinks about that

02:11bill this morning.

02:13Good on him, right?

02:14As I said, we're not a croquet club down here.

02:17We are articulating differences of opinion about policy.

02:20We unlike the Labor...

02:21The Labor Party aren't allowed to disagree publicly.

02:24They work in a socialist thing that you don't disagree and you don't debate publicly.

02:28How unhealthy is that as a party?

02:30We do and it's healthy.

02:34The Labor Party is very happy, however, for the coalition to be debating this publicly.

02:38They think it reflects badly on them and is one of the reasons that they lost the last

02:42election.

02:42They think it's a good news content?

02:53They think they're using the last election.

02:54They think the American D

02:55about 10 years later on.

03:04But we're not doing this leak a lot.

03:07We're due to the Astroon Estado.

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