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It's quiet out there, too quiet. Outback image from wwww.shutterstock.com

There’s a deafening silence in the ongoing Australian election campaign over the environment. Polling shows increasing public support for greater action on climate change but debate has been mostly missing.

And despite some blows traded over the Great Barrier Reef, the wider environment has made almost no appearance. But this hasn’t always been the case.

From the origins of the environmental movement in the 1970s to the 2007 climate change election that toppled Liberal prime minister John Howard, the environment has been a key battleground, and it could become one again.

Green origins

The environment first emerged as a voting platform in the 1970s, in the wake of controversial proposals to dam Lake Pedder. The United Tasmania Group - a precursor to the Australian Greens party - was formed to oppose the project.

Were it not for the mysterious disappearance of a plane carrying environmental activist Brenda Hean in September 1972, the election that brought us Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam might have had more of a green tinge. Hean’s plan was to sky-write “Save Lake Pedder” over Canberra.

According to Hugh Morgan - former president of the Minerals Council, the Business Council, and the climate-denying Lavoisier Group - the first indication that environmentalism had arrived as a major political force in Australia was the Whitlam Labor Party caucus’s 1975 debate over uranium mining and nuclear power.

But it was not until the 1983 election, with incumbent Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser facing off against Labor leader Bob Hawke, that the environment became politically salient with another Tasmanian dam.

After losing the Lake Pedder battle in 1972, the green campaigners were older, wiser and more determined in their fight to stop the Franklin dam.

Fraser offered the Tasmanian government a A$500m coal-fired power station instead of the dam, but was rejected.

Labor said it would use federal powers to forbid the dam if elected. It did so, and won the inevitable High Court case.

Hawke and Paul Keating, prime minister from 1991, prioritised financial and political changes (bringing down tariffs, floating the dollar) over environmental challenges. However, the issues of logging and uranium wouldn’t go away, and were joined first by ozone and then carbon dioxide.

In 1984, with a tight election looming, Hawke failed to make the Queensland government’s refusal to nominate forests for World Heritage listing an issue.

Labor won the 1987 and 1990 elections, and environmentalists’ preferences helped them squeak home on both occasions. Climate change hardly rated a mention.

Conned by greenies?

With their rising power, both sides of politics initially courted green voters. But this tactic quickly fell out of favour, first with the Liberals and then with Labor. In 1992 the Greens, despairing of being able to influence either of the big parties, formed their own.

By late 1992, Keating was lashing out at green groups, saying:

…the green movement was extremist and not listened to any more … The environmental lobbies have no moral lien over the environment. The issue belongs to the Government, to the nation.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that, according to a source of scholar Joan Staples, Keating reportedly walked into an election planning meeting and announced that “the environment will NOT be one of the priority issues in this election.”

A “bomb” planted on a railway line in northwest Tasmania two days before the 1993 federal election suggested otherwise (it didn’t have a detonator). While media and politician accused “ecoterrorists”; Bob Brown suggested at the time and since that it was a setup to thwart public favour for the Greens.

Nothing changed under the next three year’s of Keating’s government. Another source of Joan Staples recalled that when Keating met green groups before the 1996 election, he walked into the meeting room and pointed at each representative, saying: “Don’t like you. Don’t like you. Don’t know who you are. Don’t like you. She’s alright.”

Despite climbing greenhouse emissions and international pressure on Australia, the environment didn’t feature in the 1998 or 2001 elections, and made only a small but perhaps crucial appearance in 2004 around forestry.

The greatest moral challenge

Liberal prime minister John Howard was unable to ignore the environment three years later. Upon becoming opposition leader in late 2006, Kevin Rudd made climate change not just an issue but “the greatest moral challenge of our generation”.

Howard, who had already tried to keep climate change in a box by reaching for the nuclear option, the Asia Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate and even emissions trading, had no effective reply.

The 2007 federal election, at which Howard became only the second sitting prime minster to lose his seat, has been called, with some justification, “the first climate change election”.

Despite the blood and ink spilt over climate change, it was strangely absent from the 2010 campaign, from which Labor prime minister Julia Gillard eventually emerged victorious. As Laura Tingle has said “it [climate change] wasn’t really something that ever really featured … it just wasn’t there”.

In truth, Gillard had floated a much-derided Citizen’s Assembly ahead of the election. Three years later, despite opposition leader Tony Abbott proclaiming the 2013 poll as a carbon tax referendum, researcher Myra Gurney has found climate change actually rated surprisingly few mentions.

Why the silence?

Besides international positions on climate change, there are any number of local environmental flashpoints that could blow up any day – the Carmichael mine, fracking in New South Wales, or something currently regarded as trivial.
“The environment” has been around as political issue for more than 30 years, and isn’t going to go away, as the environmental and social stresses grow, and the institutional responses lead to “creative self-destruction”.

No doubt both parties will fall over themselves to spruik their support for renewable energy, which is akin to motherhood and apple pie.

What is striking about the history of climate change and federal politics is just how quiet politicians become once they get into campaign mode and face scrutiny for the specifics of their policy proposals.

Perhaps they simply have no answers to awkward questions of what we do to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure and the power of the fossil fuel lobby.

Marc Hudson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Australia's Renewable Energy Target was reduced in 2015. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

With the Australian federal election just over a week away, it’s a good time to review the key milestones in Australian climate policy since the last federal election in September 2013.

After winning office, the Abbott government successfully repealed the “carbon tax”. However, an eclectic group of senators banded together to thwart attempts to remove other elements of Julia Gillard’s carbon price package, including several influential climate change agencies.

Heading into the July 2 election, both parties are clear on their climate policy platforms, committing to distinct approaches to meet international and domestic obligations.

Labor has pledged to establish two emissions trading schemes and achieve a goal of 50% renewables by 2030. While the Coalition, under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, is standing by its Direct Action plan and the pursuit of technological innovation.

The timeline below highlights Australian climate policy interventions from the past three years. A more comprehensive survey of the climate and clean air policy landscape since the last election is detailed in a working paper from the Australian-German Climate and Energy College.

The timeline below is best viewed on a full screen browser window. To navigate, click on the arrow on the right to move forward (and on the left to move back).

Annabelle Workman receives funding to undertake her PhD through a Strategic Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. She has been an employee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, and is affiliated with the Climate and Health Alliance.

Anita Talberg is on an Australian Postgraduate Award PhD scholarship.

If tests of the 100m-long barrier that collects rubbish on the sea’s surface are successful, it could be deployed at a larger scale in the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’

A bid to clear the Pacific of its plastic debris has moved a step closer with the launch of the biggest prototype clean-up boom yet by the Dutch environment minister at a port in The Hague.

On Thursday the 100m-long barrier will be towed 20km out to sea for a year of sensor-monitored tests, before being scaled up for real-life trials off the Japanese coast at the end of next year.

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Some conservationists say endangered birds at the South African reserve take priority, but others argue that locally the big cat is rarer

A leopard killed dozens of endangered penguins at a nature reserve outside Cape Town earlier this month, prompting a renewed debate about how best to protect South Africa’s threatened species.

Ranger Cuan McGeorge found the bloodied, lifeless bodies of 33 African penguins on 11 June scattered across Stony Point, a reserve at the sleepy holiday town of Betty’s Bay that protects one of just four mainland breeding sites.

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The zero-fuel aeroplane, Solar Impulse, is aiming to complete its Atlantic crossing on Thursday with a landing in Seville.

Plans to open a new mine have been criticised by local residents and NGOs for contradicting government commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and phase out coal, reports ENDS

A new surface coal mine could be created on the scenic Northumberland coast if an application is approved next month.

Banks Mining wants to create a three million tonne (Mt) opencast mine which will operate for seven years from an area of 250 hectares at Druridge Bay, between Widdrington and Cresswell.

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Scientists discover corals that look healthy but cannot reproduce, dashing hopes such reefs could repopulate bleached areas

Zombie corals, which look healthy but cannot reproduce, have been discovered by researchers, dashing hopes that such reefs could repopulate areas destroyed by bleaching.

Scientists have also found that a common ingredient in sunscreen is killing and mutating corals in tourist spots.

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As sightings in populated areas increase, authorities are trapping leopards and keeping them captive, often in small cages without adequate food. The solution is to educate the public on coexisting with the big cats, reports Environment 360

When an escaped leopard tackled a man at a poolside on a school campus in the southern Indian city of Bangalore early this year, the video went viral. The victim was one of the wildlife managers trying to recapture the animal. His colleagues finally managed to tranquilize it late that night and return it to a nearby zoo that was serving as a rescue center for a population of 16 wild-caught leopards. A week later, the leopard squeezed between the bars of another cage and escaped again, this time for good.

All the news and social media attention focused on the attack – and none on the underlying dynamic. But that dynamic affects much of India. Even as leopards have vanished in recent decades from vast swaths of Africa and Asia, the leopard population appears to be increasing in this nation of 1.2 billion people. The leopards are adept at living unnoticed even amid astonishingly high human population densities. But conflicts inevitably occur. Enraged farmers sometimes kill the leopards. Trapping is a standard response, but religious and animal rights objections have made euthanasia for unwanted animals unthinkable.

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Australia’s third longest river, the Darling river, has been suffering from low flow for many years. Wilcannia residents say the river system has been mismanaged and problems will affect future generations. Led by the local Barkindji people, approximately 100 protestors blockaded the Barrier Highway, which crosses the river, at the weekend, to highlight their concerns

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Queensland government’s $7m purchase aims to cut back on sediment flowing on to the reef, where it can smother coral and prevent its recovery from bleaching

Environment groups are applauding a “fantastic move” by the Queensland government to protect the Great Barrier Reef by buying a Cape York cattle station responsible for a disproportionate amount of pollution that flows on to the reef.

The Queensland government has spent $7m buying the 560 sq km Springvale Station, situated south of Cooktown, the ABC reported on Wednesday.

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In the 1990s almost all rubbish in the UK went to landfill. Today nearly half of household waste is recycled, thanks to EU legislation

We recycle and compost far more in Britain today than at the turn of the millennium.

Recycling targets come from Europe, and are the result of decades of directives from Brussels to reduce the environmental harm from our rubbish.

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Wenlock Edge There is something about the wildness of the dog rose, the way it stands outside cultivation with a beauty that inspires so much imitation

Days of rain and wild roses, a very British June. After the breathless spell of hot weather and sunshine, the showers were inevitable. Although some have been gently summery – good growing weather, as gardeners say – many have been epic downpours, looming like fantastical cities of cloud, bursting into tempests, thunder and lightning, cats and dogs, stair-rods, flash floods.

Sometimes the whole Wagnerian spectacle comes and goes in minutes, fascinatingly local when a mile or two down the road remains bone dry. The weather feels personal, purging, and inside the storms is another, existential world. Or that’s how it felt, broken down on the motorway. Mercifully, we were in a service station car park, and once the vehicle was fixed enough to get us home, we churned through the carwash of motorway spray back to Wenlock.

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The next phase of a national citizen science project is looking into which bird species are visiting backyard bird feeders

Pollution from many popular diesel cars is much worse when it is colder than 18C outside, new research suggests.

AAP/Lukas Coch

The endorsement for coal mining from the Labor-Coalition duopoly that the election campaign has seen in the last week makes the token appeals that have been made about tackling climate change even more disingenuous.

In this election campaign, the major parties have only brought up climate change when they have been pressed to do so at public forums, like leaders’ debates, the ABC’s Q&A, or when they treat social media as something that needs to be quelled.

The Coalition’s response is simply to say that Australia participated in the Paris agreement, and that is good enough. Labor, on the other hand, points to having outbid the Coalition on targets. Yet neither party is planning to deliver the cuts needed for Australia to play its part in keeping global warming below the 2℃ threshold.

Which leads us back to a question I will deal with at the end of this article: if polls are consistently showing that Australian voters want climate change on the election agenda, why are the leaders keeping so quiet about it?

Neither party is shy of talking up coal, however. Bill Shorten declared last week that a Labor government would not ban coal mining – and that it would be part of Australia’s energy needs for the foreseeable future.

But then on Tuesday, Attorney-General George Brandis, campaigning for Queensland’s most marginal seat of Capricornia, put in one of the pluckiest coal-selling performances of the campaign. He cited the gigantic Adani mine in central Queensland a saviour for the electorate.

We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine, which according to some estimates could generate up to 10,000 jobs. And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.

They see their future prosperity as being bound up in the development of the Adani mine, and they know that if there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future.

But what doesn’t add up here is that around the world, coal is in terminal decline, while the future for renewables is looking very bright and secure.

Just to the north, the federal government has quarantined A$1 billion from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation for projects to “save” the Great Barrier Reef. But this money is demonstrably not going to create any jobs that are relevant to Capricornia. Apparently pork-barrelling is not needed in Capricornia, as the promise of coal is a ready replacement.

But the largest contradiction of all is the complete illogicality of claiming (even if without foundation) to save the reef and solve climate change in one Queensland electorate, while proposing to unleash one of the largest deposits of CO₂ to the world’s atmosphere from the electorate next door.

It is worth heeding 350.org’s Bill McKibben’s warning that if all the coal in the Galilee Basin, of which the Adani mine holds one of the largest deposits, is exported for burning, it would use up 30% of the world’s carbon budget. 100% of the budget gets you 2℃.

And new climate research looking at the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃, suggests the latter will make what we experience at the upper limits of present-day climate variability the new normal around the globe, and worse closer to the equator.

The influence of the mining and energy industry on election campaigns

This leads us to ask serious questions about the influence that mining and energy companies have on major political parties during election campaigns.

There is some variation in which particular mining companies are favoured by particular parties. Labor is certainly not as keen on Adani as the Coalition is. But, in general, the support for fossil-fuel industries is part of the DNA of the major parties today.

It is well known there is a perpetually revolving door between mining/energy companies and politicians/staffers from the major parties.

Take the Labor Party. When Labor lost the last election, Martin Ferguson, Craig Emerson and Greg Combet either took up management jobs with mining and energy companies and associations or worked as consultants for them.

Combet, a former climate change minister, took up consultancies for coal seam gas companies AGL and Santos. Ferguson, resources minister during Labor’s last term of office, landed the position as chairman of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s advisory committee only six months after leaving politics.

With the Coalition, former National Party leader Mark Vaile is chairman of Whitehaven Coal, the company at the centre of protest and controversy at the Maules Creek mine. Another former National Party leader, John Anderson, became chairman of Eastern Star Gas only two years after quitting Canberra.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Anne Davies last year found a complex web of interlocking networks of influence that tied together NSW Premier Mike Baird’s office, then-prime minister Tony Abbott’s office, and energy and mining companies including AGL and Santos.

At times, these companies brought together high-profile Liberal and Labor politicians. Santos engaged a lobbying company, Bespoke Approach, which listed former Labor senator Nick Bolkus and former Liberal South Australian premier John Olson as directors.

AGL lays claim to the same cross-party alliance between former Labor minister John Dawkins and former Liberal senator Helen Coonan, who co-chair lobbying firm GRA Cosway.

But what is less-well-known is the degree to which mining and energy companies have enticed media advisors from the major parties to walk through that revolving door. Davies included an interactive graphic in her report that shows the rotation of media people between Canberra, mining and energy companies, and state politics.

Understanding the rotation of media advisors does not just open up the question of lobbying – it also explains how governments may feel obliged to legitimate their support for fossil fuel.

Such staffers are a real prize for the companies. They give them access to the media strategies of government departments, which may translate into real influence about the kind of messages that might be most favourable to their company’s operations.

Carbon-laced political donations

It is now a matter of public record that fossil-fuel interests have bankrolled climate denialism around the world for decades. The case of the collapsing edifice of Peabody Energy, once the world’s largest coal company, is a paradigm example of this. Fossil-fuel companies even sponsored the Paris climate summit.

But can the donations of fossil-fuel companies also influence election campaigns? Well, yes they can, but we won’t find out who and how this might be happening until after the election.

A recent Four Corners program delved into the lack of transparency of Australia’s donation process. For example, knowledge of who is funding the parties in this election campaign won’t be revealed until the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) releases its data in February next year.

But we do know from the last election campaign that mining and energy companies loomed large as donors for both Labor and Liberal parties. The AEC’s data release from February 2014 showed the Liberal Party received more than $1.8 million directly from energy companies that supported the repeal of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Even more was donated via the Liberal-linked Cormack Foundation. Two of the biggest “receipts” to the Cormack Foundation were BHP and Rio Tinto.

Labor received only $453,000 from mining and energy companies in the context of the immense industry opposition to an emissions trading scheme.

Speculating on 2016 party donations

The 2013 election was all about mining and energy companies donating in return for killing the carbon tax. This has now been completed. Job done, time to move on.

With the carbon tax gone, and millions in corporate welfare flowing directly to the mining and energy companies from taxpayers, all that the PR departments of these companies would be worried about is that climate change is kept off the election agenda.

Such an environment would suit the fossil-fuel industries as they fight for a few more years of viability in a world that is abandoning them. As constitutional lawyer George Williams has observedof all forms of corporate donations:

These companies are hoping that giving money will lead to outcomes. That’s why they’re doing it, and that’s one of the key problems of the current system.

So, here is a hypothetical PR strategy that would make perfect sense for the mining and energy sectors in this election, in eight easy steps.

Step One: Mining and Energy companies donate to major political parties with a request to drop climate change from their campaigns.

Step Two: Major political parties agree not to run on a climate platform and continue to heavily subsidise the operations of mining companies.

Step Three: Parties use money for broadcast and newspaper campaign budgets.

Step Four: Newspapers and TV and radio outlets sell the attention spans of audiences to the advertisers of political parties for large sums.

Step Five: Major parties expect that audiences will be persuaded to vote for one of them, while fossil-fuel company donations are justified by backing both possible winners who will look after their interests. The investment would only fail if one of the parties had to share power with minor parties or independents.

Step Six: Major parties continue to support coal and energy companies, offering them mining exploration licences, mining leases and export licences.

Step Seven: A part of the donations that energy companies give to parties is paid by consumers of increased electricity prices as well as taxpayers who are subsidising the corporate welfare that goes to these companies.

Step Eight: With favourable regulatory conditions for mining and electricity generation, mining and energy companies have greater certainty with which to expand their investments, operations and profits – some of which can be injected back into the political process at election time.

To the extent that this hypothesis is proven to be correct, and repeats the processes at play in the 2013 election, what emerges is that although Australia enjoys the free speech of a multi-party democracy, discussion of climate change is not free from the influence of capital in the election process.

To the extent that the major donors to Labor and Coalition are dominated by mining and energy, it is in the interests of this industry to finance a political duopoly that encourages the closure of public debates that do not conform to its interests.

The winners in this process can be identified as a media-political-industrial complex. This complex is a kind of three-way protectorate, where each group looks after itself by looking after the other two.

Broadcasters and newspapers are winners as they generate large revenues at election time that is channelled to them by political parties from the donors.

Mining and energy companies are winners, as they are able to distract voters from climate change and reduce pressure on parties to decarbonise the economy and regulate against their activities.

The parties are winners as they only need to neglect climate change in return for millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns.

The losers are the voters, who are not only forced to subsidise the political conditions that make their per-capita emissions four times higher than the global average, but also subsidise the conditions in which climate is taken off the public agenda.

The biggest losers are our grandchildren, who are going to inherit the climate mess created by the manipulative, influence-peddling mediocrity that plays out over three-year election cycles – and not just in Australia.

The Threatened Species Scientific Committee is seeking comments on the assessment of Myuchelys georgesi (Bellinger River snapping turtle). The public consultation period will be open until 05 August 2016.

In case you had forgotten, electricity prices were a really big deal in the last federal election campaign in 2013, albeit often disguised under the rubric of axe the tax. Then Coalition spokesmen quite deliberately and repeatedly conflated the term carbon tax with electricity tax.

Clearly, this conflation was deemed acceptable in the court of public opinion. The justification was that Labor’s carbon pricing mechanism specifically targeted the electricity sector rather than other key emission intensive sectors of the economy such as land-use and transport.

This time round, in the 2016 election campaign, electricity prices are much less prominent. The Coalition would have us believe that by axing the tax they have driven electricity prices down. The flow on effect from reduced household expenses is a rise in consumer confidence. And that, we are told, is a key stimulus in maintaining growth in face of strong economic headwinds, and one we shouldn’t risk by changing government.

Given the success of the Coalition strategy in the last election, Labor is understandably gun-shy on electricity prices. It also likely wants to avoid provoking further Coalition delight in spruiking one of their favourite epithets - Electicity Bill.

However, this is all a bit strange, because wholesale electricity prices have almost doubled over what they were at the equivalent stage of the last election cycle. Incredibly, they are 300% above what they were in the 2010 election.

Wholesale electricity prices in the 4 week period prior to the last four Australian federal elections. For the 2016 election cycle, the period is 23rd May - 20th June. For the previous three elections it is the 4 week period finishing on the election day. Prices are volume-weighted and differentiated by the region. Data from AEMO half-hour aggregated price and demand tables.

The current record wholesale electricity prices provoke a number of questions, not the least of which is if electricity prices are so important why is consumer confidence so buoyant? Perhaps the answer is that wholesale electricity prices really don’t matter that much. And if that is the case then shouldn’t we fess up to the idea axing the tax may have been largely immaterial to our economic outlook.

What’s happened to prices

The figure below shows the wholesale electricity prices for NSW since 2011, with the four week period May 23 through June 20 indicated in red.

Half-hour trading interval prices for NSW, from 2011 on. Red colours highlight the 4-week period 23 May - 20 June, with volume weighted prices in red boxes. The period of carbon pricing is shown in purple shading. Black boxes show the prices adjusted by removing the carbon prices assuming an emission intensity of 0.9 tonnes per MWhour. Units are $/MWhour. Numbers along the top indicate the number of intervals when prices exceeded $250/MWhour in grey for the calendar year, red for the 4-week period.

Prior to the start of carbon pricing period in July 2012, NSW wholesale prices averaged about $30-35/MWhr, reflecting subdued market conditions due to an ongoing decline in demand for grid supplied electricity. That decline started around 2009 and continued to 2015. During the carbon pricing years (mid 2012 - mid 2014) prices jumped by ~ $20 (per megawatt hour), but volatility remained very subdued as indicated by the spread in the half hour prices. Following the rescinding of the carbon pricing legislation, wholesale prices fell back to near 2011 to early 2012 levels, but only for a short period of time. Over the last year prices have risen relentlessly, and volatility has returned dramatically. Half hourly prices now regularly hit $300 per megawatt hour.

In NSW, at $101/MWhour for the last four weeks, prices are almost 250% higher than the same period last year and almost double the equivalent period in the carbon pricing years. As illustrated below, other states show comparable trends, highlighting the exceptional nature of current prices. With the exception of anomalous prices in SA in 2013, current prices are way above anything that has been experienced in recent times.

Volume-weighted wholesale prices in four mainland states for the 4 week period May 24 - June 21, for 2011 on. Data from AEOM half-hour aggregated price and demand tables. Why are prices so high?

In fact, across the eastern states prices are now averaging higher than at any time since the height of the Millennium Drought in 2007. Then drought conditions affected the supply from hydro stations and from some thermal (coal) generation due to limited availability of cooling water. With demand then growing at around 2% each year, the drought tipped the balance between demand and supply, driving up prices dramatically. The breaking of the drought in 2009 coincided with a sustained decline in demand for electricity, at around 1% per year, though to 2015. Despite some power plant closures (notably Anglesea and Northern) and mothballing of others, the market has been in a state of considerable oversupply. Notwithstanding the impacts of carbon pricing, both prices and volatility have been remarkably low, especially in NSW and Victoria.

Since early 2016, rises in price arguably reflect a tightening of the demand-supply balance, as demand has begun to pick up.

While that is what might be expected in a market that is operating efficiently it is unlikely to be the full story, since there is still very substantial underutilised capacity. For example NSW black coal generation is still only operating at about 50% full capacity.

With such excess in relatively low cost generators, there is suspicion that the market is not operating particularly efficiently. This suggestion has been made recently in Queensland, and the AEMC has indeed flagged this issue with a request for rule change that is supported by both the regulator and the operator in their submissions (see Note 1).

Should electricity prices be part of the election agenda?

Clearly the question of price manipulation in our energy market is significant and speaks to existing market rules and the powers of the regulator. The question of market efficiency is crucial and should be addressed as part of a bipartisan approach to energy pricing.

The broader question, and one that will no doubt divide the key parties, relates to the causes and consequences of the current high electricity prices.

As alluded earlier, there would appear to be an incongruency in the Coalition position with regard to the current prices. However, it is important to note that the market prices have yet to flow through to domestic retail prices. The Coalition should be worried if and when they do. According to the logic of their own axe the tax mantra, any flow through of the wholesale price rises should stymie what it argues is a somewhat fragile consumer confidence. And along with that, so to the edifice it has built in its own attacks on Labor’s economic plans.

However, it is important to understand that even at $100 MWhour, wholesale prices are still less than 50% of the standing offer of most domestic retail contracts (see note 2). That there is fat in the system is indicated by the preparedness of most retailers to offer discounts of up to 30% on standing offers for such things as paying on time. Such sweeteners amount to more than the rise in wholesale price we have seen over the last year, and given the vertically integrated nature of the much of the industry, at least some of what is gained on the generation side can delivered by the retail side with little detriment to shareholder value.

For small generators without retail arms, and for new entrants, the wholesale price rises are a godsend. For the first time in a decade wholesale prices are approaching the cost of new generation build. With an ageing, emission intensive generation sector, there is a desperate need for new build. No matter what technology is contemplated nothing is viable at less than a long-term average of about $70-$80/MWhour.

So the current prices should be encouraging with regard to many of the challenges facing the industry. Providing current prices are reflective of an efficient market one would hope for bipartisan recognition that current prices are appropriate to the challenge at hand.

However it should also be acknowledged that such prices are not sufficient to encourage new build alone. We know that adding new capacity to the system without any withdrawal will collapse the price back to the marginal cost of coal-fired-power production of around $30/MWhour or lower. This is particularly the case for new-build renewables which have the paradoxical effect of lowering market clearing prices because of their negligible short run costs. The prospect of such a collapse in prices has an analogue in what we have seen in the recent Saudi-led onslaught against largely US-based unconventionals, and is a powerful disincentive for new investment.

Given a primary driver for new build is the necessity to reduce emissions, rational economists are unanimous that the most efficient mechanism to facilitate transition to a low emission generation portfolio is to appropriately price emissions.

While we suspect the Prime Minister really does know this, we also know he is bound by a party room that is still a long way away from abandoning ideology for rationality, on this issue at least.

So on this point we must acknowledge any chance for bipartisanship ends. In the meanwhile, the rest of us might contemplate whether market prices would actually be any higher if we still had a carbon price.

While I don’t know the answer, my suspicion is probably not.

Notes

[1] The request for the rule change was motivated by recent incidences of strategic late bidding by generators and purported manipulation of the market by withdrawing Queensland generation, seen by some as a market distortion accentuated by the current market structure of 5 minute dispatch intervals and the 30 minute trading intervals.

[2] Of course, the elephant in the room in electricity prices remains the distribution network. The cost we are paying for the poles and wires is unacceptably high, especially with the cost of capital tumbling across the world.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the Australian Research Council for his geological research.

The Fat-tailed Dunnart is found in box gum grassy woodland. Damian Michael

There a many reasons to be unhappy about the state of the environment. But we’ve recently found some good news: a conservation program that works.

You probably haven’t heard of the Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP). It was a market-based agri-environment program that ran between 2007 and 2012, which funded farmers to conserve threatened ecosystems on their property. Land managers were given contracts for up to 15 years to deliver results.

Overall, 297 land managers will receive about A$152 million over roughly 18 years to implement their conservation management plans. The last of these contracts will end in 2027. No new funding rounds are expected.

There’s been a variety of market-based programs for conservation on farmland in Australia, but we don’t know what the total investment is to date. And we are not aware of scientific monitoring that demonstrates their impact.

Endangered ecosystems

The box gum grassy woodlands of eastern Australia are home to several hundred species of native birds, including the iconic superb and turquoise parrots, thousands of native plants (such as the chocolate lily that leaves a deliciously rich and sweet aroma in native pastures), and beautiful mammals like the squirrel glider.

Box gum grassy woodlands have been 95% to 99% cleared for wheat and sheep grazing and are listed as nationally critically endangered.

Box gum grassy woodland is found across eastern Australia. Author provided.

Under the ESP, more than 150 farmers from southern New South Wales to southeast Queensland have been funded to conserve the box gum grassy woodland ecosystem. This is one of the largest projects of its type in the world.

Farmers undertake controlled grazing by livestock in woodland remnants, replant native woodland, avoid firewood harvesting, cease bushrock removal, and control weeds and feral animals.

But we can’t know if a conservation program is working unless we monitor it. Fortunately, soon after it started, the Australian National University was commissioned to design a monitoring program for the ESP. We have now been monitoring these efforts for six years - and the results are exciting.

Better for wildlife…

So far, the data show that the farmers are doing a good job and it is money very well spent.

To find out if the program is working, we have to compare managed (conserved) areas with “control patches” - patches where land owners haven’t done anything. This comparison shows that funded management patches have fewer environmental weeds, greater native plant species richness, more natural regeneration of native plants, smaller areas of erodible bare ground, and more species of woodland birds.

In the space of six years, the Australian government, in concert with Australian farmers (through modest investment), has generated significant, positive environmental changes on farms. In fact, the box gum project can set the bar for many other conservation programs.

…better for farmers

The positive impacts go beyond improvement of the environment, because there have been notable social benefits too.

Farmers are now highly motivated to deliver better environmental outcomes on their farms and showcase the integration of the multiple objectives of agricultural production and conservation.

The income stream they received also helped some survive the almost unprecedented hardships associated with the Millennium Drought in the mid- to late 2000s.

More generally, regular feedback and discussions between ANU field ecologists and landholders over the past six years has provided anecdotal evidence that farmers engaged in successful environmental programs suffer fewer problems with mental illness. This landholder goodwill and change in attitude towards land management is something that will far outweigh the 15-year investment in the program.

A model for conservation

Despite its success, the program has not been without detractors who see the policy and monitoring as over-engineered or boutique. This is primarily because its design, implementation, and monitoring standards are politically and bureaucratically inconvenient. They are not well suited to a reactive, short-term focused society.

In the case of monitoring, some considered it wasteful to establish and monitor control sites (areas where there has been no management). Yet without the controls, we couldn’t tell this positive story.

This is an exciting example of successful private-public land conservation and how it can be integrated with agricultural production (the primary land use of much of Australia’s land surface).

The long-term funding model is a more sensible approach than one-off payments, and provides a realistic timeframe to achieve results.

The Australian government should be congratulated and encouraged to invest in more programs of this type. It has worked because it was designed specifically to link farmers, scientists and policy makers.

Billions of dollars are expended on the environment in Australia every year. Landscape recovery will span multiple governmental cycles and every dollar must be spent wisely. Programs like ESP give some guidance on how large-scale environmental programs can be more successful.

For further information on conservation programs like the Environmental Stewardship Program, see our new e-book

David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council, the Murray Local Land Services and the Riverina Local Land Services. David Lindenmayer is a member of the Canberra Ornithologists Group and Birdlife Australia.

Chloe Sato was employed by ANU under the National Environmental Research Program to complete research on the Environmental Stewardship Program. ANU received funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Dan Florance is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Emma Burns receives funding from the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Emma is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

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