The big winner from NSW Labor’s midnight firesale of its electricity retail assets is one of the most aggressive anti-ETS lobbyists, which claimed it would be forced out of business by even the threat of the Rudd government’s CPRS.
Chinese-owned TRUenergy has paid just $2 billion for the EnergyAustralia retail business, the trading rights for the coal-fired Mount Piper and Wallerawang stations and three development sites.
TRUenergy already owns the Yallourn coal-fired power station in Victoria, and was an hysterical critic of the Federal Government’s CPRS, despite being scheduled to receive nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in handouts from taxpayers over five years under the polluter-friendly Rudd-Wong package.
In July 2008, TRUenergy boss Richard McIndoe said the government’s emissions trading scheme would “effectively bankrupt” generators and force them to close by the end of 2008 — several years before the CPRS even started. Strangely, TRUenergy continued operating beyond 2008.
But McIndoe actually ramped up the hysteria in 2009, insisting the generators would be sent broke and the lights switched off, warning of economic dislocation “for generations”.
It was arrant nonsense from a prime rentseeker, demonstrated by the substantial gap between what McIndoe was saying in public and what his company was telling investors. As Crikey showed a year ago, the CPRS had been a complete non-issue in the company’s presentations to investors. Giles Parkinson showed how TRUenergy’s Chinese parent company was remarkably upbeat about the Australian market and the CPRS.
Oddly enough, it was the advice to investors that proved accurate. TRUenergy’s earnings more than doubled last year, at the very time it was saying the mere threat of the CPRS would destroy the company.
Ultimately of course it is by its actions, rather than its words, that TRUenergy should be judged. Now, even as federal Labor, the independents, the Greens, business and NGOs get down to the nitty-gritty of developing a carbon price to be legislated late next year and start on July 1, 2012, McIndoe’s company has snapped up coal-fired power stations and declare they’ll give TRUenergy “a strong and diverse, vertically-integrated business within the National Electricity Market, which provides an excellent platform for further growth”.
Quite a change in rhetoric from the froth-mouthed threat to turn off the lights last year. And one to remember when, inevitably, McIndoe starts ranting again about the impact of a carbon price.
Of course, don’t forget that the push to dump the CPRS came from NSW Labor, not merely via Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib, but via the NSW government blaming the CPRS for electricity price rises in that state. And despite having succeeded in killing off the CPRS, NSW Labor still couldn’t get a decent price. Whatever it takes — to be as incompetent as possible.
The 2 billion dollar coal mine and the NSW Government guarantee of ‘cheap coal forever’ irrespective of the final price of carbon have a lot with their change of opinion.
The magnitude of this betrayal of the people of NSW by Labor almost defies description. A supposedly ‘socialist’ party flogging off the people’s assets is unfortunately not atypical of these ideological turncoats. Any service, the provision of which is critical to the broad community, should not be entrusted to profit-oriented organisations. The only way to ensure that such an organisation remains service-oriented is to leave it firmly in Government ownership and control.
We have already mostly given away control of national telecommunications (the profitable bits, that is), we’ve started on roads, and the health and power industries are well on the way. Wayne Swan’s desire to rein in the banks is a bit rich, considering that his party flogged off the Commonwealth Bank, which had effectively regulated the behaviour of the other banks for decades. All we need to do now is get rid of the railways, farm out the armed services and broadly introduce self-regulation in all activities presently covered by wasteful Government departments.
This should give us the capitalist Nirvana of a few rich winners, and loads of losers who deserve to get screwed. If you want some idea of what that looks like, just cast your eyes across the Pacific to the land of our colonial masters.
Mark Arbib? Isn’t he the American plant in the government?
NSW, like Queensland is pursuing coal as the fuel of the future. Has no one told them about climate change?