Malcolm Turnbull speaks to trainees in Perth

“Walking both sides of the street by Labor in so many policy areas is actually in itself something which creates sovereign risk about our country.”  

— Arthur Sinodinos, June 2016

The Coalition loves invoking sovereign risk. Five years ago, Crikey explored how barely a day passed when it didn’t attack the then-Labor government about “sovereign risk” and the threat to business and investment — while investment in Australia was going ballistic and pushing the dollar over parity while Australia was declared a “safe have” for investors.

Getting into government didn’t stop the Coalition’s invocation of “sovereign risk”. Last year, Andrew Robb claimed the overturning of the approval for Adani’s Carmichael project — which readers will recall was at the request of the government due to a stuff-up by Greg Hunt and his department — was a case of “sovereign risk”. Robb also thought the Senate blocking the Abbott government’s budget measures was “sovereign risk”.

Tony Abbott claimed Labor’s efforts to protect Australian jobs in the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement was “sovereign risk”. The Victorian government halting the financially disastrous East West Link was also “sovereign risk”, according to Abbott (even after the Australian National Audit Office revealed what a debacle his government’s handling of it was). Hell, even the ACT Liberals had a taste of the sovereign risk lash when they threatened to tear up contracts for a light-rail system signed by the ACT government.

None of these have much to do with the original meaning of “sovereign risk”, but like terms such as “decimate” and “genocide”, “sovereign risk” has broken free of its semantic moorings and is now applied to whatever a politician doesn’t like.

After all this time, though, perhaps it’s time to reappraise the sovereign risk situation to see how, as a party so hypersensitive to sovereign risk that they can detect it beneath almost anything their opponents do, the Liberals have performed in government.

On renewable energy, the Coalition decided to completely alter the regulatory framework within which the industry was operating, proposing, in a process led by “Environment” Minister Greg Hunt, to gut the Renewable Energy Target or even abolish it altogether, despite committing to the target in opposition.

This was criticised as sovereign risk by investors and businesses and by the South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill. Unlike the claims of sovereign risk advanced at Labor over the mining tax that were being made at the same time as mining investment was going through the roof, this time the claims accompanied an actual investment collapse of nearly 90%.

The Coalition didn’t merely target the renewables industry generally, it pursued the wind generation sector in particular, demonising it as ugly, establishing still more reviews into its mythical health effects and — possibly illegally — directing the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which the Coalition tried to shut down, not to invest in wind projects.

The notionally red tape-averse government even established a specific agency to “oversee” the wind sector, complete with a highly paid commissioner. And both the Coalition Victorian and NSW governments imposed an arbitrary two-kilometre setback requirement for wind farms, even for wind farms already approved.

On foreign investment, the Coalition at the behest of the Nationals, imposed new reporting and processing requirements for foreign investment in agricultural land. This requirement was unabashedly racist — the Nationals had never expressed concerns about foreign investment in agriculture when British, Canadian and US investors and companies were buying up farms, but suddenly became very alarmed when Chinese companies began doing the same. It also sat oddly with the Coalition’s hostility to transparency of large companies’ tax affairs and sources of political donations.

These new regulations were criticised for scaring off investors. The Coalition, which boasted Australia was now “open for business” under its stewardship, also used the Foreign Investment Review Board process to block the sale of agribusiness company Graincorp and the sale of the Kidman and Co. cattle empire.

Perpetuating the theme that the Coalition can be awfully hostile to industries if they don’t fit its idea of proper business, it also imposed a massive new cost on Australia’s telecommunications industry to fund its mass surveillance scheme. The Coalition — most particularly George Brandis and Malcolm Turnbull — had been critical of data retention when in opposition.

But once in government, both Brandis and Turnbull completely reversed their former positions and imposed a scheme, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, on telecommunications companies and ISPs, with only a fraction of the industry’s costs to be covered by the government. And that was while the government imposed a new censorship scheme developed by the copyright industry on ISPs and pressuring ISPs to cave in to copyright industry demands that ISPs bear the costs of monitoring their own customers for copyright infringements.

It’s true that, compared to their UK cousins, Australian conservatives are relatively amateur when it comes to sovereign risk. The UK referendum on leaving the European Union, initiated by the UK Tory government as a sop to the hard-right of the Conservative Party, is shaping as a vast wealth-destruction exercise. This week alone, concerns about Brexit have taken nearly 100 million pounds off the value of the UK’s biggest companies as investors contemplate polls showing a strong possibility of an out vote, amid warnings that leaving could cause an economic shock to Britain costing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

But now that we’ve redefined “sovereign risk” to mean anything that changes the rules for business, it seems that Coalition MPs are as adept at inflicting it as they are at calling it out in their opponents.