As I read Will Reid’s front page story in Tuesday’s Guardian about the power going out on Monday in Nyah and Sea Lake, I got an AusNet social media message about ‘managing demand on the network’ by avoiding using non-essential large appliances and closing your curtains. Seriously?

Energy security is a matter of national security and economic security - keeping the lights on, the air conditioners running and refrigerators on at homes and supermarkets.

John F Kennedy popularised the saying “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan” and Australian energy policy is both a failure and an orphan.  Nobody is directly responsible at state and federal level when the lights go out. States, territories and the Commonwealth are all fathers of energy failure.  

The Albanese Labor Government’s reckless rollout of renewables in regional Australia – out of sight, out of mind of the Labor / Green / Teal voting seats in the cities – is putting grid reliability at risk.  Mr Albanese’s Labor colleagues at Spring Street – the Allan Labor Government – are fast-tracking the national rollout of 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines including VNI-West in Mallee.  Allan Labor’s Victorian renewable energy ‘zone’ (read: ground zero) is almost exclusively in Mallee.  Labor is also creating a foreign ownership rural honeypot for cowboy wind turbine proponents.  Local farmers, landholders and communities are being pitted against each other and railroaded while Labor’s market signal to coal and gas is: get off our grid.

You and I already gold-plated Australia’s energy grid in the 2000s through our power bills, paying a fortune for the poles and wires for a supposedly reliable energy grid. Yet Labor entices foreign-owned energy generation at places hundreds of kilometres away from where existing generators plug into the grid. Labor is now platinum-plating the grid, and it is showing on your sky-rocketing power bills.

The Liberal-Nationals Coalition will keep the power on through our common sense, secure energy policy. We will responsibly phase-out coal, backing gas as an essential resource and installing zero-emissions, 24/7 nuclear power at existing coal power sites in the existing grid from 2035.