Australia’s official ambition to become a green/renewable energy “superpower” was a key element of Labor’s 2024 Budget.
While some environment NGOs and the Australia Manufacturing Workers Union have embraced this concept, there are serious dangers in governments tying plans for the urgently needed renewable energy transition to the profit interests of corporate capitalism.
Central to the idea that Australia could become a renewable energy superpower is that capitalists have an opportunity to exploit the country’s “comparative advantages”.
These include abundant renewable energy resources, significant critical mineral reserves, a highly skilled workforce, a world-class research and development sector and a “reputation as a reliable trading partner and attractive investment destination”, as a recent joint parliamentary committee report described it.
This crude market economics imputes a misplaced rationality to the capitalist system, ignoring the distortions that giant corporate monopolies have on all markets.
These corporations, including the banks and finance companies that fund their projects, have grand plans of their own which are not made with ecological sustainability, or social need, as central objectives.
The manufacture of a public consensus around the renewable energy superpower goal idea serves to legitimise the billions of dollars of new public subsidies to private corporations that often rely on greenwashing to sell their profit-making ventures.
Similar ideological exercises were used to justify neoliberal reforms to the economy in the 1990s, including the Prices and Incomes Accord (that radically weakened the union movement) and the push to profit from the industrialising Asian economies (which made iron and coal companies billions in profits and turned universities into money-making operations with highly casualised professional workforces).
At the heart of Labor’s budget allocations and projected spending over the next decade is a new program of massive corporate subsidies to this renewable energy superpower dream.
Renewable buzz words
Labor allocated $22.7 billion in public monies, over the next decade, to “Future Made in Australia”. It said the plan is about “maximising the economic and industrial benefits of the net zero transformation and securing Australia’s place in a changing global economic and strategic landscape”.
According to the budget papers, the Future Made in Australia package “encourages and facilitates the private sector investment required for Australia to make the most of these structural shifts”.
It said it “will help Australia better attract and enable investment, encourage the transition to cheaper and cleaner energy and … also value-add to our resources, strengthen our economic security, boost our innovation and digital capabilities and invest in the highly skilled workforce of the future.”
Labor’s plan is also totally enmeshed with support for a massive expansion of the gas extraction and export industry and its spending boost to make Australia one of the top 10 arms and military technology exporters.
There is a perverse logic to this: If Australia is to become a green superpower, it needs the military might to enforce that status, albeit in partnership with the United States and other imperialist allies.
Public money is already flowing liberally to the world’s biggest arms companies, with the lion's share going to Israel’s Elbit Systems.
The Australia Institute (TAI) calculated in May that state and federal governments gave $14.5 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major consumers in 2023–24 — “the equivalent of $27,581 for every minute of every day or $540 for every person”.
TAI said that Labor had also budgeted $54 billion for fossil fuel subsidies, which is “five times the amount it has committed to its key housing policy, the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund” over the next three years.
Labor promises that the billions in public subsidies to make Australia a green superpower will create “secure, well-paid jobs”.
But, as the 1990s plan to help Australian capitalism profit from industrialisation in Asia showed, this turned out to be a lie. Jobs have become more insecure in Australia over the past three decades.
The Towards a renewable energy superpower: Industry opportunities for Australia to embrace the clean energy revolution report, commissioned by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and Climate Action Network Australia, tries to persuade Australian capitalists not to simply export green energy, critical minerals and green technology, but invest in building manufacturing industries here to produce solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, wind tower and offshore wind port infrastructure and high-voltage solar cables.
Whose needs?
But under a private-sector based transition to renewable energy, billionaires will do what helps them make a profit, regardless of society’s needs.
The fact that the world is hurtling into a future of catastrophic climate change, despite all the scientific warnings and climate summits is ample proof of this.
It might be argued that any encouragement of capitalist investment into “green” development is a good thing.
But in the global climate emergency we confront, this is not the case. A radical transition to renewable energy and the deep cuts to fossil fuel use (and extraction) cannot be held hostage to corporate profit.
As ecosocialists such as Jason Hickel and others have argued, what renewable energy is used for matters. “Green capitalism” means turning the Global South into a giant sacrifice zone so rich folks in the Global North can drive electric SUVs.
Just as the economic growth in the Global North is colonial in character, so too “green growth” visions tend to presuppose a perpetuation of colonial arrangements.
These include forms of production organised largely around capital accumulation and elite consumption — not just SUVs but fast fashion, planned obsolescence, the military-industrial complex — rather than around meeting human needs and wellbeing.
The arbiters of global capitalist development — the banks and finance companies — have made it US$7 trillion clear that they are determined to pour investment into fossil fuels, even as it imperils the liveability of the planet.
The International Energy Authority estimates that global spending on “clean energy technologies and infrastructure” is on track to hit US$2 trillion this year (although this includes nuclear energy).
Even when the billionaires do invest in renewables, it can divert resources away from what is required to speed up the transition and sustain public support for it.
The battle for control of the $30 billion Sun Cable Australia-Asia Power Link project between billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest illustrates some of these dangers.
The project was first conceived as “the world’s largest solar array” in the Northern Territory, which would produce green energy, mostly for export to Singapore (and later to Indonesia) via high-voltage undersea cables.
Cannon-Brookes and Forrest fell out over whether exporting electricity to Asia was commercially viable and Sun Cable was forced into administration last year. Since then, Cannon-Brookes has beaten Forrest for control.
While there is probably some merit in building a giant solar farm in the NT, there are many other more urgent renewable projects.
For instance, Beyond Zero Emission’s (BZE) The Million Jobs Plan report in 2020 showed that:
• Retrofitting 2.5 million homes over five years to make them net-zero energy emitters would require an annual investment of $15 billion (just $25,000 per home), and;
• Governments could build net-zero carbon emission energy-efficient public housing for just $273,000 a home. These would not only be good for the environment, they would slash household energy bills.
Such projects, that simultaneously address urgent social and environmental needs, are a much better use of resources than any billionaire’s green profit-making scheme.
BZE has welcomed Labor’s green superpower plan, although it has been forced to admit that its budget falls short of the investment needed.