Australia’s shift to net zero emissions should be accelerated by “substantial public investment” in renewable electricity including expanded state ownership, influential leftwing unions will argue at Labor’s national conference.
The Electrical Trades Union (ETU) will use the party conference to call on the Albanese government to seize the “most significant economic opportunity since the Industrial Revolution” to drive down power prices for households and create secure, well-paid jobs for thousands of Australians.
The amendment to Labor’s platform will be moved on Thursday morning by the ETU national secretary, Michael Wright, and seconded by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union’s (AMWU) Steve Murphy.
It cites the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the European Union’s Green New Deal as evidence of “significant investments” that should spur Australia to greater investment in “cheap, clean, and abundant renewable energy resources”.
Original drafting of the amendment suggested investment should be in the order of $152bn for manufacturing, renewables and electrification with a five fold increase in the National Reconstruction fund from $15bn to $76bn, however details of the size of increase were stripped from later versions.
The unions point to Labor’s legislated target of 43% emissions reduction by 2030, based on renewables making up 82% of the electricity sector, as proof the government is already committed to ambitious action.
But the conference motion comes as the Coalition argues that untested and costly alternatives including small-modular nuclear reactors could be a more feasible path to baseload power.
The ETU amendment is set to be debated on Thursday during the economic chapter of Labor’s platform, which will also feature the construction union’s motion for a super profits tax to fund increased spending on housing, and the United Workers Union’s call to review stage-three tax cuts.
A push from the Labor Environment Action Network to end native forest logging will be debated in the environmental chapter on Thursday afternoon.
Senior Albanese government ministers are working behind the scenes to avoid motions hostile to Australia’s Aukus nuclear submarine acquisition, including from the Maritime Union of Australia and an AMWU Victoria motion to rethink the plan. It will be debated on Friday morning.
A separate, potentially embarrassing motion would remove a positive reference to Aukus from the draft national platform, which states “our self-reliant defence policy will be enhanced by strong bilateral and multilateral defence relationships, including Aukus”.
The Maritime Union of Australia national president, Christy Cain, told Guardian Australia the Aukus plan to spend $368bn on nuclear-powered submarines while saying more can’t be spent on housing is “the tail wagging the dog – it’s ridiculous”.
Cain will also seek to remove a legislated Labor policy in the industrial relations debate on Friday afternoon. In November 2022, Labor passed legislation that means workers can only take protected industrial action after the compulsory Fair Work Commission conference.
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“It’s disgusting, it’s not Labor values,” Cain said. “Even the Liberals wouldn’t try that. A Labor government is making it harder for workers to win cost-of-living pay increases.”
The ETU motion commits Labor to invest in the “rollout of renewable energy generation, transmission and electrification through a national reindustrialisation strategy” to respond to “unprecedented global supply chain shocks, Covid-19 and the pressing challenges of climate change”.
It calls for the policy to be enacted through “tax credits or equivalent mechanisms to incentivise local manufacturing investment”, procurement policies that require minimum levels of local manufacturing and “expanded public ownership” of critical assets.
“Labor acknowledges the need for significant regulatory reform to unlock the transmission capacity needed to support a grid built on renewables,” it says.
Under the plan, infrastructure projects valued over $100m will be designated “strategic projects” requiring use of local content, while all government-funded projects will also require pay deals with unions as a pre-condition of tender.
Ahead of the national conference, the industry minister, Ed Husic, said the government wanted to use the NRF to demonstrate Australia can manufacture renewables and low-emissions technologies “here onshore and deploy them quickly”.
“The world has twigged that … it might be cheaper to manufacture something many thousands of kilometers away, but then you’ve got to ship it and the emissions benefit instantly evaporates [when] you think about the emissions impact of that transport,” Husic told Guardian Australia on Monday.
Asked if the $15bn NRF will be big enough given the Inflation Reduction Act’s USD $369bn investment in energy security, the NRF’s chair Martijn Wilder said the investment comes in addition to other initiatives including the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, industry policy and “the venture capital ecosystem we have in Australia”.
Husic said: “The challenge of the IRA is that you don’t lose your capacity, that is that firms don’t get lured offshore to do work in the US.
“We want to signal this [decarbonisation] is really important to Australia. We’re lining up the support to make it happen.”
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