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The Productivity Commission’s report on the energy transition provides the imprimatur Labor needs to supercharge its failing energy plan. While Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen claims his policies are working, and on track to deliver Labor’s targets, his spin can’t hide an inconvenient truth. Expert opinion and the evidence provide no basis for his confidence. Labor’s 2030 targets won’t be met.

It’s an all too familiar story. Labor has said its modelling was “the most comprehensive ever done, for any policy, by any opposition in Australia’s history since Federation”. When reality struck, it was quietly abandoned just before the election. The promised $275 by 2025, the $378 cut and 604,000 green jobs by 2030 disappeared, never to be aired again. The 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 was legislated, requiring the grid to operate with 82 per cent renewables, on the way to net zero by 2050.

Labor refuses to disclose its whole-of-system costs for a transition held together by billions in taxpayer subsidies and relief packages. The secrecy is indefensible. The public’s right to know should be defended by a Labor government promising transparency and accountability.

The reason for this might lie in the eye-watering costs revealed in independent research. Take the Net Zero Australia report, a joint effort by three universities, chaired by Professor Robin Batterham. It found: “The modelled capital requirement $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion of commitments by 2030, and $7 trillion to $9 trillion by 2060 will not be met at the current rate; the gap is enormous.”

The outcomes don’t justify the billions spent on Labor’s watch. Emissions continue to flatline, increasing by 0.05 per cent in the year to last December, a 27 per cent reduction on the 2005 baseline. Bowen described a 5 per cent fall in emissions from industrial processes as “encouraging”, suggesting he missed the recorded fall of 12 per cent in steel production. Far from encouraging, it’s very concerning.

Labor has to rely on the Safeguard Mechanism, which penalises high emitters, to reach its target. This will be problematic, as our trade-exposed industries must be competitive to survive. The Future Made in Australia is already on shifting sands. Our power prices are among the world’s highest and, without assured baseload supply 24/7, deindustrialisation will gather pace.

Our metals smelters and Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW are now at risk; thousands of workers face an uncertain future. It makes no sense to provide taxpayer-funded bailout packages, while hitting them with a de facto carbon tax. A 43 per cent fall in emissions is predicated on the grid operating on 82 per cent renewables. After a collapse in investment, taxpayers now underwrite renewable projects in secret contracts under the Capacity Investment Scheme, operating off-budget. Investment risk is mitigated by socialising the losses. Even so, the renewables share averaged 41.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year, just halfway there.

The Clean Energy Council reported only 1.17GW of renewable energy generation reached financial close in the first six months of 2025. This is just a third of the 6-7GW requiredannually to meet the 82 per cent target. Already Wood Mackenzie forecasts reaching only 58 per cent renewable energy generation by the end of the decade, and Rystad Energy estimates a substantial shortfall of about 18 per cent by 2030. The minister often reminds us “there’s no transition without transmission”. In his own words he concedes the impossibility of reaching the targets. Soon after Labor’s election in 2022, five “urgently needed” transmission projects were identified: HumeLink, VNI West, Sydney Ring, New England REZ and Marinus Link.

Three years on, not one of the projects is at construction stage. All are years late and billions over budget, and most won’t be in operation by 2030. It’s Snowy 2.0 on a grand scale. Be warned: a tsunami of transmission costs is still to hit our power bills. So much for the claim that renewables are the cheapest form of energy.

The priority of energy policy should be ensuring affordable and reliable power 24/7 in a sustainable energy mix; not chasing arbitrary targets, at any cost. We’ve already paid a high price: the billions in subsidies and grants, power bills through the roof, energy poverty, industry and jobs at risk, property rights eroded, environmental degradation and the loss of social licence in many regional communities.

Our abundance of coal, gas and uranium exports sustain our nation’s wealth and in the past provided our comparative advantage with low-cost energy. Considering our 1.1 pre cent contribution to global emissions, what would a cost-benefit analysis of the transition reveal? We’ve been flying blind. It would have served the public interest had the PC pursued this line of inquiry. It has the opportunity to do so in its final report.

With Labor’s vanity project to host the UN COP next year, the Climate Change Authority, chaired by Matt Kean, will likely recommend new 2035 targets, in the 65-75 per cent range. Setting such arbitrary and unachievable targets will only compound existing problems.

Bowen should stand by his statement that “there’s no point setting a target which the country can’t meet”. If not, blinded by reality, we will continue on a path of economic self-harm, putting our future prosperity at serious risk.

Jennie George is a former ACTU president and Labor MP for Throsby.