Renewable energy future looks bleak if CEFC axed

Concerns for the future of renewable energy projects are rising after the Coalition government announced plans to axe the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC). There are reportedly 170 projects in the pipeline for CEFC funding, of which 50 are well advanced.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) has endorsed calls for the government to reconsider its decision to abolish the CEFC. If funding for large-scale renewable energy projects is stopped, thousands of new manufacturing jobs will disappear, the AMWU says.

“There are jobs for AMWU members in the wind tower industry which would have gone to China and Korea if the CEFC had not arranged the final loans to get local companies over the line,” said AMWU National Secretary Paul Bastian.

“Knocking down this avenue of funding would put Australia back behind the rest of the world in alternative energy; it would cut this country out of an emerging $7 trillion global industry.”

The CEFC has put lending on hold after the new Treasurer, Joe Hockey, requested it stop all investments.

“What’s being put at risk is thousands of jobs that won’t be created if the Clean Energy Finance Corporation doesn’t go on with its work,” Mark Dreyfus, the former Attorney-General told the ABC’s Lateline.

Dreyfus was responsible for drafting the Act under which the CEFC operates. Lateline reported that the Act was devised to be “Abbot-proof”.

“It’s a corporation with clear objectives, which are to lend money to the clean energy sector and the board of the corporation has to go on doing that task until the Parliament says otherwise,” Dreyfus told Lateline. “It’s not open to this government to come along and seek to bully the directors, bully the corporation into stopping doing what their statute tells them to do.”

“The legal position is clear that the government can’t direct this corporation to stop its work and I think the government’s own lawyers would likely recognise that,” George Williams, a senior Constitutional lawyer with the University of NSW, told Lateline. “The government would certainly try and get a new Bill through Parliament to stop the organisation. It might try and interfere or actually direct who is going to be on the board through dismissal and appointment, or it might also look at the operating budget of the body over the longer term to try and starve it of the funds it needs to continue its work.”

“[If the CEFC is axed] it will stop a lot of projects from going ahead and it will send a very bad message to people wanting to get involved in low-carbon technology that the government is not behind it,” Giles Parkinson, former Business Editor and Deputy Editor of the Financial Review, told ABC’s Radio National.