Please find below our official media statement from Jon Seeley, Group Managing Director of Seeley International, sent to the media today in response to the announcement from the Victorian Government on gas connections to new homes.
All Pain and No Gain
The Victorian Government’s foolish and short-sighted ban on gas in new homes will only push emissions higher and increase the risk of blackouts.
Forcing people off gas causes more brown coal to be burned in our aging power stations, while increasing the strain on an already-fragile energy grid. This is an indisputable fact that this government wilfully ignores in its blind, ideological pursuit of cheap ill-informed “Green” votes.
Stop being dishonest with Victorians. Stop denying the simple science that right now, in Victorian homes, electricity from brown coal is four times more emissions intensive than natural gas.
Stop using the cover of a righteous environmental pursuit and a climate emergency, to spread mistruths and lies.
The government is driving up emissions with this decision, not reducing emissions, and throwing Victorians out of the frying pan into the fire. Less gas equals more coal.
In backing her decision today, Minister D’Ambrosio claimed the gas sector represented 17 per cent of Victoria’s emissions, but ignored the fact that residential gas (the focus of this ban) represents less than two per cent of emissions. This is a gross deception by a minister desperately trying to justify a poor policy decision. Minister D’Ambrosio has also deviously played the financial fear card, referring to the big increases in gas costs, but ignoring the even bigger increases in electricity costs, which this year alone are in excess of 20 per cent.
We all recognise the need to transition away from fossil fuels. But the transition has to be carefully managed, not rushed. And it must be done in a way that steadily reduces emissions, not drives them up as this ban undoubtedly will.
Choice for Victorians, even within your own home, appears to be a threatened species.
How galling for a morally bankrupt State Government that has run Victoria’s economy into the ground, to now dictate how people live their lives, heat their homes and cook their meals.
This dangerous ideology is not only blind to logic and commonsense, it defies trends in Europe and North America where gas, far from being banned by zealots, is being embraced with a transition to renewable gas.