‘More frequent, intense’: PM puts climate front and centre for election

Albanese on Friday issued a challenge to the Coalition on the cost of the energy transition to swap polluting fossil fuels for clean energy, arguing that there was a significant cost attached to a lack of action to curb emissions and reduce the impacts of global warming.

“People speak about the costs of that action to deal with the transition that’s underway,” Albanese said. “There’s an economic cost as well as a human cost of weather events, and that is something that … my government is very conscious of, which is why we’re so determined not just to deal with the immediate threats, but to always have our eye on that horizon.”

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The Albanese government is also under pressure over the cost of electricity and has faced questions over the patchy delivery of its plan to raise the share of renewable energy in the electricity grid to 82 per cent by 2030, in a bid to wind down fossil-fuel pollution.

It made an election promise in the 2022 campaign to cut electricity bills by $275. But this went awry almost immediately when a global energy crunch raised fuel costs and boosted average household bills to about $1600.