(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)
(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Remember “energy security”? Like most things with the word “security” tacked on, or with “sovereign” floating around, it’s a slogan employed by vested interests to advance their own cause, as much as it is a genuine policy issue. That’s why the Coalition likes to talk about energy security strictly in terms of keeping fossil fuel power going in order to guarantee supply for “when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow”.

But then the government got caught out on “fuel security” as Australia’s uncompetitive refining sector steadily shut up shop and we became ever more dependent on imports of fuel. As headlines about Australia running out of fuel proliferated, last year the government cobbled together a “fuel security package” to, it said, increase fuel storage and “to hold a sovereign refining capability”.

As always, the government is driven by its own perception of its political interests, and by the interests of its major donors, rather than by policy. But there’s a significant policy challenge to deal with: the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put on the security agenda, front and centre, the costs of remaining dependent on oil.

With the price of oil up 20% in the past month and nearly 60% in the past quarter, the reliance of the Australian vehicle fleet on oil, and the fact that the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin benefits from every extra cent motorists pay at the bowser, is plainly a strategic weakness. A rogue nation like Russia, if it is a major oil exporter, can prosper from the benefits of its aggression even as sanctions are imposed.

Unlike during the Cold War, or over the past two decades of fundamentalist terrorism, there’s now a viable alternative: electric vehicles. Australia remains a laggard on uptake of EVs, entirely due to the deep hostility of the Morrison government to them for purely political purposes. Even Morrison’s belated dropping of his hostility to the weekend-destroying vehicles after the Glasgow summit last year was far too little as well as too late: it has been left to the states like NSW to take the lead on encouraging uptake and providing the necessary charging infrastructure.

Morrison refuses even to support improved vehicle emissions standards adopted by most of our major trading partners, despite the deaths and illness inflicted by poorer-quality vehicle emissions in Australia. Such standards would help drive a shift to electric, and higher-efficiency, vehicles.

Josh Frydenberg and many in the Australian media like to lament how dependent European countries are on Russian gas, never admitting that our own clinging to 19th-century internal combustion engine (ICE) technology delivers a payout to Putin every time we fill up our vehicles.

Those Russian exports of gas have become considerably more valuable to the Kremlin in recent months as energy prices have risen. Perversely, even though Australian energy exporters have also benefited, those price rises will accelerate the end of coal-fired power. Coal-fired power is already outdated, and more inefficient, expensive and lethal compared to renewable energy and battery storage — even before you get to its massive carbon emissions. Every rise in the price of coal brings forward the closure of those coal-fired power plants beloved of Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor — bringing greater uncertainty to the small number of workers who rely on coal-fired power for jobs.

Dramatically accelerating our electric vehicle uptake — if Morrison likes, he can label it “vehicular sovereignty” — and introducing much tighter ICE vehicle standards should now be a core part of Australian national security strategy. Unusually, this improvement in our security will actually help the economy, removing a volatile and expensive input to the inflation most Australians face.

And in the more volatile and uncertain international security environment that Morrison likes to hype for political reasons, coal-fired power and its reliance on a costly, dangerous product looks more and more like another 19th-century anachronism that we need to be rid of.