Paul Murray: New WA Premier Roger Cook will feel the pain from power to forests and so will you

Former premier Mark McGowan built his success in office on a certain homespun economic pragmatism that won over many people who had never voted Labor before. But every now and then he had to throw a bone to the green Left. Like many modern Labor leaders, McGowan was in a pincer between the Greens’ erosion of Labor’s primary vote on one side and the need to appeal to swinging voters leaking from the Liberals on the other. It was only a matter of time before policies contrived to meet the demands of these pressures — rather than based on sound principles — began to unwind. Now that McGowan’s new corporate life is rolling out before him, two of his signature environmental policies with baked-in timelines are running into headwinds, creating real problems for his successor. Roger Cook, aka Batman the loyal deputy, not only doesn’t have the charmed political circumstances that propped up McGowan, but he also lacks the political smarts. The new Premier will wear the pain coming from McGowan’s decision to end commercial logging in native forests by the end of this year and the phasing out of state-owned coal-fired power generation by 2030. And so will you. As I pointed out in a series of columns last year, the unintended consequences of the logging ban were likely to impact badly on a wide variety of consumers of forest products which were not canvassed when McGowan made his surprise announcement in 2021 without any industry consultation. The first article last June focussed on the problems arising for food businesses chasing the “wood-fired” craze. The ham-fisted transition away from logging was already causing firewood supplies to dry up. At that stage, Dave Kelly hadn’t been sacked as forestry minister and the government was still in denial about how his ill-considered $10,000 relocation payment to anyone wanting to leave the timber industry quickly depleted the workforce. The consequence of the rapid departure of workers — who saw no future in staying — is that the government’s promise that its Forest Products Commission would continue to supply sawlogs to the industry disintegrated. Without enough trees being felled for sawlogs, the secondary supply of firewood quickly became critical. Word within the industry in recent weeks is that the FPC has been told to divert 120,000 tonnes of sawlogs — which were required to tide over furniture makers and flooring providers until the end of the year — to be stockpiled for firewood supplies. “To meet the Minister’s target, the Forest Products Commission is now cranking up firewood production, building stockpiles at Deanmill, Diamond Mill, Harvey and Myalup,” according to Gavin Butcher, a former FPC director. “Harvesting will need to double. Last year only 59,000 tonnes were delivered to firewood merchants. “To achieve this, sawlog deliveries are being abandoned, with saw millers being told to not expect any more logs, despite promises from the Premier to honour contracts. The denial of saw miller rights has seen good quality logs being sold as firewood.” What a brilliantly green outcome. Furniture-grade jarrah burned to grill sausages. New Forestry Minister Jackie Jarvis has told the ABC — while refusing to be interviewed — that log delivery volume obligations were removed for companies that signed a deed to get the government’s transition payments. But Forest Industries Federation CEO Adele Farina, a former WA Labor MP, says nothing in the agreement removed FPC’s contractual obligations for sawlog deliveries: “Any statement to the contrary by the government or the minister is a blatant lie.” But worse is to come. Jarvis has told the Sustainable Forest Industries Roundtable that from next year, sawlog volumes will come only from “ecological thinning and mine site clearing.” Industry sources say most of the timber from thinning is not suitable for furniture production and everything from Alcoa’s clearance of around 1000ha a year of jarrah forest is committed to charcoal production for silica manufacturer, Simcoa, which uses 140,000 tonnes a year. A new opinion survey done for the Roundtable by former Labor pollster Utting Research shows that the more people understand the consequences of McGowan’s forestry policy, the less they like it. Polling last week had 72 per cent of respondents approving of the use of timber from “sustainably harvested WA regrowth forests” for “furniture, decking, flooring, heritage restoration and firewood.” So those people clearly oppose the looming McGowan ban. Only 11 per cent approved of “more imports of timber from unregulated and unsustainable harvesting of foreign rainforests” which will be the direct consequence of the WA logging ban. Some 88 per cent supported mine site jarrah being reserved “for domestic uses such as furniture, decking, flooring, and firewood rather than for current industrial uses where it is burnt for charcoal.” The Roundtable group has been unable to get a commitment from Jarvis from many requests to give its members access to the mine site clearance supplies. And then there’s coal. McGowan’s coal-fired generation ban was the focus of a censure motion in the Legislative Assembly on August 16. Last November, this column featured a computer-based analysis by one of WA’s leading energy experts, former general manager for generation at Western Power Mark Chatfield, revealing the McGowan renewables plan can’t meet Perth’s power needs after 2030. Chatfield, appointed CEO of the Queensland government-owned CS Energy after leaving Western Power, says WA’s future reliance on wind is wildly overstated, the move away from coal is dangerously premature and the vital backstop of abundant gas can’t be delivered through the constrained Dampier-Bunbury pipeline. In the debate, Energy Minister Bill Johnston launched a tirade of personal abuse at Chatfield when his research was mentioned, repeatedly calling him “an idiot”. Johnston was particularly inflamed by Chatfield’s disclosure of a big number of days each year when cloudy and windless conditions would produce very little renewable energy. On those occasions, Chatfield found WA faced potential blackouts because the pipeline would not be able to supply sufficient gas to the south-west to burn to cover the shortfall. Chatfield’s model discounts hydrogen as too distant and he pointed to the unseen need for a giant LNG tank near Perth — replenished by tanker ships — able to hold 8-days’ supply to get through a wind drought. That is not part of any Labor plan. But while attacking Chatfield, Johnston pulled it out of the ether and adopted it as his own. “I have already said in public that it is possible that we will need additional storage in the gas system at the southern end of the pipeline because at the moment the two storage facilities are at the northern end of the pipeline,” the Minister said. Johnston then plucked a real fantasy from mid-air, while correctly noting that 40 per cent of the gas volume coming south was for Alcoa’s processing uses. “Alcoa has already said that it wants to electrify that process,” Johnston said. “If it electrifies the process, the gas it currently uses will not be used to make alumina anymore. That means that gas will then be available to feed peaking plants.” Alcoa is involved in electric calcination trials at its Pinjarra alumina refinery, funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to the tune of $8.6 million, which end in mid-2026. Trials by Rio in Queensland suggest the costs of electrification are prohibitive, leaving open the possible end result that its bauxite is shipped to China for processing. This was Alcoa’s response when I asked for a timeline for any planned move away from gas: “While we are pursuing the decarbonisation of our refining operations, including through new technology development and alternative energy sources, gas will remain important into the future.” So the minister is just making it up as he goes along. Access to Alcoa’s gas cannot fix the looming shortages. Any new investment decisions would be well past the closure of WA’s coal-fired power stations. This is what passes for energy policy in WA. The day after that debate, Johnston announced a six-month delay in retiring the Muja 6 coal-fired generator at Collie, the first sign McGowan’s 2030 target was in trouble. The crabwalking has begun. On the very day Johnston was attacking Chatfield, the WA energy market operator, AEMO, reported Perth was facing a 945 MW shortfall in 2025-26, warning the transition trajectory was nowhere near meeting the 2030 target, by which time another 1,366MW of coal-fired generation capacity would be retired. Which is pretty much what Chatfield predicted. The AEMO warning showed the shortfall is growing, not retreating. Meanwhile, Labor sleepwalks towards disaster, hoping renewable capacity will just appear. This winter, AEMO even had to buy power from sidelined diesel generators for up to five per cent of Perth’s energy needs to avoid blackouts during peak periods. On some sunless and windless days, coal and gas were still providing more than 90 per cent of our energy needs. And Johnston says his expert critics are the idiots.