**Check against delivery**
Interview 17/11/25 Afternoon Briefing
JOURNALIST: Malcolm Turnbull is a former Liberal Prime Minister, who, of course, lost his job on the basis of these sorts of policies, on the climate, and he joins us now. Welcome.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Thank you very much, Patricia, I lost my job twice, you could say as leader of the Liberal Party.
JOURNALIST: I was about to say, but I didn't want to rub it in, right?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: You won't rub it in.
JOURNALIST: You have been there and done that. You've already been critical of the policy generally in relation to abandoning net zero. Yesterday, though, a new front in all of this, the Nationals and the Liberals coming together with their brochure that they put out now on the future of their energy [and] climate policies. What did you make of what they released?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, look,it's the same problem the Coalition's been bedevilled with really ever since 2009 which was the first time I lost the leadership of the Liberal Party over energy and climate. Basically what has happened is that the right wing of the Liberal Party, which consists of most of the Liberal Party nowadays, and the National Party, have turned what should be a matter of engineering and economics and facts into an ideological culture war issue. Now, back 20 years ago, renewables were more expensive than burning coal, but we argued that we should pay the price to cut our emissions to save the planet. Now we're in the happy circumstance where the cheapest forms of new generation are renewables, above all solar, and the millions and millions of Australians that have solar panels and their roofs understand that. So what you've got is a fact-free, reality-free culture war going on, and it is designed to gratify the right wing sort of media ecosystem, dominated by Sky News, and that is basically what is now in charge of the Coalition. So that's why I say, look, I feel sorry for Sussan Ley.
JOURNALIST: Do you? Why do you feel sorry for her?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I feel sorry for her because she's in a fish tank consisting of goldfish that have no memory, that forget everything that they've done the last time round, and they act like piranhas, they just want to eat each other. So they've got the memory of goldfish and the dining habits of piranhas.
JOURNALIST: Okay, so they're pretty busy at the moment there's no doubt about it. They did release this policy yesterday.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: They go around wanting to eat each other.
JOURNALIST: And that policy is pretty interesting, it seems, to open the door to potentially subsiding coal. What did you make of that?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: How insane is that? I mean, think about it. The only reason you would have to subsidise coal is because the market won't invest in it, and as Anthony Albanese said why won't the market invest in it? Because it is too expensive. Why are electricity prices higher today than they were last year or a few years ago? They've actually been coming down a bit, wholesale prices have been coming down, but the big factor is the cost of gas. The things that are pushing down the cost of electricity prices, or at least are countervailing influences, are the fact that renewables, particularly solar, is so much cheaper. And then, of course, you talk about coal fired power stations. We've got old coal fired power stations that are getting to the end of their life, some of them are really ancient, and maybe you can squeeze a couple of more years out of a few of them, but it's very hard and becomes increasingly expensive, and they become increasingly unreliable. And again, this is a point that the energy sector understands because as they become more unreliable, that again means you need to rely on gas more and that is more expensive.
JOURNALIST: So when Sussan Ley says that energy prices will be cheaper under the Coalition's plan, it's not, you don't agree?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, look, absolutely not. It is very clear that the right thing for us to do, and I mean both in terms of affordability and environmental responsibility, is to continue the transition to a system where our bulk of our primary generation is from solar and wind, backed up by batteries and pumped hydro and keep some gas in reserve for peaking. That's the best solution. It's very clear that's the way to go. …. I go back to when I was John Howard's Environment Minister, back in the days when the Liberal Party supported an emissions trading scheme before these culture wars overtook common sense and rationality, back in those days, if I had said in 20 years or 15 years or whatever, the cost of solar will have declined by more than 90%, you would have thought I was crackers, but it has. The fact is we now have cheaper and cheaper renewable electricity, and that's our big comparative advantage in Australia, because we've got a lot of land, we've got a lot of sunshine, and we can take a advantage of it.
JOURNALIST: So let me take you to Sussan Ley's predicament, because she's in a bit of a pickle at the moment, it seems.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: To say the least.
JOURNALIST: Really, it was a polite way of putting it. She's having a tough time. The conservatives are on the march. It looks like some moderates, not all, some moderates, are switching perhaps to Andrew Hastie and they want to dump her. Would that be wise?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well…. I'm not gonna give an opinion on that. I think the fundamental problem that the Liberal Party has got now is that it is essentially dominated by a membership that is in itself has a majority of people who are getting their political views from that right wing media ecosystem that I talked about earlier. And, these are just completely out of touch with reality, they're out of touch with the bulk of the electorate, and they’re certainly no way to winning government and they've lost two elections on the trot because of this view of the world, having this view of the world.
JOURNALIST: And do you think it would damage them further if they were to roll Sussan Ley next week?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I don't know whether it would damage them further, but it's certainly….none of this is helpful. The problem is not Sussan Ley, and it's not Andrew Hasie or Angus Taylor, the problem is that the position that they're taking… instead of approaching these issues in a rational businesslike, hardheaded, fact-based way, in other words, engineering and economics, they're approaching it through a culture all lens which is about ideology and idiocy. I keep on saying the same thing, so…
JOURNALIST: No, well, let me ask one more question before I go to my next guest, which is this: today we saw this Redbridge poll, we're going to speak to Kos Samaras a little later about it, it does show that the One Nation vote is up to 18%. So, you know, this is some of the MPs on the right are very nervous about this. This is why they're changing some of their positions.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: And they're trying to outflank Paul Hanson, and this a point…I've made this point, Penny Wong made this point on the weekend. Paul Hanson will say… you can't outflank her. She will just go further and further, and she will say you should have built coal fired power stations, you know, on every street corner and they should all be owned by the government. She can say anything she likes. And the problem is if they're going to chase her down that rabbit warren, they're going after maybe 10, 15% of the vote. And the nuttiness of this is, Patricia, is that to win an election in Australia you have got to get 50% plus one, you've got to win in the centre. And we make everybody vote, we've got preferential voting, our whole voting system - as your colleague, Annabel Crabb is explaining so very well in her series on the ABC at the moment - a whole electoral system is designed to bring our politics to the centre, and that's a really good thing. So if you're running off to the extremes, which is what the Liberals and the Nats are doing at the moment, that's just a recipe for permanent opposition.
**ENDS**
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