Comparisons are odorous.
Much Ado About Nothing, Act
three, Scene five.
This week, the journal Nature Energy published an
extraordinarily important article titled Geographies of regulatory disparity
underlying Australia’s energy transition (link
here). Authored by researchers at the ANU, University of Melbourne,
and Tangentyere Council in Alice Springs, the article lays out in in stark and
disturbing detail how remote and Indigenous communities are structurally and
systemically disadvantaged in terms of regulatory protections related to the
ongoing – and arguably accelerating – energy transition towards reliance on
renewable energy resources. What makes this research particularly important is
the extraordinarily detailed levels of analysis that provide irrefutable
evidence of the patters and extent of systemic disparities.
This research article is the latest in a series of pathbreaking
research papers that have opened up a line of sight into the complex energy
related challenges facing remote Australia as it confronts the consequences of climate
change. I have previously published a post on earlier research by members of
this research team (link
here). See also references #8, #19, #52, #61, and #68 in the current article.
The abstract to the most recent article states the primary
research finding, which focusses on:
the geographic and
socio-demographic characteristics of settlements likely to be underserved by
regulations to: protect life-support customers, guarantee service levels,
clarify connection requirements for rooftop solar, require disconnection
reporting and set clear and independent complaints processes. Assessing whether
communities receive fewer than four of five protections, we find that
Indigenous communities are 15% more likely to be underserved across multiple
metrics and remote communities are 18% more likely to be underserved.
As the authors note in their introduction, summarising the
paper’s conclusions:
Our study identifies
settlements with fewer extant legal protections for electricity services,
mapping those at risk of further exclusion from the benefits of energy
transition. We find that life support protections, guaranteed service levels
and disconnection reporting that are ubiquitous for residential customers
within urban and regional areas are often absent in remote settlements. Remote
settlements and settlements with majority Indigenous population are
respectively 18% and 15% more likely to lack comprehensive regulatory and legal
protections compared with non-remote and non-Indigenous settlements.
The authors have undertaken an extraordinarily detailed
level of analysis and produced a series of vivid maps that illustrate the
geographical extent of disadvantage, but also the complex inconsistencies in
regulatory coverage that permeate the energy system nationally. I strongly recommend
readers access the full paper (it is open access), scan through the maps to get
some sense of the geographical spread of the disparities in regulatory coverage,
and read (at the very least) the Discussion section of the paper.
The following paragraph provides an insight into the extent
of the analysis upon which the analysis rests:
We reviewed each of the 284
documents recording legal protections pertaining to 3,047 settlements across
Australia as of 1 July 2022, including those small settlements with fewer than
200 people. Of these 3,047 settlements, the 51 settlements missing data on
relative socio-economic advantage are included in mapping but not the
subsequent statistical analyses. Our review indicates that an estimated 5
million Australians (approximately 20% of the population) are living in
settlements where not all customers are guaranteed protections across the five
dimensions of life support, rooftop solar connection, disconnection reporting,
guaranteed service levels and clear and independent complaints processes.
The Discussion section of the article is essential reading
and makes a number of arguments that have enormous force and merit. I have not
sought to summarise the authors arguments in that section here, but in what
follows I don’t seek to detract from them in any way. There are however two
important additional points I would make that readers should consider when
reading the research article.
The first relates to the argument
the authors make about the rationale for removing energy regulatory disparities.
The authors argue that regulatory disparities in the energy sector should be
addressed because Indigenous peoples’ lands will be crucial to the nation’s
energy transition — a point made in a recent seminar by Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh
(link
here) — and it is thus likely that they will at once be contributing to the
nation’s energy transition while simultaneously missing out on full access to
energy related services. This point is obviously correct, but as a rationale
for addressing disparity it is in my view incomplete.
The systemic disparities afflicting remote and indigenous
communities extend well beyond the energy sector and demand a more extensive
and wide-ranging investment of public resources. Remote housing provision,
water infrastructure, communications infrastructure, investments in quality
services in educations, health and ecological services all demand greater
attention, yet are not assisted by focussing solely on the desirability of a
just energy transition. The policy rationale for addressing systemic and
structural disadvantage must be found in a more comprehensive and dare I say
it, a more radical rationale based around the notion that Australian
citizens deserve to have equal access to citizenship ‘entitlements’. The
power of this research is to demonstrate once again, and with extraordinary analytical
rigour, that this notion has never applied across remote Australia, and the gap
continues today with no obvious policy mechanism or commitment in place which will
address it.
The second argument that needs to
be made, and which is only implicit in the analysis of the research article, is
the role of the Commonwealth in the federation and under the Closing the Gap
National Agreement. For the past decade, the Commonwealth has run dead on
taking a robust role in pushing the states to deliver services to all Indigenous
citizens. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth power to legislate
because the states and territories were not delivering across the board: in
energy, housing, health, employment, essential services, communications and
more. Of course the Commonwealth should
step up on energy disparities across the nation, and actively and proactively
pressure the states and territories to address these systemic services
deficits. As the paper notes, the Commonwealth lacks access to data that even
measures these energy disparities (refer to footnote 70 in the Discussion
section of the article). But, in line with my first point above, the
Commonwealth should step up across the board in pressing the states to deliver
equal levels of services, including regulatory arrangements to all citizens residents
across remote Australia.
Next month, we will see the Productivity Commission’s final
report on its Review of Closing the Gap (link
here). Whatever that report says, the lens which will best give the best measure
of the quality of the Commonwealth’s response to that forthcoming report will
be the extent to which it decides to shift its approach: that is, away from being
just one of the nine government parties to the Agreement (an assemblage that at
present might accurately be likened to a clowder of cats whose only skill is in
producing policy confusion and turmoil) and towards an approach which proactively
adopts the role of ringmaster or overseer, focussed on ensuring consistent and
policy relevant processes are applied to the management of the Closing the Gap
Agreement.
Such a shift in approach would increase the likelihood that
policy and program inputs are made accessibly transparent, that states and territories
will be held accountable for and therefore that tangible outcomes are delivered
across the Indigenous policy domain including in areas such as energy
regulation. One obvious and simple example of the sort of change I am advocating
would be for the Commonwealth to promulgate a template for the state and territory
Implementation Plans under the agreement that radically simplifies their format
and length to say five or ten pages (like a Cabinet submission), rethinks the
decision that they are produced each year, and lays out a template that ensures
that they become real working documents rather public relations exercises and
interminable lists of supposed actions and activities. At present these
Implementation plans are a joke, and if they are not fixed, the National Agreement
will be a joke.
Moreover, the Commonwealth should substantively acknowledge
that there is more to Indigenous disadvantage than focussing on 19 closing the
gap targets and broaden its current approach to the Priority Reforms at the
core of the National Agreement (especially Priority Reform 3) to ensure a tangible
focus on issues such as energy regulation shortfalls across remote Australia.
The pathbreaking research at the centre of this post has
opened a window onto a previously hidden vista of systemic regulatory disparity
in relation to access to and the provision of energy, but simultaneously reinforces
out nation’s ability to ignore and live with continuing and much broader systemic
disparities between remote and non-remote Australians. This is what structural
exclusion looks like.
The citation for the article discussed above:
White, L.V., Riley, B., Wilson, S. et al. Geographies of
regulatory disparity underlying Australia’s energy transition. Nature Energy
(2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-023-01422-5
19 January 2024
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