ALP now wants "Coal power stations needed 'back online'", page-179

If you happen to know anyone that worked in those government owned power stations back in the day, you would know how wasteful and inefficient they were .

Building them 50/60/70 years ago was a great idea. It established a stable electricity network. It created a lot of skilled jobs, trained a whole bunch of people and facilitated the building of infrastructure like roads, towns, dams etc.

However, once that was all established, the government's work was done. The power stations of the 80s were terribly inefficient, had bloated workforces doing very little and were becoming a drag on the economy.

That's one of the main reasons why they were privatised.

Look at any project the government builds now. Cost blowouts, time delays etc.

Renewables are reliable and can provide energy at a national scale. Conventional baseload is no longer competitive in a traditional sense in a widely distributed grid and is going broke.

The failure of a solid government policy to manage the transition smoothly is the problem. If the COALition had set targets and given industry policy that they could invest against, we wouldn't be in this predicament.

Hopefully Labor will sort that out and it will be smoother from here. There are plenty of companies, both fossil and other, that are ready to go. They just need a policy framework to work with.