FRAN KELLY: Angus Taylor is the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reductions. He's in our Parliament house studios. Angus Taylor, welcome back to Breakfast. 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Thanks for having me, Fran. 

FRAN KELLY: No detail, no modelling, no new money, no legislated target. All you've got is a shiny new brochure, full of 30-year assumptions. Why would anyone trust the Government when it says it's got a plan to reach net zero by 2050? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, because none of those things, most of those things you've said are not right, Fran. 

FRAN KELLY: Really? No legislated target? No modelling…

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, there's a hundred, there's a hundred…

FRAN KELLY: No new money? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, let's be clear, there's a 128-page document that Labor were out talking about before they'd actually read it. The truth is that Labor, who were criticising this - and you said that right up front - don't even have a plan. They have no plan for 2050, they have no plan for 2030, they don't have a 2030 target. Look, what we have laid out over, over…

FRAN KELLY: Well, you don't have a 2030 target either. 

ANGUS TAYLOR: We do have a 2030 target. We absolutely have a 2030 target. 

FRAN KELLY: No. You do not have a 2030 target.

ANGUS TAYLOR: And we're going to meet and beat it. 

FRAN KELLY: Oh, your old target?

ANGUS TAYLOR: We have a 26 to 28 per cent target. It's a target, and we’re going to meet and beat it, Fran, just as we met and beat our Kyoto target. We're going to do it in a responsible, practical way - the Australian way, which is recognising that our economy is different from most other economies in the world. Forty per cent of our emissions are export related, so we have to work hard on those industrial technologies - hydrogen, you talked about; low-emission steel and aluminium; you didn't mention stored energy; we're building Snowy 2 but we see other forms of storage that are coming down in cost rapidly. Solar, you mentioned - Australia has led the way on solar, 12 per cent cost reductions a year, every year for 50 years. That's when uptake happens. We've seen 90 per cent of the uptake in solar in the last 10 years because those costs have come down. That's the way this works. It will work that way, and is working that way with technologies like hydrogen, stored energy. Carbon capture and storage has come down in cost dramatically and provides a really strong pathway for industrial energy emission abatement…

FRAN KELLY: Okay, we'll come back to that, we'll come back to…

ANGUS TAYLOR: Soil carbon and the role that our 90 million hectares of agricultural land can play. We've announced a whole series of policies around supporting that in recent months. Those policies we've announced over two years, Fran. Over two years, we've been laying this out piece by piece by piece. The good news is that plan that we laid out yesterday shows that those policies add up to putting Australia within range of achieving net zero by 2050. It gives us a plan that very few countries in the world have. We have a plan and a target, unlike the Labor party. 

FRAN KELLY: Okay. The problem might be for the Coalition though, a credibility gap. Because for the last two years, you've been saying that, for the last 10 years you've been denigrating action on climate change, denigrating solar, saying, you know, when the sun don't shine, the wind don't blow, these technologies are no good. You, you tried to abolish the renewable energy target- You did abolish the renewable energy target. The Renewable Energy, Energy Agency, you tried to abolish; the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The Prime Minister hugged a lump of coal in the Parliament. He's compared big batteries to the big banana. He said electric vehicles would kill the weekend. There doesn't seem to have been any real conviction to decarbonise the economy, or any real faith in these technologies which you are now banking on completely. 

ANGUS TAYLOR: But the runs are on the score board. We've reduced our emissions…

FRAN KELLY: Well then why have you spent so long bagging them?

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, hang on, because you've got to do it in a practical way. The debate, in my mind, has always been about how. How you do this, a practical pathway forward that protects the lives and livelihoods of people in regional Australia, protects the lives and livelihoods of those who depend on affordable, reliable energy. You can't go into this and say, you know, let's just wipe out industries, let's just wipe out jobs, let's just raise…

FRAN KELLY: Well, no one's saying that.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, you know, the truth is that many of the policies that are bandied around do exactly that, Fran. When we saw the carbon tax introduced in Australia many years ago, we saw one in eight manufacturing jobs gone. Gone. And…

FRAN KELLY: A lot of manufacturing jobs had already gone, and then your Government came in and shut down the car industry.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, I tell you we’re back up to…

FRAN KELLY: That didn't help manufacturing jobs.

ANGUS TAYLOR: We're back up to over a million people working in manufacturing, and the last time we saw that was before the carbon tax was introduced. So, they're the facts. What we are laying out here is a responsible pathway forward that provides, crucially, a pathway for our traditional industries like agriculture, mining, heavy manufacturing, and those industries have the most to lose with the wrong policies, and the most again with the right policies. This is the point…

FRAN KELLY: Yeah. Well, everyone agrees on that. But is it fair to say that in your plan, as the Prime Minister called it so many times yesterday, there's a fair degree of faith in you to- in fact, that quote: the times are a changing? You know, you're banking on technology changes, including new, cheap, you-beaut low emissions, technology breakthroughs.

ANGUS TAYLOR: We have hundreds of years of experience that that is how the human race has prospered. I mean, it's not new, this is not new at all. To give you an illustration of this, you know, the cost of solar has come down every year for 50 years, by 12 per cent, give or take, but average of 12 per cent a year for 50 years. Now that's meant in the last 10 years, 90 per cent of the world's solar that has ever been installed has been installed. You get to a point where these technologies are cost competitive and then they're adopted…

FRAN KELLY: We've all watched that and that's why people are putting it on their roofs. Australians understand that. 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Correct.

FRAN KELLY: What they didn't understand was perhaps the resistance to some policies for so long. But now, you are where you are, you have the road map. But the Head of the UN, Antonio Guterres, says there's a leadership gap undermining the world's efforts to curb global warming. And he says leaders need to come to Glasgow with, quote, bold, time-bound, front-loaded plans to reach net zero. The Government's plan, as revealed yesterday, is none of those things. We're late to the party, and we're going to come up short by those measures, aren't we? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, I don't agree with that. We've met and beaten our Kyoto targets, and there's not a lot of countries that have…

FRAN KELLY: But they weren't bold.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, you know, we deliver and we beat, right? So, that is…

FRAN KELLY: Bold, front-load. This is not those. 

ANGUS TAYLOR: What matters at the end of the day is delivery. You know there's a lot of talk in this space, a lot of talk. What's distinctive about the Australian way is that we get on and find practical pathways to deliver that are good for Australians, good for Australian industry. That's a distinctively Australian approach that recognises the fact that our emissions are 40 per cent exports, that those exports are reducing emissions in places throughout Asia, our customer countries…

FRAN KELLY: Our exports are reducing emissions when we're one of the world's largest exporters of gas and coal? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: We have grown our exports of LNG to be a world leader, to be the biggest in the world, and that's reducing emissions in countries like Japan and Korea. Go and talk to the Japanese and Koreans, they'll tell you that, there's no debate about that Fran. Now, we need to continue to adapt to what our customers want, and this is a crucial part of the plan. Our customers' demand is changing, there's no question about that. So investing heavily, as we are, in industries like hydrogen and ammonia that can provide supplies into places like Japan and Korea to allow them to reduce their emissions in their electricity sector that is exactly what our customers want. It's the right thing for Australia. We're investing heavily, we've already invested $1.1 billion in moving hydrogen forward. We've got a total of $20 billion committed over the coming years to invest in these technologies, to get them to scale, to increase their deployment as the costs continue to come down. This is the practical pathway forward. Importantly, and this is absolutely a crucial point, these technologies we've prioritised are not only the technologies that reduce emissions in Australia, but they will reduce emissions in countries throughout the world in a way which reconciles strong economic growth with bringing down emissions at the same time. That's what the world needs most of all. 

FRAN KELLY: Let's talk about the technologies you’re banking on. Some of which you concede, and it’s part of the plan, they're not there in terms of being a cheap enough yet to deploy, to be effective enough. But you're banking on those global trends and those future trends. You've added ultra low-cost solar to the five priority technologies already identified, which are hydrogen batteries, green steel, aluminium and carbon capture and storage. When will they all be commercially viable? Hydrogen, for example, when will, according to your modelling which we haven't seen yet, hydrogen be produced at $2 per kilo? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well we've laid that out absolutely in the plan. In fact, I put a slide up yesterday showing those time frames…

FRAN KELLY: So when will it be? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: So there, so there's two different parts to this. The blue hydrogen, which is produced from gas and the CO2 is sequestered and it's a very pure stream of CO2, which makes it low cost to sequester. We're at a point now where we know we can do projects under $2 a kilogram. Now we've got to get to scale, so we can do that very quickly…

FRAN KELLY: So when we'll be at scale? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Green hydrogen, which is made from renewables, from electricity, but it can be renewables - it's an electrolysis process. That we expect to be getting down to the $2 mark in the 2030s. So we're investing heavily in this. There's lots of different ways we can bring the capital cost down. We've just invested in three of the biggest electrolyser's in the world over recent months, and working with…

FRAN KELLY: Well, Twiggy Forrest has invested in it.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, he hasn't yet, but, but he's obviously doing a lot of work in this space. But we have actually invested and we're building electrolysers. We're getting on with it. Those projects are world leading projects. They'll help us to understand how we can continue to drive down the cost of the electrolysers, the plant that goes around it, drive down the cost of the renewables that supplies them. That's why the $15 a megawatt-hour target for solar is so crucial because it can help us to get that cost of hydrogen down to where we need it to get. 

FRAN KELLY: In your plan so far, I think, I may have this detail wrong, but I think it's a 111 million tonnes of emissions from fossil fuels across the electricity, transport, agriculture industries will be offset by soil sequestration, which you've mentioned, also, carbon capture and storage. Speaking of Twiggy Forrest, we spoke to him here about this on the program just two weeks ago. Let's have a listen.

TWIGGY FORREST: So Angus and I've had a chat, and I have agreed to not say carbon capture and storage fails 19 out of 20 times. To compromise, I've said, I've agreed I'll say, it fails, and correctly, at least nine out of 10 times. So I wouldn't be banking our kid's future on something which is a proven failure, Fran.

FRAN KELLY: So that's Andrew Forrest, one of the very people you're banking on to help fund low emission technology - don't believe in part of your plan. Has he just blown the lid on carbon capture and storage, it doesn't work? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: No. It's time for him to have a look at some of the projects that are working. There's 60 projects…

FRAN KELLY: But he's had a chat with you. Or are you going to convince him?

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, hang on. Let's, let's actually get to this. I mean, he's an iron ore producer, and good on him for doing what he's doing, but this is a different area. There's 60 projects around the world, 30 in operation. Industrial capture of CO2 and sequestration is happening at a rapid rate. The United States is where the most of its happening, backed in by Joe Biden, who said he's doubling down on it; backed in by the IPCC, the IEA, who all say this is part of the answer. There's no doubt about it. Now, no, no single technology's the whole answer in this. 

FRAN KELLY: They all say it's part of the answer, but they're not saying it's been proven and working to scale yet. That's the problem.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, it absolutely…

FRAN KELLY: It's taking a lot of years to prove up, hasn't it?

ANGUS TAYLOR: It absolutely is and like solar took us 50 years to get to the point where we're seeing this rapid deployment. The good news about carbon capture and storage is we've been sequestering CO2 under the ground for many, many, many years and the oil and gas industry has been doing that for a long time. So it's not new, you know. This is the important point. Now, we're doing it different way, a different scale, and we're learning as we go. But we know now there's many projects that are working around the world. This is part of the answer. Now, there's a lot of people out there who want to kill off industries. Their real goal in this is to kill off industries - they want absolute zero, not net zero. That's not the Australian way. We see these industries as crucial to our future as they've been crucial to our past. They have to adapt, there's no doubt about that. They have to continue to evolve in the products they supply and the way they supply it and we're working closely with industry leaders to do exactly that. This is part of the mix. 

FRAN KELLY: We're almost out of time. But about half the work of reaching net zero, according to your plan as released yesterday when I watched the press conference - will be done by things which are either out of your control or we can't quite be certain about global trends, for example, in technology, new technologies which are either undeveloped or unproven. Doesn't all the uncertainty underscore the need to legislate the target? Isn't a mandate the only way to send the right and firm investment signal to business? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, if you want a carbon tax, that's the way to go. We don't want a carbon tax. And there's many, there's many…

FRAN KELLY: Well, why is it [indistinct] a carbon tax?

ANGUS TAYLOR: There many people out there, and they say, the only definition of a policy in this space is some version of a carbon tax, some version of telling people what kind of cars to drive, what kind of food to eat...

FRAN KELLY: Well, just on what kind of cars to drive. We talked to Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute earlier, who said, this is a technology plan, it's not a plan to net zero, because we need policies to just to get us there, to deploy those technologies. For instance, emission standards for vehicles. You've done a number of pieces on this program about, you know, how Australia is a dump for dirty cars, engines now because of our mission standards. Why don't you have a policy there? 

ANGUS TAYLOR: Tony Wood wants a carbon tax, make no mistake about it. Now, an emission standard the forces up the cost of a Hilux or a Ford Ranger, the two most popular cars in Australia - which is the policy that Labor took to the last election - is a tax, let's be clear about it. Now, the way to get emissions [indistinct]…

FRAN KELLY: Yeah. But so is $20 billion invested on new technologies. That's taxpayer's money, Minister.

ANGUS TAYLOR: No, we're not raising taxes. Can I just say, the important point here, Fran, is that the way forward here which is good for all Australians, is to bring down the cost of low emissions technologies, not to raise the cost of traditional energy sources. That's the way forward. We do want to see cost competitiveness of those low emissions technologies. But the way to do that is not to raise costs - it's to bring those technology costs down. We have a track record of doing it, we can do it, I'm very optimistic about this, this is the Australian way. 

FRAN KELLY: Minister, thank you very much for joining us.

ANGUS TAYLOR: Good on you, Fran. 

FRAN KELLY: Angus Taylor is the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction.

ENDS