Lost in transition: competing discourses and Australia's energy future
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines Australia’s efforts to transform its electricity regime along ecologically sustainable lines. To carry out this analysis, it traces the evolution of climate and energy policy at national, State and local levels through primary interviews and secondary documentary analysis since the emergence of the Toronto Target in 1988. Drawing on insights from the sustainability transitions literature and combining this with a neo-Gramscian perspective, this thesis exposes and deepens our understanding of the power relations that enable and constrain sustainability energy transitions. To date, Australia has made little progress toward ‘greening’ its electricity regime. Nevertheless, analysis of Australia’s sustainability energy transition narrative reveals significant patterns in climate and energy discourse and policy formation. Over the last 25 years configurations of material, institutional and discursive forces have led to moments of policy innovation, which, particularly from 2007 onwards, have shifted the policy landscape. The first formal attempt by the Federal government to introduce an emissions trading scheme (2008 to 2010) offered a new path for energy futures. Ultimately this effort was defeated with relative ease, exposing the contingent nature of sustainability energy transitions in Australia. The second attempt, which sought to introduce a carbon tax (2010 to 2013), proved more successful. A minority Labor government - provoked and supported by the Greens - developed a new and important overarching institutional structure, paving the way for significant reforms. These breakthroughs notwithstanding, institutionalising a sustainability energy transition has proven extremely challenging. This thesis finds that climate policy and energy policy in Australia have been dissociated from one another. This failure of policy coordination and integration is reflected in the diverging goals and paths of each policy domain, and is caused in part by attempts to reconcile competing neoliberal and weak ecological modernisation discourses. This clash, played out within the policy domain through key institutions, actors, and special interests, has led to a range of ad hoc and often contradictory policy pathways. The inability of Australian governments to define and articulate a coherent narrative around a sustainable energy future has constrained Australia’s progress towards electricity decarbonisation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".