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Anticipatory activity in the Australian energy system
This section summarises the current state of anticipation in the Australian energy system, drawing on the literature review and stakeholder consultation to date. Where appropriate the following guiding questions have been considered: • What are governments, regulators, industry, customer groups and researchers doing to engage with the future of the Australian energy system and plan for energy transition? • What are the key future-focused publications produced by these groups, what are their aims, and how are they used? • What methods are used to anticipate the future? How prevalent are forecasting, exploratory foresighting, normative foresighting and anticipatory action? • For each of the groups, what is being done well, and what could be improved? Each organisational group is considered in turn below, followed by a summary of findings in Section 4.8.
4.1 Australian government While many other national governments have institutionalised foresighting capability (see Section 5), the Australian Government does not have a recognised ‘institution of foresight’ 19 as part of its policy or decisionmaking structure. There have been some attempts to develop such capacity in the past. The Australian Commission for the Future was established in 1985 to raise public awareness and stimulate debate about future issues, and report to Parliament. It lasted for 13 years in various forms before its closure in 1998. In 2001, the Australian Parliamentary Library produced a research paper Australia 2020: Foresight for our Future, outlining how formal foresighting methods could be used for policy development 20, however there is no evidence these recommendations were adopted. At the highest federal level, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet recently published the Blueprint for Critical Technologies, which specifically calls for using an advanced foresight capability (set up within the Defence Science and Technology Group) to identify critical technologies and notes that this capability is one where Australia has taken the lead in the Quad Leaders Dialogue. 21 Visibility at this level may mean that exploratory and other formal foresighting methods may be more widely applied across the Australian Government in future, which would be important for resilience as forecasting and normative foresighting alone may not prepare us well for unexpected disruption. Despite the lack of a formal foresighting function, the Australian Government does engage in anticipatory activity. It is responsible for Australia’s greenhouse gas emission projections 22, which are required to demonstrate progress towards international emission reduction commitments. These projections are based on quantitative forecasts but do include some sensitivity analysis (exploratory) and policy statements (normative).
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Slaughter, R. A. (1999). Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future: 1986–98. Futures, 31(1), 91-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-3287(98)00114-1 20 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0001/01RP18 21 https://www.pmc.gov.au/resource-centre/domestic-policy/blueprint-critical-technologies 22 https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/australias_emissions_projections_2021_0.pdf 31
E2 Opportunity Assessment Final Report