The Opposition’s climate spokesman, Greg Hunt, last night made several extraordinary admissions about Tony Abbott’s sham Direct Action policy for tackling climate change in a performance which has shredded any remaining credibility for the deeply flawed policy.

In an interview on ABC TV’s 7.30 program, Mr Hunt failed to give straight answers to two simple questions: how will Direct Action clean up Australia’s electricity generating sector and who will pay?

Mr Hunt told the ABC that under Direct Action a Coalition Government would pay large brown-coal fired electricity generators to reduce their pollution by switching to gas-fired generation.

“Natural gas is a more expensive fuel for generating electricity than brown coal,” the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet said.

“That means the Coalition’s policy would either see electricity prices rise with no assistance to households or the Coalition having to subsidise the electricity generators.”

“Those subsidies would cost taxpayers billions of dollars and would have to continue for decades given that electricity generating plants are long-lived assets.”

Mr Hunt failed to answer the question whether electricity prices would rise several times. Eventually he admitted that the only way of avoiding higher prices would be through indefinite taxpayer subsidies to the generators.

Q: Sure, but you agree that brown coal-fired power stations are much cheaper than gas stations aren’t they?

A: They are, they are.

Q: So who pays the price difference?

A: We also have a mechanism built in to ensure there are no price differences, no impact on electricity prices as a result.

“The real answer is that under the Coalition’s policy ordinary householders will pay the increased taxes needed to fund the subsidies,” Mr Combet said.

Mr Hunt also dipped into Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey’s discredited $50 billion of Budget savings, saying they would be used to pay for the Coalition’s electricity subsidies.

“That is an off-the-cuff new spending commitment by Mr Hunt that will cost tens of billions of dollars,” Mr Combet said.

“This blows yet another hole in Joe Hockey’s deeply-discredited savings promises.”

Finally, when pressed further, Mr Hunt did an about face and admitted that the Coalition might not even clean up the electricity sector after all, despite previous public commitments.

Hunt: “If we can clean up some of our oldest and dirtiest power stations as one of the lowest cost means of reducing emissions, we are happy to do that. But it could be soil carbon, it could be capturing waste coalmine gas, it could be cleaning up landfills.”

“Mr Hunt’s performance has shredded the Coalition’s Direct Action policy,” Mr Combet said.

“This comes after his frontbench colleague Malcolm Turnbull estimated the policy would end up costing the Budget $18 billion a year by 2050.”

“While Mr Hunt accepts the climate science his credibility has been trashed by Mr Abbott and he is compromised by a Coalition full of climate change sceptics.”