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Finance Minister Jim Chalmers has slammed the Coalition’s proposal to keep all coal-fired power stations open, saying it would keep the economy under pressure for longer.

The Government this morning published an economic analysis suggesting the Coalition’s policy of keeping all coal-fired plants open for 10 years from 2028 would cost the budget more than $17 billion.

Speaking to ABC Radio National, Chalmers said the opposition’s approach to net zero was “hare-brained”.

“This will raise energy prices and have a devastating effect on the budget and the economy,” he said. “What’s putting upward pressure on energy prices on our grid is not the new, cheaper, cleaner, renewable, reliable energy we’re introducing. It’s the older, traditional energy sources becoming less reliable as they move closer to shutting down.”

Chalmers said the Coalition’s decision was “100 per cent driven by the internal party politics of the Coalition party room” and that it had no economic consequences.

“The reason it’s crazy from an economic standpoint is that the most expensive part of the upward pressure on energy prices, which is the unreliability of the aging fleet, is that they want to drag this out longer and keep people under pressure for longer periods of time,” he said. “The result of all this will be higher energy prices, not lower.”