Australia does not need any more coal stations. Wanting to build new ones has weirdly become a strange infatuation by the conservatives, but there is absolutly no need in Australia for more baseline capacity. It's all in the peaks, which is all gas (which mostly of sets the benchmark price given where it sits in the AEMO stack).

So most of our price problems are just the price of gas, and the introduced reservation program has helped with that a little but does not go far enough. That, and the gold plating of the infrastructure (which alone is like 40% or something IIRC of the price rises over the last decade).

Most of the 'reliability problems' than the politician are on about are really just 'fears of possible future reliability problems', stirred up by the blackouts in SA that were mostly due to transmission lines being blown over in a massive storm while one of the interconnectors with Victoria was down for maintenance, and some wind turbines tripping out because of dangerously high wind speeds. There isn't really that much reliability risk apart from the fact that our coal stations are all pretty unreliable (the Australia Institute has taken to tweeting every time a generator trips out, it's pretty crazy how unreliable our coal stations are).

Perhaps we will need some more gas peaking stations but new pumped hydro and big batteries will probably take over some of that.