Meanwhile in Australia, "Coal is the future!" - Tony Abbott
The electrical grid has some very serious limitations that most of the people are not aware of. For example you cannot recover from a blackout scenario without electricity. Only very few power plants are able to do that, the most common types are nuclear plants.
Another lesser known fact is that any windmill you put in your system requires a fossil based turbine as well to be able to control the surges and dips in the power production.
On the top of that, most of the windmills are not suitable for being placed for human population based on the frequency of sound they produce.
I think the future is clean nuclear power and some renewable sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBmk7t5K35A http://oto2.wustl.edu/cochlea/wind.html
Same holds for dips and surges, you can ramp a pump storage very quickly, same order of magnitude as a fossil plant. Additionally you don't need to have it running on base-load. That's why this mode of operation is currently not feasible for many gas-fired power plants. Gas prices vs electricity prices are so bad (at least in Germany) that you will always loose even in the most modern and most efficient plants if you try to provide control reserve. If you don't run on maximum efficiency you'll loose all the time, if you do, however, you cannot control dips in the power production as the point of maximum efficiency is often near maximum load.
You can run solely on renewables if you have enough hydro plants (see Norway).
Australia has a lot of coal (no need to import raw material).
Australia has coal mining companies (no need to import technology).
CO2 is only a global problem, the coal which Australia burns won't make a big dent in the effects and the cost is shared globally.
So, financially it totally makes sense to use up the local resources first. At least in the short term until these resources get scarce.
In the long term, saving resources may be the wiser option. E.g. have coal plants on standby most of the time while solar and wind supply the grid. Then you can export some of the coal or save it for future generations.