Australiazuela Is Next on the Road to Socialist Paradise

As I recently wrote, Europe’s idiotic infatuation with ludicrous “green energy” policies is leading it down the primrose path of destruction. Energy supplies are collapsing, right in the middle of the sort of winter the Climate Cult assured us would never happen again, and the continent stands on the brink of de-industrialisation.

“Hold my shandy,” says Anthony Albanese.

Like all socialists, Albanese labours under the persistent delusion that an economy can be controlled by top-down government directives. In reality, government attempts to control supply and prices only ever serve to restrict supply and drive up prices. It’s Basic Economics — but that’s a book little Albo’s never read (he was too busy poring over Das Kapital).

And here we go again…

Anthony Albanese’s energy market intervention could increase gas bills by $175 per year and push up businesses’ energy costs by 40 per cent, according to independent modelling that warns price caps may trigger supply shortfalls and blackouts in Victoria.

As relations between the private sector and the Prime Minister sank to new lows, Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher ­accused the government of doing the bidding of trade unions and imposing a “Soviet-style policy” creating investment settings in line with Venezuela and Nigeria.

Ignoring the hysterical headline-grabbing of “Soviet-style”, the government’s policy meddling is very socialist — and destined for disaster.

One of the most ominous features of the policy is that it doesn’t do anything about supply, only about local prices.

The fallout from the government’s energy price relief bill, which passed through parliament on Thursday with the support of the Greens and teal independents, came as Mr Albanese rejected concerns that a one-year $12-a-­gigajoule cap on gas and $125-a-tonne cap on coal would trigger an investment drain and supply gaps.

What do these clowns think will happen when suppliers are forbidden from charging higher prices for one or two scarce resources in one market when there are hundreds of other markets begging for the same resources and prepared to pay top dollar — and the locally-available resources are even scarcer?

Even more gas and coal supplies will be sold overseas, while the local prices of “renewables” will soar even higher than they already are, as more and more people are forced to scramble for them.

What is “Soviet-style” about the Albanese government, though, is its reflex of attacking anyone who points out inconvenient reality as counter-revolutionary wreckers.

“If you go out there and you say, ‘Oh, this will inhibit investment, this will create issues for us going forward’, then you’re essentially talking down your industry. They want to be careful that they’re not talking themselves down,” Mr Albanese told Sky News.

Way to shoot the messenger, Albo.

New modelling commissioned by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association reveals price caps could heap more pain on families and businesses, in addition to Coalition warnings of energy bill spikes in excess of $700 in 2023-24 […]

“In the long-term, households could pay up to an extra $175 per year on gas bills while businesses cop a 40 per cent increase relative to a scenario with no price caps and in which planned investment is able to proceed.”

The Australian

One big miner is happy with the policy. It should surprise no one that it’s billionaire China-toady and born-again green trougher Andrew Forrest.

It’s cold comfort (quite literally, as “summer” is looking more like neverending winter), but at least it can be said that Albanese is making exactly the same blunders as Rudd and Gillard.

But then, if socialists learned from their mistakes… they wouldn’t be socialists.