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As I wrote recently, Victoria is providing a real-world case study in Chloe Swarbrick’s screeching demands to ‘electrify everything’. Victoria has only taken the first baby steps down that road to hell and it’s already shaping up to be a disaster.
On the other side of the country in WA, another triumph for the ‘just stop’ brigade is working out just like all the other ones. ATCO Australia is decommissioning its Albany gas distribution network, citing ‘excessive costs’ – costs that are almost entirely the result of government distorting the market – to replace an ageing system. Eight thousand customers, households, restaurants, laundromats, are being herded toward bottled LPG or full electrification. It’s already beggaring them.
An Albany restaurateur says he’s facing costs of half a million dollars to switch over to electrical appliances.
Les Palmer runs a steakhouse. His gas equipment actually cooks properly. Switching means $150k–$300k just for power upgrades, plus another $200k for new kit.
“The vast majority of my equipment uses gas, and the ability to change to electric is not impossible, but it’s vastly out of my ability to pay.”
That is to say, practically impossible. This is the real world, after all, not an activist’s green fever-dream.
Laundromat owner Hayden Jones similarly faces planning headaches, landlord approvals and the sheer impracticality of gas bottles everywhere. The town’s mayor is pleading for more time and compensation. Instead, the state government has thrown $10.8 million at social housing. Everyone else can pound sand while the working groups meet.
This is the inevitable endpoint of ‘Net Zero’ ideology untethered from reality. As I’ve warned before, you cannot simply wish away the resources that underpin modern civilisation.
Fossil fuels aren’t just electricity. They are the invisible foundation of everything: commercial cooking, reliable refrigeration, industrial processes, transport, plastics, fertiliser... the lot. ‘Just stop oil/gas’ sounds noble at a protest. In Albany it means restaurateurs choosing between bankruptcy and serving lukewarm, half-cooked meals.
Pretending we can flick a switch to unicorn energy without consequences is economic illiteracy with a green bow. The result is always the same: higher costs, less reliability and the working and middle classes paying so the commentariat can feel morally superior.
Sound familiar, New Zealand? Victoria has become the crystal ball for Swarbrick and every other Kiwi green dreamer. While Victorians endure skyrocketing power prices, blackouts and businesses fleeing, New Zealand’s political class eyes the same delusional path. The same script: demonise reliable energy, subsidise intermittents then act shocked when the bills arrive and small businesses get crushed.
It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Under the Gillard-era carbon tax, hospitality and manufacturing watched costs spiral. The ‘price on carbon’ was sold as painless virtue. The smashed margins and higher grocery bills told the truth. Even worse, the perverse incentives of the carbon tax sent Tasmania to the brink of economic and environmental disaster, as the state’s hydro corporation drained lakes to near-deserts in order to make a windfall profit selling ‘green’ electricity to the Mainland. When the Basslink connector broke, as it regularly does, Tasmania was left stranded.
Now Albany is running the sequel, and New Zealand risks the same rerun.
“Here we are, the second biggest growing town in Western Australia, and we’re all going off reticulated to just bottle gas everywhere.”
Regional growth meets green retreat. Businesses forced into impractical, expensive alternatives. Supply chains disrupted. Costs passed to customers already squeezed by inflation. All so inner-city elites can virtue-signal about their solar panels and EVs while the real economy takes the hit.
Albany is a microcosm. A growing regional centre forced backwards because maintaining gas infrastructure is suddenly “too expensive” in the rush to Net Zero. Never mind that the alternatives impose massive new burdens on businesses already battling energy volatility.
This isn’t transition. It’s managed decline dressed up as salvation. Small businesses, the backbone of regional towns on both sides of the Tasman, become collateral damage in a grand ideological experiment. When the blackouts hit, the cold dinners are served and the renewables fail at scale, the same voices will blame ‘greedy corporations’ rather than their own reckless policies.
The lesson from Albany is blunt: you cannot ‘just stop’ the fuels that make modern life possible without consequences. Pretending otherwise isn’t environmentalism: it’s economic vandalism with better PR.
