Just Two Weeks and Already the Wheels Are Coming Off

Well, that was fast. Just two weeks in office and the wheels are already falling off the Albanese government. Suddenly, Albo is finding out government involves a lot harder work than just sniping at everything the other guy does, and when you keep telling people you have a plan to fix everything, well, some of them actually expect you to deliver.

As successive new PMs, from Kevin Rudd on, have found out, too, Australian voters are not exactly inclined to easygoing forgiveness any more, either. So, trotting out a series of excuses and trying to blame the other guys isn’t going to wash, either.

Albo may even have had his first “ScoMo” moment, by flitting off to Indonesia on his second international junket in just his first two weeks in the job, where he bored the pants off Joko Widodo with his endless anecdotes about growin’ up a poor boy from the Western suburbs. While a prime ministerial visit to one of our closest regional allies might normally be in order, doing so right as a catastrophic energy crisis is enveloping the nation is not a good look.

Australians are about to experience a winter of much discontent.

Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn has warned that Australia’s current gas crisis will place increased hardship on Australian households.

Speaking from Jakarta as part of a trade and investment delegation accompanying Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Mr Comyn said there was no “silver bullet” for the cost of living pressures hitting Australian consumers.

“It’s an issue that every country in the world is grappling with at the moment in terms of a secure and affordable energy platform,” Mr Comyn said.

We had a secure and affordable energy platform. Under the sort of “Net Zero” policies Labor and the Teals have been pushing so hard for, we deliberately tore it down.

Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott said there needed to be a rational discussion about the problem.

“…not a blame game, not an ideological discussion,” Ms Westacott said.

In other words, woke big business know they screwed up with their climate virtue-signalling and they’re trying to shift blame.

We know where the blame lies. It’s so obvious that even Labor’s own ministers are admitting it.

Resources Minister Madeleine King says a lack of investment in coal-fired power stations is the driving force behind the nation’s energy crisis, urging coal operators to bring the power stations back online as quickly as possible […]

Speaking to the ABC, Ms King said 30 per cent of Australia’s energy crisis underpinned by coal had been taken out of the mix because of unforeseen circumstances including unplanned power outages and an inability to fill the gap with renewables and gas.

The Australian

This is far from the most spectacular backflip on energy, though. Teal independent Monique Ryan is openly campaigning for more natural gas to be made available to the domestic market.

Guess those solar panels and wind turbines just aren’t cutting it, eh?

Labor isn’t just being mugged by the reality of government, it’s being mugged by its own past.

Just ten years ago the then Labor government rejected outright the very proposal to preserve 15 per cent of Australian gas production for domestic use on the eastern seaboard which is now being considered as part of an emergency answer to apocalyptic gas shortages.

Last Friday Anthony Albanese said on Perth radio that the Western Australian policy of reserving 15 per cent of gas production, which WA Labor Premier, Alan Carpenter introduced in 2006, was “visionary” […]

But in August 2012 the then Gillard Labor government rejected a proposal from its own task force into how to protect jobs by maximising Australia’s natural advantages with a domestic gas preservation scheme based on the WA model.

Of the senior Labor leadership in 2012 when domestic gas preservation was rejected there are now 13 who were then in Cabinet or the outer ministry, including Albanese, Chris Bowen, Tony Burke, Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Bill Shorten, and the new Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was the chief of staff to the then Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, Wayne Swan.

The Australian

So much for Albanese’s boast, last week, that he was going to “end the climate wars”. A funny thing happened on the way to the green utopia: a funny thing called “brutal reality”.