‘Net Zero’ Hits the Rocks of the Real World

The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher said, is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. That’s the thing about pie-in-the-sky, Pollyanna fantasies passing as ideologies: sooner or later, they come crashing hard against reality. It’s like jumping off a cliff to prove you can fly: it’ll work – but only for a little while and it will end very, very, badly.

But believing in absurdities such as socialism tends to be just part of a showbag of related absurdities: the Omnicause, as it’s known. Communism, ‘anti-racism’ (aka extreme racism), ‘Palestine’, transgenderism, ‘climate change’... you name it.

The Albanese government is more demented than most when it comes to the latter. Thanks largely to Chris ‘Boofhead’ Bowen, our “Climate Change and Energy Minister”, Australia has been driven at breakneck pace to smashing our energy infrastructure in the name of ‘Net Zero’.

Now, the fantasies are crashing hard on the rocks of reality. The climate dementoids in Canberra are fast discovering just how absolutely vital oil still is to keeping a modern country running. So are the nutbars who infest the Beehive. At least the Albanese government had some sense enough knocked into it to keep just two oil refineries still operating here.

At least some can see how crazy the whole thing really is.

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters says his country and Australia should have been better prepared for the Iran war oil crisis and made “serious mistakes” in allowing fuel refineries to close because they were “too cocky” about the state of the world.

You mean, such as blatherskiting about what an ‘incredibly benign strategic environment’ we live in?

[­Defence Minister Richard Marles] and Foreign Minister Penny Wong sat down in Canberra on Tuesday for annual ANZMIN “2+2” talks with Mr Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins, at which they agreed to a new plan for the nations’ defence forces to co-operate more closely and develop capabilities together.

Does that mean we’ll each get to have the remaining ship on alternate weeks? Word to the wise: don’t let the lesbians near the wheelhouse again.

But defence capability means a whole lot more than guns, planes and boats. This is a fundamental truth the wokies just don’t get: before you can have guns for the rough men on the walls, you need the factories to make them and the steel and oil to make them with. Pull out any block of the Defence Jenga set and you’re screwed.

Successive governments in Australia and New Zealand have been pulling at the blocks with gay abandon. Suddenly, they’re pretending to be surprised that the whole tower is wobbling harder than a Greens MP on the turps.

While New Zealand has about 52 days’ fuel supply in storage or en route to the country compared with Australia’s 30 days, Mr Peters said both countries had been caught off-guard by the conflict and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which choked off about 20 per cent of the world’s oil ­shipments.

How on earth were they caught off guard? What part of world events for most of this year, if not the last two years, have they not been paying attention to?

“You’re learning that some of your refineries should have been kept open; so are we,” he said.

“These are not extremes we’re at now, but we should have always had those contingencies covered off in all of our forward planning. We made some very, very … serious mistakes by being far too cocky about the world circumstance we’re in. Here comes the present reality, right here, right now. Things are very unstable. We hope we get out of here. But it would have been … great to have the comfort of a backup just in case anything went wrong.”

When it comes to the defence of your nation, a responsible government has to assume that, if something can go wrong, it will. Sadly, successive governments of both countries have been very far from responsible.

Meanwhile, Marles, whose greatest talent is collecting snow globes (no kidding), is trying to act like the defence force he’s allowed to be gutted by budget cuts, is somehow relevant.

The government committed the Wedgetail aircraft, 85 crew members and an undisclosed number of air-to-air missiles to the region following a request from the United Arab Emirates.

Note that America didn’t bother to ask. No more than the school rugby coach would pick the specky git with pipestem legs to play prop.

The government has sought to draw a line under the contribution, with Transport Minister Catherine King declaring this week: “We won’t be sending a ship to the Strait of Hormuz.”

That’s because we haven’t got any worth shit right now. Although, to be fair, at least the pride our so-called fleet isn’t sitting on the seabed near Samoa right now, a rusting monument to the idiocy of DEI promotions in the military.

On the other hand, at least NZ’s foreign minister seems to be dimly aware that having an entire Chinese fleet encircling your country with impunity is not a good look. Our dropkick PM didn’t even know it was there until a commercial airline pilot on a trans-Tasman hop happened to notice.

Mr Peters said he was concerned over growing instability in the Indo-Pacific, highlighting China’s surprise live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea in February 2025, and its firing of a ballistic missile which landed 700km from French Polynesia in September 2024.

“You can’t fly a missile all the way to the outskirts of French Polynesia and say you’re just testing it, or have an exercise in the Tasman Sea without thinking people might be alarmed about what’s going on here,” Mr Peters said.

He said the lessons of the incidents were to “keep your eyes wide open”.

“We did put it to the Chinese. We asked them, ‘Was the reason for the Tasman tests to see whether the trajectory of missile utilities or armaments are different in the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere? Is that the reason why you had the test in the Tasman Sea? We’re still waiting for an answer.”

That is more than our government did. All the Chinese got from Albanese and co was a humble request to be permitted to kiss Xi’s other withered buttcheek.