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When you’re being shown up by Scott Morrison, you’ve really got problems. In this case, though, the belated vindication of the Bad Churchy Man is cold comfort for those of us enduring the results of the idiocy of those who replaced him.
The demented Climate Cultists shrieked and fainted when Morrison brought a lump of coal into the parliament. They screamed bloody murder when he intervened to prevent a strategic blunder so dunderheaded that only a climate-deranged loon – which is to say, the entire left and most of the normiecon right – could contemplate it for even a nanosecond.
That strategic blunder was nearly letting the nation’s domestic oil refining capability fall apart. The measure of how disastrously stupid such an idea is, is that the demented Jacinda Ardern went ahead and did it, in New Zealand. Australia very nearly fell prey to the same cretinous delusion.
In 2021, the Morrison government was accused of writing a blank cheque to stop oil refining from disappearing offshore.
“There are a number of budget measures vying for top spot as the most brazen fossil fuel subsidy,” wrote the Australia Institute’s Audrey Quick, “but paying Australia’s oil refineries an undisclosed amount to stay open is a strong contender.”
That is kind of rich, coming from the Cultists who are perfectly willing to pour trillions into the pockets of environmental vandals that are busily bulldozing vast swathes of the Australian landscape and burying it under vast fields of aluminium, glass and whirling bird and bat-manglers. All for the dubious ‘return’ of collapsing energy security.
Energy security, though, is vital to national security. Shutting down the last oil refineries is a strategic idiocy on par with handing the Sudetenland over to some raving loony with a funny moustache. Thankfully, for once, the Morrison government got something right.
The deranged howling of the left is all the more proof of its wisdom.
With hindsight, the modest payments then energy minister Angus Taylor offered to keep the Lytton and Geelong refineries operating is arguably the most sensible intervention in Australia’s energy sector in recent years.
They may not produce enough fuel to satisfy the country’s needs, but they will at least ensure that, if things turn bad, Australia’s air force will not be waiting for the next tanker from Shanghai before it can take to the skies.
Meanwhile, the Albanese government is writing blank cheques as fast as crony corporate cowboys can snatch them. For not just no benefit, but to actively undermine Australia in nearly every way.
Last year, the government announced it would spend $2.3bn to subsidise the installation of household batteries, $300m more than the Morrison government budgeted for in its 2021 Fuel Security Package.
Straight into the pockets of the same Boomers who spent the last few decades fleecing the taxpayer for their rinky-dink rooftop solar.
As recently as two weeks ago, Chris Bowen was claiming his Cheaper Home Batteries scheme had been a runaway success. More than 250,000 home batteries had been installed with a total capacity of 6.4 gigawatt hours.
Rule of Thumb: if Boofhead’s singing its praises, its a Hindenberg-scale disaster.
It was “a remarkable achievement”, he claimed, “better for the planet and better for the pocket”.
Whose pockets was he referring to? Not taxpayer pockets – obviously – since, as we learned in the Mid-Year Economic Forecast, the cost of the scheme blew out to $7.2bn in less than six months, triple its initial budget […]
It is a reflection of the lack of discipline in Canberra that the ability to shovel public money out the door faster than promised is chalked up as an achievement by this government. The government has adopted the big-hearted Arthur approach to fiscal management. Budget blowouts are apparently virtuous if they are channelled into worthy causes.
What else would you expect from socialists? Every lefty idiot knows that other people’s money grows on trees (at least, the trees that haven’t been bulldozed to make way for a wind or solar farm).
As the Productivity Commission reported in August, FBT exemption on EVs is an extraordinarily expensive way to reduce carbon emissions ranging from $1000 to $20,000 a tonne. Discounting fuel excise duty on E10 petrol, for example, would produce the same benefit for roughly a tenth of a price, even if it lacks the same green kudos.
Batteries too are an inefficient and costly way to reduce emissions, even more so when they are installed at household level. Home batteries can reduce peak demand and help smooth short-term fluctuations, but they do not solve the core intermittency problem. The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the saving to customers across the National Energy Market from faster battery uptake is just three per cent.
No matter how hard you juggle the data, the inescapable conclusion is that this is low-grade public policy, poorly conceived and clumsily executed.
That’s to say: Albanese government policy.
And still we need oil and gas and coal as badly as ever.
As Chris Ulhmann reminded us at the weekend, after 20 years of “transitioning”, Australia depends on oil, coal and gas for some 90 per cent of the energy we consume. The prospect of an extended global energy crisis exposes the net-zero project as a dangerous political distraction from the fundamental challenge of energy security.
The only problem is that we have complete and utter morons like Boofhead and Zippy with their hands on the levers.
In a world that suddenly seems more serious, Bowen responds by beclowning himself.
“There’s one form of energy that Vladimir Putin cannot disrupt,” he told an interviewer last week, “and that’s the flow of sun to our landmass and the flow of wind on and off our shores.”
If flippant idiocy was an energy source, Boofhead would power the world.
