Once upon a time unionists and Labor politicians actually worked for a living – at least for a while – before plonking their arses on the velvet and sucking on the public teat for life. This at least gave them some sense of what their constituents’ needs and priorities were.
Not any more. The “party of the worker” hasn’t seen an actual worker in its parliamentary ranks since Doug Cameron and John Faulkner retired. Nowadays, the Labor party is wall-to-wall professional politicians, Arts-Law graduates all. The last worker your average Labor politician saw was the bloke who came in to fix the bean-to-cup coffee machine.
Former ACTU president Jennie George was another Labor MP who once worked for a living – and represented the blue-collar, steel-industry Illawarra region. Unlike the gaggle of lefty hacks who make up the party today, George can see through the bullshit of “net zero” hysteria.
Former union leader and long-term Labor MP for the Illawarra steel region, Jennie George, has accused Labor of misleading workers on job losses over the move to carbon neutrality, and has warned Scott Morrison against false technology solutions such as “green steel”.
Ms George takes particular issue with the Klimate Kult’s lying slogans, declaring that:
Labor’s argument that “the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action will no longer cut the mustard”.
“Neither will promoting figures without assumptions, costings or specific jobs data,” Ms George writes.
Unlike inner-city Arts-Law graduates, Ms George understands that the cost of shutting down Australia’s steel industry – which “net zero by 2050” necessarily will – would be devastating.
“The 100,000 ‘carbon workers’ in coalmining, gas and oil extraction, fossil fuel generation and integrated steel making deserve better than this,” she writes.
“The impacts are felt not just by them, but their families, the people employed indirectly and, often, whole regional economies underpinned by these industries[…]It is a pity the advocates don’t tell the community there are no proven and commercially viable technologies to replace coal/coke in the blast furnace steelmaking process at BlueScope in the Illawarra,” she writes[…]
Ms George says the Hunter Job Alliance, supported by unions and environmentalists, raises false expectations that the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW could run on renewable energy.
“It operates 24 hours a day, directly employs 950 people and produces 25 per cent of Australia’s aluminium. It is called on to reduce operations to avoid widespread blackouts when there is a system security risk,” she writes.
“Renewables are not commercially viable, nor can they guarantee the required reliability for the smelter’s continued operation. The largest South Australian battery today would power that smelter for less than 15 minutes.”
This is exactly the sort of argument I’ve tried to make with Klimate Kultists, with little success. With their heavily-subsidised rooftop panels, they imagine that the whole of industrialised society can be run on a few more. Trying to make them understand the sheer scale of energy-consumption – of which household power is the tiniest slice – and just how impossible it is for niche technologies like solar and wind to replace it, only draws blank stares of incomprehension. “But Greta says…”
Thankfully, ordinary, blue-collar Australians are able to see right through the bullshit that so bamboozles the bourgeois, university-educated Green Elite.
Labor’s inability to estimate the costs and job losses of its emissions policy is credited as being part of the reason Bill Shorten lost the 2019 election.
Not that Anthony Albanese has learned a damned thing from Shorten’s well-deserved defeat. Nor has PM Scott Morrison.
Mr Morrison has also been shifting Coalition policy towards net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 but has argued it has to be through technology — not taxes on energy — and has cited green steel and hydrogen as ways to cut Australia’s emissions.
The Australian
Morrison is trying to serve up the same turd in white bread instead of wholegrain. If he persists, voters in resources-dependent areas will likely take one sniff and throw it back in his face.
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