Have the wheels ever fallen off a government as fast as Albanese’s Labor? Well, possibly Julia Gillard’s: from the moment Gillard broke her clear promise, made the day before the 2010 election, not to introduce a carbon tax, her government was toast. All that was left to decide was who was going to have the honour of leading the party to defeat in 2013, her or Kevin Rudd.
But Anthony Albanese is possibly outdoing Gillard in throwing a stick into the spokes of his own little bike. Barely a month in and his government is floundering in cost-of-living and energy crises (both falling out of climate policy), and the boats have already re-started. History not being without a sense of irony, climate and boats were the very issues that sunk Rudd-Gillard.
In opposition, Gillard loved to crow, “Another boat, another policy failure”. There’s a whole lotta policy failure heading Albo’s way, already.
Dozens of asylum-seekers, including several women and children, intercepted on a boat bound for Australia have been returned to Colombo as people-smugglers tell increasingly desperate Sri Lankans they will be welcomed in Australia.
Another charter flight from Christmas Island to Colombo was understood to be due to depart early on Monday, 48 hours after a flight carrying 41 asylum-seekers, including five women, two girls and four boys, made the same journey.
One of the women aboard Saturday’s flight, Meenu Mekala, told The Australian after being granted bail by a Sri Lankan court that she and her husband had decided to take their two sons on the boat after being assured by people-smugglers that the new Australian government would allow them to stay.
“We were told that there is a new refugee-friendly government elected and we would not be sent back,” she said.
The Australian
Gee, now why would anyone think we have a “new refugee-friendly government”? I mean, surely it wouldn’t be because one of Albanese’s first acts as PM was to allow back in the country a family of illegal immigrants and their anchor babies, who even the High Court ruled are not refugees? Just to sprinkle extra sugar on the table for the people smugglers, Albanese was loudly talking about granting them permanent residence.
Again, Albanese is directly overruling the Highest Court in Australia to let these illegals in for good.
Not to mention Labor’s powerful and vocal pro-“asylum seeker” internal faction.
Should anyone be surprised that people smugglers are capitalising on Labor’s weakness — yet again — with record speed?
And does anyone think this isn’t going to end like Rudd/Gillard: with boats arriving daily and tens of thousands in immigration detention?
On the other issue — energy, which is as much as to say, “climate change” — Albanese is belatedly realising that, well, bugger me, coal and gas are essential for reliable power supply.
Coal and gas power stations would receive payments to secure reliable supply and keep Australia’s ailing electricity system operating, as the government faces pressure to avoid blackouts and fix the national energy crisis.
It’s almost as if renewables are unreliable heaps of crap.
Clearly out-of-his-depth Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, is blithering that Australia hasn’t invested enough in renewables. Given that the country has blown $30 billion on renewables in just the past two years, that begs the question: Just how much is “enough”? $50 billion? $100 billion? A trillion?
How much money must we waste before these clowns admit what is happening right in front of our eyes: “renewables” mean blackouts right when power is most needed, during summer heatwaves and cold winter nights.
Like all cultists, though, the climate nutters will always find an excuse to explain away the bleeding obvious.
Simon Holmes A Court, whose Climate 200 group helped sponsor the teal independents at the federal election, said the mechanism should focus on storage to back up renewables.
“The sooner we expand storage the sooner we can close existing coal and gas. Anything that prolongs the life of coal and gas must be rejected,” he said on the weekend.
The Australian
Given that the Greens and Labor are adamantly opposed to building new dams, and that you can’t exactly bottle wind or sunshine, Silver Spoon A Court can only be talking about massive lithium batteries.
Which once again begs the question of cost — monetary, temporal and environmental.
“Big batteries” aren’t cheap, and we’d need a hell of a lot of them, very fast, to make the “renewable” fantasy even remotely plausible. South Australia’s battery cost nearly $100 million. For that, it can theoretically supply a very small town for maybe an hour or so, the whole state, minutes at best. Yet, during the state’s frequent heatwaves, peak demand can last for hours at a stretch.
And that’s for one of the least-populated mainland states. To provide anything like energy security for Sydney or Melbourne, Australia would have to spend hundreds of millions on batteries — batteries with a shocking environmental and social footprint in developing countries — and cover whatever large swathes of the landscape aren’t already cheek-by-jowl solar panels and wind turbines.
Then in another decade at best, when their useful lifespan is over, we’ll have to do it all over again.