OPINION
As I wrote recently, Australia’s Nationals, unlike New Zealand’s National, are finally recovering some testicularity in the face of the Climate Cult. The Nationals, the old Country Party, are facing a grass-roots backlash from their constituents, over “Net Zero” policies in general, and “renewables” in particular.
Because, unlike the green-left and dripping wet Liberals and Teal elites, firmly ensconced in their inner-city havens, Nationals voters — country people — actually live in the environment. More importantly, they rely on nature for their livelihoods.
So of course they’re not too thrilled at the sight of farmland and forest being bulldozed so that Chinese-owned wind farms can hack endangered native raptors to pieces, or so mile after mile of once-green hills can be carpeted with glass and silicone. All so that wealthy Teal voters can charge their EVs with a pretense of a clear conscience.
The Nationals are escalating their war on wind and solar farms, demanding a moratorium on all large-scale renewable energy projects until they undergo “proper approval processes” by the federal government.
In a push that gained early support from the Liberal Party, the Nationals federal conference passed a motion on the weekend calling on the government to “place a moratorium on all large-scale renewable energy projects until the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act … is amended to automatically refer all commercial-corporate renewable energy projects to the EPBC Act approval process”.
If a coal mine directly slaughtered as many endangered species as the wind farms which blight Tasmania’s rural landscape, the Greens would be chained to them, ten deep. Instead, the green-left turn a blind eye to ecological devastation in the name of “Net Zero”.
NSW Nationals MP and Coalition frontbencher Barnaby Joyce said there was “red hot sentiment” in regional areas where people felt they were “powerless against wind factories, solar factories and this new cobweb of transmissions lines that’s destroying the environment and landscape”.
“People have been run over by foreign-owned wind farms and governments using their powers to get corridors through and then flipping the deal to foreign-owned transmission companies,” he said.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said all energy projects, including renewables, were already assessed under the EPBC Act. There were more than 100 renewables projects currently being assessed.
This is the Act, presumably, which actually allows a wind farm in Tasmania to exterminate more than a dozen endangered wedge-tailed eagles, every year. Try to imagine a coal mine being allowed to get away with that.
Nationals’ voters are also well aware that bulldozing miles of native forest for a wind-farm is just part of a chain of environmental catastrophe wrought by “renewables”.
The Nationals motion, which was put by the Queensland and NSW divisions, also asks the government to “examine the environmental impact of the mining and refining of resources for renewable energy generation, of land clearing required for renewable energy generation, and the disposal or recycling of all renewable energy infrastructure”.
But, like political leaders across the conservative board, the Nationals’ gutless leadership are too pathetic to stand up to the Climate Cult, even when their own rank-and-file are furiously demanding it.
In a win for Nationals leader David Littleproud, a motion calling for the abolishment of the party’s net zero emissions by 2050 commitment was heavily watered down to “acknowledge that the world is moving to a lower carbon economy, and adopt a policy that will reduce Australia’s Co2 emissions in collaboration with the rest of the world”.
The Australian
Who needs the Greens, when you’ve got these pathetic pieces of jelly-like excrement continually bobbing up to the top of the “conservative” parties’ leadership?