OPINION
As Thomas Sowell said, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong”. It’s even worse when those same people are given license to keep on making bad decisions with other peoples’ money.
To borrow another time-worn phrase, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Australia’s Energy and Climate Change Minister, Chris “Boofhead” Bowen.
Taxpayers will underwrite a five-fold increase in new government-backed renewables capacity across Australia, as Chris Bowen gambles on a dramatic market intervention to secure grid reliability and achieve Labor’s ambitious target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030.
The Energy and Climate Change Minister on Thursday will unveil a massive expansion of the Capacity Investment Scheme to deliver enough battery, wind, solar and pumped hydro generation to replace exiting coal-fired and thermal power sources.
Because when you’ve completely failed to meet your targets so far and your entire project has turned into a ruinous black hole, the obvious thing is to keep throwing money at it.
We are governed by gibbering loons. From coast to coast, thanks to wall-to-wall Labor governments, save in Tasmania where the Liberal government is so sopping wet that it makes no difference.
Mr Bowen, who is expected to win state and territory support at an energy ministers’ meeting on Friday, has previously conceded it would be difficult to deliver on the government’s 82 per cent renewables target.
By “difficult”, Boofhead really means, “completely, utterly impossible — but, hey, it’s not my money!”
Before the election, Anthony Albanese said targets in his Powering Australia climate change manifesto – which included a promise to lower power bills by $275 per year from 2025 – were based on existing Labor policies.
The Australian
And how’s that promise going?
Power bills to jump as much as 25pc (again)
Australian Financial Review
Along with, as a consequence, the price of everything else.
And the government’s only response is to act like that idiot who gets a new credit card to pay off the other credit card that he used to pay off the personal loan that he used to pay the mortgage. And reckons everything will be fine because he just put all his money on a dead cert at the dogs.
Tell me this isn’t a Labor government.