Opinion
The shameless grifters of the Climate Cult have more front than Myers. Not content with sucking billions yearly from the taxpayer, to subsidise their panels, turbines, and electric cars, now they’re coming, cap in hand, demanding the taxpayer pay their workers’ wages.
We’re constantly huckstered that “green jobs” are the employment wave of the future. Every laid-off coal-miner and power-station worker will get a green job, and more to spare! And green jobs are even more lucrative than fossil fuel jobs!
Then reality intervened.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in investment will be needed to fund Australia’s transition to net-zero emissions by 2050, with former Labor cabinet minister and ACTU secretary Greg Combet declaring governments may need to become “significant equity players” to help derisk the transformative green-energy projects of the future.
Translation: green energy is such a dud they’ll go broke without taxpayer’s money.
As for those lucrative green jobs:
Coal and gas workers facing the prospect of losing their jobs would be offered early retirement.
Mr Combet was unable to guarantee the thousands of coal and gas-fired power station workers would be able to earn as much in new clean-energy jobs.
“I cannot say with any certainty about that,” he said. “Obviously the ambition and the intent is to try and ensure that they are well paid, secure jobs in the new industries that will emerge. They are in key industrial regions where there is good industrial organisation, there’s well understood standards for industrial relations and I would certainly hope and anticipate that they will be satisfying and well-paid jobs.
He can hope and anticipate all he likes, reality will have the final say. As Vox grits its teeth and admits, Dirty energy pays more than clean energy. That’s a problem. Well, it is, if your government are demented Climate Cultists intent on destroying “dirty energy” jobs.
Save us, gubmint! bleat the troughers.
Mr Combet acknowledged governments might need to be big investors to derisk projects and adopt a “long-term view before recovering capital”.
But what kind of capital is he talking about? Political capital, more than anything, it seems.
“In my view, successfully transforming the region around Gladstone, and similar regions around the country, must be a key national endeavour,” he told the National Press Club in Canberra.
“Green hydrogen, green metals, green manufacturing. There are opportunities like this in other industrial regions across Australia – whether that’s the Hunter Valley in NSW, Collie in WA, SA’s Upper Spencer Gulf or the ÂLatrobe Valley in Victoria.”
By a pure coincidence, all key Labor or marginal Liberal seats. Seats which are particularly vulnerable should thousands of mining workers find themselves out of lucrative jobs, thanks to Labor’s “Net Zero” obession.
At least Combet is inadvertently giving the game away: “Net Zero” is ruinously expensive.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars in investment will be needed to achieve net zero in Australia,” he said.
The Australian
These supposedly cheap “renewables” are suddenly a lot more expensive than Boofhead Bowen wants us to believe.