OPINION
It’s apparently not a tongue-in-cheek joke that the Teals are calling for truth-in-advertising rules for politicians. In which case, they’d have to stop calling themselves “independents”.
And the ALP would have to stop calling themselves the “Labor party”. None of them have done a day’s actual labour in their lives, unless branch-stacking counts. As for being “the party of the worker”, the gaggle of arts-law graduates currently warming their arses on the government benches wouldn’t know an actual worker if one came in to fix the espresso machine in the office.
[Anthony Albanese] epitomises the careerist politician, but nonetheless his entrepreneurial sagacity is extraordinary. This is all the more remarkable considering his experience in business consists of working at the Commonwealth Bank as a teenager, and we can only assume his position there was not that of teller but instead economic policy adviser.
It’s in keeping, too, that his Treasurer is a political science PhD, and his Climate Change and Energy Minister is an economics graduate, tutored by a bloke whose career highlight was running the Greek economy for six months. ’Nuff said.
No wonder they believe guff like this:
If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is to be believed, renewables are the cheapest and most efficient form of energy. So cheap and efficient is this industry that it requires billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies to, well, renew itself.
But as Albanese constantly reminds us, Labor is transforming the country into a renewable energy superpower. And as he announced last week, his government will ensure we have sovereign solar capability. How good is this that?
Mind you, Albanese also just reckons Australia is going to reach 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Never mind that that would mean installing 40 wind turbines a month, and 22,000 solar panels a day.
Currently Australia is home to one solar panel manufacturer. Suffice to say we could achieve sovereign solar capability if our energy needs were limited to keeping the Ferris wheel turning at Sydney’s Luna Park, at least during the day.
If Maoist slogans were an energy source, we’d have power coming out of our ears.
To quote from his announcement, it is simply a matter of “turbocharging our engagement”, “surfing the opportunities of the next wave”, drawing “together the threads from across the economy and around our nation” and “catalysing new investment”. Sounds feasible and well thought out, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Albo’s brainfarts are a bubble of gas too far for even his hand-picked pet lefty “economists”.
Last week Productivity Commission chair and former Grattan Institute CEO Danielle Wood warned Albanese’s scheme lacked an exit strategy and could “take jobs and capital investments from elsewhere in the economy where they could generate higher value”.
But according to ALP national president, former treasurer, and eternal surplus-seeker Wayne Swan, she “is completely out of touch with the international reality”. Coming from him, that vindicated Wood on the spot.
Fear not! Albo reckons he’s totally going to re-vitalise Australian manufacturing. But then, that’s what Labor said for decades about the automotive industry. In its first stab at the Australian car industry, the ’80s John Button plan straight up planned to save the industry by slashing it. The stated plan was to reduce auto manufacturers in Australia from 13 to just six.
Button’s Labor successors did even better than that – they reduced the number of car manufacturers to zero.
It was not long ago that another Labor government decided that billions in subsidies and green technology were the answer to galvanising manufacturing. In 2009, then service economy minister Craig Emerson introduced the draft bill for the new Automotive Transformation Scheme (ATS), which complemented the government’s $6.2 billion A New Car Plan for a Greener Future program […] By the end of 2017, the Australian car manufacturing industry was kaput.
The Australian
Call it Year Zero, if Labor are looking for another tried’n’true socialist slogan.