The overtaking by Peter Dutton of One-Term Albo (aka Anthony Albanese) as preferred PM in recent Australian opinion polls is unprecedented for a first term opposition leader.
It has left many either speechless or reduced to mouthing gobbledygook.
The extent to which this surprising development is the result of the Coalition opposition’s recent astonishing announcement that it is “going nuclear” is open to debate. There well may be a connection.
What Dutton’s nuclear play achieves is monumental:
· It provides our nation with much needed energy security;
· It plunges a dagger into the heart of the renewables money laundering scheme – Ponzi with a Cap P;
· It brings Australian into the twenty-first century energy economy;
· It neutralises, at a stroke, bleating greens and assorted leftists and globalists who endlessly bang on about non-existent climate emergencies;
· It largely shuts down internal divisions in the opposition parties over climate and energy by simply taking carbon emissions out of play;
· It places a ceiling over our massive, energy-driven cost of living crisis;
· It restores hope to our farmers that their land won’t be pillaged in the name of renewables and in the creation of hat James Delingpole likes to call “bird-chomping eco-crucifixes”;
· It will save untold numbers of whales;
· It will restore economic life and hope to seven regional centres which have suffered grievously at the hands of those determined to kill off old power generation and mining;
· It all but secures the next election for the Coalition.
Recent polling suggests strong support for nuclear energy. 60 per cent, as a matter of fact. And why wouldn’t there be? Stories of fish with three eyes and other nuclear power-driven abnormalities are all very 1950s.
https://smallcaps.com.au/new-poll-reveals-australians-support-nuclear-energy/
If and when it comes to pass, Australia will join such nations as Canada, the United Kingdom, India, China, South Korea, France, Spain, Russia, Japan, and the USA, most prominently, in the sensible nuclear energy club. Most of the G7, in other words. Thirty-two countries, all up. Going nuclear is not a revolutionary act. Merely a mainstream one.
Oh, and Australia has around a third of the world’s uranium resource. Up until now, we have merely shipped it to other places so they can have reliable energy when we, increasingly, do not.
(Yes, I realise that the Brits are, idiotically, shutting down much of their nuclear power in the mad pursuit of net zero. As Ivor Williams points out at TCW:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/unforgivable-ignorance-at-the-heart-of-net-zero/)
Moreover, Dutton even named the proposed sites, showing both substance and further courage.
In contrast, the PM announced, a mere month ago, plans to subsidise the Australian manufacture of solar panels and wind farms. 22 billion dollars’ worth of corporate welfare. To deliver a “reliable and renewable future”, as if the words “reliable” and “renewable” should ever be used in the same sentence.
The usual suspects, like The Guardian and the CSIRO (the wildly misnamed and climate-obsessed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) now have a new game to play. Maligning nuclear, at all costs. Speaking of costs, the critics seem to be blissfully unaware of, or at least are conveniently parking, the likely final bill for renewables, estimated in 2010 at $370 billion over (then projected) ten years.
The current budget projects a Commonwealth Government spend of $47 billion over four years to “support” a transition to renewables.
All this on a system that won’t guarantee power and will only last twenty years before it all falls to bits. The Nationals’ leader, David Littleproud, has joined the fray:
‘Dripping with self-righteous sanctimony’: Littleproud lashes Teal MPs in nuclear debate.
(The Teals, for international readers, are largely rich, greenie women – we used to call them “doctors’ wives” – who won a few inner-city seats at the last election).
Littleproud’s party represents regional and rural interests. Knowing that a nuclear energy sector will revive economies inhabited by his own constituents, and will preserve much needed farmland, he has gone on the attack. He has gone big on a matter of national importance and controversy for the second time in a year. (The Nationals, so useless in recent years on so many issues, were first out of the gate to oppose the divisive referendum for a Aboriginal voice to Parliament, a move of some considerable political courage itself, at a time when the polling showed a substantial majority supporting the yes campaign).
On the question of the costs of nuclear, Littleproud had this to say:
Nationals leader David Littleproud has slammed the Albanese government over its energy plan which will cost “$1.5 trillion”.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton announced the Coalition’s nuclear plan last week.
“It’s $1.5 trillion, and that’s Net Zero Australia who's articulated those numbers,” Mr Littleproud told Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell.
“Then $7 to $9 trillion between 2060.
“That’s why we’re saying we don’t just want to leave a legacy that just doesn’t last 15 to 20 years.
“We want something that’ll last 80 to 100 years.”
Indeed. Government and allied estimates that nuclear will cost between three hundred and six hundred billion dollars, if themselves accurate, look like loose change in comparison.
The estimate by the Smart Energy Council might be taken with a soupcon of salt. This august body enjoins us on its web site:
Don’t sit on the sidelines. Join us in accelerating the transition to a sustainable future.
https://smartenergy.org.au/
Oh dear. Battling the Coalition on the cost of nuclear looks to be a very dumb idea for the greenies.
The term game-changer is a cliché whose use we should all abhor. Yet here it approaches appropriateness. Maybe it wasn’t needed, politically. Airbus Albo is probably going to achieve electoral ignominy all on his ownsome. Which makes Dutton’s move courageous as well as brilliant. He is an energy truth-teller. Above all, the word that most comes to mind to describe his nuclear energy policy is “elegant”. As the above dot points make clear.
With the imminent resignation of the LINO (Liberal in name only), greenie Matt Kean from NSW politics just announced, Dutton’s week was made. There goes the principal internal opposition to nuclear energy within the Coalition ranks. Poof! Just like that. Malcolm Turnbull’s mini-me is off to join the renewables industry scam. No doubt, he will be well rewarded. (Yes, the LINO north of the Tweed, the Leader of His Majesty’s Liberal opposition in Queensland, is opposing nuclear energy. If he continues to ignore the views and interests of his own voters, with an election coming up in the Sunshine State, he is likely to become one of history’s footnotes).
The NSW Liberal Party, the Party of Kean, will likely be in the wilderness of Opposition for as long as the British Tories – who may or may not even exist after 4 July – and good riddance to both of them. Their own-goal decades in office sealed both their fates. Mind you, there is a lot less damage that a State Labor government in Australia can do than a rabid Blairite is likely to inflict on the deeply troubled Mother Country. But by ridding themselves of Kean, once described as Australia’s most dangerous politician, the Liberals in Macquarie Street can now, perhaps, take (very) tentative first steps towards a reformed, faction-free, conservative future. No one should be too optimistic about this, but, as I say, it is a start. Pity that the Rum Corps State doesn’t have either a Reform Party or a Nigel Farage to hand.
Back to Dutton, who is increasingly looking as though he will become Australia’s fourth great opposition leader (after Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Tony Abbott).
Astonishingly, Own-Goal Albo hasn’t realised the full import of Dutton’s masterstroke. Or perhaps he has. He has been spouting even more mindless gibberish than he usually does since Dutton went for the nuclear option.
I happen to live (for some of the time) in one of the named centres for development as a nuclear energy site. The Lithgow (New South Wales) economy is currently in the doldrums. In years past, Lithgow, around two hours west of Sydney, was a thriving mining and power generation town, along with its near neighbours, Wallerawang (known affectionately as Wang) and Portland. These three towns have pushed above their weight in doing the heavy lifting for the fossil fuels sector that has, for generations, powered our economy and provided cheap electricity and high living standards. For the workers, especially. Then governments of all persuasions, in thrall to the greens and fearful of their seemingly growing electoral appeal, began to close the mines and run down the power stations.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-03/future-of-coal-fired-power-stations-lithgow/100493820
Introducing the annual Vinnies winter appeal at Sunday’s Mass, the speaker, probably knowing that he was stating the obvious, mentioned two things in particular about the plight of Lithgow’s increasing homeless and about the working and non-working poor generally. These were the exponentially rising cost of rental housing, and the fact that there are “no jobs” here. No jobs. He noted that people on miserly Centrelink payments are now paying half their incomes in rent. I know what you are thinking … only half?
Lithgow is just one Aussie regional town doing it very tough in an era of metropolitan elite-driven governments and policies. Despite the optimistic gloss put on things by the inevitable local economic development “transition” plan now out there:
The Australian energy sector is undergoing significant change as part of the global push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero. Nationally, the development of renewable energy infrastructure is accelerating which will affect communities like Lithgow with a reliance on coal mining and coal fired power generation.
The impact on Lithgow will be significant. Together, coal mining and electricity supply, including the local businesses that service them, contribute almost 46 per cent of Gross Value Added (GVA) to the Lithgow economy and employ more than 16% of our workforce.
The Lithgow emerging Economy Project (LEEP) has produced a Transition Plan to reinvent and invigorate Lithgow’s economy by building on our heritage of industrial innovation, our regional endowments and our economic advantages.
Developing new opportunities to balance the economic contribution that coal mining and coal-fired power generation brings to Lithgow is a challenging but exciting task that will require coordinated action from all three tiers of government. Work needs to begin now.
The transition will require ambition, leadership and significant effort to attract new investment to expand industries and businesses, and create diverse, skilled jobs including for young people and workers currently in the coal and energy sectors. (Emphasis added).
https://www.leep.lithgow.com/transition-plan/
This is fantasyland, on steroids. The local face of net zero, where real people outside the cities are thrown to the economic wolves.
What Dutton’s huge policy shift has done is to provide specific hope for economically moribund places which have lost their former economic reasons for being as the direct result of malevolent and deliberate government policy, and more general hope for a resource rich nation that has recently been hosing its economic advantages up against the wall.
Clueless and self-deceiving advocates of renewables routinely trot out the line that dying fossil fuel regions will suddenly and miraculously re-emerge, fully formed, with new economic roles in the clean, green, sunny uplands. Westpac Bank chirruped in 2023:
Drawing on existing skill sets and infrastructure, old coal-fired power stations are being repurposed into renewable energy hubs and vibrant community assets as the low-carbon transition gains pace.
Australia’s pathway to net-zero is taking an unlikely twist with some of the country’s oldest coal-fired power stations set to propel the clean energy future.
Energy giants such as AGL have announced plans to fast-track their exit from coal-fired generation, but rather than abandon their legacy assets, they are transforming them into renewable energy precincts and low-carbon industrial hubs.
Whatever a “vibrant community asset” is. Looking around the place in Lithgow’s environs, it doesn’t currently scream “vibrant community hub”. Businesses downtown closing by the week. Empty shop fronts everywhere. Op shops everywhere. No foot traffic. Pubs closing. Vibrant? Yeah nah.
These false dawns have been proclaimed by the greenwashing machine for a long time now. For just as long a time, limp “conservative” parties have been, at best, going quiet, and at worst, echoing the lies of the energy-suicide, net zero class. But the chimeric renewables energy “hubs” foreseen and celebrated by Australia’s woke corporates may now actually lead to real economic development, with a nuclear energy makeover.
Peter Dutton is also striking a blow against the small target oppositions that have become the norm in recent decades, where winning government and kowtowing to fashionable ideologies have replaced any desire to represent voters properly, to serve the people’s interests and to govern for the sake of the nation. And where political parties and associated policy institutes and the media have been taken over by globalist, green, millennial apparatchiks in short pants who lug around their leftist degrees, but who lack any real-world nous, and who totally ignore (if they even understand) the views, aspirations and interests of industries and voters in struggle street. These folks actually like having things like functioning electricity.
Does one detect some emerging spine, at last, among at least one of the legacy parties down under? As policy U-turns go, this one has the potential to be one for the ages.
Paul Collits
23 June 2024
I love this policy. Ten years ago I never would have imagined Australia having the nuclear debate. Being pushed to it by net zero grifters is poetic. The left eats itself again. I probably would not have agreed with nuclear years ago, so much coal and gas is ours, but if we can't have that and if this gives us an inkling of hope and I never have to hear the word "renewable" again, then I am all in. The best my state premier has is that it is a betrayal of those who have invested in roof top solar. My solar panels are 10 tears old, and I cannot afford to replace them, but apparently they will still be working in 2050. Who knew. Albozo 0 Dutts 1.
It is good to see the opposition stand for something.