Smash! Don’t say we didn’t warn you. As one energy-reliant manufacturer after another shuts up shop; as our energy prices continue to go through the (solar-panelled) roof with little sign of the glorious ‘green jobs’ revolution that was supposed to evolve; and with clear evidence that the carbon pricing and renewables schemes have had a statistically negligible impact on reducing global carbon emissions: it’s time to scrap the Renewables Energy Target.

In the same week that Alcoa and Toyota in Australia announced they couldn’t afford to continue manufacturing, Dick Warburton has been appointed by Tony Abbott to conduct a review of our RET. The timing couldn’t be more appropriate. Whatever environmental benefits this hidden tax may have, and they are at best dubious, they are insignificant when compared to the damage being inflicted upon our energy-reliant economy. As we and others have all too often predicted, industries such as car-manufacturing and aluminium-smeltering would struggle to cope under serious efforts to decarbonise our economy. Yet although they may be the hardest hit, the reality is that every electricity bill in the country is distorted by a pricing scheme that rewards and encourages the most inefficient and costly producers of energy, such as wind and solar.

Insidiously, in many instances our poorest citizens, who struggle to pay their weekly household grocery bills, are subsidising the sanctimonious inner glow of those individuals who were wealthy and canny enough to splash out on a few subsidised solar panels with which to decorate their affluent homes.

Nigel Lawson, the former editor of The Spectator and chancellor in the Thatcher government, debunked the madness of chasing innovation in renewable energy via mandatory subsidised targets in these pages over three years ago. In case Mr Warburton missed them first time around, his words are worth recalling:

[The claim] that policies to promote the replacement of carbon-based energy by (substantially more expensive) renewable energy will bring great benefit to the economy and create millions of so-called ‘green jobs’… is economic illiteracy of the worst order. As the great 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat pointed out, if jobs are your yardstick, you might as well go round breaking windows so as to create jobs for glaziers. All [you are] doing is creating uneconomic jobs that require an ever-increasing subsidy at the expense of genuinely productive jobs requiring no subsidy at all. To engineer, at great cost, a switch from the production of relatively cheap carbon-based energy to very much more expensive renewable energy… cannot possibly be justified on either employment or broader economic grounds.

Lord Lawson wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his thesis is being borne out in this country along with many others. Where once we boasted the world’s cheapest energy, we now are among the most expensive. Meanwhile, China builds ever more coal-fired electricity plants and its net emissions are steadily escalating, and the Germans (of all people) have started desperately scrapping renewables and returning to brown coal.

Time we, too, stopped breaking windows.

The sins of Craig Thomson

Blind Freddy could tell you years ago that Craig Thomson was a crook. The prostitutes, the ‘somebody must have forged my signature’ credit card receipts, the wacko and utterly implausible denials (some of them under parliamentary privilege) and the contradictory and ever-changing stories — none of this fooled anybody. Oh, except for the most important and powerful people in the country; namely, the Prime Minister of Australia, her Treasurer and the senior ministers of her government.

As if the self-evident lies weren’t brazen enough, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and the Labor gang all shamefully stood by the former head of the HSU as he trashed the reputations of former union colleagues on whom he sought to blame his own crimes. All of which was done for the sole purpose of retaining power in a hung parliament. It’s hard to think of a bigger betrayal of the Australian electorate. An honourable MP would have resigned following the initial damning Fair Work report, allowing a by-election as early as mid-2012. An honourable PM would have demanded it.

The legacy of Craig Thomson, his lies and the blinkered support of a party desperate to cling on to power leaves a costly legacy. Along with the hookers and the red turbo spa, we shouldn’t forget the crippling of our manufacturing economy, ever-rising unemployment, a record national debt and deficit, and many lives lost at sea. A fair chunk of which we might have avoided had Mr Thomson done the right thing.