In the run-up to the last federal election,  Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen promised repeatedly that they would slash Australia’s energy bills. They even nominated the precise amount that they would reduce household electricity bills by; $275 per annum. This figure was not said just the once in a careless moment under pressure, but was methodically repeated up to as many as ninety times over the course of the campaign. Talk about putting the hard sell into retail politics.

Albanese & Bowen; if they were a department store, they’d be in serious strife. Having made a firm cash commitment to 26 million Australians, since the election they have shamelessly reneged on it under the fraudulent and spurious notion that the war in Ukraine has now made the promise redundant. This is nonsense because the conflict was already underway during the election campaign so its impact should have ensured caution in making such a specific commitment. And spurious because – as Judith Sloan has argued in this magazine – the war is not the driver of energy prices in Australia. Green politics are the real villain in the piece.

As John Hinderaker argues on his Powerline blog – referencing the US energy market, although the same applies here – ‘The cost of electricity generated by wind and solar is already skyrocketing. In fact, the cost of both is destined to continue rising sharply as the massive quantities of materials they require become more expensive as a result of increasing demand, driven by ill-advised (the politest adjective I can think of) government mandates and subsidies.’

But it gets worse. Here in Australia, not only are Labor’s green policies driving up the cost of energy across Australia, but the demonisation of fossil fuels combined with government subsidies for renewables schemes, infrastructure, electric vehicles and so on, can only result in higher bills and therefore an ever-declining standard of living for all Australians.

And then it gets worse again.

Nowhere during the election campaign at any point did Mr Bowen or Mr Albanese mention their embrace of the concept of ‘climate adaptation’, also known as ‘loss and damage’. For good reason. Many voters would have switched their vote.

Last weekend at the Cop 27 climate change gabfest in Egypt’s jet-setters’ resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, the Australian Labor government appropriated potentially billions of dollars from the Australian taxpayer to be handed out willy-nilly to foreign governments over the decades ahead. With no sunset clause and no electoral mandate.

Call it Grand Theft Albo. Or The Bowen Heist.

The idea, which has been floating around the grimier fringes of the neo-Marxist environmental movement for decades, is that ‘evil’ Western nations must cough up to pay for the ‘loss and damage’ supposedly ‘inflicted’ on Third World nations, especially but not exclusively of the low-lying island variety. This ‘loss and damage’ is supposedly due to ‘climate change’ caused by our industrial and manufacturing output.

Thanks to Mr Bowen’s sterling efforts,  Australian taxpayers are now committed to handing over billions of dollars, which should be paying for new roads and hospitals or spent educating our children and supporting our businesses, to foreign countries with no strings attached and not in exchange for any goods or services.

And this is in spite of the fact, that even the ABC admits, that the land mass of many Pacific Islands has increased over recent decades, as opposed to disappearing under the waves.

The UN and the IPCC are talking about eventually trillions of dollars being siphoned from so-called wealthy countries to fund whatever madcap schemes are dreamed up in the name of saving the Third World from ‘global warming’. Of course, the reality is that much of this money will either be used to prop up incompetent governments or cover up poor economic choices, or it will disappear into despotic leaders’ bank accounts.

Trumpeted by the socialists and globalists of the United Nations for decades, this brazen transfer of wealth now goes under various euphemisms: climate adaptation, loss and damage, climate reparations and so on

But the end result is the same. Western nations get poorer, while unaccountable Third World governments and despots get richer. Full stop.

This week in parliament Peter Dutton quite rightly asked how, ‘At a time when Labor’s policies are driving up the cost of living pressures for families, the government has just signed up to funding a $2 trillion loss and damage climate fund which will send money overseas and beyond our region’. He then added, ‘Minister, doesn’t charity begin at home?’

A perfectly legitimate question. But showing not only how desperate Labor is to not admit to what they are doing, first Albanese turned nasty and feral and then disgracefully smeared Peter Dutton, accusing him of ‘dog-whistling’ by mentioning ‘foreigners’, i.e. race-baiting. This government lied about reducing energy bills and instead is determined to raise the cost of living to suit its ideological fantasies.