Human sacrifice was common in many parts of Mesoamerica, so it is unfortunate for the Aztecs that they are largely lumbered with its odious reputation. Yet it didn’t seem odious to Aztec priests. As they explained to the Franciscan missionaries who put an end to the practice, in ripping out a beating human heart they were liberating a fragment of the Sun so that it could rejoin the orb on a trail of blood. And as every Aztec knew, without a constant supply of hearts, the cosmos would not continue. Were there cosmos-powered-by-beating-hearts denialists? Who knows, but Aztecs who said the wrong thing slit their own tongues to avoid bringing down the wrath of the gods.

Disrespecting today’s pieties can also be costly. Outgoing NSW Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet couldn’t bring himself to speak ill of his state’s looming renewable energy disaster that will bring on blackouts and bankruptcy. As Yeats might have said, the best lack all conviction while the woke are full of passionate intensity.

With the Coalition loss in NSW, Australia now has wall-to-wall Labor governments with the exception of Tasmania. The last time Labor held every government was in 2007. No one should underestimate the damage done when that red wave washed over Australia. When Paul Keating said in 1996, ‘When you change the government, you change the country’ he wasn’t joking. Labor lost no time using its majorities in state and federal governments to create statutory authorities that have wreaked havoc ever since.

First there was the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority which gave us the national curriculum with its cockeyed cross-curriculum priorities of sustainability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia. Federal Liberal ministers for education in power for more than eight years of the following 14 years were either unwilling or unable to dislodge it.

Then there was the creation of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency which writes the Code of Conduct for doctors. During the pandemic it used its power to coerce doctors into not criticising government pandemic and vaccination policy even when that policy was not, in the judgement of the doctor, in the best interests of their patient.

Labor also created the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency which have locked federal governments into spending billions on unreliable energy and exorbitantly expensive batteries but still only provide 8 per cent of our energy. It will be no more possible for Australia to transition to net zero emissions with renewables than it will for the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the need for batteries to store sunshine and wind is fuelling an insatiable demand for cobalt. It’s another bonanza for China which, along with producing most of the world’s solar panels, owns most of the world’s cobalt mines, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has no qualms about sending children into toxic mines that make Dickensian London look like a worker’s paradise. Why should it worry when wealthy Westerners put fuel fetishes ahead of children’s rights?

China will be celebrating Prime Minister Albanese’s deal with the Greens this week to stymie dozens of new fossil fuel projects. The PM says not all 116 coal, oil and gas projects in the pipeline will be stopped. After all, some are owned by Chinese investors keen to ship coal to China. Why wouldn’t they when China is fast-tracking the construction of 106 GW of new coal power projects, four to five times more than Australia’s entire coal-fired power capacity.

But when it comes to green hypocrisy no one does it better than former US president Barack Obama who jetted into Australia this week on a private plane. He gadded around Sydney and Melbourne accompanied by swarms of vehicles and helicopters, while lecturing his adoring audiences on the need to cut carbon emissions in line with US President Biden who said last week, that the climate emergency was ‘Code Red’.

What are Obama’s carbon emissions each year? He’s unlikely to be counting but a report released in 2021 says that in one hour, a private jet emits two tonnes of carbon dioxide whereas the average person in the EU only emits 8.2 tonnes in a year. Apparently, one per cent of people generate 50 per cent of the aviation sector’s carbon dioxide but no one expects celebrity green preachers to give up their sins of emission any time soon.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews headed off to China this week. He was tight-lipped about what he would discuss but we can be pretty sure that China’s ballooning carbon footprint or human rights abuses won’t be on the agenda.

Yet when it comes to ripping beating human hearts out of chests, Australia’s public health authorities make the Aztecs look like amateurs. Last Saturday, the Australian newspaper ran for the first time a front page story about a 24-year-old woman whose neurologist confirmed that she was profoundly injured by the vaccine, dying eight months later. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) hasn’t bothered to contact her parents or investigate her case. It is waiting for the coroner’s report however long that takes.

An evaluation of the Pfizer vaccine produced in January 2021 has also just been released thanks to a persistent freedom of information request. It shows that the TGA knew that immunity waned rapidly after five weeks and that Pfizer had done almost no tests on whether the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) or the mRNA damaged genes or caused cancer, or whether repeated exposure was toxic. To top it off the study of the LNPs showed that it did not stay in the muscle it was injected into, as people were told, but it travelled in the blood throughout the body including to the reproductive organs and the bone marrow. This barely tested product was injected into 97 per cent of Australians, largely due to government and corporate mandates. Coincidentally or not, the nation now has the greatest increase in excess mortality in the post-war period. Yet Australian health authorities continue to insist that Covid vaccines are safe and effective. Without the arrival of Franciscan friars, it seems the human sacrifices are set to continue.