The best advice when you are in a hole is to stop digging. But this obvious recommendation clearly hasn’t sunk in for Albo as he continues his crazy, headlong push for the country to become a renewable energy superpower and to revive manufacturing. It’s all systems go for ‘Made in Australia’ to become the guiding motto of his government, throwing billions of taxpayers’ dollars at ventures that will often end in bankruptcy.

Let’s face it: there is a gigantic inconsistency in having an energy policy that has forced electricity prices through the roof while declaring that we need to make things again in Australia. (Can I be a tad cheeky here by saying that ‘bringing manufacturing back home’ sounds a bit Trumpian?) Albo doesn’t seem to realise that without affordable and reliable energy, the cornerstone of Trump’s policies, our manufacturing industry is only going one way – backwards.

Just in case you think I’m only talking about old-style manufacturing – smelting, petrochemical plants, brickworks, glassworks and the like – some of the most recent developments such as data centres and artificial intelligence use incredible amounts of energy. Indeed, Amazon has plans to invest in its own small-scale nuclear reactors to power its cloud services and AI centres. That’s manufacturing in the future.

There is another oversize inconsistency in Albanese’s pathway to the future and this involves, not surprisingly, B1 – Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. The expanded Safeguards Mechanism effectively imposes a massive carbon tax on our few remaining large manufacturers and big emitters, a tax that escalates over time.

The idea is that these plants will find ways to lower their emissions – through investing in new technology, for instance –and still flourish. If that sounds like wishful thinking, it’s because it is.

Many of the affected plants are partly or fully owned by overseas interests. These owners often have a policy of refraining from publicly engaging in debate about government measures – there will be some behind-closed-doors consultations but not public criticism.

Rather, if the profitability of local operations becomes too imperilled, they will simply pull up stumps and invest in another country. The point also is that many of these big emitting plants are fairly long in the tooth and without a major decision to reinvest, they will close in due course.

We have already seen the owners of the aluminium smelter in Kwinana, Western Australia, announce its closure in the near term. The two large petrochemical plants in Altona, Victoria and Botany Bay, NSW, are hanging by a thread and are likely to close. The consequence will be that these ‘Made in Australia’ plants will be no more.

The sad fact is that these clown politicians and their advisers really don’t have a clue about the technical requirements of operating these plants, the existence (or more likely, non-existence) of new technologies to alter their emissions intensity or the exigencies of corporate finance. With so much capital effectively involved in a global competition, unless the rates of return are adequate here, these large corporates will simply take their money elsewhere, to countries where it can be more profitably deployed.

Just thinking about some of the dreams – green steel is an example – the reality is that these possibilities are often raised as a magnet for government subsidies rather than being well-considered and tested commercial options. We hear this possibility raised from time to time by mercurial entrepreneur, Sanjeev Gupta, for the Whyalla steelworks, but there are no definite plans and there is no company money being stumped up. The plan to convert the plant to renewable energy has also been delayed.

(The worldwide Gupta steel-making empire is effectively held together by a series of loan-shark financed Band-aids. It could unravel at any moment.)

This is the situation: the enhanced Safeguards Mechanism – thanks, B1 – is placing increasing commercial strains on our large ‘Made in Australia’ manufacturing plants to assist in saving the planet while Albo wants to throw billions of dollars of taxpayer money at propping up some of these plants as well as financing some new ones that may never be profitable.

You might have thought that a billionaire like Mike Cannon-Brookes and very wealthy ex-PM, Malcolm Turnbull, could stump up their own money to finance the proposed new solar manufacturing plant to be located in the Hunter Valley. If it’s such a goer, these two men, as well as some friendly banks, should be more than happy to finance the whole deal. It’s new technology, you must understand – copper replacing silver in the panels. It’s a definite winner, for sure.

Sadly, the taxpayer will be forced to commit a cool billion dollars through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. The largest grant that Arena has ever doled out is $250 million and so this is really moving into the big league.

(It doesn’t really matter which agency/department is handing out the money; it’s all taxpayer money. In other words, ours.)

The fact is that solar manufacturing is an intensely competitive industry in which the panels are effectively commodities currently in significant oversupply. China and US are locked in a rancorous competition but the Chinese are ahead by miles, in part because of China’s access to cheap power – the irony.

Albo continues to positively salivate at the investment dollars needed to finance the net-zero transition – hectares and hectares of solar panels and wind turbines, thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines, batteries everywhere. Hang the fact that many regional residents don’t want this paraphernalia to take up arable land and spoil their landscapes – these folk generally don’t vote Labor.

Needless to say, Albo does realise that these investments won’t happen without government grants, subsidies and concessions but that also doesn’t worry him. The fact that the primary (sole?) motivation for the involvement of many overseas companies in renewable energy investment in Australia is to Hoover up taxpayer money is just the way it is.

Labor still holds on to the delusion that all this is good for the planet and good for the economy. On the first point, as long as most of the biggest emitters, China, India and Russia, refuse to constrain their growing carbon dioxide emissions, whatever Australia does will make not a jot of difference. And in the meantime, it will cripple the economy as precious investment resources are directed towards the costly, misconceived and impossible end of decarbonising the energy system in Australia.

The bottom line is we are heading to an era of big-time crony capitalism where investment is increasingly directed by the government. It’s European dirigisme all over again. It even had a name: Eurosclerosis. We know that didn’t work, leading to inferior economic outcomes as well as the stench of corruption as companies and governments worked hand in glove.

But Albo will throw in quaint rationales such as the new geo-strategic era as justifying throwing bucketloads of taxpayer money at shady enterprises as long as they employ unionised workers. It’s all too depressing for words.