Earlier this week, I wrote that our Prime Minister is far from cool. I didn’t say he isn’t cunning. By lumping One Nation and the Coalition together, Albo has made conservatives lose the plot. In the meantime, Bowen’s green energy nightmare turned into Armageddon and nobody noticed.
The problem I find with conservative parties of all stripes is that they don’t want to engage with policy scholars. All they need is a big name to agree with the policy they developed on the fly and she’ll be apples.
Well, no.
When you are caught in a vortex of self-interest tied to a political position, it is much easier to save one’s own skin rather than have principles. Or be in a position of power and state you are a conviction politician while you lie to the very people you are meant to serve.
It was so difficult to break through the ‘green ceiling’ created by academia. Having professors scowl at me saying ‘EV range anxiety is a furphy!’ when both Australian and Canadian research indicated that range anxiety (that is, the concern that your EV can’t travel as far as your 900km range diesel, which can be refuelled in minutes while an EV can’t) was a major reason people weren’t buying EVs.
Here we are now with a fuel crisis of our own making (give me a break – there is always a global oil crisis in the Middle East) when we should have been drilling and oiling and gas, gas, gassing our way to independence drawing on our vast reserves (don’t get me started in uranium!) and surprise, surprise, people are starting to buy EVs?
EV statistics are not a victory for Chris Bowen. They are a market choice based on his massive policy failure. I’ve asked him a couple of times for his Plan B. He never had one. Instead, he believed that the government could just fund its way into new industries like the Soviet Union. You remember that enormous juggernaut that failed?
It failed because government incentives are only short-term ways to restructure markets. Markets work because they balance supply and demand. Mess with this basic principle at your own peril. (Just ask the chop-chop tobacco police how the anti-tobacco intervention is working out.)
But go right back to when I first started writing for The Spectator Australia with my article, Higher taxes: that old chestnut? Ross Garnaut was touting higher taxes for the mining industry to solve our current cost of living crisis. I argued that Labor’s tired old corporatist models won’t work.
(Corporatism refers to a model of capitalism where business, the unions, and government act as representatives of the three major elite groups. It requires the three groups to achieve consensus. It also needs more than half of the workforce to be union members to truly work. In the end, it didn’t work for Bob Hawke. It didn’t work for its founder, Benito Mussolini, either.)
This week, Zen Energy, the company that was touted as the ‘proof of concept’ for Chris Bowen’s green energy dream, went into administration. Bowen’s dream became a nightmare.
The trouble is that the Coalition and One Nation are too busy fighting each other. There is policy gold unfolding all around them, but they have become so myopic they are believing their own fates are reflected in the current polling.
For One Nation, that they are on a collision course with victory.
For the Coalition, that they are done for and they have to do something else because nobody likes conservatism.
All the worst Prime Minister in the history of prime ministers has to do is throw in a mind grenade and the conservatives go into a twist.
Lesson: Don’t do that.
Meanwhile, the company founded by Ross Garnaut, has gone into administration. It is one of the biggest corporate collapses in Australia’s clean energy transition.
Crickets from conservatives.
Lesson from the Royal Australian Regiment, whose motto reads ‘Duty First’.
Translated for the conservatives: ‘Do your jobs!’
Seriously. The Albanese government is so piss-poor that the only reason they’re still in power is because the cold fart is getting everyone to play his game.
Let me make this clear. The biggest experiment in Woke, green, government-subsidised energy just failed.
It’s like that meme where people flock to line up for books on how to find the truth while the line to access the actual truth is empty.
The trouble is that instead of focusing on what actually matters to people, politicians focus on how they can one-up each other.
It’s as if the average punter is sitting around waiting for that one moment when Albo says he would shag Kylie and the whole government will be brought down.
In the meantime, Labor’s entire proof of concept has failed in reality, and nobody noticed.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
