We pay the price for climate policy lunacy

Climate change activists are merely pushing modern-day socialism, and anyone who questions them is accused of wanting to destroy the Great Barrier Reef or raze bushland, writes Peta Credlin.

It was Margaret Thatcher who famously said, “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”.

And that’s precisely why the climate change movement has become socialism’s modern-day manifestation: Saving the planet is a much easier sell and even sensible capitalists can be bullied into spending billions to put themselves out of business.

As a model, it couldn’t be better designed. The laudable instinct of conservation that almost all of us share has been hijacked by the razor-sharp politics of environmentalism, or its modern trojan horse “sustainability”.

Business has it as part of its annual reporting and marketing spiel, driven more by shareholder activism than actual shareholders, and accompanied by a stealthy social media hit squad lest they step out of line.

In the school curriculum, the indoctrination of children is replete across science (as you might expect), but also maths, geography, history and every other subject.

It’s well-orchestrated and designed to keep spewing out voters at age 18 who will keep climate change at the top of their concerns and create a virtuous circle — or better expressed, a vicious cycle — of taxpayer funding to advance the cause of the Left.

But this isn’t just me talking. Last week, the esteemed business leader Hugh Morgan AC joined forces with former BHP chairman Jerry Ellis to lead a new lobby group calling for Australia to stop funding climate change zealotry and walk away from the discredited Paris Agreement.

Hugh Morgan is leading a new lobby group calling for Australia to walk away from the Paris Agreement. Picture: Aaron Francis

Morgan said Western Millennials have embraced alarmism over climate change as a new secular religion after being indoctrinated by the education system. And he’s not wrong.

Take 15 minutes to read some of the material your child or grandchild has in their school bag, or on their laptop, and you will be gobsmacked by how much control the Left has seized over the education of our children.

No longer is an inquiring mind prized (indeed, once the hallmark of a liberal education), but instead we now demand regurgitation of so called “facts”, with no tolerance for a dissenting view, if scholars are to succeed.

Morgan’s new lobby, the Saltbush Group, has been established to help drive both sides of politics in this country to put aside their ideology and focus on what’s best for Australian industry, households and jobs, while doing our best by the environment.

The Left, of course, doesn’t have a mortgage on wanting a clean environment but it has made it a zero-sum game by characterising those who want some common sense on climate change as vandals who want to pollute the Great Barrier Reef or raze our natural bushland.

It’s complete rubbish but that’s part of the activists’ playbook, straight out of their US campaign manuals; no sober debate, no analysis of facts, “us” against “them” and a canny focus on the continuation of taxpayer funding to bolster their cause. It is no mistake that renewable energy is key to this play. Who could not be in support of “free” solar and wind powering our homes? Except that it isn’t free, and its power is off, as much as it is on.

By locking in a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, Labor’s new policy will dramatically increase power prices, cut Australia’s baseload power capacity and prematurely close a number of key coal-fired power stations at a time when our generation capacity is precarious at best.

Those who want common sense on climate change are characterised as vandals who want to pollute the Great Barrier Reef. Picture: supplied

When industry can’t afford to operate here, the jobs will leave with them but that’s OK, Labor says to voters, we’ll sweeten the pill with a couple of photovoltaics on your roof, and a cheaper battery to keep the lights on. All the better to study your dole cheque with, I suppose.

If elected, Labor announced this week it would spend millions to give average homes a $2000 rebate to install battery backup for their renewables. But this policy ignores multiple practical problems.

First, it costs between $15,000 to $20,000 to “battery-up” most homes so the subsidy is an expensive token at best. Second, by its very existence, it highlights just how unreliable our power grid has become with its reliance on renewable energy, and third, it’s so very reminiscent of the dodgy schemes, and waste, that’s bedevilled Labor Party policy in the past.

Who could forget the pink batts scheme: $2 billion to put the batts in and then another $2 billion to take them out following 200 house fires and the tragic deaths of four young installers? Or $430 million for the “cash for clunkers” scheme, scrapped before it even got off the ground. What about the $16 billion on school halls for Julia Gillard’s “building the education revolution” with $36 million spent on schools that closed within 12 months?

Just the other day I was at a primary school in Victoria that was spending millions to rebuild one of these school halls where the exterior had been clad with interior plasterboard.

I don’t believe one word of Labor’s promises that these excesses, and the waste, won’t happen again. They are inevitable when Canberra races out to throw taxpayer billions at a problem it’s spent years creating.

But it isn’t just Labor. Energy economists this week poured scorn on the Coalition’s Snowy 2.0 project declaring it a “waste of money” that won’t reduce energy prices or emissions. It was one of Malcolm Turnbull’s big signature promises. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars tripping up and back to the Snowy Mountains for picture opportunities when his polls headed further and further south. Despite telling us it would cost $2 billion, it’s already up to $10 billion once acquisition and transmission costs are factored in. Is it any wonder that Snowy chiefs want to be exempted from the government’s usual cost-benefit analysis rules?

Labor repeats over and over that “we just need certainty”.

Well I am certain, along with more and more experts that are now getting brave enough to speak up, that what’s been announced this week is madness masquerading as energy policy, and that will cripple Australian households and industry. How more certain do we want to be?

Originally published as We pay the price for climate policy lunacy