PM Scott Morrison goes for broke with three idiocies in one statement

The PM has just ‘done 26,950 Cartíer watches’ in one day wasting taxpayer funds on his new climate change initiatives announced this week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media during a press conference after the National Cabinet meeting in Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

I doubt that I’ve seen a more utterly idiotic statement from a politician than the one we got from the prime minister on Wednesday.

What made it so special, what took it to a new level of idiocy, was that it set out to deliberately combine not one, not even two, but three strains of idiocy that we get like clockwork out of Canberra – on an entirely bi-partisan basis I might add.

The first is the gratuitous waste of public – that is to say, your – money.

The government is going to pour $540m straight down the toilet – and five will get you ten, it won’t stay at ‘only’ $540m; it’ll grow to $700m and then to $1bn and indeed more.

All, sheer, unadulterated waste – and all just to give the PM something to throw into the ‘doing something about climate change’ pot at President ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden’s emergency ‘Clayton’s’ summit this weekend.

That’s the summit you have of course when you’re not really having a meaningful summit; and nobody’s allowed to notice, or smell, the carbon dioxide-belching elephant in the room: China.

That’s the second idiocy: the specific things on which the money is being thrown away.

Some, exactly, $263.7m is for so-called ‘carbon capture and storage’ – although I see now the new with-it term is carbon capture, use and storage, neatly broadening the field of waste.

CCS makes useless wind and solar look almost half-rational.

We’ve already toileted billions in trying to make CCS work - putting a big prophylactic over a coal-fired power station and trying to pump the CO2 that comes out of the chimney back underground.

It doesn’t work, it never will. The only place it could sort-of work – if horrendously expensively –is with a new gas project, where you pump the CO2 back into the space left by the extracted gas.

A further $275.5m is to promote so-called hydrogen hubs. If hydrogen is ever going to work at scale, it’s going to need not just ten but probably at least 100 times that sort of money.

And my betting is that another five will get you ten that hydrogen will work at scale right after we’ve converted all our coal-fired power stations to CCS.

All this is brought to you, without the slightest sense of embarrassment, from the same PM who was outraged, outraged, by Christine Holgate’s waste of $20k of public money.

Scott Morrison has just ‘done 26,950 Cartíer watches’ – and that was just one day in ‘wasting-your-money Canberra’.

That’s the third idiocy – the utterly meaningless, completely false, decimal place, precision in the numbers.

The commitment is $263.7m - not even $264m, far less a rounded-off $265m or $260m or $270m; or better more realistically still, $260m-$270m, but certain to increase.

Does anyone other than a complete, drooling idiot think it is ever going to be precisely $263.7m? Perhaps I shouldn’t go there.

We see this idiocy every year on an ever-grander scale in the budget, with the next one coming up.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is going to tell us that the budget deficit this current financial year will be something like $150bn to $170bn compared with the $197.7bn forecast in the mid-year update only last December when half the fiscal year had already gone.

That’s just my estimated range; Frydenberg will of course given us another exact figure – and, without the slightest sense of irony or even self-awareness, that exact figure to decimal places even when reporting that the earlier estimate, also given in decimal places of a billion, had been missed by tens of billions.

Further, this new, precise, figure will be rendered wrong when the final budget numbers are in less than two months later.

Ah, cascading idiocies and pointless precision: you gotta love ‘em. And cry.

Originally published as PM Scott Morrison goes for broke with three idiocies in one statement