Piers Akerman: Don’t let ‘Bullsh*t Bill Shorten’ fool you on election day
Bill Shorten needs to be called out for what he is — with apologies to sensitive readers — Bullsh*t Bill, Piers Akerman writes, as he discusses Labor’s signature electric car policy where 50 per cent of the vehicles on the road must be electric by 2030.
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If you’ve switched off politics you better switch back on, and quickly, because Bill Shorten needs to be called out for what he is — with apologies to sensitive readers — Bullshit Bill.
This is Bill Shorten talking about the time needed to charge an electric car battery with Kyle and Jackie O on KIIS FM last week.
Presenter: “How long does it take to charge one up?”
Mr Shorten: “Oh, it can take, it depends what the original charge is. But it can take eight to 10 minutes, depending on your charging. It can take longer.”
Presenter: “Oh, is that all?”
Mr Shorten: “Well it depends how flat your battery is.”
Judging from that exchange, Labor’s signature electric car policy — 50 per cent of the vehicles on the road must be electric by 2030 — is deader than Mr Shorten’s battery and every other policy Labor puts forward must be viewed through the prism of its approach to electric cars because that flagship policy puts all others in perspective.
It is an absolutely fanciful policy, totally unachievable, delivered by a clueless, grandstanding bullshit artist (again, please forgive the language).
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The average electric car battery can take anything from eight to twelve hours to charge — not minutes.
Mr Shorten is having a lend of the Australian people and mature, thinking voters know it. Ill-educated, over-emotional, self-indulgent virtue-signalling Millennials won’t be able to get over their own prejudices to see the self-evident flaws in the Labor-Green position.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been handed a big early Easter egg.
As he told Macquarie Broadcasting’s Ben Fordham on Friday afternoon: “I mean he reckons that 50 per cent of the cars that we all are driving around in 10 years from now will be electric cars. But the share of the market at the moment, is 0.2 per cent.
“He hasn’t thought through what that means for diesel and fuel excise, that’s around about $11 billion a year. Now, if you go and buy an electric car, well obviously you don’t pay the fuel excise, what is that going to mean for that revenue stream and what’s the cost of that?
“What about all these charging stations, how much is that going to cost? … The actual detail of it is all fluff.”
It’s a lot worse than that. Electric cars are just flat-out ridiculous in the Australian context.
Think of the extra demand on the already overstretched electricity grid which is crashing with an ever-increasing frequency when the kids come home from school and plug in their phone to recharge while they pop a slice of bread in the toaster. Ker-boom, the lights go out again.
Just log into any of the energy companies sites and check out recent outages as I did on Saturday morning in Sydney. Whoops, according to the site the power was out in Paddington, Darlinghurst, Rushcutters Bay, Kings Cross and Moore Park 22 hours earlier.
Last month, the blackout struck homes and businesses in Avalon, Mona Vale, Newport, Warriewood, Palm Beach, North Narrabeen, Elanora Heights, and surrounding suburbs.
The outage was caused by an electrical transformer failing due to increased load on the grid — and that’s with 0.2 per cent of vehicles relying on electric batteries.
Imagine what will happen to the grid — with no new coal-fired base load power coming into the system when Mr Shorten forces voters to buy electric cars and they all plug in at night when solar doesn’t work.
Comparisons with Norway should be tossed out with the skinny soy latte. We don’t have Norway’s cheap hydro electricity because we don’t have high mountain ranges, deep fjords, lakes or valleys. Further, we could fit about 20 Norways into Australia. The biggest city is Oslo (population 635,000). Sydney has roughly 4.7 million and Melbourne around 4.3 million.
We are a large nation and we like travelling vast distances. An electric car’s efficiency decreases when the airconditioning or the heater or the sound system is operating.
The driving range of electric cars doesn’t include the use of such accessories. Think of how much power your household heater devours and work out how far your car’s battery will take you when you switch on the air.
You’d be lucky to get to the outer suburbs on a hot or cold day if you wanted to play a few tunes.
So this is Labor’s big plan to woo the GetUp morons supporting the Zali Steggalls of this election.
Absolutely hollow, flawed from the start and with nowhere to go.
These are the people who haven’t delivered a Budget surplus since 1989 and are now poised to loot the surplus the Coalition has carefully managed.
Who could possibly want to see them with their hands in the till again?
Don’t let Bullshit Bill (no apology this time) fool you on election day.
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