Piers Akerman: Forget same-sex marriage and shine a light on our power crisis

AUSTRALIANS have lost sight of the national interest in the debate on reliable energy and homosexual marriage. The first is a matter of enormous importance to everyone, the second, not so much.

Sunday Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman.

EXTRAORDINARILY, some Australians have lost sight of the national interest in the ­debate on reliable energy and homosexual marriage.

The first is of enormous ­importance to everyone, the second, not so much, but the outrageous flurry of disinformation and propaganda generated by the likes of GetUp! and their allies at the ABC and Fairfax have pushed it to an undeserved prominence.

In order of immediate significance, the energy question far exceeds that of homosexual marriage but the ­latter (despite claims to the contrary from its supporters) has far-reaching impli-cations which the Yes campaign doesn’t wish to have discussed.

It is indisputable that Australia faces a power crisis. The sort of blackouts that have occurred in South Australia will, in all probability, according to the energy regulator, occur in Victoria and NSW.

The fault lies with both major political parties and the Greens because they all bought the unproven greenhouse gas/global warming causation flim-flam supported by dodgy modelling and exponents such as Tim Flannery.

Despite the failure of the models, despite the demonstrable ignominy of the prophets of doom like Flannery and the great demagogue of the deception, Al Gore, billions of taxpayers’ funds have been spent on unnecessary desalination plants and, worse, subsidies for inefficient wind and solar plants that cannot meet the needs of the community.

According to the Australian Energy Market Operator, wind generation during periods of peak demand may fall to as low as 2 per cent of installed capacity and cannot be guaranteed to deliver more than 5 per cent of its promised output.

With abundant coal, gas and nuclear fuel on hand, the despotic Greens and their hoodwinked followers in the Labor and the Coalition parties have placed the nation in ­financial jeopardy with their unrealistic demands for economy-destroying renewable ­energy targets. Definitely not in the national interest.

As Craig Kelly, the prescient Liberal MP for Hughes told me last week: “When the history of this century is fin-ally written, the Renewable Energy Target, which has ­destroyed our nation’s competitive advantage — that of the lowest cost energy in the world — and turned it into a competitive disadvantage, will be known as the greatest and most damaging policy failure our nation has ever witnessed.”

The energy giant AGL, which wants to turn off one of the pillars of baseload power in NSW, the Liddell coal-fired electricity generator, is as hypocritical as those who want to shut down the major mining and industrial operations.

Over the past several years, the hugely profitable power company has disconnected tens of thousands of households in NSW — the latest figures showing 39,139.

At the same time, the company is profiting handsomely from the closure of the Northern Power Station in SA and Hazlewood in Victoria.

Over the past two years its share price has increased 75 per cent, increasing the value of the company by $7 billion. This financial year, it expects to increase its profits by 25 per cent to over a billion dollars.

AGL doesn’t want another coal-fired station opening in Australia because it doesn’t want the added competition. So it is now demonising coal while it makes hundreds of millions from its coal-fired power stations.

Meanwhile, 80 per cent of their revenue is coal while they mine renewable subsidies (that push up prices and make coal margins even better) and flog them off to government- backed funds, locking in your super lest you get the wrong idea about climate change.

It’s a racket crying out for investigation but with AGL we’re only one plant failure away from major system-wide blackouts. It has reached crisis level. Successive governments have created a monster. And taxpayers will now have to fund the capital cost that will keep the generators operational to keep the lights on.

It was no surprise to learn that the overpaid CEO of AGL is being advised by former GetUp! campaigns director and Labor staffer Skye Laris, known for her anti-coal views and radical opinion on climate change, and that Tony Chappel, the head of government relations with energy giant AGL is a graduate of Al Gore’s climate-change leadership program, whose move to the corporate world last year is part of his mission to “change the system from within”.

Changing the system from within is, of course, the stated aim of the activists who are driving the homosexual push and who have within the space of a few years manipulated the public with emotional arguments to sell their new-found fondness for marriage.

Thus, ardent Yes advocate Senator Penny Wong was able to state with certainty just seven years ago that: “On the issue of marriage I think the reality is there is a cultural, ­religious, historical view around that which we have to respect. The party’s position is ... this is an institution that is between a man and a woman.”

Not so now and, more importantly, Labor, the Greens, the ABC and the rest of the ­extremely vocal homosexual marriage lobby are making the extraordinary claim that even discussion about the postal survey must be limited to Yes and No when in reality changing the definition of such a fundamental social and cultural building block will have massive effects on our whole social structure. This is self-evident.  

Abroad, in Canada, the UK, the US and Ireland, the legislation of homosexual marriage has heralded the dawn of an age of inequality and intolerance. Without pre-determined guaranteed protections for free speech, for religious organisations, and for those who wish to state the obvious — that children raised by their biological mother and father — face better outcomes overall, the Yes vote is no more than a stalking horse for a repressive, Marxist-inspired assault on Western culture.