Vikki Campion: Judge federal MPs on showing up – it’s clear they have no interest at all
Given the chance to examine the arguments for and against nuclear energy, federal MPs didn’t go because they didn’t want to hear the reality of the intermittent power grift, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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If a government-subsidised development were to wipe 70 per cent of the value off Toorak’s $4.5m mansions or Bondi’s $1.3m apartments, the inquiry would be fierce and furious.
If a government agency were going to acquire chunks of homes in Yarraville or Cremorne compulsorily, leaving $1.5 million properties unsellable, a desolate fraction of what mortgagees owed the bank, the prosecution by committee members would be savage. Replace Toorak with Muswellbrook; suddenly, two-thirds of the inquiry committee forget how to book a Comcar.
Hold it in a NSW coal town, that keeps the lights on when wind and solar can’t, and instead of investigating why regional homeowners are being decimated with diligent inquiry, the committee just don’t turn up.
Many of the shiny silver name plates of parliamentarians nominated by their party to represent them on the country’s energy future pile up on a desk no one is sitting at.
Muswellbrook is not Timbuktu; it’s just a three-hour drive from Sydney. To discuss a policy with more than a trillion dollars being spent on energy, communities at war, financial ruin for some and short-term riches for others, and the best the entire federal parliament could muster was three committee members to actually show up.
Embarrassingly, more state MPs showed up to hearings for an NSW inquiry on whether people wearing turbans should have to wear helmets on bikes this week than those federal MPs appointed as committee members on the biggest debate of our time, the Parliamentary Inquiry into Nuclear Energy.
To bring in nuclear, they must change the whole AEMO framework on electricity generation, remove mandates that businesses and industries must use wind and solar and take away their taxpayer subsidies.
This is their chance to examine the arguments for and against.
Members didn’t go because they didn’t want to hear the reality of how lives were only getting worse because of the intermittent power grift.
You don’t need to show empathy for ruin if you aren’t there.
You don’t need to pretend to listen to the ringer who spent 20 years sweating in the sun on horseback to buy his place, whose neighbour sold his to a foreign solar factory, now no real estate agent will list it.
You don’t need to pretend to hear Blackrock Industries MD Steven Fordham in an orange hi-vis and a beard, slapping the table about your war on his job, which delivers billions in royalties, which you waste in Canberra, if you are barely phoning in, and even then, not to Mr Fordham, just to witnesses who agree with you.
Nor do you need to look former Muswellbrook Mayor Steven Reynolds in the eye and tell him there will be many jobs in renewables, when he knows better, having explored $1.3 billion renewable energy hubs which employ only six humans.
What happened to Anthony Albanese’s 600,000 jobs in renewables for the regions? They have never eventuated and never will.
That’s why so many who have been sucked into the GetUp propaganda on the committee didn’t want to come and hear from the Northern Mining and Energy Union representatives warning of the complete decimation of coal towns.
You can continue in blissful platitudes for renewables when you don’t hear grazier Nigel Wood explain how his property value has been gutted, lumped with 20 turbines 600m from his place; or hear Tim White speak of the nightmare of EnergyCo arriving on properties unannounced, threatening farmers – “Take them (transmission lines) or we will compulsorily acquire your land”.
When witnesses give testimony explaining how they have been bullied, slandered, trespassed, and lied to by the intermittent power lobby, why would pro-intermittent power advocates like Dr Dan Mulino and Climate 200-funded Dr Monique Ryan turn up knowing these first-hand exposes will make it harder to call for more of it on Instagram?
When the secretariat and Hansard staff outnumber the parliamentarians who show up to hear community concerns, it ensures companies that employed thousands such as Tupperware which closed Australian operations this week, remain only in countries where they can affordably manufacture, will keep leaving; and Canberra will continue to bestow an intermittent power nightmare on regional communities.
It means people like Dr Ryan, who did not go to hearings at Biloela, Muswellbrook, Port Augusta or Lithgow, those coal towns which will lose tens of thousands of jobs thanks to the energy “transition”, can continue posting wind and solar love letters on social media, unburdened by the knowledge of lived experience.
The only three MPs consistently to be there at the inquiry are the chair, former coal worker and Hunter MP Dan Repacholi, former seafarer Spence MP Matt Burnell, and the new Liberal Cook MP Simon Kennedy, who was added to the committee late, and is not allowed to vote.
Watch Question Time and be fooled that they are immersed in the details. Judge it by participation in showing up and it’s clear they have no interest at all.
WEE WAA ENRICHES NSW – BUT BAD LUCK IF YOU’RE SICK AFTER 5.30PM
If you have a town that’s a giver, it’s around Wee Waa, deep in one of Australia’s most productive agricultural zones, worth more than $5 billion a year to the country.
This region grows the wheat for your bread and pasta, the steak for your barbecue, the cotton for your clothes, and digs the metallurgical coal to make the steel for your iPhone and your car. They stay up all night in risky jobs, harvesting through the night, 24 hours a day.
Yet Wee Waa Hospital, in the state’s northwest, operates with no doctor, no patients in beds, and forces the nurses to do everything in an emergency ward that closes at 5.30pm.
They aren’t asking for all the bells and whistles of Sydney hospitals like the Royal North Shore, they just want a doctor because if you are bitten by a snake, endure a minor stroke, or have a child with undiagnosed appendicitis after 5.30pm, you need to wait for them to open at 8am the next day, which can be a bit of a problem when you are dying before then.
Despite the enormous taxes paid by the industries in these areas, the royalties they deliver, and the products they provide, NSW’s country hospitals are being starved.
Narrabri Mayor Darrell Tiemens, who is leading the Save Wee Waa Hospital campaign, says the taxpayer didn’t even cop the bill for building it, with the community raising funds through charity balls to construct nurses’ quarters.
How many metro hospitals have wards full of empty beds, not because no one needs them, but because there’s no doctor?
Wee Waa is underfunded to the point that it is a hospital by name only.
Which is such an economically dumb move by NSW Health Minister Ryan Park because, if you want to stop the biggest taxpaying industries in the state from making you money to spend in Macquarie St, ensure there is no medical attention for workers and their families when they need it most.
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