Vikki Campion: Time to jettison intermittent power policies — or sink at the election

The lead-up to an election is a time for political parties to listen, learn and scrape the barnacles from the bow of the ship they’re steering. Intermittent power is a barnacle that needs to be removed, writes Vikki Campion.

Before an election, political tacticians scrape the barnacles from the bow. Policy and candidates are subject to ruthless examination in the race for government. Everything comes under the lens of vote winner or a vote loser.

If Chris Bowen’s barnacle of intermittent power is not scraped away, the ship will pull in another direction entirely.

What started in country kitchens with the directly affected, spilt into town halls with the associated.

Now, in the cities, it’s standing room only as the affected and the associated are joined by the bewildered – energy prices have soared while the Energy Minister says they are fixed and celebrates “record” wind and solar on the east coast grid.

When it tips over and spills out of the kitchens and into the bowlos, RSLs and public parks, when all ages and demographics turn up across the political spectrum, where the one thing that unites them is their deep concern over our energy future, it’s a massive barnacle on your bow.

Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean (l to r) federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Martin Ollman

Mr Bowen, and his appointee Matt Kean, are quick to RSVP to ticketed knees-up events at the Sydney Hilton with the intermittent power choir, but are suspiciously elusive when it comes to attending the packed function rooms in regional cities with the common clay.

Bowen and Kean will rub shoulders with climate company chief executives in suits on several hundred thousand dollars a year at the Sydney Hilton soon, but are less inclined to present themselves to the fury of the inflicted, such as the farmers whose land is being confiscated by the state, the native-rescuing environmentalists, the bushwalkers, the surfers, and the other end of town.

Who is going to leave the Hilton Hotel with a different mindset? Whose opinion is going to be challenged with another set of facts?

It’s just greasing up the pole on the multi-level marketing scheme, like a giant intermittent power Tupperware party.

There’s one conversation in the Illawarra park with young families on picnic blankets talking to engineering experts and community leaders about wind factories off the coast – and another conversation entirely at the Hilton talking about windfall gains in their pocket.

While Kean and Bowen swan around the Hilton, the real experts are talking to same great unwashed, the same people the government blocks.

Former Nationals politician Adam Marshall.

Kean and Bowen will clear their diaries for CBD rooftop bars for subsidy miners and confidently think they will win the battle by turning up to select functions.

Why won’t they invite the public in?

Why won’t they have along the koala-rescuing Kindly Animal Sanctuary’s Trinity Hooper – who breastfeeds her daughter roadside while saving orphaned koalas – to tell her story about the natives getting decimated by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s Boorolong wind farm?

Why won’t they hear from the actual farmers from the afflicted sites?

In the Armidale bowling club this week, Adam Marshall, who signed us up to this rubbish and then quit politics to work for them, is noticeably absent.

In Guildford, at a leagues club in the heart of McMahon, a seat set aside for Mr Bowen remained vacant.

Their cockiness at Question Time stops at the door.

While they are blocking and ignoring the public, the energy and environment experts such as the Robert Parkers, the Aiden Morrisons, the Steven Nowakowskis, and so many others, are going out to change minds, linking the graziers losing their prime ag land and the pensioner struggling with their power bill to the insanity of government policy.

This is not a Labor versus Liberal problem. The Liberal Nationals do not have a clean slate on this. As evident yet again in the Federal Court this week, the Victorian Liberals think the way to win is to knife their own who might actually stand for something.

Queensland’s LNP is taking Labor’s renewable targets to the late October state election, ensuring a big wedding and one of the shortest political honeymoons, as Katter’s Australian Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will shave votes in the north.

The crowd at the hall is fast to remind political speakers from the federal Coalition that they were responsible for signing them up to the 2050 targets that brought about this insanity.

People are leaving Labor, but they are not coming back to the Coalition – if third-party alternatives combined as a party, it would be the biggest in Australia – but the tacticians seem wilfully deaf to this.

In the period before the election, you have to listen, learn and, if required, change.

Obstinately stick to the barnacle clique of self-interested parties and you will be king of the Hilton cocktail parties – but the clown of the towns.