Greens plan would end Australia’s first world lifestyle

The Greens pretend there’s no downside to shutting our biggest export industry but what they leave out is how much poorer most people would be if their New Age fantasies ever became policy, writes Peta Credlin.

Forget saving trees, that’s just a ruse to sucker you in.

The real game for the Greens is to use their power as Labor’s preference machine on the Left to up-end the way you live and the nation you live in.

For many years now, Labor’s primary vote has been so low that they can’t win many seats in their own right hence the power of the Greens. And with each election, as the Greens push out a more radical agenda, Labor over time, shifts to left to do their bidding, in order to survive.

The Greens latest plan, out last week, is to immediately stop all new coal mines and all new gas fields; and to eliminate all coal exports, all coal-fired power generation, and even all gas-fired power generation by 2030; and also to ban from then, any new petrol or diesel-fuelled cars.

When coal and gas are two of our biggest exports and help fund our hospitals, schools, defence assets and schemes such as the NDIS, this is worse than socialism masquerading as environmentalism; it’s the end of the sort of first world lifestyle Australians enjoy today.

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The end game for the Greens is to up-end the way we live, up-end differences between nations so that there are no real borders, flatten out incomes so there’s no incentive to work (god knows where they think the money for their giant welfare state will come from?), remove gender, dissolve the power of the family, and grow the role of government in the lives of its citizens.

Greens member for Melbourne Adam Bandt says an argument for Australia exporting coal because it’s cleaner is ‘the drug dealer’s defence’. Picture: Facebook

And key to all of this — the control and the money to make it all happen is, the “climate change emergency”.

It’s all there in black and white, in the Renew Australia policy document released by the Greens last week. But what they leave out of course, is how much poorer most people would be, if their New Age fantasies were ever to become government policy.

Indeed, they pretend there’s no downside whatsoever to shutting our biggest export industry, and forcibly recasting our economy.

According to the Greens, the more renewable energy we have, the cheaper power will be — even though power prices have actually doubled in a decade as the percentage of renewable energy has scaled up and up.

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Rather than export coal and gas, the Greens claim that we can use solar and wind power to create hydrogen, using electrolysis, and then export it to Asia as (I kid you not) “bottled sunlight”.

It’s not entirely a technical fantasy but it is an economic one. If the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans thought this was remotely feasible, they’d be doing it themselves rather than buying ever greater quantities of Australian coal.

Far from seeing coal as a $67 billion-a-year export industry, generating $5 billion annual tax revenue in royalties alone, and employing 50,000 people directly and a further 120,000 indirectly, the Greens see coal as the “new asbestos”.

And far from being an environmental model, Australia is actually the world’s worst polluter, they say.

“Burning coal is the world’s biggest cause of climate change and Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal… (and) all of it damages our climate and threatens our future.”

Last week on Sky News, Greens MP Adam Bandt was asked why Australia shouldn’t continue to export our coal that’s relatively clean in order to stop other countries using their own, more emissions-intensive, coal. No, he said because that’s “the drug dealer’s defence”.

But hang on, isn’t this exactly the ground, that it would otherwise be worse, that the Greens use to justify pill testing at music festivals?

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All this would be bad enough if it were just the economic fantasy and consequent societal cost of a minor party attracting about 9 per cent popular support.

But it’s not just the damage that the Greens do using the balance of power in federal and state parliaments. It’s the influence that the Greens have over the Labor Party by forcing a policy auction in order to hold inner city seats.

The Queensland Labor government would not have come up with delay after delay to the Adani mine if it weren’t terrified of losing Brisbane seats to the Greens. Bill Shorten would not have a 50 per cent renewable energy target and a 45 per cent emissions reduction target but for the Greens. And we should never forget Julia Gillard’s formal “alliance” with the Greens in 2010, in order to cling on to power.

When it comes to the Greens, let’s hope voters see the red flags.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights from 6pm.