Forgotten Tanya plays green faves

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, has exquisitely exposed the government’s anti-Australian priorities with two decisions in two days.

The ‘forgotten’ member of prime minister Albanese’s front bench, environment minister Tanya Plibersek, has exquisitely exposed the government’s anti-Australian priorities with two decisions in two days.

First, she effectively banned a $1bn gold mine in NSW.

Then she sliced through ‘green tape’ to wave through Mike Cannon-Brookes massive solar farm in the Northern Territory, supposedly aimed at ‘shipping;’ electricity to Singapore.

This is, by the bye, my extension of the old-fashioned everyday ‘red tape’, that always hindered – and indeed hinders, present and future tense - if not outright crippled/cripples entrepreneurial and just ordinary business and especially small business activity.

‘Green tape’ – the use of mostly spurious environmental objections, including the most spurious of all: ‘climate change’.

It’s really a wonder that anything gets done or even started in Australia in this 21st century.

If the normal red tape won’t strangle you at birth, the green tape will be lurking out there, available to the activist, to do the job instead.

Now Plibersek claims that she hasn’t banned the mine near Blayney in NSW. All she’s done is to make it unviable by depriving it of an effective tailings dam. By accepting the ‘advice’ of a fringe group over the representative Land Council.

Incidentally, was this how The Voice was going to work? That fringe players would have been over-riding, and doubling up on, the ‘official Voices’?

As for the fast-tracking of the giant solar farm in the Northern Territory, now I wouldn’t go so far as the lads at the MacroBusiness website, who accused Plibersek of allowing Cannon-Brookes to “steal our sunshine”.

After all, it’s entirely – if you’ll excuse the word – logical, in terms of the (utterly whacky) Albanese-Bowen renewable energy, well, canon.

To their, well, so-called thinking, this is exactly what we should be doing in the 21st century: exporting our sunshine rather than our minerals.

Heaven forfend, we ever got around to exporting our sunshine in metal cans.

Bu all that said, if a gigantic solar farm makes any sense, shouldn’t it first be directed to supplying Australians with electricity?

And indeed, why only one? Why not two? Two dozen? Indeed, two hundred!

Why, we could power Asia with all our ‘free’ sunshine. Enabling them to close down all their coal, and nuclear, power stations.

At the risk of pouring cold water on it all - and obviously, a lot of cold water is one of the last things you want to see flowing over a solar array, albeit ranking behind a shower of (wet) hailstones – I’m going to boldly predict the Cannon-Brookes solar farm will go the same way as all those ‘free’ wave and tidal power projects.

We will see it deliver electricity into Singapore about the same date as the first train in Victorian premier Jacinta Allen’s ‘train-line to nowhere’ chugs into its destination.

And if it ever did get to that point, would involve a similar – utter – waste of money.

But I suggest they will only get to their respective destinations, as fifties crooner Johnny Mathis warbled: around about the 12th of Never.

Originally published as Forgotten Tanya plays green faves