Andrew Bolt: Bog of nonsense choking our energy supplies

A project that would bring us jobs, gas and billions of royalties is being opposed because of a magical serpent nobody has seen. Why are we strangling our energy supplies by inventing irrational taboos?

I’ve never seen a country grow so stupid – and I’m not just talking about the NAPLAN results showing a third of our school students now perform below standard.

The adults are even worse, and it’s become a real wealth hazard.

See how we’re making ourselves poorer by inventing irrational taboos on things like coal, gas, oil and nuclear power.

The craziest example came just this week – the kind of thing Labor’s planned Voice to Parliament will just encourage.

Santos is trying to open the big Barossa gas field out in the Timor Sea north of Darwin, at a cost of $4.7bn, but has run into a bog of nonsense.

Last year the Federal Court ruled the project couldn’t go ahead. Santos had committed the sin of not consulting Dennis Tipakalippa, a traditional owner on Melville Island, more than 100km from the Barossa field.

Sure, it had consulted the Tiwi Islands Land Council, which supposedly represents the islanders, but it really should have talked to Tipakalippa and some other elders, too. And they said no.

Santos is trying to open the big Barossa gas field out in the Timor Sea north of Darwin, at a cost of $4.7bn, but has run into a bog of nonsense.

I suspected Santos was in trouble when I saw the judge, who had once sought Labor preselection as a candidate from the party’s Left, going through a smoking ceremony before taking evidence at the island.

Now it gets even wilder, as Santos tries to save the project. Two more Aborigines, this time from Croker Island, even further from Barossa, say they don’t want the gas field either, and the Environmental Defenders Office, funded by the Albanese government, is backing them.

One of these two women – just two out of 300 islanders, says Santos – has said: “We also have our rainbow serpent, who protects us and our community – she cannot be disrupted or disturbed or harmed in any way. We live off the sea”.

So two people a long way from a project that’s way out at sea say they’re against it because of the rainbow serpent. Is that we must lose the jobs, the gas, and the billions of royalties, some of which will inevitably be used to prop up Tiwi Islanders, 58 per cent of whom aren’t in the workforce, and 27 per cent of those who are unemployed?

And this is a claim supported by an Environmental Defenders Office that the Albanese government decided to fund again, to now strangle our energy supplies in the name of a fussy magical serpent no one has seen. We deserve poverty.