No Labor leader has said how much their plans would actually lower the temperature

Anthony Albanese is like some carnival huckster, selling us snake oil for his fake scare, hoping voters forget Labor’s long history of dud global warming promises.

This federal election looks like becoming the day Australians finally make Labor pay for lying for nearly two decades about the cost of its global warming fantasies.

Labor’s lies go back way beyond Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s dishonest press conference on Tuesday, or his broken promise last election that his green schemes would cut your electricity bills by $275.

Back in 2007, Kevin Rudd, then Labor’s leader, started the rot by promising Labor’s global warming plans would cost “something like $1 per person per year”.

A dollar a year! Yes, Rudd really did claim in 2007 that Labor’s “renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020” would “between now and about 2045” have “a total impact on the economy of somewhere between $600m and $800m … or something like $1 per person per year”.

Kevin Rudd started the rot by promising Labor’s global warming plans would cost ‘something like $1 per person per year’.

How badly Australians have been fooled. How angry many are now to pay the price, and not just in high power bills.

Professor Paul Simshauser, CEO of the Queensland government’s Powerlink transmission business, is the latest to expose the con.

Forget a dollar a year. Simshauser’s new study warns that just building the extra solar, wind, batteries, hydro and gas assets we’ll need to get close to Labor’s latest target of net zero emissions will cost about $300bn – or $11,000 per person in total.

That’s not all. Not included are the costs of the countless other schemes to cut emissions.

Just this month, the Albanese government’s new emissions standards kicked in, hiking the price of petrol-driven cars.

Also not included is the cost of the blackouts Simshauser predicts as Labor kills off our remaining coal-fired generators, or the jobs we’re already losing to countries with cheaper and more reliable electricity.

Even so, Simshauser’s figures seem light on. A study by Net Zero Australia two years ago said we’d need to spend up to $1.5 trillion by 2030 to reach Labor’s target, and $9 trillion by 2060 – or $333,000 for every Australian man, woman and child.

Does that make sense to you – $330,000 from every person in your family to get green electricity? Has Australia gone insane?

Powerlink chief executive Professor Paul Simshauser is the latest to expose the con. Picture: Shae Beplate

How you’ve been hoaxed! Like I said, Labor has raised its target to net zero by 2050 since Rudd’s airy talk of just “$1 per person per year”, but that was always its predictable end game – and never has Labor come clean on the final cost.

In fact, it’s refused to tell you either the cost or the benefit – what good its schemes would actually do. It’s like selling us a car without telling us the price or even if it works.

No Labor leader has said how much their plans would actually lower the temperature.

None would say how many fewer fires, flood and cyclones we’d get, or even if there’d be any change at all.

Labor’s net zero policy is like selling someone a car without telling them the price or even if it works. Picture: Getty

None has considered whether the small warming we’ve seen is actually good for us. After all, we’ve had more rain, bigger crops and fewer cyclones in the past few decades.

I suspect Albanese understands none of this, and, worse, doesn’t care to. This is religion, to him. It’s tribal. It’s politics.

What it’s not to Albanese is science and economics. How else to explain his press conference on Tuesday, as he kickstarts his election campaign?

Talk about deluded. Or deceitful.

This is religion to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. It’s tribal. It’s politics.

He told us there was “a transformation to net zero that is happening globally”. False: despite spending nearly $3 trillion a year on this “transition”, the world is using more coal and gas than ever.

He warned that “climate change” had to be fought to save the many jobs which “which rely upon the Great Barrier Reef”. In fact, most of the reef has lately had the most coral cover ever recorded.

Albanese also babbled about “moving towards green hydrogen in the future” so that “aluminium refineries can continue to operate”.

Green hydrogen? Another fantasy. Woodside, Origin and even hydrogen spruiker Andrew Forrest all dropped planned investments last year, admitting it just costs too much.

Albanese also dismissed the Opposition’s plan for nuclear power as a “fantasy”, even though nuclear supplies 10 per cent of the world’s electricity because, unlike green hydrogen, it’s a proven technology.

But here’s Albanese still like some carnival huckster, selling us snake oil for his fake scare, hoping voters forget Labor’s long history of dud global warming promises.

My tip? Polls suggest they haven’t – and Labor will pay. It must.