Peta Credlin: Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are not making realistic promises

With a prime minister who gives away money as if it was limitless and an opposition leader who is clueless when it comes to energy policy this election campaign has come off the rails, writes Peta Credlin.

As this campaign has gone on, the sense of unreality has only deepened. The Prime Minister barnstorms the country announcing new grants for various good causes, as if money were
no object.

Last Friday, there was $4.5 million for a highly successful Tasmanian whisky distiller. Since when was it government’s role to be an ATM for private business?

There have been hundreds of millions for green hydrogen boondoggles, including one associated with Twiggy Forrest; suggesting that business welfare now extends even to billionaires under a Liberal government.

Meanwhile, the Opposition Leader keeps reassuring us that he has a plan for “net zero” that will supposedly cut power prices by around $300 per household per year by 2025, create 600,000 jobs and attract $52 billion of investment. Really? In what economic universe do private businesses have to invest $52 billion into system upgrades only for prices to fall, not rise?

The truth, as revealed by Australia’s energy regulator on Friday, is that wholesale power prices have risen by 114 per cent in 12 months, on the back of higher prices for coal and gas, and the planned and unplanned withdrawal of coal-fired generating capacity.

Both the ALP and the Liberal party are making crazy promises to the electorate. Picture: Toby Zerna - Pool/Getty Images

The premature closure of coal-fired power in all three eastern states is expected to create shortfalls in generation within the decade; and while the gap will undoubtedly be filled by more renewables, keeping the lights on will require gas “firming” at ever-increasing prices.

Like lemmings, we’re following a few years behind what’s now happening in Britain and Europe.

Thirty years of running power systems to reduce emissions, rather than to produce affordable and reliable power, has produced a massive dependence on gas to keep industry running and houses heated when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

The more intermittent power there is, the more vulnerable consumers have become to price spikes such as the one last winter when a sustained wind drought sent gas prices soaring. British power prices, for instance, have almost doubled in the past year while heating costs are up 52 per cent.

And all of this has made Europe more vulnerable to strategic blackmail, as Russia cuts off gas as punishment for NATO support for Ukraine. It’s what’s happened last week in Poland and Bulgaria; and it’s the threat hanging over Germany, as it increases its military aid to Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion.

Peta Credlin

The end result of 30 years of climate alarmism is a relatively stronger Russia, thanks to Western dependence on Russian oil and gas; and a relatively stronger China, as Western heavy industry has moved to places much less fastidious about emissions and where labour is cheap.

But it has shaken up at least one leader, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a “climate change pass” with new nuclear power stations, more coal production and even talk of the first new coal mine in Britain in more than 30 years.

Then there’s the inflation that’s now gripping the world economy, and starting to take off here, as bottlenecks bite and prices soar. It’s partly due to pandemic disruption, partly due to disruption caused by Ukraine, Ukrainian war, and partly due to the economic decoupling from China – a strategic necessity that will make us more secure in the long term, sure, but a move that will make us less prosperous in the short term.

Matt Canavan is a lonely public voice for climate and economic realism. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

And yet here we are in the midst of a federal election where none of this is being even notionally, let alone realistically, addressed in the campaign. A government first elected on a promise to end Labor’s debt and deficit makes daily spending announcements, as if more public spending is the answer to every problem; while the opposition trumpets the supposed benefits of its net zero plan that’s sheer fiscal fantasy while economic and security storm clouds continue to build.

Senator Matt Canavan is a lonely public voice for climate and economic realism, while in many once-safe Liberal seats the main alternative is a cabal of Climate 200 green independents who are little more than well-heeled, well-connected stooges for the hard left.

Even with the bombs and missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities, and Russia threatening to break the military stalemate using nuclear weapons, the green-left ideologues insist that the only imminent apocalypse the world faces is from increasing global emissions.

Has there ever been an election less grounded in real policy to deal with our real problems?

Is it any wonder so many voters feel politically homeless, and so many remain undecided?

HEY ALBO, WHY ARE YOU KEEPING TANYA HIDDEN

ANTHONY Albanese hasn’t just adopted a small target strategy. He’s adopted a low visibility strategy. Maybe he thinks that voters are “over” politicians dominating the airwaves, even during election campaigns. Or maybe he’s decided the less he says, the less he’s liable to stuff up.

But, one way or another, the relative absence of the opposition leader is another unusual feature of this odd campaign. True, he’s just getting over Covid but he’s vaccinated, which means it’s not a killer blow. Yet apart from a couple of radio interviews, he really went missing. After a stroll in the park Friday and a couple of soft interviews, he flew to Perth to prepare for today’s campaign launch, leaving the hard campaign work to his frontbenchers who copped an absolute grilling from a frustrated media for their leader’s absence. It’s a little reminiscent

of Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency, most of which was spent at home, doing highly staged media from his basement.

Tanya Plibersek has been absent during the campaign. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts

In Biden’s case, he never actually had Covid. He was just taking advantage of the 2020 Covid panic which had many US states in long-term lockdown. There was also the sense that Democratic Party strategists were happy to hide a candidate for the world’s most challenging job who was clearly past his prime. Albanese is not as stamina and acuity-challenged as the president but he’s been extraordinarily ill-prepared for a campaign he should have been gearing up for over the past three years and seems remarkably ignorant of his party’s own policies. Last week, Labor spinners were trying to make a virtue of his invisibility, saying that it had put the focus onto the PM and that voters hadn’t liked what they saw. Labor’s handlers would have been delighted at week’s end by Richard Marles’ Covid diagnosis that took the accident-prone deputy off the campaign trail too, and away from scrutiny of his aggressively pro-China views and his ignorance of Labor’s anti-coal emissions policy.

Another curious feature of the Labor campaign has been the near-absence of former deputy leader Tanya Plibersek.

As one of Labor best-known and most popular frontbenchers, and with no recent own goals to live down, it’s hard to grasp why she hasn’t been more readily deployed – unless there’s concern she might outshine her boss? If Labor is to emerge victorious, never before will an incoming government have such a thinly announced policy agenda and such a little known and under-scrutinised leader. All at a time when leadership and ability has never mattered more.

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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are not making realistic promises