Coal case: renewables will destroy our economy and lifestyle
The state governments along the eastern seaboard are all fairly stable.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews rules with a huge majority. In NSW and Queensland, Gladys Berejiklian and Annastacia Palaszczuk have comfortable majorities that make any attempt to defeat them at the next election look like an almost impossible task.
Mark McGowan is riding a huge wave of popularity and will govern Western Australia for quite a while yet.
The Liberals have held Tasmania for many years and Tasmanians are not warming to the leftist leanings of the Labor Opposition.
Liberal Stephen Marshall plods along in what was once a Labor stronghold in South Australia and looks safe. Of course, in South Australia Labor shot itself in the foot by foolishly relying on renewables too much and could not escape responsibility for blackouts.
Not unreasonably, voters regard the responsibility of keeping the lights on with great respect. Renewables have a big future, but in a land with 400 years of coal readily available, it is logical to expect we will rely on that cheap source of power for some time to come.
Those who take to the streets to protest against the use of coal know there is no alternative. We could return to the Dark Ages and live off the land, but the population of the world has grown so much that we know it won’t happen. I have never fired a gun. My family would surely starve.
A headlong rush to renewables will destroy the economy and our lifestyles with it. Labor leader Anthony Albanese is way too bright to travel down that path to certain ruin. He will rightly pay homage at the altar of renewables, but he won’t stay on bended knee for long. This huge change will occur only when battery technology can match the driving ambitions of the mob, not the elites.
The death of Australian manufacturing could have been delayed or prevented if we had not demolished the smokestacks of the Hunter Valley. If Australia stops using coal in the short term, we should have our collective heads read. We have an enormous advantage with a never-ending supply of good quality coal upon which we could build an exciting future. Those who preach the need to negate that advantage are fools who must be ignored. And our coal, by world standards, is particularly cheap. Pressing home that advantage will not be difficult.
Coal exports will continue to be of vital importance to our balance of payments.
We have come a long way from the 1970s and 80s. In those days if Qantas bought a new Boeing 747 our economists would be aghast. The monthly figures would be turned upside down and we all felt it really mattered.
Now that our mineral exports have reached such a level you might notice that you rarely see a newspaper report or a radio of television news grab about the level of imports coming into Australia. That is a source of real concern to me because it is accompanied by the unspoken suggestion that it really doesn’t matter if we don’t make anything in Australia anymore.