On Albanese’s Fantasy Island, it’s the grand gestures that count
From promises of cheaper energy to Palestine statehood, the government deals in illusion ... and the politics/media class is only too willing to indulge the ruse.
The deeper we get into his second term, the more the Prime Minister seems to have modelled his government on the 1980s television series, except this time reality is turned on its head by Albanese and his loyal sidekick Chris Bowen.
On the fantasy island of Australia, they have bent the laws of engineering, meteorology and economics so the Climate Change and Energy Minister can refer to “clean, cheap, reliable renewable electricity”. Presumably if anyone dares to point out that since the preferencing of subsidised renewable energy our electricity has become more expensive and less reliable than ever, they will be evicted from these phantasmagorical shores.
Albanese has been in Turtle Bay, New York City, just across town from the Theater District, acting out another implausible script, announcing “the Commonwealth of Australia recognises the state of Palestine”. Except there is no such state and will not be anytime soon.
This is something the Acting Prime Minister, Richard Marles, seemed to realise back home when he said this was about recognising “the legitimate aspiration of the Palestinian people to statehood”.
That is the danger with fantasy, there is always the risk a realist will burst your bubble. Albanese and his fellow travellers may as well have recognised Neverland or Nirvana. They have confused aspiration with achievement and missed a million steps along the way.
Jim Chalmers was busy creating his own fiscal fantasy. In one media conference he boasted about adding more “cleaner and cheaper renewable energy” to the grid, blamed a monthly inflation spike on higher power prices and promised to help “people with their electricity bills” by extending government rebates – could he not connect these dots?
Yet when Donald Trump called the renewables push an “expensive joke” the Albanese government would have it that the President was deluded. The US, by the way, while we were busy destroying our electricity grid, transformed itself from net energy importer to an exporter by exploiting its abundant fossil fuel resources.
Who could explain Australia’s wonderland, where we have enviable quantities of coal, gas and uranium but all of which we have determined not to use ourselves? Apparently we would prefer to reduce our standard of living and export these dense energy resources so other nations can boost their standard of living instead.
Topsy-turvy.
Truth no longer has currency on this fantasy island continent. We have a government addicted to pretence and a political /media class only too willing to indulge the ruse.
How else to explain bureaucrats and scientific organisations colluding to produce a report on global warming that is so dedicated to fearmongering it flips findings on their heads? Research pointing to a net decrease in weather-related deaths was censored to reflect only alarm about the increase in heat deaths.
Fantasy, everywhere. The same report failed to note agricultural benefits from warmer days, greater carbon dioxide saturation and higher rainfall, as if the longstanding and widespread use of greenhouses for horticulture were an inconvenient fact.
While Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong continue to talk up their “recognition” of the non-existent state of Palestine, they point to a series of promises from the Palestinian Authority – demilitarisation, elections, an end to indoctrinating children into terrorism and “martyrdom” as well as an end to “pay for slay” payments to the families of terrorist prisoners and suicide bombers. Our Prime Minister even declares that “Hamas would hand over its weapons to Palestinian security forces and never control Gaza again”.
But Albanese and his gesture-making allies also call for a ceasefire now, which would leave Hamas in control of Gaza. And while the PA would love to see the back of its bitter Hamas rivals, this is something it can never guarantee.
At the UN, Albanese, Wong and Bowen lauded China’s self-declaration as a climate action leader when it is the world’s largest emitter, its emissions are growing every year by more than Australia’s total annual emissions, and it has 300 new coal-fired power stations under construction or in the planning pipeline. Yet Albanese tells us his economy-sapping emissions reduction plans at home will improve the weather and reduce the incidence and severity of natural disasters.
Reality is unknown on this island. Science is denied. Albanese pretends he is a stickler for the science. “The science told us that Australia always had some extreme weather events, but they’d be more often and more intense,” the Prime Minister says, “and that is what we are seeing playing out.”
This is just not true. We are not seeing more drought, we are not seeing more cyclones or floods, we are not seeing worse bushfires – the empirical evidence is just not there.
Remember when the weather bureau feverishly told us that Adelaide had recorded the highest maximum temperature ever in a capital city? With a bit of digging I discovered that a higher maximum was recorded in the same city in the 1930s, and the bureau confirmed the new record applied only because it had “homogenised” the earlier record downwards.
In a similar half-truth the bureau proclaimed the hottest overnight minimum as a national record, except the weather station that recorded it, at Noona in western NSW, had been in place for only two years. So all we could say for sure was that it was the hottest night in Noona for a couple of years.
We are being fed fantasies. People are telling us what they want us to hear, with little regard for boring, inconvenient little facts.
Who could believe Albanese for starters? He told us Trump scared the “shit out” of him, then raced up and embarrassed himself by snapping a selfie with the US President. Cringe.
This week I watched a bit of ABC breakfast television while in an airport lounge and noticed they were quick to point out there was no evidence to support Trump’s claims about a sabotaged escalator at the UN.
Yet just minutes earlier they had given us a doe-eyed report on Xi Jinping’s outrageous claim to be leading the world in climate action – they did not raise an eyebrow in scepticism or provide any countervailing facts to expose the lie.
Choose your fantasy. Choose those you will challenge and those you will not.
Staying on climate, Bowen keeps insisting “the cost of inaction will always outweigh the cost of action”. This is demonstrably untrue and phantasmagorically wrong, no matter how often he and other zealots mouth it.
All policy should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis. But Labor will not even provide an estimate of the cost of getting to net zero.
With the help of AI, I have estimated that state and federal governments have blown around $150bn so far, and there are credible estimates the total could top $600bn to $1 trillion by 2050.
And given we know that Australia’s action cannot have any discernible impact on the climate (our emissions are 1 per cent of the global share and falling, while global emissions are rising), we also know there can be no cost on our country from our own inaction. To the extent that greenhouse gas emissions alter the climate, we will get the climate that global emissions send our way, regardless of our own effort.
But daily we are told by Labor, Greens, teals and some Coalition politicians that what we do will change our weather. Our kids are taught the same fraudulent nonsense.
We may as well be sacrificing virgins to the sun gods. All we are doing is destroying our energy advantage to undermine our economy and pretending that we are saving the planet.
Bowen sounds like he is speaking in tongues: “We can use these advantages to power hundreds of thousands of jobs and new investment to set us up for a bright economic future, making the most of our strengths and building our decarbonisation journey here and helping the rest of the world.” This is nonsense; the opposite to reality.
The Treasurer, Chalmers, says “an orderly transition to net zero is a golden economic opportunity for Australia”. I guess in much the same way that an orderly transition to unemployment is a golden economic opportunity for a worker.
We are being fed bunkum, pure bunkum, daily. Much of the media and most of social media just go along with the charade, suspending critical thought and following what looks like the political fashion.
The trouble is that no matter how long or often they ignore reality, it has a habit of catching up with us eventually. The fantasy will end.
More Coverage
“My dear guests, I am Anthony Albanese, your host, welcome to Fantasy Island.”