Vikki Campion: Power companies have taken our money and treated us with contempt

As power companies bamboozled us with taxpayer-funder greenwashing, they have a left a trail of destruction in their wake. And what’s worse we, the taxpayer, funded their behaviour, writes Vikki Campion.

Are we sick of the big greenwash yet?

The big companies make moralistic statements of benevolence and then ruthlessly manipulate gullible governments for shareholders?

This week, it was revealed that Origin Energy had been squirrelling away taxpayer-subsidised coal, which could destroy 1000 jobs in the Hunter.

They could do so thanks to the ill-judged policy fathered by Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Liberal Treasurer Matt Kean, who stood side-by-side to impose price caps on domestic coal to NSW power stations.

Instead of slashing power bills, it has put 1000 jobs at risk because Origin no longer needs coal from Myuna mine because it hoarded so much, and Myuna is only set up to supply Origin’s Eraring power station.

When former NSW Treasurer Mike Baird announced selling Eraring’s assets to Origin in July 2013 his press release said it would “only bolster our AAA credit rating” and make it easier “to invest in critical infrastructure for the people of NSW”.

Adam Marshall has retired from politics to work of Origin.

What about the critical infrastructure of energy powering homes and business?

Now, nearly 11 years later, we are bent over by Origin, whose main game is shutting down our primary coal power station Eraring and industrialising prime agricultural regions for intermittent wind factories.

This week we discover Origin’s brand new senior government relations manager is former Nationals MP Adam Marshall, who was at the cabinet table when Mr Kean designed Renewable Energy Zones, turning New England into an industrialised wind experiment that Origin is now set to profit from, thanks to the succulent teat of Mr Bowen’s subsidies.

If only Mr Bowen could ask himself questions like: “If power prices didn’t go down when the fuel source was being subsidised, where did all the money go?”

Our grid is captured by greenwashing billionaire interests who have convinced the government we need to give them more money, or the world will end.

Origin could not care less if Australian families can afford power or if Hunter workers have a job.

That’s why last quarter, Origin paid what seems to be many millions for what is little more than a $2 shelf company with no experience or capital in developing industrialised wind.

That enterprise walked into the regional NSW town of Walcha, got a $1m grant from the federal government, and offered a bunch of farmers four figures to sign wind exclusivity agreements.

Now Origin has these contracts to take to market, leaving what was once a tight community utterly fractured with no social licence for the project.

Mr Marshall, never one to shy away from a photoshoot atop a wind turbine, issued some 80 media releases during his tenure about the future of intermittent energy while saying he sympathised with this same rural community that his new employer intends to litter with hundreds of swindle factories. Of all the job opportunities from intermittent power generation that the former member would often spruik, is it any surprise that the most well-paid one in the region has gone to himself?

He abandons his seat just in time to help Origin with the next step to turn idyllic farming areas into industrialised intermittent power generators, leaving the taxpayer with a costly by-election (measured at some $300,000 by 2008 prices) to go to a company hellbent on destroying the social fabric of a town he was supposed to represent.

Selling off our power and handing over our land to an onslaught of foreign developers has been a massive grift from the beginning.

The winners along the way were the merchant bankers, who Mr Baird went to work for, and now the power companies, who Mr Marshall now works for, and the ultimate sucker has been us.

WHERE’S THE SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS

How can teaching be “one of the most important jobs in this country” for the Prime Minister and simultaneously fail to warrant support staff?

On one hand, Anthony Albanese glorifies and reveres education, using students as props in flashy photo shoots at public schools this week.

On the other, he allows his state counterparts to freeze the hard-saved funds in NSW public school accounts, slashes budgets, and threatens to lay off support staff.

Anthony Albanese with students in Darwin. Picture: Lukas Coch/ Pool/ NCA NewsWire

If you are a teacher who requires the support of a teacher’s aide or a learning support worker or a parent whose kid needs a little extra help in the classroom, how does it feel to be left short by the party of free education?

All the bon mot and flowery rhetoric about how public school education is the foundation of the beauty of the world seems to have fallen off like Humpty Dumpty when Labor has to back it up with action.

After all the campaigning the teachers’ unions did for the Labor Party at the last election, urging voters to bring in an Albanese government for fully-funded public schools, three years into this experiment, not one public classroom in NSW is fully funded.

Last October, Mr Albanese was eulogising his economics teacher for changing his life when he announced $10m in advertising to recruit teachers in a campaign, which, like the Voice, helped advertise greasers’ bank accounts more than the kids in need.

This week, he continued on as a sentimental bloke, crediting a brother from his Catholic college with changing his life after making him a footy captain. He released a sepia throwback of his schoolboy days while his NSW counterparts continued their assault on teachers’ aides.

He gives us a fireside chat on the mythology of his school days, the economics teacher and Catholic brother who made him captain, but his vision stops in the 1970s.

Where is his empathy for the children going through school in 2024?

The ones, lockdown affected, who are behind in math, writing and reading and need that extra support?

Originally published as Vikki Campion: Power companies have taken our money and treated us with contempt