Stupidity squared on climate, banking

THE APRA duo Wayne Byres and Geoff Summerhayes have drunk the climate change Kool-Aid, writes Terry McCrann.

Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh and APRA chairman Wayne Byres.

THE APRA duo Wayne Byres and Geoff Summerhayes have drunk the climate change Kool-Aid and as a consequence wandered way off their regulatory reservation and deep into Loon Pond territory.

Disturbingly, this announces that APRA — the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority — has joined Federal Treasury on the intellectual scrap heap.

Both used to be fundamentally important to both public policy formulation and execution. Both used to be the core of rigorously rational policy analysis and advice. Both are now, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly useless.

I say disturbingly, because in the case of Treasury it doesn’t matter. It was already fundamentally irrelevant to anything actually going on.

How long is it since anyone cared what Treasury had to say about the economy, about policy, indeed even about the Budget?

It can’t even get its forecasts within cooee of reality. It’s now staffed — rather, stuffed, in both meanings of the word — with what I term “very stupid clever people”.

APRA is an altogether different matter. Because of its regulatory role, it has real-time major relevance in your life — even though you wouldn’t have the faintest idea who Byres is (its chairman) and even less idea of this character Summerhayes (one of its, excuse me, “executive board members”).

Last Friday, Summerhayes spoke to the Insurance Council annual forum. The title of his speech — “Australia’s new horizon: Climate change challenges and prudential risk” — captured the pompous inanity of its contents.

Pompous? How’s this sentence? “We (as in, clever right-thinking people) now have a much more sophisticated, granular, quantifiable understanding of the impacts, risks and probability distributions around climate change.”

It was wall-to-wall climate change/global warming hysteria. Summerhayes mouthed all the verities about the devastation to be, and indeed already being, caused by climate change.

It was delivered with all the pompous climate change pseudoscience certainty, while demonstrating not the slightest understanding that all the hysterical predictions of the “scientists” have failed again and again and again to happen.

My colleague, Andrew Bolt, can provide the utterly clueless Summerhayes near endless chapter and verse on that.

The extreme weather that isn’t. A major Chinese study has found that hailstorms, thunderstorms and high wind events in China have actually halved since 1960.

The massive increase in cyclones and typhoons that isn’t. The overflowing dams that will never fill again — a shout out to our former official national hysteric, Tim Flannery.

The global grain harvests which keep setting higher and higher peaks. Hardly surprising — if I can be so bold — Geoff, as that great “pollutant,” carbon dioxide, is also the plant food, something primary school kids used to know and now “very clever people” don’t.

The vanishing — indeed, evaporating — polar bears that ain’t. Gee, you disappoint me, Geoff, no mention of the bears in your speech.

The key concern for policy rationality was the ominous paragraph that suggested APRA was going to “climate change adjust” its mandate and its regulatory intrusion.

“I want to offer some observations about why climate-related risks are likely to be relevant and important, not only for insurers but for all APRA-regulated entities,” Summerhayes pontificated.

And then added: “I will also talk about how we see ‘climate risks’ as part of our broader approach to prudential risk management and supervision.”

THESE words — “and that APRA wants to be explicit about” — left no doubt that all this was with the direct imprimatur of Byres. So every inane word that Summerhayes uttered can be taken as having been uttered by Byres.

Yet another reason why we need a down-under Donald: not so much to drain the swamp, but to sweep out the Kool-Aid drinkers.

It was a good week for stupidity, as we saw over the frenzied Coalition reaction to the appointment of former Queensland Labor premier Anna Bligh to be CEO of the banking lobby group.

The very reaction announced the stupidity. The bank CEOs have chosen Bligh to be their prime lobbyist. Do you think they might actually know what they are doing? That they know who she was and is? Further, it’s not “always about you”.

Now true, all individual politicians (with some very few, fingers of, OK, two hands exceptions) and political groupings find it all too easy and rewarding to engage in bank bashing.

But right now bank bashing central is Bill Shorten’s Labor Party.

The lunacy is best and most recently captured in Shorten’s call for the banks to miss out on any company tax cut. That is to say, he wants bank customers to pay more.

So what in fact the bankers have done is to say that, yes, despite the sort of generic, reflex, bashing from Coalition politicians, they have some reasonable hope that it won’t spill over into utter policy stupidity.

So their main game is trying to get the Labor Party and especially its leadership off the Kool-Aid. Hence, a former Labor insider. It’s actually something of a (small) compliment to the Coalition.

Now, there is no guarantee that anybody in the current Labor Party is going to listen to Bligh; from Shorten down, and with no exceptions, they’ve all demonstrated a total imperviousness to logic and even the most basic common sense, impressively, for want of a better word, across all policy fronts.

Interestingly, there are a lot of ex-Labor premiers running around in the media, advisory and lobbying spaces. In political retirement, they mostly show impressive common sense and policy rationality — once they stop drinking the Kool-Aid, various flavours.

AT LEAST, HALF-AWAKE

SOME business leaders are finally waking from their sleepwalking towards the energy precipice.

The head of Australia’s only steelmaker — what used to be BHP and is now called BlueScope — warned yesterday of a national “energy catastrophe”.

Paul O’Malley called for a commitment across governments and parties to a set number of coal and gas power stations to provide baseload power. He also suggested we should reserve some gas for local use, rather than export it all.

The catastrophe was threefold — not just security of supply, but ever-rising prices and basic supply itself.

But O’Malley’s rationality only went so far. He still felt the need to figuratively put his hand on the global warming bible and to propose what was essentially just a milder version of the current rush to renewables insanity.

That the sort of “base” of baseload coal and gas stations would only be aimed at ensuring that when the wind or sun stopped the grid didn’t fall, SA style.

Sorry Paul, how about a power system that delivers the most reliable, plentiful and the cheapest power? Like we used to have. Before we started building useless turbines.

Originally published as Stupidity squared on climate, banking