Let’s turn back time, Albo

Our Prime Minister in one of his frequently mundane news conferences recently reminded us that “we can’t turn back the clock” when it comes to issues like multiculturalism and economic reform.

Well maybe the PM in his DJ Albo guise had  a couple of lines from his idol Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off in mind:“I never miss a beat, I'm lightnin' on my feet, And that's what they don't see, mm-mm…”

At least he didn’t fall off the stage this time, but many of us are old enough to remember when we had incredible music from the likes of The Beatles, Deep Purple and the Rolling Stones. Or climb on board with Cher’s Turn Back Time to the Fabulous Fifties with Elvis, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry and their contemporaries who set the scene for even greater times to come. 

Music aside, before we embraced the concept of  all-encompassing “climate change” in recent years, we  produced and refined most of our own oil and fuel, our energy bills were among the world’s cheapest thanks to an abundance of reliable coal-fired power stations, our steel mills and aluminium smelters could run profitably without the multi- billions of dollars  in government subsidies handed out recently, we manufactured our own urea to fertilise essential food crops, and we didn’t smother an area bigger than Tasmania with Chinese-sourced and more heavily-subsidised solar panels and wind turbines which are pushing power prices through the roof.

We also manufactured our own glass, plastics and paper, which are now also dependent on overseas imports along with our dwindling fuel supplies, the latter thanks to the on-going war in the Middle East which governments present and past should have foreseen as a powder keg waiting to erupt. And we didn’t have rampant antisemitism or any other huge racial divides creating traffic chaos in capital cities most weekends and culminating in the slaughter of 15 innocent Jewish citizens at Bondi on December 14 last year.

So sorry Albo, if we can’t turn back the clock by waking up to reality and diverting some of those $$$billions in subsidised green dreams to fast-tracking domestic oil recovery and refining or utilising known techniques for producing oil from coal such as South Africa does, or re-visiting the vast oil shale deposits near my old stamping grounds of Gladstone, we are all much worse off.

(Your new deal to secure some refined fuel from Singapore in exchange for our LPG is a tenuous stop-gap measure at best, as Singapore is dependent on crude oil imports mostly from the Middle East.)

 Add the irrational  ban on reliable nuclear energy now  being increasingly adopted by other OECD nations, to that long list of fails.

The obsession which you and your Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen have with staying on track to the fabled goal of “Net Zero” was also highlighted recently by signing up to the new Euro Free Trade Deal which ties us to meeting our obligations under the previously mainly aspirational Paris Accord.

This was highlighted by Sky News Australia's commentator Peta Credlin the same day that Bowen had adamantly denied it during an interview with her colleague, Kieran Gilbert.

“I pointed out that the EU trade deal could well be set up as a back-door way to enforce compliance with UN climate targets,” Ms Credlin said. “By God, Chris Bowen is slippery, isn't he? Slippery – and either deliberately lying about what's in the agreement, or wilfully ignorant of the detail. “If you look carefully at the DFAT website, the government's own trade website, you will find this document titled ‘Australia-European Union free trade agreement – benefits for trade, environment and climate’. “And off the top, it says this, ‘for the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia (and the EU) has made a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change.’”

Google’s AI is in agreement: