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Hayek and von Mises brilliant economists

As prime minister, Kevin Rudd (now former Ambassador to the US) in his 2009 Monthly article said,

"Neo-liberal economic philosophy has its roots in the theories of Hayek and von Mises" and "Neo-liberals such as Alan Moran ... blahblahblah".

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Only a genuine buffoon makes such a connection but:-

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Thank You Kevin   Read here (if you wish) 

Policy Options Palatable as Road Kill

Quadrant Online, 25 March 202​6

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    The Iranian war and consequent reduction in fuel supplies has brought diesel, petrol, and LPG price increases for consumers with widespread reported shortages. In one response to this, the state opposition leaders in South Australia and Victoria have called for a compensatory reduction in excise taxes. These calls have been echoed by One Nation and even some Teals. Treasurer Jim Chalmers accused shadow treasurer Tim Wilson of dropping “a clanger” in claiming the government was benefitting from increased prices on fuels when the main revenue is a fixed excise (52.6 cents per litre).​

 

In fact, a tax cut to mitigate the effects of diminished supplies is exactly the wrong policy response. Lower supplies require .....Read online   .....pdf

Australia has a gas problem

Canberra must get serious about domestic reserves and natural resources

Spectator Australia, 25 March 202​6

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    By demonstrating the reality of One Nation’s rise, the South Australian election confirmed turmoil in Australian politics.

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This brought to the surface a new contempt for the politically correct agenda that has come to dominate politics in Australia. Not only did One Nation savage the Coalition vote, but it also ate into that of Labor.

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Labor is responding by pirouetting towards a form of hybrid patriotism with multicultural Australia that encourages people to share a drink and argue about the footy… Meanwhile, the Liberals and Nationals are torn between fighting One Nation by adopting its policies or continuing to product-differentiate themselves from Labor and   .....Read online   .....pdf

Weighed down by the Australian government

We might not survive this Labor agenda

Spectator Australia, 10 March 202​6

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    The world faces increased insecurities as a result of the US and Israel (with little help from others in the West) finally confronting the Iranian theocratic reaction to the modern world.

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However, in addition to having brought about economic weaknesses, the Australian government is mired in an inability to change course.

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Growth-stifling policies commenced under the Turnbull government and have been turbocharged by the Albanese government’s breakneck spending and regulatory measures on welfare   .....Read online   .....pdf

One Nation is chasing the Coalition in the right direction

Spectator Australia, 24 February 202​6

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    Albanese presides over a government that indulges in big-spending, a loser-industry reward structure, and investment-deterring policies that have sent the economy into a tailspin.

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Labor’s support from welfare recipients, political elites, and activist groups – together with the unions and various Net Zero beneficiaries – makes the Prime Minister unable to contemplate corrective small government measures.

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They have no plans to fix Australia.

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Meanwhile, the Coalition’s strategy of seeking power without further     .....Read online   .....pdf

Polly Wants a Crack-up

Quadrant Online, 22 February 202​6

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    Energy Minister Bowen, the Prime Minister and just about every ALP/Green/Teal MP parrot the myth that renewable energy is the cheapest source of power. Such notions are bolstered by green-flavoured think tanks. Thus, the Grattan Institute’s modelling claims that substituting almost all coal and gas with wind and solar would halve the average Australian annual household energy bill — including petrol, electricity, and gas — by 2050.

 

Such forecasts have been common over the two decades during which governments have subsidised renewable energy, thereby penalising coal. As a result, twenty years ago coal supplied 85% of electricity but is now down to 50%.     .....Read online   .....pdf

Can Angus Taylor free Australia of the green energy nightmare

Spectator Australia, 13 February 202​6

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    The renewable energy bubble is popping globally – though not in countries run by green socialist governments, including the UK, Spain and, sadly, Australia.

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Following Angus Taylor’s elevation, an urgent task for Australia’s emerging anti-socialist forces is to unwind the energy tragedy caused by successive government attacks on coal generation.

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Having once supplied 85 per cent of electricity, coal is now down to 40 per cent and scheduled to be phased out in the next dozen years.

Globally, the US under Trump is leading the way in unravelling     .

....Read online   .....pdf

A political earthquake is rumbling beneath our feet

Spectator Australia, 6 February 202​6

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    Anyone who rules out the possibility of a seismic change in the political scene in Australia is not paying attention.

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The rise in popularity of One Nation is unparalleled in Australian history and there will be many career politicians extrapolating a trend that we have seen in less than 12 months.

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Simplistically, we’ve seen One Nation’s share of the vote market rise from 6.4 per cent in May 2025 to 17 per cent by the end of the year and now to 25 per cent.

And this is not based on a few outlier polls; it seems pretty consistent across all pollsters.        .....pdf     ..... Read online

One Nation on the rise

Albanese slips into incompetence

Spectator Australia, 27 January 202​6

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    The rise in One Nation’s share of the vote is causing a major political realignment.

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Their rise is coincident with public frustration at the deterioration of internal security. These security failures led us to the massacre at Bondi Beach. We hope, but do not know, if this is where the story ends.

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The election of the Albanese government has ushered in a new era of incompetence in the management of the basic security that citizens expect from their government.

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It is a government narrowly focused on identity     ...Read online   .....pdf

The Evil of Two Lessers

Quadrant Online, 22 January 202​6

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    The cause and effect of the Bondi Beach murders have long been percolating. The deterioration of public safety as a result of anti-Semitism was evident long before the carnage of December 14 in the security barriers and personnel Jews have had to build and organise to protect areas where they congregate and their children are schooled. Labor governments have been unable and unwilling to counter this intensifying menace because of the voting coalitions they rely upon. Having built and populated their Muslim voting blocs, incurring their electoral wrath by acting contrary to their wishes is unthinkable.

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Australia’s century and more of successful immigration rested upon a common set of values and customs. From a British ....Read online   .....pdf

Albanese’s Royal Omission Commission

Quadrant Online, 11 January 202​6

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    We need real and well-analysed options to resolve the cancer in our society revealed by the Bondi massacre. The Royal Commission announced at long last by the Prime Minister comes nowhere near fulfilling that objective as evidenced by the language laying out its its major objective:

 

"Tackling anti-Semitism by investigating the nature and prevalence of anti-Semitism in institutions and society, and its key drivers in Australia, including ideologically and religiously motivated extremism and radicalisation".

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Nowhere will you find the words “Islam”, “Muslim”,  ....Read online   .....pdf

The four pillars of modern civilisation

When a high-energy society opts for an unreliable, expensive grid

Spectator Australia, 29 December 2025​​

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    In a frequently cited analysis, Vaclav Smil demonstrates how the progression of human living standards has been conditioned by inventions creating cheaper energy, especially in the modern era once steam engines were invented.

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Smil’s four pillars of modern civilisation – cement, primary iron, plastics, and ammonia – cannot be produced except at great cost by energy sources other than fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro-electricity (which has little new potential).

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He notes how much more expensive renewable   ....Read online   .....pdf

They Would Say That

Quadrant Online, 22 December 2025​​

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    It is of course clear to everybody that independent inquiries called by the government are headed and staffed by people selected to provide recommendations which the government itself favours. To buttress this, they normally have terms of reference that direct the recommendations along the desired path.​

 

Occasionally, though, an appointed commissioner delivers a report that goes off the reservation. This was clearly the case with Jillian Segal, whose recommendations addressing anti-Semitism in Australia collided head-on with Labor’s vital Islamic constituency. As soon as she presented her report a concerted chorus of vilification sought to discredit her, and thus the report remained unanswered for six months  ....Read online   .....pdf

Nature positive (?)

A triumph of regulation pretending to be conservation

Spectator Australia, 14 December 2025​​

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    On November 28, the Albanese government rammed through its overhaul of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

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Comprising seven Acts in 1,500 pages, it emerged from the 2020 Samuel inquiry into the EPBC Act. The Act purported to be pursuing the commendable goal of rationalising the roles of state and Commonwealth in environmental regulations.

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The 252-page report was founded upon the fashionable absurdity that, ‘The environment is not sufficiently resilient to withstand current, emerging or future threats, including     ....Read online   .....pdf

The tide of climate alarmism is receding

Will Chris Bowen be the last man standing in the mud?

Spectator Australia, 5 December 2025​​

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    The key issue for economic policy remains the ‘transition’ away from dependable energy sources (coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro) towards low-density, unreliable wind and solar backed up by batteries and a cobweb of new transmission lines.

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As 2025 comes to an end, we are seeing a diverse picture regarding the politics of energy.

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Globally, the 30th Conference of the Parties in Brazil was attended by a diminishing handful of world leaders.

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The World Resources Institute (funded by      ....Read online   .....pdf

Can democracy protect private property?

Net Zero is pushing governments to violate our rights

Spectator Australia, 28 November 2025​​

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    My great friend Reg Hamilton has offered a full-throated promotion of democracy.

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Who could oppose the notion that freedom is far superior to tyranny? And that democratic institutions, notwithstanding their persecution of Donald Trump, George Pell, and many others, generally perform better than those without the oversight of a free press and constitutional restraints on the Executive?

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Reg says, with regret, that, ‘They [the early Australian constitutionalists] settled for the less democratic Upper Houses in each colony and electorates weighted to the country regions.’     ....Read online   .....pdf

Leaderships change, but Net Zero policy endures

Spectator Australia, 19 November 2025​​

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    Since 2015, when an anaemic majority of Liberal MPs replaced Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull, the establishment figures across the political spectrum have pursued the ideology of Net Zero carbon emissions, which includes closing down domestic coal use.

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The battle for a rational energy policy was left to the minor parties – with Malcolm Roberts the most prominent – along with those peripheral to Coalition leadership, including Matt Canavan, Barnaby Joyce, and Alex Antic.

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The ructions underway within Australia regarding climate policy have stemmed from a growing awareness of a voter backlash against Net Zero.

   ....Read online   .....pdf

The $16B Quest for a Spine

Quadrant Online, 15 November 2025​​

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    The Coalition’s rejection of Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions is part of a global receding of nations’ appetites for measures that demonstrably undermine their economies. This is illustrated by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading promoter of such measures, having been forced to restore reality, rather than ideology, in its published annual forecasts of energy growth and its composition. It has bowed to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who threatened to defund it unless it ceases shilling for renewable energy.

 

The IEA’s focus in the past 10 years has been “the energy transition”. Globally, the share of investment in “clean energy” rose from 45% in 2015 to today’s 65%. But in 2024, oil, coal and gas supplied 82% of global energy, down only slightly from 85% in 1974.     ....Read online   .....pdf

Is this the final fight for Net Zero within the Coalition?

Spectator Australia, 10 November 2025​​

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    With the OECD recognising a significant global slowdown in the appetite of nations to adopt CO2-reducing policies, on Wednesday, the Liberal Party is set to agree a new policy on renewable energy subsidies. These subsidies have been progressively increased over the past 25 years under a policy was sanctified by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Australia ratified the agreement in 2016 and adopted its emission reduction rulebook program in 2021.

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The Liberal Party will decide its position within a maelstrom of pressures that renewable energy is creating in terms of flailing economic output and the potential for blackouts, which is juxtaposed with pressures from constituents to hold firm, relax, wind-back, or abandon the subsidy programs.     ....Read online   ....pdf

Labor riding high in the polls

But wealth redistribution doesn’t work forever

Spectator Australia, 4 November 2025​​

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    The Coalition, split over climate policy between wets and dries, faces an existential crisis.

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While Labor is riding high in the opinion polls, it faces future headwinds as a result of the electorate not sharing the Labor elite’s social philosophy. Most voters are far more concerned about a squeeze on living standards that they attribute, at least in part, to high immigration and climate policies.

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And, as Alexander Downer has pointed out, political shifts across the world are, at the present juncture, far more dynamic than we have seen previously – especially towards what the establishment likes to call ‘far right’ parties.     ....Read online   ....pdf

Overlays of regulation killing the economy

Our rare earths and critical mineral deal will mean nothing if we can’t mine

Spectator Australia, 29 October 2025​​

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    The Australian Labor Party, in and outside government, has expressed its loathing for the US Republicans, in particular Donald Trump, whom Kevin Rudd famously called a ‘traitor to the West’, ‘the most destructive president in history’, and a ‘village idiot’. Albanese has also been less than complimentary to Trump.

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Across the aisle, former Liberal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg commented that:

‘He’s a drop kick, Tony. I mean, his comments are totally offensive, you know, his comments about women … it’s beyond the pale for any politician, regardless of their political hue.’       ....Read online   ....pdf

Zoning, mass migration, construction

The nightmare situation in Australia’s housing market

Spectator Australia, 27 October 2025​​

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    Australia’s housing market has seen escalating prices since the 1970s.

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Various ad hoc attempts to cheapen supply have been tried by variations of subsidy schemes to the less well-off and to first home buyers. The latest scheme is the federal government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, which features a home deposit guarantee scheme for first buyers and social and affordable housing programs. This has so far resulted in a planned 18,500 new homes, well short of the estimated 640,000 Australian households whose housing needs are said to be currently unmet.          ....Read online   ....pdf

Doubling Down on Stupid

Quadrant Online, 21 October 2025​​

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    The Grattan Institute is the mainstream media’s go-to outfit for supposedly erudite, green-left commentary on climate issues. Its recent modelling says substituting almost all coal and gas with wind and solar would halve the average Australian annual household energy bill — including petrol, electricity, and gas — by 2050. It argues the decarbonisation could be taken further by introducing a carbon tax, thereby sacrificing a modest amount of this improved outlook.

 

There is an ethereal tenor to forecasts such as these since they neatly invert the actual outcomes we have seen in recent years. Over the past 10 years, Australia’s ex-generator wholesale electricity price has increased from about $40 per megawatt hour to around $105. This resulted from the rising requirements for wind and solar to be    ....Read online   ....pdf

Chris Bowen is in denial about renewable energy

Australia will lose critical industries as coal-fired plants shut down

Spectator Australia, 13 October 2025​​

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    China has cut off nearly all exports of rare earths, over which it has built a monopoly. Rare earths are critical in the production of not only renewable energy, but also within the wider technology and defence industries.

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This shows how the world has become an even more dangerous place.

China’s market control over critical minerals adds  ....Read online   ....pdf

Political temperatures are rising

And Albanese keeps dragging Australia to the Left

Spectator Australia, 8 October 2025​​

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    Democracy struggles to survive when there is a lack of consensus and an unwillingness to accept a government run by unwelcome political parties.

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Political murders and attempted murders in the US and Manchester (UK), are symptomatic of deep partisan divides and a departure from the consensual cement characteristic of stable democracy.

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Deep fissures in people’s perceptions and aspirations ..Read online   ....pdf

Where is the Dark Money?

Thoughts on the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy

Spectator Australia, 23 September 2025​​

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    Did anyone else tune into the hearings of the Senate inquiry into ‘misinformation and disinformation which relates to climate change and energy’?

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No, I didn’t think so.

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It was handled by a duet comprising the Chair, Greens Senator Whish-Wilson, and Deputy Chair, newbie ALP Senator Ananda-Rajah.

The inquiry came just after President Donald Trump at the United Nations, urged countries to abandon the ‘green scam’ or risk collapse, accusing the UN of making incorrect and alarmist predictions.

.....Read online   .....pdf

Australia’s National Climate Assessment and the US DOE Critical Review

by Michael Asten, Spectator Australia, 23 September 2025​​

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    Australia’s National Climate Assessment makes for disturbing reading, not just for its apocalyptic forecasts but for its lack of scientific method. .....Read online   .....pdf

Net Zero with expensive extras

Spectator Australia, 23 September 2025​​

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    There is a consensus that cheap and reliable energy is indispensable to modern living standards, but the preferred means of delivering that outcome has been conditioned by fears that emissions of CO2 will cause climate change.

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This has brought many politicians to make a radical call for replacing the energy sources (fossil fuels and nuclear) on which modern affluence has been built. Some claim wind and solar will be eventually be cheaper sources of energy but nowhere do they find market success without government subsidies, and wherever governments have insisted upon their installation, they have brought higher energy costs.

     .....Read online   .....pdf

Senate inquiry into climate and energy seeks truth, allegedly

An attempt by the Greens to silence climate change dissent

Spectator Australia, 12 September 2025​​

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    Will the Senate inquiry into climate and energy reveal the true sources of misinformation and disinformation?

The Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy was established in July of this year to investigate the prevalence and impacts of misinformation and disinformation in climate and energy policy. The Greens were ostensibly the main impetus behind the investigation and Greens Senator Whish-Wilson is the Chair. But the ALP placed Senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah as the Deputy Chair.       .....Read online   .....pdf

The energy grid needs markets, not mandates!

Spectator Australia, 26 August 2025​​

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    Average electricity wholesale prices rose from less than $40 per MWh in 2009 (actually less than $30 in 2011) to their present $110.

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Almost continuously over the past 20 years, governments and the political establishment generally have chanted the mantra that renewables are the cheapest form of energy and predicted the dawn of lower prices from the ‘energy transition’ away from fossil fuels.

Given the data, this is astonishing – and all the more so in view of the continued need of renewables for subsidies and evidence of low electricity prices in countries where the wind/solar penetration (and subsidy level) is low.       .....Read online   .....pdf

Self-Harm as a National Priority

Quadrant Online, 19 August 2025​​

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    Until twenty years ago Australian and the US electricity prices tracked closely together, with US prices on average about 30 per cent lower and the price differential gradually narrowing. But, starting 15 or so years ago, this changed alongside a faster growth in Australia’s wind/solar market share. Subsidies brought increased installations of wind and solar energy in both nations with a rise in the market shares of renewables from insignificant levels to 30 per cent in the case of Australia and 18 per cent for the US.

 

In the US, the Obama-Biden subsidies eventually comprised two main elements. These were, first, a 30 per cent tax reduction to the owner on each solar/wind dollar of spending and, secondly, .....Read online   .....pdf

Tony Abbott doesn’t go far enough on energy policy

Australia’s renewable energy subsidies were underpinned by a con-job 

11 August 2025​​

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    Tony Abbott recommends a Coalition energy policy centred around some basic ideas such as no coal-fired power stations close without a reliable alternative; a rapid development of new gas fields; ending subsidies for new renewables; and ending the bans on nuclear.

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That represents a decent start and a sharp contrast from the Albanese government’s approach, which now is set to be put deeper in place by advice from the recent Nelson review, which reported on ‘market settings to promote investment in firmed renewable generation and storage capacity’.     .....Read online   .....pdf

Green Dreams, Grid Realities: Renewables -v- The Rest

Address to the Western Heritage Round Table Forum:  NSW Parliament House -  5 August 2025​​

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    This issue involves several different dimensions.

 

The wellspring of the issue itself is global warming. Is this happening, is it a threat and what to do about it if it is.

 

The second aspect is what are the costs of taking some action.

 

And the third aspect is what are the outcomes of the action itself that we might take.

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Concerning global warming, a general consensus  .....Read online   .....pdf

Australia’s energy grid is in reverse

Spectator Australia, 5 August 2025​​

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    The Productivity Commission is not what it used to be. Most governments decide what they want to hear and pick the people who will tell them just that.

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The Albanese government does not break this mould.

The Commission is led by Danielle Wood who was formerly with the Grattan Institute. Grattan has been the front runner in advocating regulatory-induced emission reductions and taxation of emissions even though this is demonstrably harmful to the economy.

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It comes as little surprise that the interim report to the Productivity Summit reads like a Greenpeace Manifesto.     .....Read online     .....pdf

Seven Days of Energy Fables and Follies

Quadrant Online, 31 July 2025​​

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    There’s never a dull moment in the greenhouse and energy space.

 

The week started with Barnaby Joyce, supported by other Nats, but not his party leader or any Liberals, tabling a bill to repeal Net Zero. The Australian Financial Review proclaimed, “Labor delight as Coalition reopens climate wars” and that the rest of the world is onboard with emission reductions! The AFR is seemingly oblivious to the US ending green subsidies, and was apparently unaware that the very next day the US Environmental Protection Aagency was taking another step to overturn its current determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health.

 .....Read online     .....pdf

Australia, the Switzerland of the South Pacific

Spectator Australia, 23 July 2025​​

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    Peta Credlin has speculated that Albanese would like Australia to be a neutral Switzerland of the South Pacific ‘but without the compulsory National Service’.

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Switzerland is a nice place: prosperous and peaceful. What could go wrong?

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Well for a start there’s the absence of self-defence at a time of disturbing military build-up and sabre rattling on the part of a potentially hostile China.

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In 1939, adjacent to a dangerous neighbour,   .....Read online     .....pdf

Memories of John Stone

Spectator Australia, 23 July 2025​​

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    John Stone was a valued acquaintance, particularly after he had left the Treasury. He was a towering intellect within the Public Service. Very few of his peers would challenge him directly, especially those who, as traditional public servants, sought industry protection, subsidies and increased expenditures for their departments. Stone’s dedication to preventing inadvisable political actions from undermining the economy went to far greater lengths than those of any of his peers and particularly than any of his current successors in any parts of the public service.

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In my own Public Service days I had occasion to oppose him on two particular issues. The first was with regards to the... exchange rate. John was highly conscious of inflation and its capacity  ...Read online     .....pdf

Thanks Albo! Australia is one of the worst-performing nations in the developed world

Spectator Australia, 12 July 2025​​

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    One thing is certain about the government’s August productivity summit – there will be no policies adopted, and even fewer implemented, that might arrest the disastrous decline in Australia’s output per person. That decline can be measured in many ways, but it is non-controversial that output per head has fallen at least 5 per cent since 2022. Australia’s performance is just about the worst among nations in the developed world.

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The immediate cause of this disaster is a precipitous decline in investment, which is the key factor in labour productivity.

Australia’s investment level as a share of GDP was increasing rapidly in

....Read online     .....pdf

Renewable energy exposed

Australia’s economy is facing a crisis fuelled by Net Zero

Spectator Australia, 5 July 2025​​

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    There is an ethereal tone to the Australian debate on energy.

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The government is focused on what it regards as an inevitable transition to Net Zero emissions. This means replacement of coal by wind and solar and eventually by ‘green’ hydrogen from water. While ‘green’ hydrogen has suffered terminal judgements on its viability with proposed projects cancelled all over the world, including Australia’s largest green hydrogen project, the $12.5 billion plant and pipeline in Gladstone, the nation’s three energy regulators, acronymed as AEMO, AER, and AEMC, devise paths by which Net Zero based on wind and solar may be achieved.

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For its part, the Opposition remains in pursuit of a ....Read online     .....pdf

Coalition no match for Labor’s ruthless Net Zero agenda

Spectator Australia, 25 June 2025​​

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    For many years Australian policy has been moving backwards in the pursuit of cheap, reliable energy. The policy has now taken a further turn away from lowering costs, towards a focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions and thereby raising costs.

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As with other parts of the globe, carbon dioxide is emitted from various sources and the vast majority is re-absorbed in the plants, the soil, and the water resources. Simply because we have just about the lowest population and lowest levels of emissions per hectare in the world, Australia is a natural net sink for emissions.

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This has been amply demonstrated by many, i   .....Read online     .....pdf

Albanese must change his approach to Trump

Spectator Australia, 19 June 2025​​

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    More than any US President in recent history, Donald Trump’s focus is upon the interests of the US itself. Promotion of other countries wealth and security is a by-product rather than a goal. A manifestation of Trump’s policy is his mistaken protectionist approach to trade policy as a promoter of greater US wealth. And he holds little back in beratingly disparaging US opponents and even friendly foreign heads of state (Zelensky, Macron, and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa).

Trump recognises those seeking to usurp other nations as enemies. These include Islamic cultists (obviously Iran and its clients) but not ‘normal’ Islamic states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey. He views China as an hegemonist that threatens key allies and economic partners.

 .....Read online     .....pdf

Renewable energy is doomed

Spectator Australia, 11 June 2025​​

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    No sooner had the Prime Minister announced a roundtable on productivity when advice was being proffered on how further to reduce it. Electrical Trades Union national secretary, Michael Wright, urged the productivity roundtable to address delays in approving transmission, solar, and wind projects. This was in line with the Prime Miniister’s own predilection to harness this into creating the new forms of industry that are to accompany Australia’s transition to a renewable energy superpower.

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Yet it is the subsidies and regulatory favours governments have provided to these intrinsically high-cost energy sources that are at the root of the nation’s productivity slowdown. Energy is the life .....Read online     .....pdf

Let’s Hope CIS Means ‘Can It, Stutchbury’

Quadrant Online, 5 June 2025​​

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    Michael Stutchbury has been appointed to head up the Centre for Independent Studies, which along with the Institute of Public Affairs is the leading Australian think-tank addressing economic social and political issues from a conservative-cum-libertarian perspective. Stutchbury’s long media career culminated as Editor-in-Chief at the Australian Financial Review between 2011 and 2024, after which he became editor-at-large.

 

The AFR has long been in favour of the “transition” to renewable energy and its May 12 editorial on Matt Canavan’s bid for leadership (“Nats’ populism a threat to Liberals’ economic reset”) was despairing about a possible Coalition backsliding on net zero. This may not have been the hand of Stutchbury. But it is consistent with    .....Read online     .....pdf

You Get What You Vote For

Quadrant Online, 31 May 2025​​

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    For its population, Australia is the most resource rich nation in the world but has spent almost 30 years impeding this from being fully materialised. The nation is now facing a critical juncture. People have re-elected a government that has delivered negative 5% income growth over its the three years in office and which promises more of the same measures that caused the decline.

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In contrast to its claims that as it is now focused on increasing that productivity the Labor government’s policies are focused on measures that will reduce this, the only way in which we can increase income levels.

 .....pdf

The net cost of the Coalition

Spectator Australia, 23 May 2025​​

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    Friends and foes alike are urging the Liberals and the Nationals to continue as a Coalition, but the cost of this may be unacceptable.

The Nationals had four essential conditions for retaining their Coalition membership.  Three of those are relatively low threshold issues: permitting nuclear power, ensuring better telecommunication connectivity in the bush (as though this is not already available with Starlink), and some sort of development fund for the bush. In addition, there was a ridiculous suggestion about breaking up the major grocery chains – which would lead to a marked increase the price of groceries for everybody.  The Liberals were castigated for not attempting to agree to those     ..... Read online    .....pdf

Amping up the Lunacy

Quadrant Online, 21 May 2025​​

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    Now the Coalition has split we may be seeing the prologue of a libertarian/conservative political party. But the Nationals are not – at least yet -ready to take on this role. With Matt Canavan in a clear minority, the only difference the Nationals have from the Liberals is they want to permit nuclear, if anyone is inadequately risk averse to invest, perhaps limit subsidies to grid solar and wind by some unspecified amount, and force Coles and Woolies to divest stores. Maybe it is a start but there’s a long way to go to get back to a workable low cost energy policy and reduced government intrusion.​

 

We really need the teal Nationals and Liberals to form a separate party with the true conservatives to form a new party with Family First, One Nation and other conservative/libertarians.     ..... Read online    .....pdf

For Now, the Bliss of Ignorance

Quadrant Online, 8 May 2025​​

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    Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said the focus of the second term of the Albanese government will be productivity. But Chalmers has never shown any understanding of how productivity – more output per unit of input – is achieved.​

 

He has presided over a record level of government spending with increases in debt planned for the next five years. This is debt that is incurred not to finance higher levels of infrastructure, which might facilitate productivity improvements, but to finance more social spending and government winner-picking industries like hydrogen power and renewables.  Those particular expenditures are worse than .....

     ..... Read online    .....pdf

Diddler on the Roof

Quadrant Online, 28 April 2025​​

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    Some primitive and isolated societies, when initially observing the wealth of foreigners, embraced “cargo cults”. Abandoning agriculture, they cleared vegetation to allow aircraft to land, thinking this would provide similar wealth. Instead, they experienced starvation. It is all too frequent for nations to face internally generated economic declines.

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Economic stagnation, and worse, has invariably followed adoption of the cult of scientific socialism. All triumphs of socialism prove to be short-lived: the expropriation of individuals’ private property brings wealth dissipation and

..... Read here    .....pdf

The Birth Dearth’s Coming Impact

Quadrant Online, 25 April 2025​​

​

    The German states lost between 30 and 40 per cent of their populations during the Thirty Year War of 1618-1648 but re-population gradually followed. Today we face depopulation from a different cause.

 

A stable population without net migration needs a birth rate of 2.1 per couple. In a recent post, Elon Musk drew attention to declining birth rates and instanced (South) Korea, which has a birth rate of 0.7. This, in the absence of net migration, means that within three generations — early in the next century — the country’s population will have fallen from its present 52 million to a mere 3 million. Many European countries as well as China (where the birth rate is 1.0) are heading in the same direction. Birth rates are much higher in poor na ..... Read here    .....pdf

The Bipartisan Beggaring of Australia

Quadrant Online, 17 April 2025​​

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    We have heard the pitches from the Coalition and Labor. They include oodles of money promised from an exchequer that had been depleted by the Coalition’s response to Covid and seen debts mount under the Albanese government. Both Labor and the Coalition promise to enrich the nation with policies involving more government interventions to correct the supposed shortcomings of markets in delivering housing, cheaper energy, and higher levels of productivity. For Labor, the solutions do not include removing the regulatory restraints that are the cause of the nation’s shortcomings in these matters. And even the Coalition addresses such measures only in general terms.

 

The ALP’s claim of greater economic competence is particularly audacious in light of its three years in office having delivered a 6% reduction in real per capita incomes – far and away the worst outcome in the OECD.

 ..... Read here    .....pdf

Name Your Poison, Australia

Quadrant Online, 10 April 2025​​

​

    While President Trump’s trade policies are, on their most generous interpretation, a ham-fisted attempt to roll-back other countries’ distortions, elsewhere his policies offer a blueprint for all governments seeking to improve their nations’ prosperity.

​​

He is taking measures to combat the productivity-suffocating corset of the Diversity Equity & Inclusion mantra, the enterprise-stifling environmental regulations, a tumescent bureaucracy, and excessive government spending, which he hopes to cut by 30 per cent (an outcome already achieved by the Milei government in Argentina). Above all, Trump has reversed the fixation on green power  that has suppressed competitiveness ..... Read here    .....pdf

The Trump Liberation Day tariffs and Australia

27 March 2025​​

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     Trump has variously made the case for support for domestic production of goods, like semiconductors, that are of military importance. He has also called for a reindustrialisation of the US by bringing back home the products that are at the backbone of a modern and militarily powerful economy: steel, aluminium, and vehicles.

​

In addition, he is pressuring gas importers to substitute Russian and other supplies (maybe Australian) for those from the US.

​

Finally, he has extolled tariffs as a virtue that enables the US to prosper with much lower levels of domestic taxes, a view that puts him on a collision course with almost all economic thinking ever since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations hit the bookshops in 1776.

    ..... Read here     .....pdf

Chalmers is wrong about energy costs

19 March 2025​​

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     Treasurer Jim Chalmers has defended the government’s pledge to lower electricity prices by a third. He said:

‘If you look at the inflation numbers for the last year to the end of 2024, what we saw – that electricity prices were down a little over 25 per cent. And lest you want to think that that is all the rebate, most of that is the rebate, but they still would have gone down a bit over 15 per cent absent the rebate.’

He added, ‘In some parts of Australia, we are expecting some price pressures. And as the independent experts said at the time, that is primarily about the unreliability of the legacy parts of the energy network'      ..... Read here     .....pdf

Trump’s autarkic ambitions

17 March 2025​​

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     The rationales Trump offers for his trade policy include those with some legitimacy which seek to put pressure on Canada and Mexico to prevent illegal migration and fentanyl crossing the border; ensure strategic industries are on located on US soil; and to level the playing field, particularly in:

  • combatting subsidised exports to the US that are detrimental to domestic production. China is targeted because its government provides greater industry support than other governments. But even with China, the support (mainly soft loans) averages only 3 per cent of the selected firms’ revenues and is almost certainly at the cost to firms that are not favoured.      ..... Read here     .....pdf

Labor’s debt apocalypse is upon us

11 March 2025​​

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     The Albanese government has spectacularly failed on every level. Instead of pricking the Covid-inspired spending balloon it inherited, Labor has poured debt-financed money into the economy bringing debt to its present $948 billion with another $200 billion earmarked for the next two years and $45 billion in off-budget spending through Rewiring the Nation, the Housing Australia Future Fund, and the National Reconstruction Fund.

​

The period from the election of the Albanese government to the third quarter of 2024 saw Australian living standards fall by 5.3 per cent, more than those of any other OECD country and a near mirror image of the OECD average increase of 5.5 per cent.     ..... Read here     .....pdf

Whyalla: a leading edge in Australian industrial econocide

25 February 2025​​

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     The attempts of the Commonwealth and South Australian governments to rescue the Whyalla steelworks is the latest ad hoc measure to paper over the cracks being created by Commonwealth and state energy policy disasters.

​

The promised spending of $2.4 billion is to save 1,000 jobs involved. Moreover, the assistance is conditional on ensuring much of the money is allocated to replacing coal and gas fuels by intrinsically high-cost and unreliable wind and solar – and prospectively by hydrogen from water, a solution rightly ridiculed when Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen promoted it in the 1980s.     ..... Read here     .....pdf

USAID – AUSAID:  Same playbook different actors

19 February 2025​​

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     Donald Trump tweeted “Looks like billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and other agencies much of it going to the fake news media as a payoff for creating good stories about the Democrats”. Revelations about corruption in the USAID beg questions about the integrity of Australia’s aid programs.

 

There are long-standing questions dating back to the Clinton days and before the Rudd ALP Government.      ..... Read here

Econocide: green subsidies are hastening our energy demise

The Spectator, 17 February 2025​​

​

     In addition to bringing reduced emissions of supposed planetary warming CO2, government plans for wind and solar to dominate electricity supply assumed these technologies would become cheaper than the coal and gas they were to replace. Wind and solar were to be nurtured by government support, transforming them from ‘infant’ industries into mature supplies. But the level of subsidy, far from falling, has increased as they matured.

​

Moreover, the shadow price for CO2 that the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) regards as necessary to achieve the government’s Net Zero ambitions rises over the years to 2050 to $420 per tonne. This equates to a tax of about $200 per MWh for gas   .... Read online     .....pdf

Trade wars: risks and opportunities for Australia

The Spectator, 6 February 2025​​

​

     President Trump’s weaponising of trade may simply be applying pressure to correct what he sees as unequal access for goods and to staunch the inflow of unwanted drugs and immigrants. But he often also talks about the benefits to the US of forcing imports to be replaced by domestic products. Notwithstanding a massive literature to the contrary, he also appears to believe that the foreigner, not the US consumer, ends up paying the import tax.

​

Trump places special attention to nations running a trade surplus with the US. This does not include Australia, which imports about twice as much from the US as it exports.​     .... Read online     .....pdf

Abandon net zero, rescue the economy

The Spectator, 30 January 2025​​

​

     'To rescue our economy,’ Trump signed day-one orders ‘to end all Biden restrictions on energy production, terminate his insane electric vehicle mandate, cancel his natural gas export ban, reopen ANWR in Alaska (the biggest site potentially anywhere in the world), and declare a national energy emergency.’

​

Trump terminated Biden’s Green New Deal, pulled out of the Paris Accord, and castigated the Davos elitists who could do nothing more than acquiesce in his triumphant procession. Among the measures is a freeze on $280 billion for green energy ($50 billion was already committed) said to have ‘a very negative effect’.     .

.... Read online     .....pdf

From Nero to LA’s Firetruck Lesbians
Quadrant Online,16 January 2025​​

​

     When Rome burned in 64AD, claiming 10,000 houses, the Emperor Nero was blamed but diverted criticism onto Christians. A similar search is now on for those to be blamed for California’s catastrophe despite the causes — from negligence and incompetence to DEI hiring policies — being as obvious as a hillside inferno.

​​

Since the cataclysm in Los Angeles started on January 7, every political body in the world responsible for fire-prone areas will be summoning reports from their specialist wildfire units and academic consultants.

​

Fires come and go, and serious ones invariably bring inquiries in their wake. In Australia, the outcomes normally chastise the    ..... Read online      

Is Peter Dutton listening to Trump?
The Spectator,  8 January 2025​

Government efficiency is an election-winning issue for those with courage

​

     President Trump is creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate harmful and useless layers of bureaucracy. This may be an even more radical assault on costly government impositions than that of Argentinian President Milei, who in his first year of office consolidated 18 government ministries into nine and fired 50,000 government workers. Inflation is close to being tamed and a strong economic recovery is underway.

​

Australia has a dismal record in such measures. Who can forget how Kevin Rudd said he would take a ‘meat-axe’ to the      ..... Read online    ..... pdf   

Trump’s energy policies are a game changer for renewables
The Spectator,  4 January 2025​

​

     2024 ended with the now-customary government energy reviews and reports. The Senate Select Committee on Energy Planning and Regulation in Australia reported on the National Electricity Market (NEM) comprising the eastern states and South Australia. The report reflected the kaleidoscope of the Parliament’s views on energy.

​

The recommendations of the Chairman, Senator Van, (a Liberal turned independent) included having the Productivity Commission (PC) conduct a review of the energy network. Other recommendations sought to reduce the costs of the battery storage necessary to complement the increase in dispersed wind and grid-scale solar. Six of the 22 recommendations call for measures to promote ‘Community Energy Re..... Read online    ..... pdf   

Nuclear cannot match coal as a competitive electricity supply
The Spectator,  17 December 2024​

​

     The debate between the Coalition and the Labor Party has long had an ethereal dimension. They are in furious contention, though both are promoting a wind/solar future. Labor says it wants to see wind, solar, hydro, and batteries supplying all but 2 per cent of the market, while the Coalition – as per Frontier Economics – says it wants to see a similar profile but with nuclear providing 29 per cent of supply.

​

After Tony Abbott’s Prime Ministership, the Coalition adopted a Labor-lite electricity policy. Like Labor, it has paid obeisance to the Western world’s prime energy goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, though at a reduced pace to that of Labor. It is unclear whether the Coalition actually accepts the ALP view that wind and solar,     ..... Read online    ..... pdf   

Even climate fanatics are having doubts
The Spectator,  13 December 2024​

​

     Time for another review of the electricity market…? Commonwealth and state ministers have established a new four-person commission, the NEM Wholesale Market Settings Review Panel, to advise on how better to administer an electricity market that endless subsidies and regulatory meddling has transformed from a world beater to among the developed world’s highest cost and unreliable supply.

​

Creating a new review panel means politicians think there are insufficient resources in the thousands of people employed at taxpayer or electricity consumer expense in the burgeoning market-oversight agencies, including the three main market regulators, the CSIRO and the Commonwealth and state departments. All of these advise      ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

The Department of Inefficiency and Public Waste
The Spectator,  5 December 2024​

​

     It is difficult to overstate the economic disaster that the National Accounts data is progressively revealing. The headline figures show income per capita levels that have been diminishing for each of the past seven quarters.

 

Tragically the Treasurer appears to be unaware of the cause of this – and that is also likely to be the case with his departmental advisers, who have been nurtured on Keynesian economics where every dollar spent by the government is counted as an additional dollar of domestic income. In fact, it is high levels of investment that is the basis for the wealth that brings income.    ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

A very very very bad government
The Spectator,  28 November 2024​

​

     According to Anthony Albanese, ‘We came to office of course in 2022 with a number of challenges.’ His problem is that his shocking mismanagement has brought just about the worst economic outcome in the developed world.

​

The most comprehensive measure of Australia’s abysmal performance is real GDP per capita. With the installation of the Albanese government in May 2022, Australia’s post-Covid recovery went into reverse. GDP per capita in the second quarter of 2024 remained below that of the first quarter of 2022. During that period, the US grew 5 per cent and the OECD as a whole was up over 2 per cent.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Australia’s energy policy is all coming badly unstuck
The Spectator,  21 November 2024​

To cap all Labor’s woes, the Starmer and Biden governments have announced a major u-turn to nuclear as their strategy to reducing emissions. Both the UK and US have recognised the impossibility of achieving Net Zero with the intermittent wind and solar strategy that has been their focus. They have asked Australia to join them in this approach but Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has rejected the invitation, claiming that Australia will stay on track, thereby becoming the sole remaining aspirant ‘renewable energy superpower’.

​

Mr Bowen claimed that Australia should not follow such a route because we have better solar assets than the UK. Perhaps so, but ours

     ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Trump a portent for Australian politics

The Spectator,  16 November 2024​

Trump might have only won 51 to 49 per cent of the popular vote, but the victory is assessed by friend and foe alike as so sweeping that it is already having global effects in causing even his political adversaries to modify their own policy stances.

​

If it wasn’t apparent prior to the election, it is clear now that Trump wants to go beyond staunching the flow of Wokeism that has been, almost without remission, implanting itself within Western economies since the 1970s.

​

His picks for high office demonstrate a radical determination to overturn the political status quo within Defence, Energy and Climate Change, Education, Health, Immigration, Tax, and     ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

The World has changed
The Spectator,  7 November 2024​

(Outgoing) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says, net zero is necessary to combat the “existential threat” of climate change at a cost to the US of $3 trillion per year by 2050. The policies, as passed, are to cost almost a trillion dollars

 

Trump’s view is, "the thing that's an existential threat is not global warming where the ocean will rise, maybe 1/8 of an inch in the next 497 years." He labelled the Biden policies to fight climate change as a "green new scam". And JD Vance stated, “Electricity already costs 30% more than it did when Ms. Harris took office, with projections of another 30% increase …  next year. Gasoline prices are up 42%.

 ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Astonishing cost, miserable return
The Spectator,  27 October 2024

It will take a long time to undo the damage done to our energy grid

​

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s head, Daniel Westerman, attracted the media’s attention by refusing, under Parliamentary scrutiny, to guarantee that the Integrated System Plan (ISP) developed by his agency on behalf of the government will bring lower prices.

​

Indeed, another of the plethora of regulatory agencies that are grinding the economy to a halt, the Australian Energy Regulator sets out the shadow price of CO2 incorporated into the electricity supply costs at $70 per tonne of CO2 in 2024, rising to $105 per tonne in 2030 and $420 per tonne in 2050.

 ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Can subsidies help Australians make more babies?
The Spectator,  23 October 2024

Previous fears of overpopulation in nations with high population densities have been replaced by concerns about a declining and ageing population.

​

The news that Victoria has Australia’s lowest fertility rate at 1.39 births per woman means that, excluding migration, its population will decline by one-third in a generation. Taiwan, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates at 1.09 per woman, faces a halving of its population in a generation. This perhaps poses an even greater threat to its future than mainland China.

​

For the world as a whole, fertility has halved since 1960 to a level equivalent to the 2.1 rate per woman     ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Vic Libs: four years of power in 24 since Kennett lost
The Spectator,  14 October 2024

Recent polls show that the Liberals are more popular in Victoria (or less unpopular) than Labor for the first time since 2017.

Recalling a previous buoyant trend in 2017 being reversed with a change in leadership, some insiders are suggesting that the beleaguered John Pesutto be kept in place.

​

That is surely untenable. Pesutto has decided to pursue what feels like a vendetta against Moira Deeming centring on the absurd fiasco at the Let Women Speak rally. The cack-handed approach of the leadership group has made Pesutto a joke. It is a rejection of support for one of a new breed of active MPs which is married to a generally timid approach to policy.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf   

Monopolies in the labour market
The Spectator,  6 October 2024

See Saw Margery Daw,

Jacky shall have a new master;

Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,

Because he can’t work any faster

The first reference to this rhyme is 1640. It describes an iron law that payment must be related to productivity. This is inevitably so for the economy as a whole, and is even conceded by many of the politicians and IR experts who foster legal machinery to boost workers’ earnings above those that would emerge in a competitive market.

​

The case rests on ‘market failure’.

​

The term is bandied about regularly by those who .... Read online ..... pdf   

Restoring Australia’s competitiveness
Canberra Daily,  4 October 2024

​

Although a familiar name to Canberra political insiders, Van Jones is generally not well known in Australia. He was the green jobs czar in the Obama administration and has made the easy transition to being a CNN host, where he campaigns for Kamala Harris. During a discussion on green energy, he made a remarkable admission, saying, “Early on in my career, we thought we were going to be able to get all the way to our clean energy goals with no fossil fuels. It turned out that wasn’t true.”

​

Contrary to the view expressed by Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen, Van Jones is now toning down the renewable goals that have featured so prominently in the US with subsidies under Build Back Better, as is the case with our own Future Made in Australia.     ..... Read online ..... pdf   

West and East divide along the economic green line
The Spectator,  21 September 2024

   Dismantling reliable power is crippling Australia

​​

Stung by criticism from the business community, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested that he and they sought to address common concerns: housing, cost of living, the care economy, Net Zero, and skills. As a generalisation, Albanese has a point aside from Net Zero, which is finally losing its allure for a business community now less besotted with the possibilities of cheap renewables. But for the rest, the Albanese plan is nothing but statements.

 

Indeed, rather than recognising a need to reduce consumption to make room for capital expenditure to propel productivity..... Read online ..... pdf   

The rise of social regulations
The Spectator,  9 September 2024

   T he great surge in Australian productivity took place in two decades to the early years of the present century. It resulted from the deregulations initiated by Treasurer Paul Keating that were maintained and built upon by the Coalition (from 1996) which had, embarrassingly, been outflanked on the free enterprise right by the socialistic Labor Party. Something similar happened in New Zealand and to a degree in the United States during the same period.

​

However, the Keating-Howard deregulation focused almost entirely upon “economic” regulation - measures which set prices and access to markets. Thus, for example, Australia had industries like electricity, which were exclusively government provided; it had airline. ..... Read online     ..... pdf   

The Albanese government has become a parody of itself
The Spectator,  3 September 2024

   R eprising Kevin Rudd’s Monthly essay 14 years earlier, at the beginning of 2023, Treasurer Jim Chalmers outlined a new economic template that breaks away from the fusty models of the past. He talked of a ‘wasted decade’ of poor performance under Coalition rule, which he would turn around by replacing ‘neoliberalism’ with, ‘reimagining and redesigning markets – seeking value and impact, strengthening safeguards and guardrails in areas of unchecked risk’. Along with coordination and co-investment. He named the ‘clean energy sector’ as the perfect example of how this should work.

​

Imagine his disappointment when, having put in place his radical new approach, he was confronted with Australia’s    ..... Read online     ..... pdf   

Albanese’s inevitable slide into a Whitlamesque economy
The Spectator,  24 August 2024

   A common mindset held by too many on the left is that production is inevitable, and will be maintained irrespective of the taxes levied and regulations imposed upon productive processes.

​

For many, the issue for activist politicians is simply how do we divide people’s incomes between the part they are permitted to retain, the part for promoting the political class’s preferred ideologies, and the part for the all-important task of maintaining themselves in power.

​

This may explain why the first and immediate act of the Albanese government was to grant favours to Labor’s key paymasters, the union movement, including putting in place      ..... Read online     ..... pdf   

Are Superannuation funds serving our best interests?
Canberra Weekly,  15 August 2024

   Since the requirements for all employees to participate in superannuation schemes, these savings have come to dominate the nation’s wealth holdings. The total funds now amount to $4 trillion, which is one third greater than the total value of shares traded on the Australian Stock Exchange. 

 

Superannuation funds fall within three categories. Industry Funds (the biggest being Australian Super) are controlled by trade unions and manage about one third of funds. Originally founded to cover particular sectors, all these funds are now open to anyone. Public sector funds account for about 20 per cent of holdings with Queensland’s Australian Retirement Trust being the largest -      ..... Read here   

Kamala, the ‘Yas, queen!’ of energy subsidies
The Spectator,  14 August 2024

   In the US, the Clean Investment Monitor has estimated the effects in investment of the Biden government’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is the primary Federal subsidy legislation for renewable energy. It reckons the IRA has brought ‘clean energy’ investment, including Electric Vehicles, to comprise 5.5 per cent of total private investment. US ‘clean energy’ subsidies, estimated at $US78 billion a year, are assessed to bring about 5-6 times this in terms of new investment.

In Australia, with subsidised ‘clean energy’ now comprising almost one-third of electricity supply (twice the US share), these subsidies loom even larger.     .... Read online     .....pdf

Australia’s Energy Future
The Light, Issue 13,  August 2024

   Andrew Forrest, a climate alarmist who controls the giant Fortescue group, has finally been forced to bow to commercial reality and abandon hydrogen as a future source of energy. Fortescue has reportedly lost $2 billion in pursuing this will-o’-the-wisp.

 

Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, under the spell of Chris Bowen, his Climate Change and Energy Minister, continues to pursue the illusion that hydrogen can provide cheap, safe and reliable energy. In an attempt to remodel the nation’s energy supply system, the government is requiring taxpayers and energy consumers to spend some $16 billion a year on renewables and hydrogen. But reality will surely soon prevail in the hydrogen myth – just as it did forty years ago .....  Read more .....pdf 

Bleeding Australia dry
The Spectator, 4 August 2024

   Nations achieve high standards of living by having a productive workforce and high levels of investment. Either they produce the goods and services most in demand or import them. The latter route requires a corresponding level of exports.

The world’s most traded goods are oil, gas, and petrol; motor vehicles and parts; computers and other IT; pharmaceuticals; aircraft; and medical equipment.

Uniquely among ‘first world’ nations, with the exception of gas, Australia has a major presence in none of these     ......Read online   .....pdf 

Trump will change the (energy) world

The Spectator, 23 July 2024

   The film VICE traces the rise of Dick Cheney to the position of US Vice President under the administration of the second George Bush (2001-09). Cheney, uniquely for Vice Presidents, negotiated virtual control over US foreign policy.

​

His career started as a Congressional intern in 1973 during the Nixon administration at a time when interns were assigned to Democrats or Republicans rather than deciding for themselves. But, having attended an initiation in which Donald Rumsfeld (later Secretary of Defense) gave a rumbustious but apolitical address, Cheney was pleased to be placed with the Republicans, indeed, to the staff of Rumsfeld  .....Read online   .....pdf 

Yet another government plan to destroy the economy
The Spectator, 15 July 2024

   The Commonwealth Treasury is developing a ‘taxonomy to support the flow of capital into sustainable opportunities and the achievement of Australia’s climate, environmental, and social objectives’.

​

Initially offering voluntary guidelines for investors, this is foreshadowed to become mandatory in future. It would then become a central plan apparatus to vet capital expenditure proposals to ensure that they are consistent with the government’s goals. That is a breathtaking departure from the current market system based on individuals and businesses deciding how they should spend their own funds.

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The taxonomy’s focus, as with so much of      .....Read online   .....pdf 

Superannuation funds and green energy
The Spectator, 6 July 2024

   A new One Nation cartoon speculates that when it comes to superannuation funds which are union-controlled, ALP donors support renewable energy and oppose coal, gas, and nuclear because they have huge holdings of the firms receiving the subsidies to renewable energy. But it is not only ALP-aligned super funds adopting this stance.

... see cartoon on X here

The subsidies to renewables are not sufficient to prevent costs being incurred by investors in ‘Environment Social Governance’ (ESG) funds – actually now a virtual pseudonym for those investing in businesses pursuing ‘CO2 Net Zero’.    .....Read online   .....pdf 

Nature vs. nuclear: the economics of renewable energy
Canberra Daily, 4 July 2024

   Predictably, ACT Independent Senator David Pocock attacked the Coalition’s policy to build nuclear power generators. But in what may be a first, he did so on grounds of cost, a matter about which the decarbonising Senator had never shown the least curiosity with regard to the renewables program.

​

His previous objections were to policies that:

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The nuclear gamble
The Spectator, 21 June 2024

   Finally, the Opposition has announced it is going to develop a nuclear power future for Australia. The government, along with the renewables subsidy-fuelled lobby, issued howls of derision. Too expensive. The community won’t accept it. Drawing from no less an authority than a Simpsons cartoon, Energy Minister Bowen declared nuclear energy will cause mutations including three-eyed fish.

​

Predictably the move was panned by renewable energy investor Malcolm Turnbull, who burnished his own energy credentials in creating Snowy 2 as a $2 billion solution to the intermittency problem of wind and solar that would be up and running by 2022. Snowy 2 will cost over $20 billion, not be ready by 2030 and will only provide a minor     .....Read online   .....pdf 

Recognising ignorance
The Spectator, 19 June 2024

   In March this year, Treasurer Jim Chalmers asked the Productivity Commission (PC) to assess competition-enhancing reform options to reinvigorate the stalled process of productivity gains. He did so against a decade-long background of flagging productivity gains and actual falls since 2022.

 

Illustrating his ignorance about why such alarming trends were taking place, the Treasurer asked the PC to recommend solutions in the context of ‘adapting to the Net Zero transition’ (code for forcing the displacement of low-cost coal with high-cost wind and solar) and the ‘expansion of the care and support economy’. These – together with regulatory amplifications covering housing, mining, and     .....Read online   .....pdf 

Government regulations are responsible for unaffordable housing
The Spectator, 11 June 2024

   The Australian house building (though not apartment building) industry is mainly non-unionised and therefore has low costs. But building a new house or apartment faces hundreds of different regulatory requirements. For houses, (which comprise over two-thirds of new dwellings) the most important of these is government regulation of land for building – especially on the periphery of cities.

​

The latest Demographia Index places the cost of buying the median house in Australia at 8.2 times the median income (up from 6.2 in 2004). For Sydney and Melbourne, buying the median home requires 13.3 and 9.9 times the median income respectively. Perth at 5.4 times the median income has the cheapest prices in Australia.    .....Read online   .....pdf 

Renewable energy subsidies undermine our economy
The Spectator, 6 June 2024

   Australia has seen a 20-year downward trend in productivity. Many other nations have seen similar trends and the cause is common: burgeoning growth of government squeezing out productive investment and an unrelenting surge in regulations, especially and notably so in Australia, covering fossil fuel both in its extraction and in its domestic use.

​

The Productivity Commission depicts the generally downward trend in productivity since the mid-1990s, punctuated by a mini recovery that petered out about a decade ago. In 2022-23 productivity actually fell by 3.7 per cent and remains below its 2021-22 level.     .....Read online   .....pdf 

Energy issues in the Commonwealth budget
Canberra Daily, 29 May 2024

   Energy and climate issues were front and central in the latest Commonwealth budget.

​

The government announced that taxpayers will plough $22.7 billion into Labor’s ‘Future Made in Australia’ agenda. That funding is also intended to help “unlock greater private investment”, which detractors say in reality invites an even greater wasteful use of funds. The policy focus is on eliminating coal and other fossil fuels by fostering five priority areas: green hydrogen, critical minerals, green metals, low carbon liquid fuels, and clean energy manufacturing.

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In the past, we have seen governments seeking to build local industries which have proven successful overseas – largely by using  .....Read online   .....pdf 

Budget papers.jpeg

Budget review: net zero cannibalises our prosperity
The Spectator, 16 May 2024

   The public is receiving the Budget with a sense of bored irrelevance. People are pleased to see a $300 cut in their electricity bills, hoping that someone else is financing this, but eyes glaze over at the billions of dollars of taxpayer money with which the government promises to catapult the economy into the nirvana that is the green energy transition. And nobody seems concerned that spending is at its highest since the Hawke-Keating years of the early 1990s.

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But the reality is this budget not only amplifies the already excessive government spending levels, but adds measures that aim to transform the economy by injecting unprecedented government   .....Read online   .....pdf

Victoria’s Budget reveals a state strangled by Labor
The Spectator, 10 May 2024

   Forty years ago, John Cain’s Victorian government commenced an era of extravagant expenditure turbocharged by the Victorian Economic Development Corporation (a forerunner of the Albanese government’s Future Made in Australia fund) and government deficits. As the chickens of this were coming home to roost in 1990, after eight years as Premier, he was replaced by Joan Kirner, a politician from the far left.

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The nine-year reign of Dan Andrews saw a comparable massive expenditure increase including extravagant public service spending and was propelled by his Big Build infrastructure program. Andrews was last year replaced by Jacinta Allen, like Joan Kirner, from the socialist left.

    .....Read online   .....pdf 

The modern obsession with ‘green’ investment
The Spectator, 1 May 2024

   The recently deceased Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway was arguably the most successful investor ever. He was noted for his pithy statements, one of which was, ‘Invest in a business any fool can run, because someday a fool will.’ Under his and Warren Buffett’s management, the fund adopts the standard portfolio investment theory of investing in all sectors but targeting firms with great management systems. The sectors in which Berkshire Hathaway invests include food, technology, retail, home building, motor vehicles (only EVs), traders, telecoms, and energy (both oil/gas and renewables). Warren Buffett said about the latter, ‘We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms … that’s the only reason to build them.’

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Many other investment funds do not follow this      .....Read online   .....pdf 

Debate over Albanese’s public sector investment in clean energy
Canberra Daily, 26 April 2024

   Mr Albanese’s government has announced a new plan to have the public sector as ‘a participant, a partner, an investor and enabler’ in selecting areas for support, with the focus on ‘clean energy’ and new industries.

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There is so much wrong with this. 

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In particular, the investment in clean energy is already destroying the low-cost electricity and gas that have underpinned our industry and agriculture. And it is doing so with subsidies extracted from consumers and taxpayers that amount to $15.5 billion a year.   .....Read online   .....pdf 

Broken Promises - Broken Budget

The Spectator, 22 April 2024

   In December 2021, Anthony Albanese announced his ‘plan’ to reduce electricity prices by $275 per household by 2025. He said he was certain of such a price reduction, ‘because we have done the modelling’. According to Selectra, the average bill was $145 higher in March 2024 than in November 2021.

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Government measures are targeted at the ‘energy transition’ to Net Zero emissions of carbon dioxide by replacing coal and gas with wind and solar. As a result of this support, renewable energy is forcing low-cost coal capacity out of the market. But rather than producing benefits from what politicians tell us is the lowest cost form of electricity, the wholesale electricity price has risen to over $100 per MWh    ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Albanese’s Net Zero protectionism
The Spectator, 15 April 2024

   Australian governments are forcing a “transition” in electricity supply from coal (and gas) to wind and solar. Though the ACT has virtually no electricity generation other than that from rooftops, it leads the way in terms of its purchasing contracts for grid-sourced renewables.

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Wind and solar have different operating characteristics than coal and gas electricity generators. Coal and gas (and nuclear) can operate pretty much continuously but weather and nightfall limits solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

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With wind/solar at their present market share of   ..... Read online   .....pdf 

We have a problem with democracy

The Spectator, 4 April 2024

   The UK Reform Party, whose President is Nigel Farage, is campaigning for a referendum on ‘Net Zero’. However, YouGov polling has 71 per cent of all voters (63 per cent of Conservatives) supporting the overall Net Zero target. The majority vote is conditioned by agitprop claiming catastrophic global warming is occurring due to the burning of fossil fuels, that a consensus of nations is taking action to prevent this, and that the cost of doing so is trivial.

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None of this is true.

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Although mediocre scientists are on the global warming cart, the giants – think Richard Lindzen, Willie Soon, Will Happer, Ole ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Australia’s government-induced transition to a high-cost, unreliable electricity supply
Canberra Daily, 2 April 2024

   Australian governments are forcing a “transition” in electricity supply from coal (and gas) to wind and solar. Though the ACT has virtually no electricity generation other than that from rooftops, it leads the way in terms of its purchasing contracts for grid-sourced renewables.

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Wind and solar have different operating characteristics than coal and gas electricity generators. Coal and gas (and nuclear) can operate pretty much continuously but weather and nightfall limits solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

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With wind/solar at their present market share of   ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Fatal flaws exposed in the Net Zero transition. What is to be done?

The Spectator, 26 March 2024

   According to NSW’s Ausgrid, the most recent AEMO draft Integrated System Plan (ISP) for electricity supply will require $325 billion for transmission to meet Net Zero emissions by 2050.

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Aside from blowing the lid on this element of Net Zero’s cost, the call for submissions on the draft ISP allowed a sliver of realism to be voiced.

Electricity suppliers, including the major generation businesses, (who are also beneficiaries of renewable energy subsidies), warned the government and its appointed advisers that their time-frame for closing down coal and most gas generators is impossible.     ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Costs of subsidies for renewable energy and associated need for energy storage - Read here
March 2024

The grim cost of firming up solar and wind
The Spectator, 20 March 2024

   The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.

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These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law,

 ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Energy Policy and How to Fix it
Quadrant Online, 15 March 2024

   Many people have personal concerns about the pursuit of green energy by governments, federally and state. The visual intrusion, the land-hungry windfarms and solar panels and the extensive enlargement of the transmission network required to accommodate them have a marked effect on individuals’ environments and livelihoods. But the more fundamental issue is the destruction of our economy and living standards from the policies being ruthlessly pursued by both Labor and – sad to say – Coalition parties and governments.

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In pursuit of the myth that emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is bringing about a change in the global climate, throughout the Western world governments are spending inordinate  ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Retrieving Australia’s energy policy disaster
The Spectator, 29 February 2024

   Australian governments are in denial but it’s clear that the great green revolution they planned for energy supply has failed abysmally. Supply has become precarious and electricity prices to households and commercial users alike are skyrocketing. This is threatening the ongoing viability of industries like nickel and aluminium smelting where energy accounts for a third of the costs.

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Rather than abandoning the folly of an energy policy dictated by ideology and bereft of industry knowledge, governments are responding with ever more market interventions. These attempts to remedy the adverse effects of the interventions already in place will aggravate the economic injuries.

Federal and state government measures impose a  ..... Read online   .....pdf 

The solution to our government-induced malaise

The Spectator, 19 February 2024

   Studying last month’s Davos meeting of the world’s (largely self-appointed) elites, Walter Russell Mead sees an inflection point.

He says that when they listened to Argentinian President Milei promoting free market capitalism, the Davosies’ applause was more than polite clapping. There was a sense that all was not well in the supposed government-planned China, and a recognition that the more hands-on EU governmental approach has resulted in Europe slipping behind the US with its lighter government touch over the economy. This was coupled with a concern that the farmer revolts around Europe reflected a sudden rejection of trust in the establishment. Above all, Ukraine has made the Euro grandees ‘uncomfortably aware of how dependent the     ..... Read online   .....pdf 

The stumbling journey of EVs
Canberra Daily, 17 February 2024

   The forecast triumph of electric vehicles (EVs) is facing headwinds.

In the US last year, Ford lost $US64,731 for each EV it sold – almost as much as the selling price for the top-of-the-line Mustang Mach-E. GM is also facing difficulties and, like Ford, has re-jigged its production plans back towards the internal combustion engine. Also, mounting losses have forced Hertz to radically reduce its EV fleet.

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And in Europe, reduced subsidies for EVs brought a 16 per cent sales fall in Germany last year with a further 9 per cent decline expected this year. In France, Renault was forced to abort plans to float its EV division on the stock exchange. Electric commercial vehicle makers have fared even worse. Several, including Volvo’s subsidiary and the UK’s   ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Plucking the income goose
The Spectator, 8 February 2024

   Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s celebrated Finance Minister, is reported to have said, ‘The act of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of squealing.’ Populist politics suggests that policies which allow high earners to keep more of their earnings are always electorally risky, even though high tax rates on high income earners discourages enterprise, bringing long-term adverse effects on wealth creation.

 

So, the Labor government has abandoned the Stage 3 tax cuts, which it supported six years ago whilst in Opposition. This was to have removed some of the bracket creep caused by inflation which pushes taxpayers into higher income tax bands. The proposals would       ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Will this be the summer of Daniel?
The Spectator, 31 January 2024

   'Wholesale electricity prices on the East Coast have halved from 2022 levels, reflecting the increasing role that low-cost renewables are playing in daily generation,’ announced an excited AEMO press release, citing comments from chief Daniel Westerman.

 

But hold the front page!

 

Just to confirm that ‘one swallow a summer does not make’, the average 2023 price was around $120. That’s three times its level in 2015, which is the year before it became evident that the subsidies to renewables – now costing over $10 billion a year – had destroyed Australia’s low-cost coal-based electricity supply.     ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Will 2024 mark a turning point?
Canberra Daily, 20 & 23 January 2024

   The ACT projects itself as a pioneer in the global movement towards “Net Zero” emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases”.

The Territory has contracted for 100 per cent wind/solar electricity (though as an integral part of the NSW region its actual supply is 70 per cent coal derived). It has been a pioneer in subsidising electric vehicles and is a “first mover” in banning direct use of natural gas; those measures that are claimed to bring lower emissions by replacing coal, oil and gas with wind and solar.

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The Territory’s position appears to be consistent with the communiqué issued in Dubai at the 28th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 28) of the UN Climate Change Convention. The COP 28     ..... Read online   .....pdf 

Renewables: an expensive nightmare to nowhere
The Spectator, 16 January 2024

   Plans for the elimination of coal require increasing regulatory measures and ever-escalating levels of government spending.

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Federally, the ALP has built upon the measures introduced by the Turnbull and Morrison governments with increased funding for ‘Clean Energy’ projects, the Safeguard Mechanism (requiring the biggest 215 electricity users to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030), and the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) which provides subsidies to developments that add ‘firming’ capacity to improve the reliability of the weather and daylight reliant wind and solar.

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Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, won’t say how much the CIS contracts are costing. He says that’s because     ..... Read online   .....pdf 

20 years since John Howard’s renewable energy policy
The Spectator, 5 January 2024

   It is now just over 20 years since John Howard introduced a renewable energy policy which required wind/solar-generated electricity to be incorporated within energy retailers’ total supply. This gave those sources of energy a de facto subsidy. That basic subsidy presently is $50 per megawatt hour for large-scale solar and wind – rather more than the total price of generated energy formerly experienced – and $40 per megawatt hour for rooftop solar.

 

John Howard recognised the error he had made and that subsidised energy would, if allowed to expand, undermine the electricity supply’s economics. He refused to increase the capped amount of subsidised wind and solar from its initial 9,500 gigawatt hours (nominally 2    ..... Read online   .....pdf 

The energy Grinch
The Spectator, 27 December 2023

   Just before Christmas, the CSIRO presented the government with an analysis in support of their beliefs that wind and solar are the cheapest electricity supply sources. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) also issued its latest Integrated Systems Plan (ISP), carrying a similar but more nuanced message.

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Overlooking evidence that the higher the share of renewables the higher the electricity price, CSIRO’s analysis (GenCost 2023-24) also rejected concerns that the intermittent nature of renewables would translate to impossibly high costs.

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Implicitly, the report endorsed the COP28 climate forum’s communique

  ..... Read online   .....pdf

Australian farms among most productive in the world
Canberra Daily, 21 December 2023

   Aside from farmers’ skills, a nation’s agricultural potential is dependent on three key variables: good rainfall, plentiful sunshine and secure rights over the land that is being used for farming purposes.

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While Australia has plenty of sunshine, it is the driest continent by a considerable distance. However, reasonably secure property rights and a have-a-go attitude have brought Australian farms to be among the most productive in the world. Australian farmers produce about twice as much agricultural output as the population consumes.

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“Riding on the sheep’s back” is a hackneyed but not inaccurate description of the Australian success story at least until the past 50 years when mining rose to prominence.

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An indispensable part of the success of agriculture has been irrigation. This has severely reduced     ..... Read online   .....pdf

From West to East: shifting global power via Net Zero
The Spectator, 21 December 2023

   The 28th annual scourging of fossil fuel users, the Conference of Parties (COP28), has been and gone. Like the previous 27 meetings, it has issued a lofty statement of intent but unlike other recent meetings there was no Greta Thunberg. Her absence appeared to relate to limited protest options in the oil potentate United Arab Emirates.

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Some observers regard the final COP agreement as a radical intensification of the fight against coal since it mentions phasing out the demonic fuel for the first time. Others argue this is an exaggeration since the conference advocates a phase-out only ‘in a just, orderly, and equitable manner’.

In fact, although the ‘commitments’ at the COP talkfests are voluntary,

..... Read online   .....pdf

ACT energy policy denies consumers choice
Canberra Daily, 13 December 2023

   Green climate activists initially preferred gas over electricity for power supplies. They did so because, per unit of energy, the CO2 emission levels of gas are about half those of coal, which remains, albeit to a diminishing extent, the mainstay of electricity power generation. But each new regulatory victory in extending the subsidies for wind and solar to replace low-cost and more reliable coal in electricity generation has led activists to raise the ante. Some have dishonestly claimed lower gas use, as well as helping prevent a fictitious “global boiling”, will also reduce non-existent health risks from gas fumes.

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On 8 December, the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to ban gas connections to new housing developments.      ..... Read online   .....pdf

Capacity Investment Scheme hog-ties nation to energy woes
The Spectator, 9 December 2023

   Market regulation is designed to modify the outputs of, and inputs to, goods and services. In doing so, they will not only cause higher costs and prices but also bring unanticipated distortions that require additional regulations that normally magnify cost increases.

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Nowhere is this more apparent than with regulations placed over the Australian electricity market and the expanded subsidies envisaged under the government’s recently announced Capacity Investment Scheme.

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Electricity is the building block for modern production and human comfort. It involves the cost of generation, the cost of transporting it through poles and wires, and the cost of administering that process.

   ..... Read online   .....pdf

The broken water politics of the Murray Darling Basin
The Spectator, 25 November 2023

   Twenty-five years ago, initiating a pattern that is now commonplace, a group of radical environmentalists calling themselves scientists launched a campaign to re-allocate water, then being used in agricultural production, to the ‘environment’. The claim was that agriculture, and especially irrigation, was causing environmental stress through salinisation of the soil and erosion.

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As usual with such activist claims, the facts showed them to be totally baseless. There is no serious soil or water salinisation in Australia other than that which occurs naturally. Moreover, it is ludicrous to suggest that farming is causing soil stress when both farm productivity and farm output has increased steadily for two centuries. A Parliamentary Committee examined the matter and agreed with that conclusion.         ..... Read online   .....pdf

Labor cannot escape blame for economic woes
The Spectator, 17 November 2023

   The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Read demonstrated how Australia experienced a sharp reduction in living standards during the third quarter of 2023, an outcome not seen within the OECD as a whole.

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Productivity is the key to income levels and it has been falling in Australia. Real output per hour worked, following a brief post-lockdown recovery (the red line below) on the latest data (the June quarter of 2023), was over 7 per cent below the average level at the March quarter of 2022. The widening gap between wages (the blue line below), which continues to grow, albeit sluggishly, and productivity is unsustainable. Inflation is inevitable with such a gap.      ..... Read online   .....pdf

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The Paris crowd
The Spectator, 07 November 2023

   Last month, the Paris-based OECD published its latest assessment of the Australian economy.

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Nobody read it other than those people paid to do so. And it did not, and could not, better inform anybody of desirable future directions because all it did was repeat the bromides and policies that Australian government departments – mainly the Treasury – served up. Those policies were eagerly accepted by the OECD report writers since they are cadres in the same group-think team.

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Predictably, the OECD assessment recognised a problem with the Australian government’s fiscal deficit. But, just as predictably, ..... Read online   .....pdf

The Bowen delusion
The Spectator, 30 October 2023

   Both the ALP and the Coalition, ostensibly as a means to reduce national emissions of CO2, espouse wind and solar supported by regulations and financial subsidies.

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As well as causing increased taxes, disadvantaging coal means higher energy prices across the board. Political leaders fail to explain this – often because they don’t understand why prices rise.

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Governments prefer consumers to refrain from asking where these price rises come from. After all, when it comes to energy, the government is acting in the interest of the consumer. Allegedly.

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John Howard’s original regulation, 20 years ago was to force electricity     ..... Read online   .....pdf

Chasing idiocy: how subsidies power our energy price hikes
The Spectator, 24 October 2023

   If we looked at the picture for Australia in the mid-90s, the electricity industry was massively overstaffed and the gas industry was dissipating the wealth that Exxon had discovered in Bass Strait.

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In the case of electricity, Victoria led the way, and one simple figure illustrates the benefits brought about by privatisation and the introduction of competition. Generation Victoria was the monopoly supplier. Prior to reforms, which were ironically initiated by socialist Premier Joan Kirner, it employed 25,000 people; by the early 2000s, the numbers employed, including consultants and contractors, were under 3,000. At the same time the output, in terms of the power stations’ availabilities to run, had lifted from somewhere in the mid-70 per cent.    ..... Read online   .....pdf

Albanese’s heavy-handed government
The Spectator, 7 October 2023

   The contrast between the ALP’s most successful government – the Hawke-Keating government – and that of Mr Albanese is easily recognisable. By and large, Hawke led a party that had transformed itself from the wreckage of the previous Whitlam government’s dalliance with extreme socialistic policies. Mr Albanese leads a government that is a reversion to the Whitlam policies cloaked in more modern green-imbued garb.

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The government led by Bob Hawke set about to differentiate itself, not only from the socialism of Whitlam, but from a Liberal/National Coalition that had not deviated from a path involving government increasingly constraining business operations.     ..... Read online   .....pdf

Labor in office: time to take stock
The Spectator, 28 September 2023

   The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Energy Minister were supposedly somewhat trained as economists, but all three fail to grasp the discipline’s basic principles.

 

Energy Minister Bowen claims that his renewables program will create 60,000 jobs by replacing ‘legacy’ coal plants with wind and solar facilities plus the increase in power lines and batteries that replacement will entail.

 

While increases in jobs (and/or income levels) may result from the services stemming from government spending, Mr Bowen’s numbers refer to the gross jobs involved in the construction activities  ..... Read online   .....pdf

Unexpected costs
The Spectator, 17 September 2023

   Manipulated estimates of Levelised Cost of Energy tables showing wind and solar to be the cheapest supplies of energy are contradicted by the trends on actual electricity costs and inter-country comparisons.

 

The readily available data by country for the wind and solar renewables share and price of electricity show a high share of renewables is concomitant with high electricity costs. The cheapest electricity is found in the nations with the lowest renewable energy share: Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, UAE and Korea. Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy have high prices and high renewables shares.     ..... Read online   .....pdf

The RBA’s Cock and Bullock Climate Myth
Quadrant Online, 8 September 2023

   In recent years, getting promoted to the most senior ranks of the bureaucracy has been conditional upon the candidate being either immersed in the ruling polity’s ideology or proving willing to subordinate “frank and fearless” advice to political pragmatism. Those climbing to the top in economic or environmental policy areas have had to assure their political masters they are on board with human-induced catastrophic climate change and that wind/solar (and the hydrogen fantasy) are the only antidotes. 

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Michele Bullock showed this in titling her first speech as governor-designate as, “Climate change and central banks”. Her previous public statements made no mention of the issue. These included this before the Senate and this in June (when she had her hat in the ring), ..... Read online  

Spinning the myth of Global Warming for corporate gain
The Spectator, 25 August 2023

   Although in 2011, the Commonwealth Budget papers compiled all the measures that were being implemented to foster renewable energy, that assembly ceased, presumably, because it was recognised as being antipathetic to the notion that wind and solar were cheaper than the fossil fuels that they were destined to supplant.

 

The myth of human-induced global warming has always been a mixture of scientific chicanery and businesses, seeking to leverage a competitive advantage over their rivals.

 

For scientists – at least those in the public sector – global warming provided the opportunity to be listened to by politicians and the public, to attend international gatherings, and be shown the respect they felt was previously lacking.     ..... Read online     .....pdf

The onset of bankruptcy: from green to red
The Spectator, 13 August 2023

   CSIRO'S GenCost analysis, which gives cover to Ministerial actions to replace coal and gas with wind and solar, has been revealed as a series of factoids that make wind and solar energy appear cheap because the infrastructure required to transport it, the storage required to firm it and its subsidies are all just assumed to be costlessly in place.

 

​here are also growing grassroots concerns about the collateral land use and environmental damage to rural and suburban communities from the wind and solar farms and their associated transmission lines.

 

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has plans to increase regulatory imposts on energy and extend them to Industry, the Built Environment, Agriculture and Land, Transport, and Resources.  ..... Read online     .....pdf

Global Boiling: Net Zero hysteria catches fire while Greens meltdown
The Spectator, 3 August 2023

   UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared ‘the era of global boiling has arrived’. Australia’s Teals and Greens no doubt eagerly grasped at the ‘terrifying’ words.

 

Greens Senator Nick McKim went into a state of peak catastrophism when he said, ‘Shut your mouth! People are dying because of … sociopaths like you.’ It was a comment directed toward Matt Canavan. He was swiftly asked to withdraw the remarks. ‘I withdraw, and I’m not going to cop interjections from sociopaths like Senator Canavan. I will not cop it and I won’t…’

 

The invective attests to blind adherence to the ideology of human-induced climate change that is failing to occur and  ..... Read online     .....pdf

The $10 billion cabal of renewable subsidies killing coal
The Spectator, 24 July 2023

   A t this time, the attack on fossil fuels, particularly coal, is at a crescendo. In North America with the dishonestly named Inflation Reduction Act and the European Union with its Green Deal, key government institutions are doubling their efforts to subsidise renewable energy and force the closure of coal.

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In Australia, we are seeing similar trends spearheaded by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, a man whose political conceit is only exceeded by his apparent incompetence in the role. Bowen was the man who, as Immigration Minister in the Gillard government, announced that stopping boats bringing illegal immigrants to Australia was impossible. He remained unchastened when the Abbott   ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Treasury’s Warmists Chill the Prospects for Growth
Quadrant Online, 18 July 2023

   W e have seen big government and woke financiers working hand in glove over recent years to advance the cause of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG). Superannuation funds have been increasingly orientating their investments towards ESG. The governance part involves avoiding firms with boards and senior executives containing too many white males and, therefore, inadequate ‘diversity’. The environmental and social parts once meant avoiding firms in the defence and tobacco industries, but the pariahs in our modern woke world are avoiding hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil.

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When the Bank of England released its support package for firms facing difficulties due to the Ukraine war, it insisted that firms   ..... Read online    

Why Dutton needs coal not renewables or nuclear
The Spectator, 8 July 2023

   Y esterday, Opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to embrace nuclear power to secure a clean, cost-effective, consistent electricity supply. 

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Dutton is right to be concerned that the government’s policy of replacing coal-fired plants with renewables will end in a disastrous shortage of power.

 

Dutton’s proposal is to replace coal-fired plants with small modular reactors that are on the drawing board in the US, UK, and elsewhere. By locating the new nuclear reactors in existing coal-fired plants, they can tap into existing transmission lines. 

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There are a number of problems with this, but first ..... Read online    ..... pdf

The failure of forced transition despite public lust for green energy
The Spectator, 1 July 2023

   T hroughout history, interactions of supply and demand have driven ‘transitions’ – think horses to cars and trains; whale oil to paraffin; transistors, resistors, capacitors to microchips. Uniquely, the much-flaunted energy transition from coal, oil, and gas to wind and solar and perhaps to green hydrogen is politically propelled, resting on a supposed link of climate change from burning hydrocarbons.

 

In Australia, as in the US with its so-called Inflation Reduction Act and the EU with its European Green Plan, expelling hydrocarbons from the energy supply has become the central dimension of politics itself.

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Ostensibly, this is curious since environmental      ..... Read online    ..... pdf

Jumpin’ Jack Flash: gas joins the ‘lexicon of evil’
The Spectator, 26 June 2023

   I n 1990, at the dawn of climate alarmism, it was welcomed as a bridge to the zero-carbon fantasy that was to avert a fruitless search for a ‘Planet B’ – billed as the only alternative to decarbonising. Per unit of energy, gas, after all, has only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal.

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But a political Group-Think by all major Western leaders (post-Trump) favours net neutral emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between 2030 and 2050. This has raised the ambition of the leading cadres and is impacting on politicians. New vistas for closing off the use of hydrocarbons are being probed. Gas has become no longer half-way acceptable.      ..... Read online    ..... pdf

World Bank woes
The Spectator, 19 June 2023

   T he World Bank has a great cosmopolitan air to its name – not like one of those parochial institutions like the US Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank. This is the world organisation.

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However, the World Bank turns out to be just another Woke UN institution. Its original rationale was to provide long-term loans to foster infrastructure in third-world countries. Water, energy, and health were major disbursement areas.

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Nowadays any energy funding would exclude hydrocarbons. Indeed ‘sustainable development’ and ‘transition’ are key objectives – both are, of course, code for replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Nuclear is excised from the Bank’s vocabulary.     ..... Read online    ..... pdf

Slowing down environmental craziness
Spectator, 10 June 2023

   P ressure to replace controllable and low-cost coal and gas with an intermittent and high-cost wind and solar alternative continues, but there are increasing signs of unease with this policy. Some of this may stem from a growing recognition of the implausibility of the government’s claims that the ‘transition’ to wind and solar will be both smooth and cost less when finished.

 

For many, a compromise that will give a secure electricity supply without carbon emissions is nuclear. This, though far more expensive than coal as a source of electricity, is safe and, being controllable, is cheaper than wind and solar. 

 

The problems with nuclear include the long    ..... Read online    .....pdf

The Rise and Riches of the Rentrepreneurs
Quadrant Online, 5 June 2023

   C WP Renewables Pty Ltd presents as a story of successful entrepreneurship for which its owners have been rewarded with fantastic profits. But that outcome has been accompanied by a huge cost to the community.

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The company, established in 2007, has been mainly involved in wind farm developments with giant Swiss holding company Partners Group, which also contributed a chunk of equity capital. Aside from some potential ‘blue sky‘ projects involving solar, wind and batteries, CWP’s main assets were five windfarms with 257 turbines erected between 2016 and 2020 at a cost of $1.72 billion. The turbines were financed by the Commonwealth’s CEFC green energy bank ($233 million), and Partners Group    ..... Read online    

Political and corporate defeatism
The Spectator, 26 May 2023

   C harles Mackay’s 1841, titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has enduringly served to refute claims of collective wisdom. He described events like Dutch tulip mania and the 1711-22 South Sea Bubble as frenzies of collective investment hysteria.

​

In the modern era, every decade or so we have seen more such investment delirium, including the build-up to the 1929 Wall Street crash with lesser events like the 1970s Poseidon mining boom/bust and the 2007 collapse of US leveraged housing funds.

​

In all cases, investment frenzies ramped up share prices to stratospheric levels. Lessons have not been learned. The next debacle will centre on

   .... Read online     ..... pdf

Upshots from politicians delivering more free stuff and regulations
The Spectator, 24 May 2023

   T he forerunner of democracy – a post-medieval one-man-one-vote – was propelled by radicals seeking greater freedom of trade, speech, and religion in the face of vested interests and intolerance.

​

Building upon gains in these areas, radicals promoted greater equality – first of incomes (by compulsory takings from the better-off) and subsequently augmenting this with regulatory measures on economic activities. At a later stage, some special privileges were extended to previously disfavoured racial groups. In this latter respect, people, at least in Western nations, are probably more accepting of non-mainstream race, religious, and sexual preferences than in any previous era.     
.... Read online     ..... pdf

Recessions are bad news for super funds
The Spectator, 11 May 2023

   T he Commonwealth budget surplus stems from the nation’s resource assets, and to a lesser degree its agricultural strengths. But, rather than fostering these advantages, Australian governments are focused on negating them.

 

For agriculture, this is seen in ever-mounting land-use restrictions and in the Commonwealth’s intent on stopping the live sheep and beef trade.

 

The resources industry faces even greater environmental-based curbs on new proposals.

 

The Commonwealth Environment Minister, Tanya  .... Read online     ..... pdf

Energy: drowning in subsidies
The Spectator, 6 May 2023

   P aul Broad, the former head of Snowy Hydro, resigned amid, according to the Australian Financial Review, an escalation of tensions with Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Broad did not comment on his reasons for resigning. In a recent interview with 2GB,  he said ‘it will take 80 years not 8’ to transition to renewables. He seems to claim we need this transition, but I do not believe we do. Most political leaders are deaf to such views, which swim against a tide of activist enmity and businesses searching for subsidies.

​

You can’t. And the truth is, we need this transition. If it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. So there’s massive changes need to occur. And I’m deeply concerned about the rush. The notion that somehow     .... Read online     ..... pdf

Australian productivity growth lowest in 60 years
The Spectator, 25 April 2023

   L ast month the Productivity Commission (PC) revealed that Australian productivity growth on the decade to 2020 was the lowest in 60 years. Mining and agriculture were the most efficient sectors, though productivity gains in some services – like medicine and digital services – may be hidden because of improved quality.

​

 

To avoid antagonising the dominant political ideology, with masterly understatement, the PC opines, ‘…abatement efforts could, in many instances, increase the cost of production and could put downward pressure on measured productivity, at least in the short term.’ The PC makes stacks of recommendations for improvement, including some that could raise productivity by freeing up investment  .... Read online     ..... pdf

Two cheers for democracy!?
The Spectator, 19 April 2023

   T wo cheers for democracy! So wrote E.M. Forster speaking for the Bloomsbury set, the affluent intellectuals who were the leading ‘Wokes’ of the 1930s. ‘Two cheers’ was a half-hearted acclamation of a political outcome that, at least in the England in which they lived, had neither delivered government shorn of Victorian traditionalism nor advanced sufficiently along a socialistic path.

 

The Bloomsbury set would be more pleased with ‘diversity equity inclusiveness’ slogans that have been adopted by today’s professional elites and become omnipresent in all but a handful of democracies and in nations where Islamic politics dominates.     .... Read online     ..... pdf

Australia’s ‘green energy’ chimera
The Spectator, 12 April 2023

   T he government has asked the Joint Committee on Trade and Investment Growth to inquire into ‘Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower’. It wants ideas on how to accelerate growth in sectors covering renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles, and so on.

 

The inquiry attracted 125 submissions. A few submissions, like that of the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), pointed out that the proposal rests on the case for reducing human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide but that there is no scientific proof that this would have any significant effect on our climate. And, the non-Western world is not going down that same path, with the consequence that the de-carbonising economic suicide into which the West is sleepwalking, can     .... Read online     ..... pdf

The unsafe Safeguard Mechanism

The Spectator, 28 March 2023

   A nd so, the Greens have joined the ALP in imposing additional carbon taxes on the top 215 greenhouse gas emitting firms. In passing the so-called Safeguard Mechanism, the voluntary program that the Coalition originally introduced is converted into a requirement on the nation’s top mining and industrial firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Those emissions are said to be 137 million tonnes a year. Their curtailment builds up to constitute 40 million tonnes a year. This is in addition to abatement measures already in place, which confer a subsidy on wind and solar, that has enabled those energy sources to displace a quarter of the supply formerly provided by coal.

 

One way to meet the new reductions is by      ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Slow rolling crisis or banking wildfire?
The Spectator, 23 March 2023

   The world’s leading funds manager, BlackRock, has argued the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) may start a ‘slow rolling crisis’. This may be so but, at this point, bank share prices have stabilised (Chinese banks have even seen their share prices increase).

 

SVB was only sixteenth in terms of size within the United States. Yet it, and the smaller Signature Bank, were bailed out by the Biden Administration, ostensibly on the basis that their failure would cause contagion across the system. Perhaps, as many have conjectured, other factors, including SVB’s important role as a lender and bag-holder to the speculative tech industry, may have helped its path to salvation.   ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Silicon Valley Bank: doomed to fail?     
The Spectator, 15 March 2023

   The basic question to ask about the collapse of the $200 billion Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is, why did it take so long for such a collapse to occur?

 

The root cause of the bankruptcy is the vast increase in US government spending, which, like that of other governments, was not accompanied by matching increases in taxation. Inevitably, the outcome of that is an increasing money supply monetary policy. And the corollary of that will always be an increase in inflation.

 

When the US Federal Reserve started to combat the excessive supply of money it did so by the only way available – buying up debt – ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Australia: suffocated by regulation and raided by greedy politicians     The Spectator, 8 March 2023

   Gary Banks in The Australian notes how government regulatory measures are destroying our vital comparative advantage in energy supply and promoting inefficient labour relations practices, while spending splurges have brought no improvement in outcomes, especially in health and education.

​

Years of over-regulation and excessive spending have been pushed even higher by Labor. The Commonwealth Government has to maintain the momentum of carbon abatement by massive new regulatory impositions on the major carbon dioxide emitting firms and forcing consumers to fund new spending in the transmission lines for wind and solar.
..... Read online     ..... pdf

Climate change: short on proof, drowning in nonsense

The Spectator, 27 February 2023

   The environmentalist creed in context

 

Environmentalism, more particularly its prevalent global warming strain, dominates politics. It is the fourth such banner raised by the disgruntled that has conditioned politics since Medieval times.

 

Earlier eras saw politics underpinned by a struggle against government taxation which in the anglosphere can be marked by Magna Carta (1215), the English Civil War, and the American War of Independence. France experienced the ‘Fronde’ in 1648, which placed restraints on the king’s ability to levy new taxes, eventuating in the French Revolution a hundred and forty years later when the king was forced to convene a Parliament to seek    ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Is coal making a comeback? Australian mining’s uphill battle  The Spectator,  19 February 2023

   Coal supplies a quarter of the world’s energy, oil and gas account for a half, and renewables – in spite of vast subsidies everywhere they are built – comprise just 7 per cent.

 

While Germany is being ridiculed for re-opening coal mines, even tearing down a wind farm to do so, it is claiming this is only a temporary departure from its decarbonisation transition.

 

Such assurances are not being given by the fastest-growing developing nations.

 

Indeed, Bloomberg reports, regretfully, that coal is making a comeback

     ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Climate ruminations: the markets reject Chalmers

The Spectator,  13 February 2023

   Combatting the perceived incidence of global warming is driving government policies. In Australia this has been obvious for many years, but for the ALP it was clarified by the publication in the Monthly of the Treasurer’s philosophy on the need to remake capitalism. Jim Chalmers claims this is necessary because energy policy cannot be left to genuine market forces when we need to combat the effects on the Earth’s atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels.

 

That rests on the theoretic construct that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is likely to take place in the next 50 years, is causing about a 1 to 1.5°C warming and Australia, with 1 per cent of emissions, can be instrumental in stopping this. Most experts     ..... Read online     ..... pdf

"Chalming" no-one:  Labor rommances communism
The Spectator,  29 January 2023

   Jim Chalmers is proving to be the most iconoclastic Treasurer since the Whitlam government’s Jim Cairns, a man who only joined the Labor Party after his application to join the Communist Party was rejected. Cairns spearheaded a previous assault on conventional capitalist economic theory and, like Chalmers, sought to borrow, spend, and regulate the nation into prosperity with fairness. Both Chalmers and Cairns came into politics with doctorates in economic history – that of Chalmers was a hagiography of Paul Keating, whose policies he now wants to reverse.

​

Like Cairns, Chalmers faced a budget crisis but was unable or unwilling to make the expenditure reductions necessary to rectify this.

   ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Energy chaos: the shape of things to come

The Spectator,  25 January 2023
   Australian governments have made energy policies focused on achieving higher shares of renewable energy that they claim is the cheapest source of power. The Commonwealth government is planning for renewables to reach 82 per cent of supply by 2030, while the Liberal Party’s plan is for 85 per cent by 2050 and 61 per cent by 2030. State governments have additional plans. In pursuit of these goals, governments around Australia are being sucked into a vortex requiring ever-increasing controls, while seeing mounting cost increases.

​

Subsidies that amount to $6.9 billion per year have propelled wind and solar, which had virtually no market presence 20 years ago, to their current market share of 27 per cent. The CSIRO and other    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Inquiry into Australia's transition to a green energy superpower

Submitted 22 November 2022

The inquiry seeks advice on how Australia can “transition to a green energy superpower”.

The Inquiry mentions a number of areas in respect to the “transition”, including:
• where trade and investment activities are already having a positive impact; and
• emerging and possible future trends.

It further seeks advice on how government agencies can assist in identifying opportunities and in assisting and subsidising new investment. It has particular interest in how activities can be assisted in areas the government has determined to be prospective. These, it says, include renewable energy, battery storage, energy supply and infrastructure, electric vehicle industry, infrastructure; advanced manufacturing, and services and technology.

​

The Australian Environment Foundation notes multiple failures where industries designated by governments as being highly prospective have received favourable treatment from tariffs or support through financial assistance. None have succeeded. Some of these have been in the areas now, with little supporting evidence, once again being re-affirmed as worthy of support.     ..... Read the submission here

The Old Man’s Tale

by Viv Forbes


 

 

The council man was adamant:
“The Law must have its way,
The shed you built is not approved
It must come down today.”

 

“No doubt the shed is safe and strong
And no one has complained,
But plans and rules must bind us all
Or anarchy will reign.”

​

The old man clenched his horny hands,
He gripped the planner’s arm,
Then changed his mind and led him out
To look around the farm.

​

“You see that shed” the old man said,“With shingle roof and wattle wall,With no advice from coots like youMy Grandpa built it all.”

“He came out here from Birmingham
With no help from the Crown,
Without a passport or a card
He sailed to Sydney town.”

 

“He got himself a riding horse
Bought cows and found a dray,
But sought no travel permits
As he left for Moreton Bay.”

 

“There were no maps to guide him
Once he left the city blocks,
And flooding of the Richmond
Cost him half his mob of stock.”

 

“But when he got to Moreton Bay
A sickness swept the place,
So Grandpa saddled up again
To see a safer base.”

 

“For weeks he struggled northwards
Thru the bush and hostile blacks,
Until he reached a mighty stream
Which stopped him in his tracks.”

“The soil was deep and fertile
And the flats were green and lush,
So Grandad thought he’d squat a while
He had no need to rush.”

 

“He cleared the scrub and dug a well
And found himself a wife,
He brought her to that wattle shed
To start their married life.”

 

“Then rangers tried to take his land
(For squatters rights were spurned.)
My folks were forced to sell their stock
To buy the land they’d earned.”

 

“My Pa was born in that old shed
He worked to earn his land
‘Twas he who built the homestead
And no planner lent a hand.”

 

“The sweat of generations
Feeds parasites like you,
And now you tell us builders:
‘This shed will never do.’

“With subtlety and cunning
You have nibbled at our rights,
You’ve taxed away our substance
So now we cannot fight.”

 

“But this is where I draw the line
And I won’t be alone,
So if you try to smash my shed
I’ll fight for what I own.”

 

“So clear off or I’ll clout you
Do not bother us again,
Take all your forms and files and fees
And shove them up the drain.”

 

The planner started shouting
But old Nigger bit his leg.
He cleared the fence, and yelled a threat:
“When next I come you’ll beg.”

 

The wreckers came next morning
But the neighbours got there first.
They stood six deep across the gate
And bid them do their worst.

Before the planners could react
Before the police could call
The old man’s son, a barrister,
Restrained them with the law.

 

He quoted laws and precedents,
He combed the ancient books,
He tied the council up for months
In writs and counter suits.

 

By then there were elections
And the old man led a team;
They sent the planners packing
And restored the builder’s dreams.

 

Once more a man could build a shed
Without a planner’s chit
And no one could invade his home
Unless he had a writ.

 

The planner got an honest job
The red tape was undone,
The Old Man got a Knighthood
His mighty fight was won.

Collapse of the $35 billion Sun Cable

The Spectator,  16 January 2023
   Last week saw the collapse of Sun Cable, a pie-in-the-sky $35 billion plan by alternative energy enthusiasts, Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes, to generate solar energy and transport it by cable 4,200 kilometres to Singapore. The taxpayer provided $14 million for the project’s solar system, Australian-developed 5B. But major spending, which amounted to $210 million before Andrew Forrest pulled the plug, came from the two entrepreneurs.

 

Last week also saw Energy Minister Chris Bowen release his consultation for the disarmingly named Powering the Regions Fund. A centrepiece of this was weaponising the ‘Safeguard Mechanism’ from the emission reporting requirement that the Coalition  ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Dark money

The Spectator,  11 January 2023
   Recent years have seen a strengthening dominance of politics over individual and commercial decision-making. This is readily evident in the growth of regulations and government spending increasing from under 20 per cent of the economy a century ago to around (and over) 50 per cent today.

 

Within democracies, these developments are due to electorates demanding income redistributions and tolerating increased national debt – oblivious to the adverse effects on their own future living standards. There are very few political leaders of stature like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Margaret Thatcher, or Donald Trump who seek to persuade voters of the folly of such demands. Most opt for.    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Batteries not included

The Spectator,  29 December 2022

Renewable energy battery farms threaten to cripple the economy with cyclic costs
   The replacement of fossil fuels (and nuclear) by wind and solar is said to be a ‘transition’ implying, like that from sail to steam and horse to motor power, that this is being inexorably pushed by consumers adopting a lower cost technology. In fact, the ‘transition’, wherever it is taking place, is due to government subsidies and regulations. Not one significant unit of wind or solar power generation anywhere in the world has been installed without such assistance

 

Moreover, a wind/solar-rich electricity system requires expensive features that are naturally present or available at a trivial    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Chris Bowen’s rendezvous with bad ideas

The Spectator,  22 December 2022
   Back in July 2022, Chris Bowen the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, launched the latest CSIRO electricity costs report which says wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity supply. He said, ‘This underlines the need for Australia and the world to invest heavily in renewable energy sources to put downward pressure on power prices.’

 

He continues to call for eliminating coal and gas in Australia, claiming this is necessary to prevent harmful climate change. Climate change was the focus of his September address to the American Australian Association. He said 80 years ago, ‘Curtin and Roosevelt had a rendezvous with destiny. Our job is to avoid a rendezvous with  ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Energy collapse: it all begins with a market cap

The Spectator,  14 December 2022
   Thousands of years of experience – from the ancient Babylonians and Roman Emperor Diocletian, through to modern times – have demonstrated how price controls prevent the allocation of scarce goods to their most valuable uses, lower short-term production, and cause investment to seize up.

 

The inevitability of such outcomes is lost on Australia’s political class. Politicians, egged on by self-interested and socialists, are once more embracing price controls that were abandoned in the 1980s when the Hawke-Keating government accepted market prices stemming from supply and demand as the most efficient means of running the economy

..... Read online  ..... pdf

ESG: climate virtue bleeding super dry

The Spectator,  7 December 2022
   B usiness, where the profit motive is explicitly dominant and where the hundreds of millions of direct and indirect owners want to see it remain the crowned ruler, might be expected to reject spending that syphons off profits to political causes… And yet, nearly every firm funnels funding to politically acceptable causes, in the main involving those of a social and environmental nature.

 

Sometimes, pressured by governmental regulatory stances, like the soon-to-be mandatory reductions on the top Australian emitters, a growing number of firms also engage in expenditure that replace fossil fuel derived energy with more expensive wind and solar. Also important is the avoidance by superannuation fund managers of ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Dan enters the pantheon of ‘great’ leaders

The Spectator,  28 November 2022
   N ow the hurley burley’s done, and Dan Andrews is in the pantheon of the state’s great leaders, it’s time to see what Victorians voted for.

​

Like other electorates in the Western world, Victorians proved themselves to have a large appetite for government spending. The Lib-Nats joined Labor (and, of course the Greens) in proposing big increases in hand-outs. For Labor, these included subsidies for electricity, travel, kindergartens, and ‘infrastructure’.

​

But, reflecting voter preferences for free stuff, Labor was reticent in approving tax increases to cover these increases. These election gifts therefore (as did the Liberals’ offerings) add to the ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Victoria’s looming energy disaster

The Spectator,  23 November 2022
   A centrepiece of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ campaign is to renationalise Victoria’s privately owned electricity businesses. He claims that the private owners have scammed ‘$23 billion in profits off pensioners, families, and businesses’.

​

The state’s electricity assets, previously managed by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) were sold under the Kennett government in the 1990s. Kennett inherited a near-bankrupt state.

 

The SECV had been a drain on government finances due to its excessive levels of staffing. Over-staffing is a hallmark of ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Our retreat from rational economics

The Spectator,  16 November 2022
   In today’s world, government spending accounts for up to and (in the EU) over 50 per cent of GDP – Australia’s at 38 per cent may be understated due to it being a federation. In the 1920s, no significant government spent more than 20 per cent of its nation’s GDP (federal spending in America and Australia was 4 per cent 6 per cent respectively).

​

 

Sovereign debt is now well in excess of 100 per cent of GDP in most EU countries, America, and Japan – Australia’s is 57 per cent. Until 100 years ago no state went into debt except to combat an existential crisis – indeed few states had the creditworthiness to do so.

 ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Greta and her green-communism

The Spectator,  8 November 2022
   Many breathed a sigh of relief when Greta Thunberg announced she was not going to attend COP 27 Climate Change meeting which is now underway at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The COP process is a ‘greenwashing scam’, she explained.

​

It seemed that the girl, although not even having reached the age of 20, had already emerged from the catharsis of teenage simplistic idealism. Was she having doubts about promoting a goal of dubious worth at a cost that is unknown but without a scientific breakthrough is incalculably high? Seemingly so, and that corroborated the notion that at a coming of age (historically at 21), she reached a maturity society expects of each emerging generation to take balanced judgements ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Andrews’ Leninist approach to power

The Spectator,  24 October 2022
   Last week, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews paraded his inner Lenin. He attacked Victoria’s privately owned coal generation businesses, claiming that they have taken ‘$23 billion in profits off pensioners, families and businesses’ and announced that they must be effectively driven out of business by state-owned alternatives.

 

Those facilities were sold to the private sector during the 1990s.

 

Jeff Kennett and his Treasurer Alan Stockdale pushed through the privatisations, which netted $11 billion for the   ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dirty dependency: superannuation and ESG

The Spectator,  21 October 2022
   Condemning those who have glued themselves to roads to create chaos, the (now former) UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman hit out at ‘the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, Wokerati anti-growth coalition’. Her indignation about the economic damage caused by climate radicals is warranted, but she said nothing about the economic harm stemming from the fund-manager/governmental institutional wing of the anti-coal climate alarmists, which uses the Environment Social and Governance (ESG) pastiche as cover for its control aspirations.

​

Indeed, as she was speaking the Bank of England..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dead-weight drowning productivity

The Spectator, 14 October 2022
   Productivity growth is the key to income growth – we can’t have the latter without the former. A matter that has troubled many economists in the Western world during recent decades is a slowdown in productivity growth. 

​

Australia is typical. Multi-factor productivity – the overall return on labour and capital inputs combined – has been growing at only 0.3 per cent per year in recent years, while the more commonly understood, labour productivity, has also seen growth at only 0.9 per cent a year. These are half the levels seen in the 1990s. 

​

That slowdown is less evident in many countries ..... Read online      ..... pdf

The price of environmental activism

The Spectator, 7 October 2022
   The environment social and governance (ESG) movement commenced life over 100 years ago with wowser investors avoiding shares in brewers and distillers. Embargoes on the merchants of sin, with gambling and smoking joining alcohol, have long ceased to be the primary target. The sin is now hydrocarbon energy (particularly coal), with gas and oil as secondary prey. That other bête noir of green agitators, nuclear, is considered an additional activity to be avoided and divested.

 

With this agenda, ESG investors have come to dominate stock exchanges, and their funds expected to total $50 trillion by 2025 which is over one-third of total global stocks.       ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Argentina’s socialist demons are coming for the West

The Spectator, 26 September 2022
   How did we arrive at the position where, throughout the Western world, political decisions to undermine the cheapest and most reliable energy sources are bringing about economic stagnation and possibly collapse?

​

Notwithstanding evidence of this, why are policy settings intensifying the very measures that have created the breakdown?

​

Europe is seeing record energy prices and the America’s renewable subsidy-oriented Inflation Reduction Act portends a following of suit.

​

For Australia, similar measures are intensified by law courts deciding that individual Indigenous voices, now extending to a  ..... Read online      ..... pdf

The sharp decline since Paris

The Spectator, 14 September 2022
   Returning from the 2015 Paris Agreement, former Clinton Energy chief Joe Romm, proclaimed:

​

‘You know, change happens slowly, until it happens quickly.’

He was talking about climate ‘guru’ Michael Mann declaring that the Paris Agreement signalled the end of ‘the age of fossil fuels’.

​

Of course, there was a major speed bump along that road in the form of Donald Trump, who commenced dismantling the subsidies and regulations that were forcing this rapid change in the world’s biggest economy. And, to the ridicule of the German UN delegation including its Foreign Minister, Trump presciently urged Germany to.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Transition teething problem or permanent disaster?

The Spectator, 27 August 2022
   Politicians, regulators, and subsidy-seekers portray the present difficulties in the energy market as being part of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy – and perhaps to more exotic forms of energy derived from extracting hydrogen from water.

​

They go on to claim that transitions always involve teething problem difficulties.

​

This is false.

​

Transitions in the past from horse-drawn transport to trains, motor vehicles, and aeroplanes involved only benefits to    ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dangerous energy politics

The Spectator, 02 September 2022
   Electricity has properties that require supply and demand to always balance every few seconds.

​

This means, firstly, that there has to be a considerable surplus of supply in order to cope with swings in demand. Secondly, a large share of supply (and/or demand) has to be capable of rapidly switching on and off. 

There is probably no other area of the economy with such time-sensitive complexity and an array of different providers with vastly dissimilar cost profiles.

​

Electricity is an area of commerce that is highly unsuitable for political control.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

An Open Letter Concerning AEMO’s 2022 Integrated System Plan

By Dr James Taylor PhD

Independent Engineers and Scientists     ..... Read here

A mild case of split portfolio disorder

The Spectator, 18 August 2022
   As a one-time senior public servant, I find the debate over Scott Morrison’s supposed power seizure of separate ministries to be based on somewhat unrealistic depictions of the powers of individual ministers.

 

There are two issues in Prime Minister Morrison’s visits to the Governor-General. The first concerns the massive overreaction to Covid and the Prime Minister’s decision to formally appoint himself as several ministers as an insurance against his colleagues’ incapacitation and, astonishingly, doing so without informing those colleagues. The second was the insertion of himself as de facto Minister in the Department of Industry, Energy and Resources.

​

With regard to the latter, Morrison has said,     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Labor’s Climate Bill is an economic precipice

The Spectator, 08 August 2022
   In what The Australian called a ‘capitulation of the Greens’, the government’s Climate Bill has passed the House of Representatives. Its passage through the Senate is a formality.

​

With the Bill’s central requirement being that greenhouse gas emissions fall by 43 per cent (from the 2005 base), it amplifies the 28-30 per cent formal reduction level set by the previous Coalition government. In pursuit of decarbonisation to combat a mythical ‘climate crisis’, the Bill is designed to stymie the use of coal and gas. In doing so, it will increase the costs of mining, manufacturing, and other services; it will also increase costs in the farming sector – including by diverting the use of productive agricultural land into a carbon sink.      ..... Read online      ..... pdf

​

Wrecking a Nation One Electricity Bill at a Time

Quadrant Online, 29 July 2022
   The first thing to recognise is that for many years now governments — Labor and Coalition alike — have been hard at work destroying the low-cost electricity market that Australian businesses and consumers once enjoyed . The second thing to note is that there is an actual undertone of energy realism — yes, really! –about the Albanese government, but it is no portend of good news: “You’ll know what we’re up against when your electricity bill arrives,” the Treasurer said on Thursday (July 28). That would be the bill we were assured during election season would fall by $275 once Labor waved its magic wand. 

​

We can see the degeneration of Australia’s electricity security graphically presented in the chart below which tracks July electricity    ..... Read online

​

Politicians destroy nuclear when the world needs it most

The Spectator, 25 July 2022
   Human advancement has rested on harnessing increasingly dense sources of energy from non-human origins. Animal power, burning wood, wind technology, and water power were crucial in allowing early civilisations to develop.

​

The Industrial Revolution that gave humanity income levels 10-100 times higher than those of antiquity was driven by hydrocarbons which brought over 100 times the power density of wind.

​

Nuclear, with 10,000 times the power density of coal, has been heralded as ‘the next step’ for the last fifty years.      ..... Read online     .....pdf

​

Europeans punished by expensive renewables backed by Russian gas

The Spectator, 14 July 2022
   Europeans are now paying heavily for their shift in abandoning coal and nuclear and adopting renewable energy supported by Russian gas.

​

Across the continent, coal generators have been closed as have nuclear facilities in a headlong pursuit of the ‘transition’ to renewables. Throughout the Western world, that transition has been touted as inevitable by the ‘experts’ now dominant within government and among their advisory detritus.

​

Only this week Australia’s very own CSIRO           ..... Read online     .....pdf

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The (expensive) brave new world of ‘clean energy’

The Spectator, 09 July 2022
   The market was working pretty well 20 years ago and is not expected to be much larger by 2030. It involved a capital asset base in terms of transmission at about $22 billion and for the electricity energy itself, in today’s dollars about $100 billion.

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We now have two national plans for the future: Rewiring the Nation,  ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Climate Justice? Victoria’s fresh assault on businesses

The Spectator, 01 July 2022
   Last week’s restoration of the electricity market, following the regulator assuming full control on June 15, means the energy crisis is apparently over. But spot prices remain at around $230 per megawatt hour – a mere sixfold their historical levels. As for gas, well that’s still price-controlled and consequent supply shortages are causing business closures.

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Victoria has done his bit to create the crisis.

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Premier Dan Andrews tripled the royalty tax on coal – the straw that broke the back of the Hazelwood Power Station, which produced a quarter of the state’s electricity. Then, as with South Australia’s  .... Read online  ...pdf

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Climate Change's 'Pigouvian' tax

The Spectator, 27 June 2022
   Rod Sims, formerly head of the ACCC, advocates a carbon tax as a ‘Pigouvian’ solution to the global damage which he says is being created as a result of burning coal, gas, and oil.

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A ‘Pigouvian’ tax is set at a level where the damage from distorting the economy, which any tax inevitably causes, is offset by the rectification that it brings about. Such a tax is generally considered superior to having the government centrally determine measures to redress inadvertent damages resulting from production. This is because it incentivises firms to seek out the cheapest solutions and avoids governmental failures inherent in ‘winner picking’

Henry Ergas points out that the proposal Rod Sims .... Read online  ...pdf

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Standard of living to fall sharply

The Spectator, 24 June 2022
   In the pre-Covid days, strike activity was fast disappearing. In Europe, the average days lost from strikes more than halved.

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In Australia, the fall was even more dramatic – from over 500 strike days per 1,000 workers in the 1970s, to just 14 in the decade to 2020.

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Suddenly, in Europe a spate of strikes is underway. They are in England and threatened in France, Spain, Italy, and even Germany. These are taking place ‘amid spiralling increases in the cost of living’ which describes EU annual wage increases averaging 2 per cent compared to price increases of 8.8 per cent.     ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Albo's war against Capitalism

The Spectator, 21 June 2022
   Seeking to disabuse critics of the notion that his interest and expertise in economics were Whitlamesque, Anthony Albanese released a couple of pages of an undergraduate essay on economics he wrote nearly 40 years ago. The material was replete with supply and demand curves to burnish his credentials on any sceptic.

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Mr Albanese’s economics degree was from the ‘political economy’ school of Sydney University – which had a strongly Marxian focus – stressing on how the economy should best be managed by those who consider themselves well able to understand and manipulate it. The university mentors favoured central direction rather than what they perceived as the anarchy and heartlessness of the market system. ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Politicians have sabotaged the energy market

The Spectator, 13 June 2022
   'After a decade of denial and delay, Australia deserves a better future – one with cheaper power, more jobs, and less emissions,’ said Energy Minister Chris Bowen, in his last media release prior to gaining government.

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Mr Bowen advocated replacing coal generators with wind and solar, with their shares of electricity supply to increase from 30 per cent to 82 per cent by 2030. To facilitate this, he proposed spending $80 billion on transmission, thereby quadrupling its present costs.

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He also ridiculed a Morrison government that ‘does not believe renewables are the cheapest form of energy, or that the    ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Customers won't like the new energy game

The Spectator, 3 June 2022
   Right now in Australia, we are seeing some smaller electricity retailers being forced out of the market and voluntarily shedding customers. One example came this week, when ReAmped Energy told customers they should leave because bills were set to double.

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These sorts of retailers have gained a few percent of the overall market by offering cheap prices via wholesale purchases on the electricity spot market, which is usually cheaper than arranging supplies through long-term contracts with generators.

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But with shortages of electricity (which are from time to time inevitable) come very high spot market prices. What we are  ..... Read online     .....pdf

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This is worse than we thought

The Spectator, 24 May 2022
   It’s much worse than we thought.

The ALP will govern in its own right, but will be forced into extreme positions by a Green-left Senate.

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The first thing to recognise is that the result demonstrates a new consensus.

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There are some differences between the ALP, the Coalition, the Teals, and the Greens. To placate its funders within the union movement the ALP will seek to abolish the ‘gig’ economy and promote a 5 per cent wage rise, something the Greens would also support. But that apart, the consensus represents a goal of abandoning the fossil fuel    ..... Read online     .....pdf

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The Seinfeld election: a show about nothing

The Spectator, 17 May 2022
   With the virus abating, and with the confected anger over supposed government inadequacies for compensation owed to those harmed by adverse weather conditions losing topicality – the issues that should be dominating the present election campaign are taxation, spending, energy costs, industry policy, and defence.

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The Coalition and the ALP have tried to minimise their differences on these matters.

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For its part, the Coalition has little alternative after five years of clothing itself in the ALP policies it claims to oppose. It has been spending in Whitlam-esque proportions since its MPs ..... Read more     .....pdf

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Build More Dams

Letter to the Editor, Regulation Economics (from Viv Forbes) - 12 May 2022​

   Since the days of Joseph in ancient Egypt, droughts have periodically rationed water and food supplies for humans and wildlife. Sensible peoples store water, but it is about 40 years since Australians built a big dam – young Aussie engineers have no damn experience.

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Even beavers build dams and weirs to provide long-term wetlands and food supplies along rivers. Dams also moderate floods downstream.

See here for pictorial comment (right):
 

Foolish children and Green politicians think that floods are caused by carbon dioxide, but farmers know that it is La Nina that brings flooding rains to Eastern Australia             ..... Read more

beaver-dam.jpeg

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The politics of an energy dystopia

The Spectator, 10 May 2022

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   We are seeing unprecedented prices in the Australian gas and electricity wholesale markets.

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The first five days of May saw electricity prices average over $400 per MWh in Queensland and NSW, and over $150 per MWh in Victoria and South Australia. Compare this with the historical average daily prices of $40-$80 per MWh.

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Forward electricity prices for 2023 averaged 122 per cent higher than in 2021. 

 ...... Read online     ..... pdf

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Stoking the fires of energy policy

The Spectator, 26 April 2022

   Stung from previous election losses, the ALP is at pains to deny that it will introduce a carbon tax. The Coalition is trying to claim a Labor government would do so.

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That aside, both sides are seeking to marginalise environmental issues and their all-important impact on the economy. Many on the government side believe the Matt Kean dogma that there is an inevitable ‘transition’ away from coal, while others feel obliged to murmur assent in the face of popular support for that same view, funded as it is by subsidy-dependent renewable energy interests.

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In fact, we already have carbon taxes and an ALP ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Scomo, Albo, and their fantasy Net Zero policies

The Spectator, 15 April 2022

   Both the ALP and the Coalition have the same Net Zero goal for 2050, but that time frame is, at best, aspirational and is contingent upon technological breakthroughs many of which verge on the fantasy.

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A 2030 time-horizon is a more realistic means of comparing the two sides of politics.

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For 2030, the Coalition has a goal of a 26 per cent reduction in emissions compared to the base year of 2005 and hopes to achieve a 35 per cent reduction with its present policies.

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The ALP is targeting a 43 per cent reduction on  ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Renewables subsidies: $22 billion by 2030

The Spectator, 5 April 2022

   Energy Minister Angus Taylor noted that the Commonwealth Budget added $1.3 billion to assist uneconomic renewable energy, bringing the total support to $22 billion by 2030. Added to direct budget support are the regulatory subsidies that force consumers to pay for otherwise unviable wind and solar energy as well as the networks that have to be built to bring their energy to market. 

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Green energy enthusiasts and vested interests fraudulently claim wind and solar are cheaper than coal-generated electricity. Some also concoct data purporting to prove that fossil fuels benefit from enormous subsidies.

..... Read online     ..... pdf

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You can't save the world with Net Zero

The Spectator, 24 March 2022

   Ever since socialism’s credibility collapsed in 1990, environmentalism has increasingly dominated the political agenda. Central to this was the global warming scare and its implications for energy supply and economic activities in general.

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Environmentalists’ pressures ensured that this agenda was widely embraced. Every Western country agreed to pursue ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions, replacing hydrocarbons with wind, solar, and prospectively hydrogen as power sources. In most countries, this was combined with rejecting another environmentalist bogeyman – nuclear power.

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China, India, and other burgeoning economies ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Will war end the climate alarmist zeal of the central banks?

The Spectator, 21 March 2022

   Faced with implacable opposition from the Senate, Sarah Bloom Raskin, President Biden’s pick for supervising banks within the Federal Reserve (Fed), has withdrawn her candidature. During the Obama administration, she was one of the Fed’s seven governors and a Treasury deputy secretary.

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Her rejection by the Senate was a result of her expressed intent ‘to incentivise a rapid, orderly, and just transition from fossil fuels and other high-emission investments’.

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Not so long ago, that opinion would have not been a barrier to the job – indeed her appointments under Obama faced   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Practicalities in addressing autocrats’ aggression

The Spectator, 11 March 2022

   The shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that it demonstrated a form of aggression most people thought belonged to an earlier time.

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Following the Napoleonic era, a war of conquest against a recognised sovereign state was considered legitimate only if fought in the name of national self-determination.

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National self-determination remained a worthy goal in the Wilsonian world of 1918, but its practicalities were always uncertain in the mix of languages and what were deemed to be ‘races’ that still characterised Europe. Even territorial claims based on national coherence disappeared post-1945, though in certain circles aggression     ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Fresh gunpowder in the nostrils of politics

The Spectator, 2 March 2022

   Fresh gunpowder in everyone’s nostrils has brought a new political reality.

It was only this month that US Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth demonstrated where her focus lies by introducing emission reduction plans, which would de-fang her nation’s military with features like:

  • Investing in an all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035.

  • Significantly reducing operational energy and water use.

  • Buying electricity from carbon-pollution-free generation sources.

  • Reducing direct greenhouse gas emissions that result from Army

       ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Closing coal? The real victims are Australian energy consumers

The Spectator, 23 February 2022

   If software billionaire Mike Cannon Brookes is Australia’s latest corporate raider, his bid for AGL redefines the whole notion of a corporate raider.

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Historically, corporate raiders have sought to profitably reinvigorate under-performing assets, but Mr Cannon Brookes ostensibly seeks to close down the target firm’s assets whether or not they are under-performing. Cannon Brookes is the junior partner in the bid which is led by Brookfield, a $250 billion real estate developer and manager with renewable energy comprising about ten per cent of its assets.

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AGL has developed from a Sydney gas         ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Let’s remove government regulations that undermine electricity

The Spectator, 17 February 2022

   Today’s announcement of the early closure of the Eraring power station means that, with the Liddell station scheduled to close next year, almost half of New South Wales coal generation capacity will have closed.

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Contrary to the propaganda, those closures are not because the coal stations have become uneconomic. They are due to competing energy supplies – wind and solar – having been subsidised by governments. This lowers the market price when those intermittent sources are running (while raising the overall price to consumers) and imposes stop-start costs on coal generators.

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The loss of the coal generators will mean much ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Future Policy Directions For Australian Electricity Supply

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A Submission to the Draft 2022 Integrated System Plan for the National Electricity Market of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)

9 February 2022

................ ..... Read submission here

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Can Big Tech remain as the arbiter of politics?

The Spectator, 4 February 2022

   Increasingly, climate change is coming to dominate energy supply and indeed the whole economy.

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Modest changes to the climate are taking place as a result of human activity releasing CO2 – mainly by burning oil, coal and gas – but this isn’t bringing adverse outcomes like fires, floods, hurricanes, pestilences, etc.

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Combatting emissions by seeking to replace hydrocarbons with wind, solar and hydrogen is, however, having very serious economic consequences in costs to consumers and taxpayers while bringing about deindustrialisation of western economies, like Australia, which are implementing policies to restrain CO2 ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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The re-enthronement of capitalism: are ‘woke’ investment funds falling behind?

The Spectator, 26 January 2022

   Over many years now, superannuation funds have been orientating their investments towards options that avoid unapproved Environmental and Social goods or Governance structures (ESG).

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The governance part involves avoiding firms with boards and senior executives containing too many white males and, therefore, inadequate ‘diversity’. The Environmental and Social parts used to mean avoiding firms in the defence and tobacco industries, but the pariahs in the modern woke world are hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil. These and some other industries, like forestry and nuclear power, are targeted by the legions of non-government organisations which are largely funded by governments and wealthy elites, some of whom owe their for ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Australians mugged by taxes and regulations

The Spectator, 18 January 2022

   Issued last Friday was a new Victorian government review of ‘embedded networks’, which act as the electricity retailer to co-located customer groups in dwelling clusters like flats and caravan sites. The panel of four conducting the review included two consumer activists from the Victorian Government-funded Consumer Action Law Centre, and another member from the renewable energy lobby group, the Clean Energy Council.

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The panel’s recommendations purport to introduce some measures that will prevent cheating of consumers by suppliers and other measures designed to give consumers better value. While speculating about how consumers served by embedded networks    ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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The four horsemen of the economic apocalypse

The Spectator, 6 January 2022

   The appearance of Covid brought a resurgence of fears of Armageddon.

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Conscious of mankind’s imperfections, ancient settled societies envisaged a destructive reckoning that could only be averted by the people’s acceptance of and subservience to a warrior god. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have their own versions, as does Marxist Leninism.

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The Christian version features the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, each one soothing personal unhappiness with measures that carry seeds that worsen it.  ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Is Frydenberg’s post-Covid economic optimism justified?

The Spectator, 21 December 2021

   Josh Frydenberg was pleased with last week’s midyear economic review issued by Treasury. He preened himself, opining that the Covid spendathon had kept the economy ticking over and that the future was a deluge of new jobs, higher incomes, and what he described as one of the world’s ‘strongest recoveries’.

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He declared, ‘Our economic plan is working!’

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Glossed over was some of the enduring economic damage which government policies have left in their wake. The bottom line is that we’ve seen a permanent uplift in government spending. At a level of 28.7 per cent of GDP this year, it barely falls in future   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

 

There will be a reckoning for renewables

The Spectator, 13 December 2021

   With COP26 a recent memory, the looming federal election has again pushed renewable electricity into the limelight.

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Despite the campaign promises of federal politicians, electricity systems are constitutionally the responsibility of state governments. Accordingly, in the push for glory and accolades from the media and the renewable lobby, state governments have foisted a series of renewable electricity targets onto their constituents.

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In 2015, the Queensland government committed to supplying 50 per cent of the state’s electricity demand from wind and solar by 2030. The effect of this on the existing Queensland government- ..... Read online       ..... pdf

Is the ALP ‘powering the future’?

The Spectator, 7 December 2021

   With the collapse of the Soviet bloc came a disenchantment with socialist planning as an alternative to market capitalism.

 

Environmentalism, seeking to reverse specious damage allegedly caused by market capitalism, became the alternative paradigm.

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In the context of confected global warming alarmism, the enemies of free markets now focus on interventions to prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Central to such interventions is a forced replacement of hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil – by wind and solar. In addition, we have unattainable technologies like hydrogen being crowbarred into prominence by faddists and subsidy seekers.   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

Remembering Adam Smith before it’s too late

The Spectator, 3 December 2021

   Adam Smith in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, marvelled at the way the factory system made vast improvements in productivity due to its division of labour.

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In his pin-making factory example, he estimated that this allowed 4,000 pins a day per worker to be manufactured, while one man working alone would probably only make one such pin. A modern manufacturing plant, like a car factory, assembles in pre-arranged formats tens of thousands of ‘pins’. Many, like semiconductor chips, are manufactured in climate-controlled facilities largely by robots.

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Smith attributed the success of the nascent  ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

Why are we borrowing from Build Back Better?

The Spectator, 25  November 2021

   Seventeen Nobel winning American economists have said that the Biden Administration’s $1.7 trillion “Build Back Better” program, will increase growth without inflation. They include well-known names like George Akerlof – husband of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz. Other US based Nobel economists, of which there are 27, (incongruously, including the left-wing Paul Krugman) did not sign the petition. Almost all Nobel Prize-winning economists are US based.  

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The President claims the “Build Back Better” program’s cost, itself seriously underestimated, is fully offset by taxes. This is untrue and, moreover, not relevant since increased taxation will cause   ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

ScoMo’s climate modelling is even dodgier than his climate policy

The Spectator, 14  November 2021

   The government went to Glasgow to sell its net zero emissions by 2050 policy to world leaders. 

  

The policy was based on heroic assumptions like green hydrogen – at present not even a pistil hoping to be fertilised — becoming the cheapest source of electricity, and solar power, which presently costs $70 per MWh as long as suppliers dictate demand, falling to $15 per MWh. Its low credibility was recognised by the legion of green left loonies in Glasgow, who awarded Australia the “Colossal Fossil” for measures that least promote the undermining of current living standards. 

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Now we have the “modelling” ostensibly behind ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

COP26 and the climate cult’s schizophrenia

The Spectator,  7 November 2021

   British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in addressing the fashionable fiction of human-induced climate change used the hackneyed phrase “It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now”. He even conscripted Prince Charles’ relatives to the cause, thereby lighting a slow fuse under the 1135-year-old monarchical institution.  

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President Biden has taken leadership of the issue but due to the failure of Congress to pass the “build back better” spendathon, Myron Eball of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that the US has ”little to offer but hot air” but that its policies will bring “increasing energy prices and economic collapse”.      ..... Read online         ..... pdf 

Farewell ScoMo, hello crippling costs of climate fantasy

The Spectator,  28 October 2021

   Scott Morrison is heading off to lead Australia’s team at the Glasgow climate change meeting. He goes with a formula that will continue the nation’s shuffling towards diminished income levels from the politically motivated sabotage of the economy.   

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Like Joe Biden and most other leaders who have decided to attend, Scott Morrison brings nothing extra to the table. Amidst the Conference’s impassioned pleas and scary stories, there will be no dramatic new pledges, no carbon border tariffs, no methane-driven constraint on beef growers and further deferrals in the promised gifting of $100 billion a year “compensation” the rich nations have promised poor nations. Voices from climate realists and alarmists alike     .... Read online         .....pdf 

ScoMo, net-zero, that deal – and the death of the Nationals?

The Spectator,  24 October 2021

   Like MPs from other political parties, the Nationals are motivated by self-interest with rare infusions of the public interest represented by Matthew Canavan and few others.  Apparently, enough rural MPs have been persuaded by opinion research purporting to show that rural seats’ voters believe the loud voices declaring “net zero” will be good for the regions. Others realise that any funding and regulatory compensations offered for sacrificing mining and farming would be meagre.    

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Deputy Nationals leader  David Littleproud says that cast iron guarantees can be offered to protect regional Australia. He claims the Nationals have triumphed in “securing but also growing regional jobs into the future.”  This is absurd.     .... Read online         .....pdf 

Why won’t the advocates tell us the cost of net-zero?

The Spectator, 17 October 2021

   Nowhere in the world can wind and solar compete without subsidies which drive out more competitive supplies and eventually raise electricity costs and/or taxes. One manifestation of the cost stemming from increased renewables supplies can be seen in the price of electricity. The average electricity price alongside the penetration of wind/solar for the 15 largest economies in the world shows this pattern.  The relationship of wind/solar and price indicates the share of renewables accounts for 64 per cent of the difference in prices between these major economies.  (Other causes include policies on nuclear energy as well as natural endowments and pricing regulations). 

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Most of Australia’s more grounded      .... Read online   .....pdf (unedited)

Much Pain for Net Zero Gain

Quadrant, 13 October 2021

   It is this simple: skyrocketing world electricity prices stem from renewables policies. Notwithstanding the avalanche of propaganda we are seeing throughout the country, no wind or solar gets built anywhere in the world without subsidies paid by taxpayers and customers.  In Australia’s case these costs are $10 billion a year in grants and network spending. 

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The genesis of the current malaise has been closures of generating plants which have been demonised by the politically correct. In Europe this mainly involves coal.  Those countries that have been particularly severely hit by the present crisis are the UK and Spain, both of which have closed 80 per cent of their coal capacity – and Germany, which has closed about one third of its coal.  Germany also suffers from having closed  .... Read online

The Business Council of Australia’s green schizophrenia

The Sepctator, 11 October 2021

   The Business Council of Australia is a pale imitation of the body that pioneered economic reform and deregulation 30-40 years ago. Nowadays it is dominated by firms in service industries who support green policies which for many of them are important sources of revenue in trading and advisory functions.   

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Most of the rump of BCA members involved in mining production, gas and electricity and manufacturing are acutely aware of their dependence on government.  In addition to commercial support this includes protection from the NGO activities that impaired business in recent decades but also against the increasing numbers of green left regulatory and judicial appointments.    .... Read online          .....pdf

Beware a blind charge to net-zero emissions

The Spectator, 30 September 2021

   In the prologue to the UN Glasgow meeting on climate change, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been preparing the ground for an Australian statement announcing a goal of “net zero” emissions.  He is doing so on the basis of “if rape is inevitable lie down and enjoy it”, arguing that banks and investors are increasingly requiring net-zero and that there is increasing investor appetite for Australian renewable energy (wind and solar) with $35 billion invested in it since 2017.    

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Left unsaid was that all that $35 billion in investment was made possible by the direct and indirect subsidies to wind and solar.  This was made clearer by New South wales Energy Minister, Matt Kean, who has no misgivings about the forthcoming triumph of ren ..... Read online      .....pdf

Australia’s Obscene Green Subsidy Machine

Quadrant, 6 October 2021

   When an ALP government introduced a “carbon price” on electricity in 2012 it was sold as a neutral tax. It was, of course, nothing of the sort.

 

The tax was on the carbon content of fossil fuels, but a neutral tax would have had the new tax replace other imposts. In fact, mandatory levels of renewable energy required of every retailer, which were the major Commonwealth subsidies to wind/solar, were left in place, as were other support mechanisms. In addition, there were state schemes, though at the time these were still modest in scope.

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At its 2014 rate of $24 per tonne, Labor’s carbon tax, if applied to all fossil fuel inputs into electricity, would have raised $3.7 billion  .... Read online

If we’re all such good friends and allies, there’ll be no carbon tariffs? Right?

The Spectator, 20 September 2021

   Almost daily, supposedly pro-business outlets publish material calling for net zero emissions, carbon taxes and the abandonment of coal in the cause of curing the synthetic problem of human induced dangerous climate change.  Never do they disclose the existing $7 billion a year cost of subsidies, further boosted by frequent spending announcements like the $1.5 billion pursuing of will o’ the wisp schemes for energy from hydrogen.  Only occasionally, for example in addressing the mounting costs of Turnbull’s Snowy 2 folly, does it refer to other expenses being incurred, and even then it is from a perspective of seeking even more subsidies to renewables.  

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The Financial Review’s Jennifer Hewitt is not be the ... Read online     .....pdf

There’s so much wrong with Anthony Albanese’s ‘Green ANZUS’

The Spectator, 15 September 2021

   Rehearsing what he says is Labor’s long commitment to the American alliance, Anthony Albanese has sought to modernise this, saying, “ On coming to office, I will make comprehensive US-Australia co-operation on climate change a hallmark of our alliance.” 

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That agenda is being set by political commentary on the recent IPCC report’s climate forecast.  The report, delivered last month, contained some concocted data on previous centuries, temperature data that disappeared the warmer climate in Roman times and the Viking era and cooler eras post 400 AD and in the four centuries to 1850.  That apart, the recent IPCC report was rather less gloomy than some earlier ones regarding adverse temperatures and climatic .... Read online     .....pdf

The ongoing woke undermining of Australia’s economy

New Catallaxy, 7 September 2021

   The march of the woke inspired destruction of the free-market economy continues apace. The additional baggage it is being required to carry is evident from articles and views from the past couple of day’s media.

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The Business Council of Australia continues to call for additional costs to be imposed on the firms it is supposed to represent. Its CEO Jennifer Westacott wants to make domestic violence leave a right.  The sixty something says her mother was abused so why should not employers be required compensate women for being assaulted by their husbands/lovers?!                                                                        .... Read online

The UN says no coal by 2030

The Spectator, 7 September 2021

   Reminding us of what a difference a year makes was yesterday’s exhortation by UN Climate Action Team head Selwyn Hart, that Australia abandons coal by 2030. That means replacing electricity from coal which, in spite of facing incessant government penalties, provides two-thirds of the supply.  It also means sacrificing a fifth of our exports.   

 

A year ago, the 2015 Paris climate treaty appeared to be dying. With President Trump coasting to re-election, China simply mouthing support and India using the treaty as a fulcrum to extract rents from the west, only the EU was taking it seriously. And in doing so the EU was completing its decades-long transfer from industrial powerhouse to an interesting place to visit that had outsourced its carbon-emitting   ....Read online      ..... pdf

When Liberals Gussy Up in Green Drag

Quadrant Online, 2 September 2021

   The advice to governments from the Energy Security Board (ESB) recommendations on the post 2025 electricity market has brought howls of outrage from the renewable energy sector. Wind and solar electricity suppliers, who already get half their revenue from subsidies, were hoping for more of the same.  The ESB does envisage additional subsidies in the form of transmission lines to link remote supplies but the centrepiece proposal is a “capacity” payment to generators.  This rewards those generators able to be dispatched by the market manager, as opposed to relying on the weather to make them available.

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The ESB policy proposal was motivated by fears that the breakneck increase in supply of inherently intermittent and unreliable ....Read online

Kabul: the harbinger of western decline or the catalyst for Trump’s return

The Spectator, 20 August 2021

   Recently revealed from the fall of Afghanistan is that President Obama exchanged Kairullah Khaikhwa, the public face of the Taliban leadership, along with four other jihadists for Bowe Bergdahl, a United States soldier turned traitor.  One interpretation of this deal is that it stemmed from Obama’s political naivete, or even contempt for his own nation.   

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An alternative view is that the deal was the action of an imperious grandee confident that a benevolent gesture to a conquered backward adversary would do no harm. The latter interpretation is consistent with that of a woke administration that trumpets its cultural sensitivity but flies the rainbow flag on the US Embassy in Kabul.  To the  ....Read online      ..... pdf

The IPCC buries two millennia of fluctuating temperatures

The Spectator, 13 August 2021

   Probably nobody in the world has read the 3,949 pages of the latest IPCC report.  But many people have studied the 41 page politically determined, Summary for Policymakers.   Aside from rhetorical conjecture about increased human induced emissions of carbon dioxide bringing more storms, fires and pestilence, the following killer dual chart is placed at the outset of the Summary.   

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If this is accurate, it means human actions have changed the climate by at least the 1.1°C temperature increase estimated by the world’s most distinguished and celebrated atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen.  Lindzen’s fastidious reliance on science, positions him as estimating that a (human-induced) doubling of atmospheric CO2 will mean a 1.1°C global temperature rise. On his estimates, almost all of   ....Read online  ..... pdf

Will big financial institutions destroy our resources sector before the Greens?

The Spectator, 2 August 2021

   Last month Paul Kelly wrote that Australia was being inescapably propelled to adopting a Net Zero CO2 emissions policy, not by green activists or government policies but by global investment funds, “now mobilised in the climate cause”. 

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Traditionally, investment funds have been passive stakeholders, buying and selling shares based on prospective returns.  An active approach, based on environmental, social, and governance — ESG — criteria is replacing this. The cornerstone of ESG is net CO2 neutrality.   

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The common view is that investment in firms with rich ESG pedigrees is “closely linked with business resilience, competiti  ....Read online  ..... pdf

Another Green Spruiker Takes AEMO’s Helm

Quadrant, 17 July 2021

   As well as subsidy-seekers, governments, international institutions, business leaders and investment managers all conspire to close down cheap energy. The confected notion of harmful climate change is the justification for the dethronement of market forces and their replacement by a new clerisy of politicians and bureaucrats controlling the world’s economies. Though market forces would normally bring the demise of higher-cost suppliers, political and administrative, impediments under the Paris Accord on climate change are designed to prevent this, as my recent piece in The Spectator  explains. 

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Although Australia is not (yet) formally adopting “net zero” emissions, there are strong pressures to do so.  In any event, Australia is   ....Read online

Net zero emissions? That will be $3000 for each of you, each year

The Spectator, 15 July 2021

   In a widely accepted assessment, Energy consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimate the carbon price must rise to $160 per ton by 2030 to restrict emissions to the “net-zero” level that the IPCC claims is necessary to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius.  

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In crude terms, for Australia with CO2 equivalent emissions at an annual 500 million tonnes, net CO2 neutrality means a cost of $80 billion a year, or over $3,000 per head. The outcome would also entail closing much of the primary and secondary industry which define a modern economy.  

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There is no shortage of interest groups seeking   ....Read online     .....pdf 

Forget the virus. We should be panicked by lost productivity

The Spectator, 30 June 2021

   The very definition of harmful advice is found in the Treasury’s five yearly Intergenerational Report, the latest edition of which was handed down on Monday.  In The Australian, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg acknowledged “there remains much work to be done”, but praised the report for its policy guidance.    

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In his piece, Josh quoted one of Paul Krugman’s rare insights “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it’s almost everything”.  

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But that quote was probably Josh’s sole contribution to the piece.  You see, Josh has an economics degree and not all of it involved erroneous Keynesian macroeconomics, which advocates  ....Read online     .....pdf 

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Also read about the Intergenerational Report on:   Catallaxy Files

Why don’t we hear about the $40,000 per household cost of decarbonisation?

The Spectator, 25 June 2021

   T he Irish Times reports that an IMF study of Ireland estimates that the nation will need to spend 20 billion euros a year – or five per cent of GDP – to meet its 2050 goal of net zero emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil.

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In Australia, we are already edging towards the deplorable net zero target while not even formally embracing it. According to RBA estimates, we spend some $7 billion a year on large-scale renewables plus $3 billion a year on rooftop facilities.  

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Wind and solar facilities cause so much damage ....Read online     .....pdf 

The western world’s elites conspire to outlaw cheap energy

The Spectator, 16 June 2021

   Aspirations of the “have nots” or “have too littles” have, through their elected representatives brought an inexorable growth in the size of government. Government in most western nations controls over half of GDP (it is 45 per cent in Australia) compared to under 25 per cent a century ago. Ironically, some notionally communist nations that ostensibly favour an enhanced government economic presence have relatively small government GDP shares – China (37 per cent) and Vietnam and Cambodia (23 per cent).   

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Notwithstanding their diminishing non-government sectors, western economies have, to date, still retained scope for markets to bring about cost efficiencies and innovation — and hence rising living standards.    

But a corrosive undermining of economic         ....Read online   ..... pdf

The western world’s wealth-busting corporatist conspiracy against hydrocarbons

Catallaxy Files, 16 June 2021

   I have a piece in the Spectator this morning addressing how the world elites have conspired together ostensibly to combat a harmless gas (CO2), no conceivable accumulations of which could have more than a negligible affect on climate.  Politicians, national and international bureaucrats, financial institutions, leading business actors and the ‘intelligentsia’ have agreed to direct investment away from the hydrocarbon energy sources that have been essential to creating modern-day living standards.

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As a backstop against capitalist competition finding chinks through the arrays of impediments to using the cheapest sources of energy, the western world is edging towards a complex system of carbon-content tariffs that will reinforce their wealth-busting iron grip.   ....Read more 

The G7, woke corporates and the end of capitalism

The Spectator, 9 June 2021

   The Bank of International Settlements, the G7 Finance Ministers and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission have amped up carbon emissions-based “climate risk” warnings to Australian firms. This represents a new triumphal procession of green activism through international business institutions.  

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Environmental crusaders’ colonisation of business is most evident in that nadir of wokeism, the annual Davos meetings, attended (remotely this year) by business leaders who pay up to £480,000 to listen to nagging strictures of figures like Greta Thunberg and Prince Charles.  

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The first Davos meeting in 1973 emphasised the    ....Read online   ..... pdf

ScoMo and Josh’s irrational exuberance

The Spectator, 1 June 2021

   Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released figures showing new private capital expenditure rose 6.3 per cent in the March quarter. 

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told parliament, “Manufacturing investments had the biggest jump for 16 years. This is the product of our policies.”  

Well, yes.  There are lies, damned lies and statistics.  

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If the increase in manufacturing investment was to be welcomed, it also has to be recognised as a cherry on a paper maché ice cream.  In aggregate terms, the value of new private investment in the March quarter 2021 was just one per cent above that of a year earlier.

 

And, though the December 2020 to March 2021    ....Read online   ..... pdf

Will we get mugged by the return of inflation?

The Spectator, 19 May 2021

   The recent lift in the United States annual inflation rate to 4.2 per cent, the highest in ten years, has caused fears that the massive injection of money into the economy (33 per cent in the latest month) might now be igniting a general lift in prices. Below is the Consumer Price Index (in red) and money growth (in black).                                         ....Read more   ..... pdf

Enjoy the sugar hit as we flirt with economic ruin

The Australian, 17 May 2021

   Economic growth requires political stability and secure property rights. Its drivers include low taxation, an educated, skilled workforce, and technological innovation. But the overwhelming influence for nations such as Australia is investment in business activities, roads and other infrastructure.

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The budget papers note that Australia has weathered the COVID crisis better than other nations. Treasury maintains, “new business investment has picked up alongside Australia’s broader economic recovery, supported by government policy incentives implemented in response to the pandemic”. In fact, Australia actually shows a disturbing trend in the business investment component of GDP.                    .....Read more   ..... pdf

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Budget week is looming - as are electric shocks over power prices and reliability

The Spectator, 5 May 2021

   Last month energy minister Angus Taylor cited analysis by the Australian Energy Market Operator showing falls in wholesale electricity to nine-year lows as “an outstanding result [that] demonstrates how effective the Government’s actions have been”.  For example, he said, “In New South Wales, prices fell to $38/MWh, down from $86/MWh in the corresponding quarter in 2020”.  

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Self-serving distortion is unremarkable among politicians and the true situation is far less rosy.  For a start, added to the wholesale price are other elements, one of which, environmental charges, has shown a rapid increase in recent years as a result of the subsidies that have fed wind and solar into the system. In NSW the environmental   .....Read more   ..... pdf

scott-morrison-angus-taylor-energy.jpg

Higher prices, lower competitiveness as Daniel Andrews goes it alone on emissions

The Spectator, 3 May 2021

   Victoria has announced its intent to go much further than the federal government in requiring the substitution of renewable energy for the much cheaper and more secure energy that is provided from its endless supplies of high-quality brown coal.  Compared with the national policy of reducing emissions by 26 to 28% by 2030, Victoria is opting for a 45 to 50% reduction. Not only does this introduce another variation on what should be a national energy policy but it consigns Victoria to further losses of industrial competitiveness and households to higher energy costs.  

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Victoria’s intervention in the energy markets is long-standing. The state’s brown coal reserves have formed the basis for its electricity generation for 60 years. Gradually that generation became to be seen as a means of providing jobs and the union-controlled power    .....Read more   ..... pdf

Climate follies: more than half a billion new spending to keep Joe Biden off our backs

The Spectator, 22 April 2021

   The Government is desperate to appear to be doing more in the run-up to Joe Biden’s Climate Summit for Thursday US time. While professing support for decarbonisation, the Prime Minister is looking to spend money in ways that do as little damage as possible to the economy. 

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Commendably, Scott Morrison has said Australia would not, “look to reduce our own emissions by shutting down our existing export industries like agriculture, aluminium, coal and gas”. 

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Per capita, Australia is already the world’s biggest spender on wind and solar, two expensive electricity sources that have negative value because, supported by subsidies, they drive out lower-cost coal and gas. Our subsidy-supported national spending on wind and solar is twice that of Japan and the US, three times that of Germany and .....Read more   ..... pdf

Joe Biden’s bid to enforce climate club

The Australian, 22 April 2021

   The urgency of the Biden administration in pursuing green policies signifies the prominence of the issue in terms of world diplomacy and domestic policies in the US, Australia and elsewhere.

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Even though the long-planned UN Climate Change Conference will take place later this year in Glasgow, the Biden administration determined that it would call a two-day online conference, scheduled to begin on Thursday US time, addressing the issue of energy, climate change and the actions it deems necessary.

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The US administration now proposes to spend $US2.9 trillion ($3.76 trillion) on infrastructure, most of which is climate-.....Read more   ..... pdf

Big government is watching you

The Spectator, 16 April 2021

   Sexual issues have come to dominate the news cycle. This week’s headlines have been dominated by Christine Holgate. Last week sexual harassment formally become a ground for dismissal in Australian workplaces, with both parliamentarians and judges subject to the Sex Discrimination Act, in measures unveiled by Scott Morrison and Attorney-General Michaelia Cash in response to Sexual Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins’ Respect@Work report on workplace sexual harassment.

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Like walruses being driven off a Siberian cliff by a handful of polar bears, ministers in the Morrison government are scrambling to avoid femocratic attacks on real or imagined male bad behaviour.

In doing so, they may be changing our politics  .....Read more   ..... pdf

Let us give thanks to politicians for correcting our failings

Catallaxy Files, 9 April 2021

   Discovering and exterminating the hidden code in words is yet another reason why we lesser people need the wisdom and perspicuity of those we elect to Parliament.  Politicians’ extraordinary intellects see the Big Picture and are able to garnish our incomes to correct our misconceptions.

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Most of us will have seen ads like the one where a father watching his son competing in a team sport urges him to “stop playing like a girl!”.  Some old geezer, castigates him by asking “what is wrong with playing like a girl”?  While the father might simply have been urging his son to be more competitive, perhaps misunderstanding that girls on average are just as strong, run just as fast, and jump just a high as boys, he was .....Read more

EU strongarming Australia on CO2

Online Opinion, 1 April 2021

   The EU has long sought to impose its carbon dioxide abatement policies on the rest of the world. A major setback to this was the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 where Kevin Rudd sought to play a major role. Clearly operating under the EU Commission's strategy, the European Ambassador in Canberra Australia, Michael Pulch, has been making increasingly aggressive threats to Australian market access.

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He now says we will face tariffs unless we further lift the penalties we place on the use of the low cost, high CO2 emitting coal that accounts for two-thirds of our electricity generation. In recent developments, the EU Parliament has lifted the bloc's emission reduction ambitions to 55 per cent below the 2005 level (Australia's remain at 26-28 percent ...Read more

Why we must beware American senescence

The Spectator, 1 April 2021

   Sometime in the next five years, the Chinese economy will overtake that the United States.  China’s workforce may already have peaked but still has surplus labour in the 25 per cent of people working in agriculture, a share that is likely to fall to under 5 per cent.  Savings, the engine of growth, as a share of China’s GDP remain well in excess of 40 per cent – twice that of the US (and Australia). 

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By 2030, the Chinese economy, even if its growth rate falls to 5.5 per cent, will be 15 per cent greater than the US.  The US will see its growth rate stagnate to below 1.5 per cent under a Democratic Administration seeking income redistribution, diversion of capital to unproductive venues like renewable energy, allocating vast sums to raise  .....Read online   ..... pdf

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An Extended Romp Down the Green Garden Path

Quadrant, 24 March 2021

   If you have ever wondered how green absurdities become articles of faith and public policy, look no further than the mainstream and specialist media, which has long ignored the maxim that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Case in point: the rise of Sanjeev Gupta and, just at the moment, the state of the “green steel” titan’s empire as it wobbles on the brink. For those who haven’t been following the story, the BBC has a very good primer on the Indian tycoon’s woes, albeit focusing almost exclusively on his UK operations.

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Closer to home,  those who look askance at the way woke world fantasies of cheap renewable energy are endorsed with taxpayer cash will know of Gupta from his much-lauded arrival in Whyalla, the            .....Read online

Saving the Portland smelter: one problem solved, others created

Catallaxy Files, 20 March 2021

     With its rescue package of a low-cost electricity supply for Victoria’s Portland aluminium smelter, the Commonwealth and Victorian governments have reprieved the smelter from a hangman’s scaffold that they themselves built.

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The Portland aluminium smelter, along with Tomago (NSW), Boyne Island (Queensland) and Bell Bay (Tas), is among the nation’s highest value-adding manufacturing facilities.  Aluminium smelting accounts for about 12 per cent of total electricity usage.

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These facilities located to Australia during the 1980s in response to our dependable, coal-based electricity supply, which became  .....Read online

Green Eurocrats threaten our industries

The Spectator, 17 March 2021

     The EU has long sought to impose its carbon dioxide abatement policies on the rest of the world. A major setback to this was the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 where Kevin Rudd sought to play a major role.

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Clearly operating under the EU Commission’s strategy, the European Ambassador in Canberra Australia, Michael Pulch, has been making increasingly aggressive threats to Australian market access. He now says we will face tariffs unless we further lift the penalties we place on the use of the low cost, high CO2 emitting coal that accounts for two-thirds of our electricity generation.

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In recent developments, the EU Parliament has lifted.....Read online  .....pdf

Why did Cormann get the top job at the OECD? His track record shows he won’t upset woke globalists

The Spectator, 15 March 2021

     Having gone to considerable lengths in lobbying for one of our very own, former finance minister Mathias Cormann, to become Secretary-General of the Paris based OECD, the Government — at least the international set – would be very pleased with itself.    

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Unfortunately, the OECD has long outlived its former fervour for economic rationalism: balanced budgets, low tariffs, and small government that leaves competitive free markets to be the essential supply force (with agriculture always an exception given the protectionism of its key European membership).   

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In more recent times it has focussed on decarbonis .....Read online   .....pdf

The Cormann factor

Catallaxy Files, 14 March 2021

     The OECD in times gone by was the spearhead of economic reform promoting smaller government, free trade, dismantling of industry support (with agriculture always an exception given the protectionism of Europe and Japan).

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In more recent times it has focussed on decarbonisation, gender issues (there is a “gender portal” and many lectures about how progress-on-gender-equality-is-too-slow).  The OECD is also – probably always was – a proponent of Keynesian stimulus. The present Secretary General is the Mexican socialist José Ángel Gurría.

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When Matthias Cormann threw his hat into the ring for the .....Read online

No upside for electricity customers in the early closure of coal generators

The Spectator, 10 March 2021

     The announcement that EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power station in Victoria is to close in 2028, two to four years earlier than had been expected, is an inevitable outcome of the subsidies that governments provide to wind and solar. Yallourn supplies one-fifth of Victoria’s electricity and about eight per cent of that in the National Electricity Market.  

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The rapid expansion of wind and solar – all of which is subsidised – has seen their market share lift from virtually nothing 20 years ago, to over 20 per cent.  Because it is subsidised and receives payment even when (as is increasingly the case) wholesale prices are negative .....Read online   .....pdf

If Craig Kelly wants to strike while the iron’s hot…

The Spectator, 28 February 2021

     When he resigned from the Liberal Party last week, Craig Kelly signalled that he would be seeking to highlight the catastrophic consequences of failed energy dogmas. Indeed, he flagged that energy policy was the one area where he could well vote against the government.

Kelly will have his work cut out in assessing what to target among the $7 billion a year multitudinous subsidy schemes for renewables overseen by ministers more intent on placating green activism than restoring a low cost, reliable electricity supply and green activists actually controlling state government policy.

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An immediate issue concerns the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), just one government institution in the energy   .....Read online     .....pdf

A warning on windpower from deep in the heart of Texas

The Spectator, 17 February 2021

     Were the South Australian blackouts in 2016 precursors to those that have occurred in Texas during the past few days?   

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In both cases, an electricity system that has been force-fed with subsidised wind and solar suddenly failed.  The total blackout that was seen in South Australia was more severe than the Texas failure but in both cases wind and solar played a prominent role.  Those renewables normally account for 23 per cent of the electricity in Texas.  This is somewhat less than in South Australia where wind/solar is half of supply but the inherent intermittency of wind in South Australia is cushioned by links to Victorian coal.    

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Texas, without similar such links, saw 98 per cent .....Read online     .....pdf 

No, the climate wars aren’t over

The Spectator, 11 February 2021

     For over a dozen years, shills in the media and among the subsidy-seekers have been declaring the ‘climate wars’ to be dead.  Yet the disputes over policy involving reducing carbon dioxide emissions, having previously dethroned prime ministers Rudd, Gillard and Turnbull, continue to be central to Australian politics. Anthony Albanese has indicated, notwithstanding Jennie George warning about the ALP losing its worker constituency by getting too cosy with the greens, that he will embrace legislation for “net zero” emissions.

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Australia has incurred more costs per capita in suppressing greenhouse gases than other countries.  Major programs for .....Read online     .....pdf 

Pressure is on as developed world champions net zero

The Australian, 4  February 2021

     Energy and greenhouse gas emissions are once again central to political turmoil in Australia.

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The opposition has moved Mark Butler, its most active promoter of the “green revolution”, from climate change and energy policy control but offered no indication that its policy will change. Indeed, Butler’s replacement, Chris Bowen, has warned jobs will be decimated if the nation does not move away from carbon-intensive industries.

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In expressing faith in renewable energy, such views portray a remarkable incuriosity about why all the world’s rapidly growing economies, including China, India and Vietnam, are using coal, not     .....Read online     .....pdf 

Energy prices: the new fault line in politics

The Spectator, 28 January 2021

     Energy has emerged as the clear new faultline in Australian politics. We see today Anthony Albanese is removing his fellow Left faction member Mark Butler from the environment portfolio in a bid to boost not just Labor’s electability, but his chances of survival. Yet the issue is not just a matter for the ALP.

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The Nationals are saying they want to see 800,000 new manufacturing jobs in the next 15 years.  This is less ambitious than at first sight but it would mean over a fifth of new jobs being created in the sector that has seen its share of jobs shrink from 15 to 7 per cent over the past 30 years. 

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The idea is to leverage the jobs from our intrin   .....Read online     .....pdf 

ScoMo runs up the white flag on carbon

The Spectator, 25 January 2021

     It was only at midday Friday The Spectator Australia asked Will Australia face carbon tariffs under the Biden regime? By that evening, the Prime Minister had pre-empted any trade war with an immediate surrender or, as his spin on the front page of The Weekend Australian put it, declaring that the “Politics of carbon has ended“.

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The Biden Administration’s flurry of energy and carbon emission-related measures during its first day have had an immediate effect on Australian policy, with Scott Morrison declaring that political debate about reaching a carbon-neutral future is over.  

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Overturning Trump’s policies, Biden has recommitted the United States to the Paris Climate Accord, rescinded approvals for  .....Read online     .....pdf 

Will Australia face carbon tariffs under the Biden regime?

The Spectator, 22 January 2021

     Day 1 of the Biden Presidency saw the reversal of several of the Trump administration’s environmental policies, including tighter vehicle emissions standards, a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and revoking the permit for expanding and re-routing the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Biden also announced that the United States will re-join the Paris Climate Accord and has previously raised the possibility of a carbon tax.   

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These and other measures are likely to undermine the conditions that have given low electricity costs to many parts of the US and made the US an oil and gas net exporter for the first time in 60 years.   

But as is the case around the world, business in  .....Read online     .....pdf 

Why is so much big business leaning left – and what will it mean for jobs and growth?

The Sepctator, 18 January 2021

     One of the truly remarkable developments over the past half-century is the reversal and the relative flows of electoral funding going to parties of the right and parties of the left.  

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Fifty years ago, parties of the right had a colossal advantage tempered only by support of the left by unions.  In the recent United States election, the Democrats outraised and outspent the Republicans almost to two to one.  Open Secrets adds, “Even when excluding the money spent by billionaire presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, Democratic candidates and groups have spent $5.5 billion compared to Republicans’ $3.8 billion.”  But that is also remarkable in so far as two billionaire candidates were seeking to represent the Democ .....Read more     .....pdf 

Yes, the energy system is broken – but because of ministers, bureaucrats and regulators rush to renewables

The Spectator, 7 January 2021

     Kerry Schott, head of the Energy Security Board, the most senior of the dozen or so Australian regulatory bodies, is scolding state ministers for trying to “speed up” what she sees as an inevitable transition to renewable energy.   

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Schott’s focus on state interventions is a response to the new assertiveness of state government in providing renewable subsidies through power purchasing agreements with renewable suppliers and forcing vast increases in expenditure on transmission and on-grid management.    

But for 2018/19, as shown below, state government subsidies to wind and solar were dwarfed by those from the Commonwe .....Read more       .....Pdf

Doug Anthony, not the Hayseed of Popular Memory

Quadrant Online, 23 December 2020

     For a period of nearly six months in 1979, as the Trade Department’s chief economist, I was seconded to become Deputy PM Doug Anthony’s Acting Principal Private Secretary. Nowadays the position is called Chief of Staff but in those far-off times ministerial staff were only one quarter as numerous as today.  The job meant speech writing and providing briefings on other departments’ Cabinet submissions.

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Anthony himself, though affecting the air of a hayseed, was well read and open to different ideas.  He was appalled at the Whitlam Government’s policy excesses — though the extremism of some of those have been since surpassed by Coalition governments!  Naturally, he shared none of the Whitlam government’s hostility to the mining industry which led it to micro-managing price negotiations, but it was not until the  .....Read more

The state have hijacked power policy – and activists are coming for the sceptic’s seats

The Spectator, 17 December 2020

     State governments have now taken control of electricity policy from the Commonwealth. Although state control potentially allows alternative approaches to be tested and compared, all states currently have similar policies. They are signing purchasing agreements with renewable suppliers and requiring customers to fund the associated transmission, batteries and pumped hydro, which is needed to shore up the intrinsically erratic supply that wind and solar generation entails. Energy Ministers Matt Kean in New South Wales and Lily D’Ambrosio in Victoria are now doubling down on the renewable energy-oriented policies pioneered by South Australia, policies that delivered crippling outcomes in terms of price and reliability.   

The Commonwealth has become little more than a paymaster supporting state measures, with a fire-fighting role to avert or .....Read more       .....Pdf

Adding to our climate change woes, Garnauteconomics is back

Catallaxy Files, 11 December 2020

     Now that they have assured themselves of a Biden victory, the forces profiting from Australian deindustrialisation – the woke and subsidy seekers – are rampant.  The AFR has long benefitted from its renewable energy clients.  Today it featured Garnauteconomics in urging we impose further burdens on the economy by intensifying the assault on modern energy.

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Net zero emissions is the modern clarion call.  Oblivious to this requiring a carbon tax of $190 per MWh tax according to the IEA estimated or $650 per MWh estimated in an NZ government analysis, Garnaut urges us to push ahead with new impositions, saying the

big risk to Australia is that it will be left isolated from its        .....Read more  

Subsidies drain power from the electricity market

The Australian, 2 December 2020

     Last week’s virtual Climate and Energy Summit screened politicians, industry leaders and bur­eaucrats, many of whom have been responsible for destroying the world’s most competitive electricity industry. The sledgehammer has been subsidies through regulations and government spending, which are running at $7bn a year.

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Speakers included US Democratic Party activist Audrey Zibelman, who came to Australia as a refugee from the 2016 Trump victory and is returning as a Google executive to help refill the Washington swamp. Zibelman heads the Australian Energy Market Operator, which she transformed into a policymaking body fostering increased renewable energy supplies by spending $17.4bn on new .....Read more      .....pdf

Will a Biden win put pressure on our power prices – and more – with climate demands?

The Spectator, 18 November 2020

     Australia will face much-increased pressure to increase its greenhouse gas emissions abatement if Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on 20 January next year; pressures that may even encourage us to redefine our economic and political relationships.   

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Biden’s “Climate 21 policies” is his blueprint to reorientate the economy towards the climate-change programs that are central to his political manifesto.  Climate 21 would establish a National Climate Council to move the U.S. and global economy to a low-carbon trajectory. A Biden Administration will rejoin and revitalise the Paris Agreement and will publish a four-year Climate Ambition Agenda containing action plans for “greenhouse gas mitigation”.....Read more      .....pdf

Joel Fitzgibbon’s departure shows the new fault line in Australian politics

The Spectator, 11 November 2020

     Joel Fitzgibbon’s resignation as shadow minister for resources and agriculture and his departure to the Labor backbench is symptomatic of the new fault-line in politics.

 

Belief in catastrophic climate change activates policies for agriculture, energy, manufacturing, product standards, recycling and water – all the way to zoology. Irrespective of the absence of human-induced climate change and climate emergencies – bushfires, hurricanes, coral loss, heat waves etc – alarmists’ control over government institutions, the education establishment and the media has led many people to unquestioningly accept the imminence of harmful human-induced climate change.     ..... Read more    .....pdf

Joe Biden’s Green New Deal is a setback for jobs and income

The Australian, 11 November 2020

     Last week’s was America’s most important election, but it also has profound implications for Australia. The Green New Deal is what most distinguishes the Democrats’ program from that of President Donald Trump.

As Jennifer Oriel has noted, Kamala Harris and ­Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez plan to use energy policy not only to fundamentally reshape the American economy but as a means of redistributing wealth and income to “low-income communities, indigenous peoples, and communities of colour”.

With the Green New Deal, the Democrats’ policy target is ­focused on zero net emissions of CO2. This means eliminating coal and gas and sharply winding back oil consumption. Nuclear power as an alternative has no place. .....Read more  ..... Pdf

Has climate change replaced socialism as the dominant political divide?

Catallaxy Files, 11 November 2020

     With the US Presidential election still undeclared and the ALP joining the Liberals in tearing itself apart on climate policies and support for renewables, I had two pieces published today.

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The first in the Australian (ungated version here) observed how a Biden victory “will bring increased pressure on us to introduce more regulations, subsidies and other measures to reduce domestic emissions. One upshot, aside from higher household electricity bills, will be closure or contraction of Australian industries previously benefiting from low cost energy. A corollary is lower living standards.”

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The second article in The Spectator concluded, “Donald Trump, in renouncing the carbon agenda, was poised to undermine it .....Read more 

Subsidies Blowing in the Wind

Quadrant Online, 29 October 2020

     Victoria Bitter, Bunnings and miner South32 have joined the banks in being the latest to proclaim their carbon free emissions, signalling a certainty, at least from firms’ PR departments, that the future belongs to renewables.  Nations around the world – the latest being South Korea – are committing to carbon neutrality thirty years hence. The triumph of renewables was seemingly underlined by South Australia going from zero to hero. On Sunday 11 October, solar alone powered the whole state for an hour, apparently wiping away the dudgeon renewables incurred by causing a statewide blackout in September 2016.

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With all the creativity involved in finding ways to avoid reporting Hunter Biden’s laptop contents, the righteous within the media ..... Read more  

Read the report on the cost of climate policies and renewables:

Reflections on the cost to thesidies to

How Daniel Andrews added another $400 million to the power bill

The Spectator, 16 October 2020

     The Andrews Government is not telling us but it looks like they’ve lost the taxpayer some $400 million in long term power purchasing
contracts. Only a year ago they claimed they’d made a $285 million
profit on those same contracts.


Last November, Victoria’s Auditor–General’s Office waved through 15-
year contracts signed by the state’s Department of
Environment, Land, Water and Planning for renewable energy. The contracts were on a “contract-for difference” basis, under which a price is agreed and the supplier pays the difference to the government if the spot price is higher, while the government pays the difference to the supplier if it is lower. ..... Read more     ..... pdf

National Water Week reveals a policy drought

The Spectator, 23 October 2020

     This is National Water Week.  Its theme is “Reimagining our Water Future”. Proclaiming water to be one of the seven priority areas for agriculture Minister David Littleproud says “In agriculture it’s a case of just add water”.  In fact, water and infrastructure is the seventh priority behind “stewardship”, a euphemism for climate change.  Stewardship “reforms will empower farmers to diversify their income and earn credits under the $2 billion Climate Solution Fund”. In other words, it offers farmers a chance to earn income by avoiding farming.  

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In an apparent consensus, both the actual and shadow minister for agriculture have endorsed a National Farmers Federation “Roadmap” to almost double agricultural output by 2030. 

..... Read more     ..... pdf

Budget 2020: Government keeps feeding poison to the power system

The Spectator, 10 October 2020

     The budget allocated $8.7 million to assist the Vales Point generator in New South Wales in a $100 million upgrade that is now virtually complete.  The funding is so conditional that it is unlikely to be used, yet the decision has sparked outrage from the wind and solar lobby — a lobby lubricated by $7 billion a year in subsidies, one thousand times that conditionally offered to Vales Point. 

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The subsidies to wind and solar come directly from the taxpayer and, indirectly, from regulations that force consumers unwittingly to accept growing proportions of high-cost wind and solar within their electricity supplies.   

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Even excluding direct taxpayer funding,   ..... Read more     ..... pdf

New wind and solar generation being built in spite of low prices

Catallaxy Files, 5 October 2020

     Why, in spite of a glut, are new renewables still being built?

2020, like 2019, will see $9 billion spent on new (large scale) wind and solar generators. That is over 6 GW in each year (Hazelwood was 1.6 GW but could run for 90 per cent of the time, whereas wind runs at 33 per cent and solar less).

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An apparent anomaly is that, though the Commonwealth’s Large-Scale Generation Certificate (LGC) subsidy for wind and grid-supplied solar continues to be paid to existing supplies, it is not abvailable for new supplies.  It is capped at 33,000 GWh, a level which will be surpassed by supply reaching 40,000 GWh in 2021. New supplies can only get a Commonwealth subsidy by buying out existing facilities.

Even so, the Clean Energy Regulator expects new supplies  ..... Read more

A Fool’s Bargain Trades Gold for Green

Quadrant Online, 28 September 2020

     Australia’s green-ink profligacy is evident in great abundance in Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s First Low Emissions Technology Statement – 2020, grandly proclaiming “global leadership in low emissions technologies”. Masquerading as a technology fix to all our problems in ‘decarbonating’ the economy, it contained hand-outs from the Australian taxpayer for worthless returns.  It:

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  • offered funding for researchers into the ever-elusive modern Philosophers’ Stone, energy (and not the nuclear version) from hydrogen.

  • promised even more subsidies to capture and bury carbon dioxide from burning coal and gas.

  • said how essential it is to provide more funding for   ..... Read more

Ms Zibelman Pulls the Plug

Quadrant Online, 3 October 2020

Audrey Zibelman, the American head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), one of the electricity industry’s four national regulators, is to leave before her contract expires to join a Google startup.  The other national agencies regulating the industry are the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the Australian Electricity Market Commission (AEMC) and the Energy Security Board (ESB).

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Zibelman’s announced departure was not accompanied by universal praise.  One significant electricity industry player, Danny Price, the head of Frontier Economics, has long been dismissive of her understanding of how markets work best.  Though not hostile to her stance in support of renewables, Price said, “I think it is time that we have a respected, competent Australian engineer running AEMO, not  ..... Read more

Inside the federal by-election you may not have heard about

The Spectator, 25 September 2020

     Due to the impending Queensland state election, there has been little discussion about the federal seat of Groom, which is now vacant following the resignation of John McVeigh.  Centred on Toowoomba, Groom is a seat which the Coalition had a 70-30 two-party preference at the last election. 

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Matt Canavan is said to be mulling over the switch from the Senate and relocating his family 600 kilometres down the A3 from his home in Rockhampton.  Though the candidate would be ‘Liberal National’, if he did contest the seat, he would be pressured to sit in the Liberal rather than the National Party room, though he could insist on a Nat filling his Senate vacancy.  

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Canavan is said to be unwilling to switch to the Liberals but doing so would suit his purposes if he is to make a future run at the prime ministership.   

 

In this respect, Henri de Bourbon comes to mind. A Protestant, he was offered the French throne in 1593 conditional on him becoming a Catholic. “Paris is well worth a mass”, he allegedly said. Crowned King Henri IV a year later, ruling with “weapon in hand and arse in the saddle”, he oversaw a ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Bludgeoning the electricity industry corpse: the government’s technology policy

Catallaxy Files, 23 September 2020

     Compounding the further retreat from a rational energy policy that the government announced last week, this week the government announced the curiously titled ‘First Low Emissions Technology Statement’.

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The statement flags further interventions in energy supply and elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I have a critique of the policy proposals in the Spectator, The low emissions technology statement: a (hydrogen) bomb.  Essentially, the Statement involves an $18 billion ten-year program of support for:

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• R&D and energy funding, the highlight of which is funding hydrogen R&D, the “stretch” goal of which is get hydrogen at $2 per kilogram in order to displace fossil fuels; even if achievable this would price hydrogen at over $16 per gigajoule, three times the cost of the natural gas it is supposed to supplant!
• Measures, costing at least $15 billion, to ameliorate the adverse effects of high cost and unstable wind and solar, now comprising 15 per cent   ,,,,, Read more 

The low emissions technology statement: a (hydrogen) bomb

The Spectator, 23 September 2020

     Matt Canavan’s lucid insights published in the Australian this week show how little understanding politicians and officials have of the electricity industry where supply must exactly equal demand and into which they have “force-fed” intrinsically unreliable, high cost renewables.  This created a Frankenstein made more monstrous by every additional piece of tinkering.    

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Yesterday’s Low Emissions Technology statement and announcements last week show the government pursuing a further iteration of its tragic energy policy.  It is sinking the industry deeper into a morass of central planning and control conditioned by carbon dioxide mitigation.  

Angus Taylor now defines policy as resting on five pillars: clean hydrogen; energy storage; green steel and aluminium; Carbon Capture and Storage; and soil carbon projects.  It is supported by $1.9 billion in new expenditure commitments.   

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All of these pillars can only exacerbate the migration of the electricity industry from the low-cost competitive energy which created present living standards.  The new agenda maintains the ascendency of raucous climate activists and venal renewable energy subsidy seekers in replacing cheap .... Read more     ..... pdf

This week’s big energy announcements? Just another nail in the coffin of low-cost power

The Spectator, 17 September 2020

    The government’s energy policy announced this week is another milestone in the demise of what was once the world’s lowest-cost energy market. The slow fuse priming the bomb was lit in 2001, when Prime Minister John Howard Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) requiring electricity retailers to include two per cent of exotic renewables (wind and solar) into their electricity supply.  This gave a 50 per cent subsidy – paid for by customers — to these renewables.    

At that time renewables were confidently forecast to be fully competitive within a few years.  Twenty years later wind and solar still require assistance to compete with fossil fuels and their further shortcomings of variable power supply have become more evident.  

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But policy augmentations from John Howard’s modest interventions mean wind and solar are now are responsible for over a fifth of demand.  And the MRET subsidies remain in place, compounded by additional support in the form of assistance for transmission, grants and soft loans –- in all, the equivalent to $13 billion a year.  Aside from this cost, these measures bring about highly volatile prices –- especially in the current COVID-abnormal era.  

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Moreover, by forcing coal generators to operate uneconomically with stop-start operations both increasing overhead expenses and adding to wear and tear, government interventions have raised costs for those generators, which remain the dominant sources of supply.  This is making them  ..... Read more     ....pdf

Can democracy survive an increasingly biased media?

The Spectator, 16 September 2020

     The ACCC is seeking to force Google and Facebook to pay for the media content they redistribute which has led to their capturing the advertising revenue that previously went to newspapers.  The issue is ostensibly one of bargaining imbalance but behind it is the notion that social media is undermining a vigorous free press.  

 

The struggle for freedom of expression was not one of “the people” but one of what we would today call the liberal elites seeking to promote their political preferences.  It developed in England and in 1640 the press became free, allowing the Puritans to campaign against the Crown.  Having executed the king, the Puritans quickly reimposed censorship in 1643.  This lapsed 50 years later and in what would become the United States, de facto press freedom was formally established in a 1734 trial fronted by Alexander Hamilton; it was enshrined in the First Amendment in 1791.  Many other nations have adopted this, mostly without practicing it.  

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Most people, especially the press itself, see unbiased freedom of reporting as a buttress against tyranny.  Objectivity in newspapers, however, only emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century due to advertisers coming to dominate the media’s finances and generally seeking that  ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Governments have made this recession worse. They can’t now impede recovery

The Spectator, 2 September 2020

     A 7 per cent fall in GDP during the June quarter is pretty much to have been expected. Led by spending falls on transport (down over 80 per cent) and in cafes (down 56 per cent), household spending was down 12 per cent.   

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But there is no shortage of demand – the household saving rate has shot up from 6 per cent to nearly 20 per cent. Though precautionary saving is doubtless a factor, people have limited opportunities to spend their money rather than being short of funds.

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The consumption foregone in the recent quarter is lost – and further losses will be recorded during the current quarter. And there will be lasting changes in demand, including a permanent dip in demand for office facilities, which will require building modifications and adaptations.  Nonetheless, the crisis has not impacted the fundamental production base of the economy — its facilities and skills. Left to itself output will mend and do so quite rapidly – the high pent-up savings, low interest rates will help considerably in this respect. ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Biden’s handlers track away from lunacy in energy policy

Catallaxy Files, 1 September 2020

     Joe Biden’s new claim to be in favour of law and order is not the only area where the Democrats are tracking away from the radical left.  Among the crazy policies that the Democrats have been promoting (with disastrous consequences in California) are a conversion of the US electricity system to wind/solar even faster than Australia’s.

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I touched on Biden’s energy policy in the September edition of Climate News.

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In May, Biden announced a Dream Team of climate advisers co-chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “the avatar of the Green New Deal”, and John Kerry, architect of the Paris climate accord.  One former adviser not included is Hillary Clinton’s presumptive Energy Secretary, Audrey Zibelman who, since Turnbull fingered her to head the Australian Energy Market Operator, has been mustering new regulatory accretions for electricity in the Australian National Market.

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The Dream  Team, which also included Rep. Kathy Castor, the chair of Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, seemed to presage  .....Read more

We can still have a V-shaped corona recovery. Here’s how

The Spectator, 11 August 2020

     The shutdown in Victoria is devastating the state economy retarding the national recovery.

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The data on which to assess the actual downturn and longer-term national costs is confusing.

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Measured GDP has seen a reduction of only 2.75 per cent.  But this is largely a consumption-based measure and has been underpinned by JobKeeper/JobSeeker payments that represent borrowing from the future.  Such payments unsupported by production cannot continue for long in spite of the hopes of Modern Monetary Theory supporters and the illusions of leftists who think the economy produces irrespective of government measures.

A better measure of reduced output is the number of hours worked, which are down 9.4 per cent.  This is imperfect because, on the one hand, largely unproductive public sector employees have been unaffected and, on the other hand, so also have the most productive jobs in mining, agriculture, processing industries, telecommunications and finance.

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In terms of costs that have been imposed, government supporting actions will have increased debt by some $330 billion.  The average Australian ..... Read more

How a Premier should shoulder the burden of office

The Spectator, 3 August 2020

brooding%20premier_edited.jpg

We can but wish…

“It’s only fair”, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said as he announced that he and his Cabinet would work for no payment over the course of the Phase 4 Shutdown he’d just introduced.

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“Backbench MPs and their staff, who like a million other Victorians are unable to go to work, will surrender their salaries and accept the same JobSeeker payment as other workers no longer able to earn a living.  We are seeking to introduce the same conditions for all state public servants other than those in ‘front-line’ positions performing services that are even more critical in these troubling times.”

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The Premier continued, “As a government, we believe in equally sharing the pain that we, as decision makers, have visited upon the state as a whole.  And the measures will assist in alleviating some of the costs to the economy stemming from these actions.”     ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Confucian wisdom

The Spectator, 28 July 2020

     The International Energy Agency is just another international agency that Australia finances in order to receive advice that, if taken, would cripple the economy. At the latest Clean Energy summit, IEA’s agitator-in-chief Fatih Birol continued to push for a COVID 19 recovery with its central theme involving substituting high cost renewable energy for coal.

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In its coverage of the summit, RenewEconomy, one of many Australian wind/solar energy propaganda publications, applauded Birol’s call for an expedited closure of all Australian coal plants.   

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Birol does not stop at exhorting his flock to stop building new coal fired power stations but urges a decarbonisation program for the existing ones as well as for steel plant, cement factories and other emission-intensive facilities. Mentioning carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, he described finding the technologies to do this as “big homework”. Big homework it is! For coal, the massive Australian government spending on CCS – including bankrolling the highly secretive Carbon Capture and Storage Institute – would deliver electricity at three times the cost of existing High Efficiency  ..... Read more      .....pdf version       

Sorry Alan, but Modern Monetary Theory is a load of cobblers

The Spectator, 20 July 2020

     Alan Kohler considers the current crisis provides the ideal laboratory for applying the catchily titled Modern Monetary Theory — MMT.  He sees this as a paradigm change whereby the government just keeps spending money with little concern for debt in order to maintain employment.  He considers this to be a modern version of the stimulus to counteract a downturn, one that goes much further than policies favoured by Keynesian economics.   

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Keynesian economics is a prescription for ironing out the peaks and troughs in an economic cycle.  It would never have achieved its current popularity had it been seen as the permanent stimulus that Kohler advocates.  Even in its pure form it had become discredited in bringing about “stagflation” in the 1970s rather than its intendedeconomic recovery.  And in the Global Financial Crisis in 2007, Australia recovered not from the wasteful Kevin Rudd/Ken Henry stimulus policy of “Go hard, go early, go households” but from a genuine increase in demand brought about by the booming Chinese economy. 

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Keynesian policy prescriptions as advocated by Keynes himself, at least in his later years, contra Rudd/Ken Henry, involved investment spending to provide a platform of higher future incomes.  The problem with this is that government is likely to be wasteful its allocations and such ..... Read more     .....pdf version

On the Road to Ruin for no Good Reason

Quadrant Online, 12 July 2020

     This week’s announced closure of New Zealand’s only aluminium smelter presents the shape of things to come for Australia. Aluminium producers gravitated to these shores, attracted by some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. Those prices appeared to be sustainable, founded as they were on extensive low-cost and well-situated coal resources.

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A wake-up call might have been the closure six years ago of the Port Henry smelter near Geelong. Although an old facility, no suggestion of it being replaced was entertained.  Already, with carbon taxes and governments determined to reject coal in favour of subsidising high-cost and unreliable wind, the bounty of new, world-class new aluminium smelters had become a history lesson.  

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Things have only grown worse. 

Australia’s energy politics, in the form of subsidies and other favours to renewables — constantly punted as being on the cusp of being competitive with coal or gas — have left our own remaining smelters requiring government assistance to stave off bankruptcy. Hence, we have government subsidies in place to counteract the damage done by other subsidies!

Australia’s energy interventions come in three flavours:

1 Direct Commonwealth and state payments to renewables and vaunted new sources, with hydrogen ..... Read more

Do we want to follow St Jacinda and price our industry out of existence?

The Spectator, 10 July 2020

     Rio Tinto’s announced closure of its aluminium smelter in New Zealand due to uncompetitive power prices this week is a reminder of the vulnerability of Australia’s four remaining smelters, all of which face sharply higher prices courtesy of government energy policies.  With energy costs comprising about a third of their total costs, smelters are industry’s bellwethers of future energy competitivenessand all four of Australia’s are on national suicide watch.  

As a result of subsidies to wind and solar, these expensive and unreliable energy sources have caused high customer costs, both directly and indirectly, while also diverting the nation’s investment resources into avenues that actually damage the economy.   

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Commonwealth and state subsidies to wind and solar energy are running at just under $7 billion a year.  $4 billion of these are as a result of requirements imposed on consumers by the Commonwealth’s Renewable Energy Target and its similar provisions for roof-top installations and measures taken by state governments.  Some $2 billion of assistance to renewables comes from direct subsidies.    

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The effect of these subsidies is compounded by their forcing out of production lower-cost coal generators.  As a result, prices ar ..... Read more     .....pdf version

Albo’s Claytons climate policy switch

The Spectator, 24 June 2020

     In the media today, we see two contrasting ALP position papers, by Kevin Rudd in the AFR, and by Anthony Albanese in a Press Club address pre-released to some media outlets.  

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Kevin Rudd, in ranting against “the faceless men of the factions” claims among the ALP successes that, “We ratified the Kyoto Protocol, (in 2007) legislated a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target now delivering 20 per cent clean energy, and legislated twice for a carbon price only to be defeated by the Liberal-Green coalition”. 

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Rudd’s measures accelerated the trend to subsidised wind and solar, the upshot of which became clear in 2016. At that time, the increased market share of difficult-to-control intermittent generation finally forced the departure from the market of two very significant coal generators, the Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria. The upshot was first, the collapse of the South Australian electricity supply system, demonstrated the vulnerability of a system that is dependent on renewables, and secondly the doubling of the wholesale costs of electricity.     ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

A Democracy if We Can Keep It

Quadrant Online, 18 June 2020

     In an AFR column, former Liberal leader Alexander Downer has reprised a conversation with the late Lord Carrington in which Britain’s one-time Home Secretary suggested democracy would struggle to survive. It was a view Downer rejected at the time but of which he is not now so sure.  I have visited this theme in the past – for example here, here and here — and in these times of madness, when popular movements demand the sacking of entire police forces and an incident in Minneapolis sees statues of Captain Cook vandalised in Australia, I return to the theme with a marked degree of pessimism.

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The reverence for democracy arose only over the last a century or so. Prior to then, rule by consent – especially with regard to taxation – had been common, as affirmed in 1215 by Magna Carta. But that did not mean rule by the people.  The great Greek philosophers were acutely aware of the deficiencies of mob rule in Athens, and American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century were similarly concerned that the gentle tyranny of King George could be replaced with something much, much worse.  Their belief was in life, liberty and property.  John Adams wrote:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty … The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

..... Read more

Like it or not, Australia needs Donald Trump

The Spectator, 18 June 2020

     It is difficult to imagine a more critical juncture in Australian history: 

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  • We confront a world downturn, accompanied by a new kind of cold war between the United States and China,  

  • Our international protector, the US is going through a crisis of confidence, if not a populist revolution, that is engulfing the rule of law while within the Democratic Party, younger progressives and socialists are displacing moderates.  

  • Australia’s helicopter money, response to COVID-19 has further damaged an economy weakened by decades of punitive energy and environmental regulatory measures undermining its comparative advantage in manufacturing, agriculture and mining. At the same time, these productive sectors have been carrying an increasing burden of social services. All this is compounded by the military folly of selecting politically correct soldiers and hardware.  
     

President Trump right now is trailing by 13 points in the polls.  The constellation of forces creating this are the virulently hostile Democrat establishment, pushed further by the rising influence of its younger green left, supported by anti-capitalist organisations like Sunrise and Antifa.  They also include the Never Trumpers who preferred the corrupt Clintons and now acquiesce in a Democrat candidate under radical  ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Coronavirus: We can’t spend our way to wealth

The Australian, 11 June 2020

     In addressing the effects of the pandemic lockdown, the Morris­on government has injected $84bn under the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs and another $688m for home renovations. The Reserve Bank of Australia has, in addition, engineered cheap loans of at least $90bn, and possibly much more.

Though sometimes referring to these measures as a stimulus, the government would deny it is going down the same path as Kevin Rudd, who spent $200bn attempting, ineffectually, to combat­ the global financial crisis.

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A justification for this generous support is that shutdown polic­ies causing workers to be evicted from their jobs were taken in the national interest. But now we face an economic slump.

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While the federal bureaucracy, and Treasury in particular, is full of credentialed economists, they are, for the most part, Keynesian — and therefore to counter a fall in output they prescribe demand stimuli through government spending, or tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts.

 

A minority would have been schooled in Friedman’s monetar­ism and would favour creating phantom savings, which depress ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop

Quadrant Online, 9 June 2020

     Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an archaic source of electricity now being battered by upstart competitors wind and solar. Bear in mind that world electricity supply pans out at 38 per cent for coal, 23 per cent gas and 26 per cent hydro/nuclear. Wind/solar supply 10 per cent.

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IRENA tirelessly advocates for renewables, saying they “could form a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” And in the purple prose so common with these green-spruiking agencies it claims, “Scaling up renewables can boost struggling economies. It can save money for consumers, pique the appetites of investors and create numerous high-quality new jobs.” Investment in renewables is amplified by other benefits, the story goes, as it is alleged to bring “health, sustainability and inclusive prosperity.” When it comes to renewables, no snake-oil salesman of old could hold a carbon-neutral candle to the likes of their modern green-lipped urgers.

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IRENA would have us see renewable power installations as a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 ..... Read more

Is a COVID based slump causing an energy policy re-think?

Catallaxy Files, 2 June 2020

     I have a piece in the Spectator this morning that builds upon the challenging commentaries by Senator Canavan and Craig Kelly calling for termination of subsidies to renewables and leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  These measures, and those earlier under the Kyoto Accord, drive up energy costs and are destroying manufacturing which would be flourishing under the low energy costs we could have.

Some in the ALP, especially Joel Fitzgibbon representing a coal mining seat, also agree.

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Australian electricity supply has, in the course of 20 years, moved from just about the cheapest in the world to one of the most expensive.  The present relative position is indicated by this graph. ..... Read more

If we want to rebuild manufacturing post coronavirus, we need to cut the cost of energy

The Spectator, 2 June 2020

     In one of the most challenging commentaries by a senior politician, former resources minister Matt Canavan, advocates leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia has agreed to take actions that will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  He argues that Australia cannot afford to meet the treaty obligations which require replacing electricity generated from coal by expensive wind and solar. The subsidies this requires drive up the cost of energy and, with our high wage economy, prevents us having a vibrant manufacturing sector.  

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Steep electricity price increases have undermined the nation's ..... Read more 

 ..... pdf version

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Energy policy disaster continues; more intervention, less market

Catallaxy Files, 21 May 2020

     The Commonwealth keeps pressing policy issues that, on the one hand, dilute the spending egregiously allocated to renewables but then divert it to the failed carbon capture and storage (CSS) adventure and to the highly speculative unleashing of cheap energy from hydrogen.  It released a report of an activist-stacked and serviced committee chaired by Grant King that promoted this, as well as inching the nation closer to a cap-and-trade emission reduction program.  I wrote this piece for The Spectator yesterday.

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In a new initiative, the government has again appointed another committee of people who are wedded to the green energy revolution to advise on new gee-wizz tech issues.  It will get the answers it expects to get and embark on another spending spree.

The government has also provided yet another “road map” compiled by the environment department for a grateful minister. This favours gas (which it says is cheaper than coal – an absurd statement regarding Australia) and the colossally expensive pumped storage option.  Like all previous reports it predicts the dawn of an era when renewables will be the cheapest form of energy but does say they need to be “firmed” by attendant supplies of controllable energy (hence gas and pumped storage).      ..... Read more

Why is the Morrison Government leaving the back door open to a carbon tax?

The Spectator, 20 May 2020

     As part of the ABC’s climate conspiracy agenda, Four Corners this week highlighted the “anger” at the government from the senior mandarins from its failure to deliver their goal of a carbon tax.  Their preferred approach was notwithstanding the tax rate would today have to be $US100 per tonne, a staggering $80 billion a year impost.

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Also unmentioned was government action on the chimaera of climate change that presently costs over $4 billion a year in regulatory and direct funding. Included in this are regulatory requirements to support wind and large-scale solar (at a cost this year of $1.1 billion) and rooftop solar which this year is costing $1.7 billion.   

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There are two components of the Commonwealth’s Climate Solutions Package of direct spending budget on emission reductions.  The first is a “$2 billion Climate Solutions Fund to support Australian farmers, businesses and communities to adopt new technologies that reduce ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

Gassed-Up and Light-Headed for Hydrogen

Quadrant Online, 11 May 2020

     There can be no doubting the reversion of businesses’ political advice to self-interested advocacy, in contrast to the glory days of 40 years ago.  At that time there was a strong push for deregulation, but industry leaders have since backslid into promoting their particular interests, seeking subsidies (especially for energy) and, not unrelatedly, virtue-selling to deflect NGO criticism and its associated damage to share prices. I have a piece in The Spectator that addresses this.

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The advice from businesses and their representatives is now best politely ignored.  Firms willvirtue-signal but in acting on the advice they proffer – usually focussing on calls for some form of carbon tax – they face the test of the marketplace.  As I note, business success is dominated by iron laws of profit. Those leaders who implement measures that veer too close to the quicksands of virtue-signalling will be swallowed by it.

In today’s AFR, the superb Joe Aston illustrates this by focussing on Rio Tinto which, having sold its coal interests, has recently assumed the pole position among the climate alarmists. Rio is, with Shell and BHP, dominant among the international Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) which this month has     ..... Read more

Whatever happened to economic leadership from business?

The Spectator, 11 May 2020

     Having reached the pinnacles of their profession, business leaders have earned the right to speak with authority and have become accustomed to having that authority recognised. Their success stems from mastering the intricacies of their own firm: what to buy and sell, how to make savings, what product innovations to adopt and so on. But these skills rarely metamorphose into political leadership – indeed Donald Trump might be unique in this respect among world statesmen.     

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A key reason for this is that business leaders have one overriding goal, maximising the wealth of their shareholders, whereas political success measures are diffuse.  

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Not having time to master wider political issues, business leaders tend to relate national interests to those of their firm, immortalised as “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”, in the (misquoted) words of a former GM president.  Beyond this, business leaders    ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

The COVID lockdown and spendathon – was it worth it and what is to be done?

Catallaxy Files, 7 May 2020

     I have a piece in Quadrant where I estimate the person-years lives saved in Australia at 80,000. Each person-year is worth, on the government’s data, $219,000, hence saving is quantified at $17 billion.

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The cost in outlays and lost production I estimate at $235 billion, fourteen fold the benefits in lives saved.

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If however the initial health experts estimates of likely deaths without a lockdown had proved accurate the value of the lives saved would have been $526 billion, ostensibly far in excess of the costs incurred.

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But we have to be wary of applying these high values per life saved in the context of very large numbers since costs per person become increasingly unaffordable as the numbers to be saved increase. More importantly, we have to have a better fix on health projections than one that, in this cas ..... Read more

The Lockdown Strategy Called to Account

Quadrant Online, 7 May 2020

     Writing in The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen has pointed out that the statistical value of life used in regulatory assessment is $4.9 million for someone expected to live another 40 years — $213,000 per year  Such measures are income-dependent; in the US the value was put at $9 million and a 2012 study for Turkey put it at five and a half years per capita income or $59,000. Such measurements offend self-righteous claims that “every life is priceless” but such notions, if followed, would impose costs that would bring about other and additional loss of lives.​

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While Albrechtsen’s column is written in the context of coronavirus expenditure, she does not extend it to examining the worthiness of..... Read more

Revealed: the true cost of our stimulus spending

The Spectator, 7 May 2020

     Relative to GDP Australian government spending to address COVID-19 has been among the highest in the world.

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The Morrison government seems pleased to have been a world leader in mortgaging the future to combat the crisis.  Its package, totalling $320 billion, comprises five elements: 

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  • The PM’s initially announced health spending $2.4 billion 

  • JobKeeper and JobSeeker business support $168.78 billion 

  • Credit support$125 billion 

  • Access to superannuation$0.876 billion 

  • Income support$23.839 billion 

..... Read more                    ..... pdf version

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A COVID-19 economic recovery program

Catallaxy Files, 23 April 2020

     While the green left will use the crisis to march us to lower living standards and greater losses of liberty, the Commonwealth Government is making the right noises about reducing the tax and regulatory measures that have held us back.  But do they know where to start?

The tax reforms are easy: pare back company taxes and other imposts on production.

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I offered some advice in regulatory refom in an article published in the Spectator.  These regulatory sins comprise areas where real economic dividends can be made, collectively greater than the losses by the Commonwealth’s generosity with our savings and future incomes.  These are

  • Strip Back the Fair Work Commission’s functions to become similar to those in other jurisdictions: oversighting issues of unfair dismissal and human rights abuses etc.

  • Align land regulations for new housing development with those in Germany and US States like Texas, the Carolinas and Ohio, thereby reducing the cost of a new home by $200,000.

  • Curtail the creation of new national parks and address other land use measures that prevent farming, mining and logging in vast tracts of  ...... Read more

Scott, Josh and Mathias: here’s how you get us out of this mess

The Spectator, 22 April 2020

     The Morrison government has flagged tax cuts and aggressive deregulation as part of a pro-business road to economic recovery. A focus on stimulating rapid growth on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic is expected to guide October’s federal budget. — AAP report, April 20.

Future government action must focus strongly upon savings as a result of the 15 per cent of GDP ($340 billion) that has been spent on combating coronavirus.   

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Fifty years ago, the Commonwealth budget accounted for 18.3% of GDP. In the years since then, even before the current spending spree, the share had grown to 24.6%. Right now, with an extra $340 billion budgeted, the share of GDP will have become 35 %.   

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The nation’s phenomenal intrinsic wealth allowed Australia to prosper in spite of the growing claim on income by a largely     .....Read more     .....pdf file

Green Snouts Sniff a COVID Windfall

Quandrant Online, 16 April 2020

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     The Pope, deprived of the counsel of Cardinal Pell, the Church’s most astute voice, foolishly called coronavirus “nature’s response” for failures to act on climate change. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that coronavirus would be recruited to push for additional renewable energy subsidies to reinforce those that have already created today’s high cost, low quality electricity.

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Coal Wire, an anti-fossil fuel publication, was quick to swoop on a Harvard study that said the pollutant PM2.5 exacerbated coronavirus and that coal power stations were an important source of the pollutant.  Actually less than 5 per cent of PM2.5 particulate emissions come from energy production.

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Also fast out of the blocks was the anti-fossil fuel head of the Paris based International Energy  .....Read more

Does the Morrison government have the skills to lead us out of the recession it has created?

The Spectator, 16 April 2020

     The $320 billion in costs the Australian government has incurred to sustain and stimulate the economy in light of the COVID-19 crisis is money spent for consumption without it attracting any corresponding production. It is a permanent loss that can only be retrieved by increased production. Two areas where reform could compensate for this loss of revenue are the cessation of wasteful spending and regulations in water and energy, where total savings of $50 billion are available.

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But in addition to these direct savings, removal of these regulatory and taxpayer costs would unleash even larger productivity benefits in the two sectors.

For water, in Australia’s most important irrigation area, the Murray Darling Basin, the government’s actions in buying up 20 per cent of irrigators’ water for spurious environmental purposes has brought a tenfold increase in the water price, and hence its cost to farmers. At least $7 billion could be saved by the government reselling the water it holds to irrigators and recalling the funds yet to be spent.

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In addition, the economy would make other gains. Water is an essential input to agriculture and the increased output restoring ..... read more      .....pdf version

ScoMo’s gone as crazy as Kev, but we can still save the economy

The Spectator, 2 April 2020

     When the Prime Minister and Treasurer appointed Stephen Kennedy as the Treasury Secretary, they opted for a bureaucrat who had been the architect of Turnbull’s potentially disastrous carbon tax. They would also have known him to have been a senior adviser on Kevin Rudd’s exorbitant spendathon following the 2008 global financial crisis.

 

Unsurprisingly, the Secretary of the Treasury recommended that the government implement a “Full Rudd” coronavirus program, suggesting the British approach was insufficiently stimulatory.  Ministers need little encouragement to embark on spending sprees but in times past Treasury used to be a brake on their ambitions. 

 

Australia’s spending now totals $320 billion. At 14 per cent of GDP this is a magnitude similar to that of the UK program, though larger than that of the US at least fivefold that of Japan, Canada, Korea, Norway or New Zealand. Commonwealth spending programs go well beyond maintaining the nation’s businesses and sustaining those who are unemployed and extends into Keynesian economic stimulus territory. The stimulus effect will be ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Emergency Measures in Need of an Exit Strategy

Quadrant, 25 March 2020

     It started with Mirko Bagaric in The Australian — “Release super to boost economy” — who, while justifiably railing against the superannuation funds’ fees, argued that allowing people to access 10 per cent of their super could inject up to $300 million into the economy.  Mirko has separately suggested that the actual amount might be $150 billion.

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Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has accepted a watered-down version of this, which he thinks might inject $27 billion into the economy by allowing people to access $20,000 of their superannuation savings, interestingly, over two years, an indication that the malaise won’t be over soon. This is part of the fiscal package which is now at $189 billion. That’s 9.7 per cent of today’s GDP but considerably more down the road, with GDP contracting by maybe 20 per cent.

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Much of the expenditure, that which seeks to cushion the costs to those worst affected, is sensible. But, even so, there has to be be an exit strategy.  We have doubled the dole, for example, but when do we return it to previous levels?

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Some of the money is conjured up by the Reserve Bank, which is buying shares and bonds to depress interest rates.  This “quantitative easing” ..... Read more

Revealed: the Deep Green State

The Spectator, 24 March 2020

     A story in the Guardian demonstrates the impotence of government against the Deep State machinery that it nominally controls.

 

This involved an attempt, in line with government policy, to divert money from the Emissions Reduction Fund to less harmful activities than efficiency-undermining promotion of green energy that it normally funds. The case under review was an attempt by Delta Energy to get some $14 million support for refurbishing its Vales Point plant, an outcome that would extend the plant’s life (and incidentally reduce its greenhouse gas emissions). The Guardian notes that “energy baron” Trevor St Baker is a part owner of the plant.

 

The Emissions Reduction Fund was set up by the Abbott Government following its election in 2013. Its Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, was an avid promoter of “direct action” which involves buying out firms’ greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing emissions by taxing coal. In fact, buying out emissions simply funds canny firms who can offer a good story, while providing negligible effects on total emissions, since the cashiered production ..... Read more     pdf version

Danandrewstan: two steps forwards, one step back as energy security matters more than ever

The Spectator, 18 March 2020

     The latest energy policy from the Victorian government is to place a constitutional ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration but once again permit the search for conventional gas in the state.   

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The proposed policy was developed in consultation with an industry/activist Independent Stakeholder Advisory Panel. The panel was chaired by the Lead Scientist, Amanda Caples, a pharmacologist, who was previously responsible for developing the state’s “strategic industry growth plans”. In announcing the policy, the Premier said it was “a science-based approach”. Presumably, he had in mind political science. 

The exploration bans were first implemented in 2012 by the Coalition government under the then minister for energy — and now opposition leader — Michael O’Brien. For the Coalition back in 2012 seeking to blunt opposition from green radicals, a ban on new gas supplies seemed like good cynical policy. 

 

There were ample supplies of Bass Strait gas and some farmers opposed gas exploration, with others wanting more  ..... Read more          pdf version

How to Make Things a Whole Lot Worse

Quadrant Online, 17 March 2020

     Deaths from coronavirus were up yesterday (March 16) on the previous day. Although death rates lower than one per cent are being quoted, the macro data (deaths/deaths-plus-recoveries) is 8 per cent, and 15 per cent in Australia (see the chart below).  Hopefully that will improve. Otherwise, if Angela Merkel is correct in estimating that 60 per cent of humankind will eventually contract the disease, we can expect over 300 million deaths.  Tomas Pueyo’s brilliant analysis suggests a death rate levelling off at 3-5 per cent for countries or areas that are unprepared, but one-tenth of this for those quickly identifying and isolating those affected, and intensely treating the 20 per cent who develop the most serious symptoms.  Among the latter are South Korea and China outside of Wuhan, the coronavirus’ origin and epicentre.

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Despite an inevitably horrendous death toll the world will recover, leaving the virus as just another background killer, like its garden-variety cousin influenza.

For the present, the world is now in a very deep economic depression.  There is no shortage of consumer demand but the basis of that demand, income from the supply of goods and services, has been or soon will be sharply curtailed. ..... Read more

Coronavirus: Pump-priming is economic folly

The Australian, 17 March 2020

     In normal times we have a healthy disdain for the insights and capabilities of our political leaders. In Australia, the commentariat has just emerged from agendas that blamed them for not acting fast enough to combat the bushfire crisis — even having contributed to it — and from looting taxpayer funds to curry favour with voters in the sports rorts saga. In the US, half the population thinks their President is so corrupt that he should be placed on trial.

Yet suddenly, with the coronavirus crisis, politicians and their advisers are thought to have powers and the wisdom to turn back tides and lead us out of the wilderness.

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The US is focused on stopping the spread of the disease, finding a cure and easing the discomfort of those afflicted. Britain, like Australia, has added measures to assist business with investment support. .....Read more             pdf version

The Coronavirus stimulus package: not just another trip down the Swanee?

The Spectator, 12 March 2020

​     We have mixed messages on coronavirus: Angela Merkel has said 60-70 per cent of Germans will contract the disease, while the latest data from China and South Korea shows new cases having peaked and, in the case of China, recoveries closing in on new cases.

 

Aside from spending on health precautions and seeking to staunch the spread, what do governments do? 

 

The Trump Administration is talking about ensuring those thrown out of work are looked after financially – the equivalent of community action in medieval plagues when stricken villages were isolated but fed by those nearby.  In a rare flash of economic lucidity, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the government should focus on guaranteeing paid sick leave for infected workers and extending unemployment insurance for people put out of work.  But Trump is also urging the Federal Reserve to embark on a financial stimulus. 

 

Australian politicians look likely to avoid panicky measures involving economic stimulus. Hopefully this means they have learned from past ..... Read more

The last thing we need now is more costly climate virtue signalling

The Spectator 10 March 2020

     Desperate to attend the September 2020 Glasgow climate change summit with a positive program, the Coalition government continues to promote, at the expense of national living standards, elitist-appealing measures that force lower greenhouse gas emissions. 

 

The new elixir is to boost investment in CO2-free hydrogen technologies which, if not mystical, hardly require funding from Australian taxpayers.  New support measures add to the $1.5 billion annual funding of a bewildering acronymic gaggle of institutions (including CEFC, ARENA, CER and CSIRO) and at least $2 billion in subsidies to wind and solar.   

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The Glasgow meeting is the third phase of climate change programs.   

 

The first phase was established by the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, in which rich nations pledged to stabilise their emissions.  Although only ..... Read more

Toilet paper shortages – why is Australia not a net exporter?

Catallaxy Files, 7 March 2020

     It was a relief to learn that Australia is 80 per cent self-sufficient in toilet paper and there is, therefore, no need for panic buying.

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But hang on a minute.  First, that 80 per cent is for a market that has suddenly grown – perhaps doubled.  So, there may indeed be a shortage.

What should be more worrisome is that Australia is only 80 per cent self-sufficient in an industry sector which we should be a massive net exporter.  We actually import 50 per cent more wood and paper products than we export.

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In days of yore, governments were always looking for value-added industries that could leverage off our natural advantages.  Because we had cheap energy and bauxite, we were world leaders in aluminium production and this led to fantasies that we’d become a key part of the global supply chains for industries like automobiles (engines) and – I kid you not – for windmills (blades).  Governments sank considerable funding into these ventures.

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They were doomed by the labour market arrangements that, with the connivance of governments and the legal system, have priced Australia .....Read more

George Calombaris gets done like a dinner

The Australian, 14 February 2020

     George Calombaris is a victim of the Australian regulatory state. The failure of his restaurant businesses has been greeted by a mixture of schadenfreude that a tall poppy has been exposed for having cheated his employees, and tut-tutting for not being sufficiently alive to the regimen under which his industry’s labour hire regulations operate.

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In between, there have been pointed remarks about how other miscreants — for example, the ABC — have not been subject to the indignation that a commercial operator has faced for not having paid his staff in accordance with the labyrinthine government-specified rates.

There are three points that better describe what has taken place.

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First, other than in the context of the highly regulated labour arrangements that cover the Australian hospitality industry, there was no fraud involved. The employees agreed on a package of wages, hours and other responsibilities; they were for the most part seasoned workers ..... Read more     .....pdf version

One Word: ‘Klobuchar’

Quadrant, 14 February 2020

     When the US Presidential polls had the triumvirate of Biden, Saunders and Warren (above) vying for the November 2020 date with destiny, President Trump was sitting pretty. As the poll leader, Biden was a known quantity.  He was showing his age in mangling words, he had a legacy as an Obama failure, was an insider in an era when this is poison, and had a son who had benefitted immensely from his patronage and protection in getting paid handsomely for a job in Ukraine for which, aside from his father’s political clout, he was utterly unqualified. He would have been crushed by Trump’s relentless pressure as the campaign progressed.

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Elizabeth Warren adoption of far-left socialist ideas combined with a fraudulent invention of indigeneity would have likewise been a victim of Trump’s acidic bluntness.  Trawling the depths of wokeness (“reparations for gay couples”) she would have ended the campaign humiliated.

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Bernie Sanders has never pretended to be anything other than a Communist sympathiser.  He encapsulates the anti-Americanism that is ..... Read more

How the rise of environmental politics is threatening traditional allegiances – and world trade

The Spectator, 10 February 2020

     Some 172 years ago Karl Marx opened the modern era of politics in proclaiming that a spectre was haunting Europe. The spectre he referred to was in the title of his “Communist Manifesto”. 

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Marx was talking in the context of the series of political disturbances in major European capital cities in 1848.  He interpreted these as bookending the ancien regime, the evolution from which had been brutally signalled in 1789 with the French Revolution and perhaps even back in 1649 when Charles I paid the price for his “high crimes and misdemeanours”. Marx saw the events of 1848 as presaging revolution and a new era of peace and prosperity where private property would be abolished and income would be earned “by each according to his abilities” and apportioned “to each according to his needs”.     

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The shift to the modern state had been and continued to be evolutionary and founded on individual private proper..... Read more          pdf version

Old Globe

Capacity Investment Scheme hog-ties nation to energy woes
The Spectator, 9 December 2023

   Market regulation is designed to modify the outputs of, and inputs to, goods and services. In doing so, they will not only cause higher costs and prices but also bring unanticipated distortions that require additional regulations that normally magnify cost increases.

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Nowhere is this more apparent than with regulations placed over the Australian electricity market and the expanded subsidies envisaged under the government’s recently announced Capacity Investment Scheme.

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Electricity is the building block for modern production and human comfort. It involves the cost of generation, the cost of transporting it.

..... Read online   .....pdf

The broken water politics of the Murray Darling Basin
The Spectator, 25 November 2023

   Twenty-five years ago, initiating a pattern that is now commonplace, a group of radical environmentalists calling themselves scientists launched a campaign to re-allocate water, then being used in agricultural production, to the ‘environment’. The claim was that agriculture, and especially irrigation, was causing environmental stress through salinisation of the soil and erosion.

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As usual with such activist claims, the facts showed them to be totally baseless. There is no serious soil or water salinisation in Australia other than that which occurs naturally. Moreover, it is ludicrous to suggest that farming is causing soil stress when both farm productivity and farm output has increased steadily for two centuries. A Parliamentary Committee examined the matter and agreed with that conclusion.         ..... Read online   .....pdf

Labor cannot escape blame for economic woes
The Spectator, 17 November 2023

   The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Read demonstrated how Australia experienced a sharp reduction in living standards during the third quarter of 2023, an outcome not seen within the OECD as a whole.

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Productivity is the key to income levels and it has been falling in Australia. Real output per hour worked, following a brief post-lockdown recovery (the red line below) on the latest data (the June quarter of 2023), was over 7 per cent below the average level at the March quarter of 2022. The widening gap between wages (the blue line below), which continues to grow, albeit sluggishly, and productivity is unsustainable. Inflation is inevitable with such a gap.      ..... Read online   .....pdf

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The Paris crowd
The Spectator, 07 November 2023

   Last month, the Paris-based OECD published its latest assessment of the Australian economy.

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Nobody read it other than those people paid to do so. And it did not, and could not, better inform anybody of desirable future directions because all it did was repeat the bromides and policies that Australian government departments – mainly the Treasury – served up. Those policies were eagerly accepted by the OECD report writers since they are cadres in the same group-think team.

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Predictably, the OECD assessment recognised a problem with the Australian government’s fiscal deficit. But, just as predictably, ..... Read online   .....pdf

The Bowen delusion
The Spectator, 30 October 2023

   Both the ALP and the Coalition, ostensibly as a means to reduce national emissions of CO2, espouse wind and solar supported by regulations and financial subsidies.

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As well as causing increased taxes, disadvantaging coal means higher energy prices across the board. Political leaders fail to explain this – often because they don’t understand why prices rise.

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Governments prefer consumers to refrain from asking where these price rises come from. After all, when it comes to energy, the government is acting in the interest of the consumer. Allegedly.

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John Howard’s original regulation, 20 years ago was to force electricity     ..... Read online   .....pdf

Chasing idiocy: how subsidies power our energy price hikes
The Spectator, 24 October 2023

   If we looked at the picture for Australia in the mid-90s, the electricity industry was massively overstaffed and the gas industry was dissipating the wealth that Exxon had discovered in Bass Strait.

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In the case of electricity, Victoria led the way, and one simple figure illustrates the benefits brought about by privatisation and the introduction of competition. Generation Victoria was the monopoly supplier. Prior to reforms, which were ironically initiated by socialist Premier Joan Kirner, it employed 25,000 people; by the early 2000s, the numbers employed, including consultants and contractors, were under 3,000. At the same time the output, in terms of the power stations’ availabilities to run, had lifted from somewhere in the mid-70 per cent.    ..... Read online   .....pdf

Albanese’s heavy-handed government
The Spectator, 7 October 2023

   The contrast between the ALP’s most successful government – the Hawke-Keating government – and that of Mr Albanese is easily recognisable. By and large, Hawke led a party that had transformed itself from the wreckage of the previous Whitlam government’s dalliance with extreme socialistic policies. Mr Albanese leads a government that is a reversion to the Whitlam policies cloaked in more modern green-imbued garb.

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The government led by Bob Hawke set about to differentiate itself, not only from the socialism of Whitlam, but from a Liberal/National Coalition that had not deviated from a path involving government increasingly constraining business operations.     ..... Read online   .....pdf

Labor in office: time to take stock
The Spectator, 28 September 2023

   The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Energy Minister were supposedly somewhat trained as economists, but all three fail to grasp the discipline’s basic principles.

 

Energy Minister Bowen claims that his renewables program will create 60,000 jobs by replacing ‘legacy’ coal plants with wind and solar facilities plus the increase in power lines and batteries that replacement will entail.

 

While increases in jobs (and/or income levels) may result from the services stemming from government spending, Mr Bowen’s numbers refer to the gross jobs involved in the construction activities  ..... Read online   .....pdf

Unexpected costs
The Spectator, 17 September 2023

   Manipulated estimates of Levelised Cost of Energy tables showing wind and solar to be the cheapest supplies of energy are contradicted by the trends on actual electricity costs and inter-country comparisons.

 

The readily available data by country for the wind and solar renewables share and price of electricity show a high share of renewables is concomitant with high electricity costs. The cheapest electricity is found in the nations with the lowest renewable energy share: Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, UAE and Korea. Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy have high prices and high renewables shares.     ..... Read online   .....pdf

The RBA’s Cock and Bullock Climate Myth
Quadrant Online, 8 September 2023

   In recent years, getting promoted to the most senior ranks of the bureaucracy has been conditional upon the candidate being either immersed in the ruling polity’s ideology or proving willing to subordinate “frank and fearless” advice to political pragmatism. Those climbing to the top in economic or environmental policy areas have had to assure their political masters they are on board with human-induced catastrophic climate change and that wind/solar (and the hydrogen fantasy) are the only antidotes. 

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Michele Bullock showed this in titling her first speech as governor-designate as, “Climate change and central banks”. Her previous public statements made no mention of the issue. These included this before the Senate and this in June (when she had her hat in the ring), ..... Read online  

Spinning the myth of Global Warming for corporate gain
The Spectator, 25 August 2023

   Although in 2011, the Commonwealth Budget papers compiled all the measures that were being implemented to foster renewable energy, that assembly ceased, presumably, because it was recognised as being antipathetic to the notion that wind and solar were cheaper than the fossil fuels that they were destined to supplant.

 

The myth of human-induced global warming has always been a mixture of scientific chicanery and businesses, seeking to leverage a competitive advantage over their rivals.

 

For scientists – at least those in the public sector – global warming provided the opportunity to be listened to by politicians and the public, to attend international gatherings, and be shown the respect they felt was previously lacking.     ..... Read online     .....pdf

The onset of bankruptcy: from green to red
The Spectator, 13 August 2023

   CSIRO'S GenCost analysis, which gives cover to Ministerial actions to replace coal and gas with wind and solar, has been revealed as a series of factoids that make wind and solar energy appear cheap because the infrastructure required to transport it, the storage required to firm it and its subsidies are all just assumed to be costlessly in place.

 

​here are also growing grassroots concerns about the collateral land use and environmental damage to rural and suburban communities from the wind and solar farms and their associated transmission lines.

 

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has plans to increase regulatory imposts on energy and extend them to Industry, the Built Environment, Agriculture and Land, Transport, and Resources.  ..... Read online     .....pdf

Global Boiling: Net Zero hysteria catches fire while Greens meltdown
The Spectator, 3 August 2023

   UN Secretary-General António Guterres has declared ‘the era of global boiling has arrived’. Australia’s Teals and Greens no doubt eagerly grasped at the ‘terrifying’ words.

 

Greens Senator Nick McKim went into a state of peak catastrophism when he said, ‘Shut your mouth! People are dying because of … sociopaths like you.’ It was a comment directed toward Matt Canavan. He was swiftly asked to withdraw the remarks. ‘I withdraw, and I’m not going to cop interjections from sociopaths like Senator Canavan. I will not cop it and I won’t…’

 

The invective attests to blind adherence to the ideology of human-induced climate change that is failing to occur and  ..... Read online     .....pdf

The $10 billion cabal of renewable subsidies killing coal
The Spectator, 24 July 2023

   A t this time, the attack on fossil fuels, particularly coal, is at a crescendo. In North America with the dishonestly named Inflation Reduction Act and the European Union with its Green Deal, key government institutions are doubling their efforts to subsidise renewable energy and force the closure of coal.

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In Australia, we are seeing similar trends spearheaded by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, a man whose political conceit is only exceeded by his apparent incompetence in the role. Bowen was the man who, as Immigration Minister in the Gillard government, announced that stopping boats bringing illegal immigrants to Australia was impossible. He remained unchastened when the Abbott   ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Treasury’s Warmists Chill the Prospects for Growth
Quadrant Online, 18 July 2023

   W e have seen big government and woke financiers working hand in glove over recent years to advance the cause of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG). Superannuation funds have been increasingly orientating their investments towards ESG. The governance part involves avoiding firms with boards and senior executives containing too many white males and, therefore, inadequate ‘diversity’. The environmental and social parts once meant avoiding firms in the defence and tobacco industries, but the pariahs in our modern woke world are avoiding hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil.

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When the Bank of England released its support package for firms facing difficulties due to the Ukraine war, it insisted that firms   ..... Read online    

Why Dutton needs coal not renewables or nuclear
The Spectator, 8 July 2023

   Y esterday, Opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to embrace nuclear power to secure a clean, cost-effective, consistent electricity supply. 

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Dutton is right to be concerned that the government’s policy of replacing coal-fired plants with renewables will end in a disastrous shortage of power.

 

Dutton’s proposal is to replace coal-fired plants with small modular reactors that are on the drawing board in the US, UK, and elsewhere. By locating the new nuclear reactors in existing coal-fired plants, they can tap into existing transmission lines. 

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There are a number of problems with this, but first ..... Read online    ..... pdf

The failure of forced transition despite public lust for green energy
The Spectator, 1 July 2023

   T hroughout history, interactions of supply and demand have driven ‘transitions’ – think horses to cars and trains; whale oil to paraffin; transistors, resistors, capacitors to microchips. Uniquely, the much-flaunted energy transition from coal, oil, and gas to wind and solar and perhaps to green hydrogen is politically propelled, resting on a supposed link of climate change from burning hydrocarbons.

 

In Australia, as in the US with its so-called Inflation Reduction Act and the EU with its European Green Plan, expelling hydrocarbons from the energy supply has become the central dimension of politics itself.

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Ostensibly, this is curious since environmental      ..... Read online    ..... pdf

Jumpin’ Jack Flash: gas joins the ‘lexicon of evil’
The Spectator, 26 June 2023

   I n 1990, at the dawn of climate alarmism, it was welcomed as a bridge to the zero-carbon fantasy that was to avert a fruitless search for a ‘Planet B’ – billed as the only alternative to decarbonising. Per unit of energy, gas, after all, has only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal.

​

 

But a political Group-Think by all major Western leaders (post-Trump) favours net neutral emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between 2030 and 2050. This has raised the ambition of the leading cadres and is impacting on politicians. New vistas for closing off the use of hydrocarbons are being probed. Gas has become no longer half-way acceptable.      ..... Read online    ..... pdf

World Bank woes
The Spectator, 19 June 2023

   T he World Bank has a great cosmopolitan air to its name – not like one of those parochial institutions like the US Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank. This is the world organisation.

​

However, the World Bank turns out to be just another Woke UN institution. Its original rationale was to provide long-term loans to foster infrastructure in third-world countries. Water, energy, and health were major disbursement areas.

​

Nowadays any energy funding would exclude hydrocarbons. Indeed ‘sustainable development’ and ‘transition’ are key objectives – both are, of course, code for replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Nuclear is excised from the Bank’s vocabulary.     ..... Read online    ..... pdf

Slowing down environmental craziness
Spectator, 10 June 2023

   P ressure to replace controllable and low-cost coal and gas with an intermittent and high-cost wind and solar alternative continues, but there are increasing signs of unease with this policy. Some of this may stem from a growing recognition of the implausibility of the government’s claims that the ‘transition’ to wind and solar will be both smooth and cost less when finished.

 

For many, a compromise that will give a secure electricity supply without carbon emissions is nuclear. This, though far more expensive than coal as a source of electricity, is safe and, being controllable, is cheaper than wind and solar. 

 

The problems with nuclear include the long    ..... Read online    .....pdf

The Rise and Riches of the Rentrepreneurs
Quadrant Online, 5 June 2023

   C WP Renewables Pty Ltd presents as a story of successful entrepreneurship for which its owners have been rewarded with fantastic profits. But that outcome has been accompanied by a huge cost to the community.

​

The company, established in 2007, has been mainly involved in wind farm developments with giant Swiss holding company Partners Group, which also contributed a chunk of equity capital. Aside from some potential ‘blue sky‘ projects involving solar, wind and batteries, CWP’s main assets were five windfarms with 257 turbines erected between 2016 and 2020 at a cost of $1.72 billion. The turbines were financed by the Commonwealth’s CEFC green energy bank ($233 million), and Partners Group    ..... Read online    

Political and corporate defeatism
The Spectator, 26 May 2023

   C harles Mackay’s 1841, titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has enduringly served to refute claims of collective wisdom. He described events like Dutch tulip mania and the 1711-22 South Sea Bubble as frenzies of collective investment hysteria.

​

In the modern era, every decade or so we have seen more such investment delirium, including the build-up to the 1929 Wall Street crash with lesser events like the 1970s Poseidon mining boom/bust and the 2007 collapse of US leveraged housing funds.

​

In all cases, investment frenzies ramped up share prices to stratospheric levels. Lessons have not been learned. The next debacle will centre on

   .... Read online     ..... pdf

Upshots from politicians delivering more free stuff and regulations
The Spectator, 24 May 2023

   T he forerunner of democracy – a post-medieval one-man-one-vote – was propelled by radicals seeking greater freedom of trade, speech, and religion in the face of vested interests and intolerance.

​

Building upon gains in these areas, radicals promoted greater equality – first of incomes (by compulsory takings from the better-off) and subsequently augmenting this with regulatory measures on economic activities. At a later stage, some special privileges were extended to previously disfavoured racial groups. In this latter respect, people, at least in Western nations, are probably more accepting of non-mainstream race, religious, and sexual preferences than in any previous era.     
.... Read online     ..... pdf

Recessions are bad news for super funds
The Spectator, 11 May 2023

   T he Commonwealth budget surplus stems from the nation’s resource assets, and to a lesser degree its agricultural strengths. But, rather than fostering these advantages, Australian governments are focused on negating them.

 

For agriculture, this is seen in ever-mounting land-use restrictions and in the Commonwealth’s intent on stopping the live sheep and beef trade.

 

The resources industry faces even greater environmental-based curbs on new proposals.

 

The Commonwealth Environment Minister, Tanya  .... Read online     ..... pdf

Energy: drowning in subsidies
The Spectator, 6 May 2023

   P aul Broad, the former head of Snowy Hydro, resigned amid, according to the Australian Financial Review, an escalation of tensions with Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Broad did not comment on his reasons for resigning. In a recent interview with 2GB,  he said ‘it will take 80 years not 8’ to transition to renewables. He seems to claim we need this transition, but I do not believe we do. Most political leaders are deaf to such views, which swim against a tide of activist enmity and businesses searching for subsidies.

​

You can’t. And the truth is, we need this transition. If it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. So there’s massive changes need to occur. And I’m deeply concerned about the rush. The notion that somehow     .... Read online     ..... pdf

Australian productivity growth lowest in 60 years
The Spectator, 25 April 2023

   L ast month the Productivity Commission (PC) revealed that Australian productivity growth on the decade to 2020 was the lowest in 60 years. Mining and agriculture were the most efficient sectors, though productivity gains in some services – like medicine and digital services – may be hidden because of improved quality.

​

 

To avoid antagonising the dominant political ideology, with masterly understatement, the PC opines, ‘…abatement efforts could, in many instances, increase the cost of production and could put downward pressure on measured productivity, at least in the short term.’ The PC makes stacks of recommendations for improvement, including some that could raise productivity by freeing up investment  .... Read online     ..... pdf

Two cheers for democracy!?
The Spectator, 19 April 2023

   T wo cheers for democracy! So wrote E.M. Forster speaking for the Bloomsbury set, the affluent intellectuals who were the leading ‘Wokes’ of the 1930s. ‘Two cheers’ was a half-hearted acclamation of a political outcome that, at least in the England in which they lived, had neither delivered government shorn of Victorian traditionalism nor advanced sufficiently along a socialistic path.

 

The Bloomsbury set would be more pleased with ‘diversity equity inclusiveness’ slogans that have been adopted by today’s professional elites and become omnipresent in all but a handful of democracies and in nations where Islamic politics dominates.     .... Read online     ..... pdf

Australia’s ‘green energy’ chimera
The Spectator, 12 April 2023

   T he government has asked the Joint Committee on Trade and Investment Growth to inquire into ‘Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower’. It wants ideas on how to accelerate growth in sectors covering renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles, and so on.

 

The inquiry attracted 125 submissions. A few submissions, like that of the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), pointed out that the proposal rests on the case for reducing human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide but that there is no scientific proof that this would have any significant effect on our climate. And, the non-Western world is not going down that same path, with the consequence that the de-carbonising economic suicide into which the West is sleepwalking, can     .... Read online     ..... pdf

The unsafe Safeguard Mechanism

The Spectator, 28 March 2023

   A nd so, the Greens have joined the ALP in imposing additional carbon taxes on the top 215 greenhouse gas emitting firms. In passing the so-called Safeguard Mechanism, the voluntary program that the Coalition originally introduced is converted into a requirement on the nation’s top mining and industrial firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Those emissions are said to be 137 million tonnes a year. Their curtailment builds up to constitute 40 million tonnes a year. This is in addition to abatement measures already in place, which confer a subsidy on wind and solar, that has enabled those energy sources to displace a quarter of the supply formerly provided by coal.

 

One way to meet the new reductions is by      ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Slow rolling crisis or banking wildfire?
The Spectator, 23 March 2023

   The world’s leading funds manager, BlackRock, has argued the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) may start a ‘slow rolling crisis’. This may be so but, at this point, bank share prices have stabilised (Chinese banks have even seen their share prices increase).

 

SVB was only sixteenth in terms of size within the United States. Yet it, and the smaller Signature Bank, were bailed out by the Biden Administration, ostensibly on the basis that their failure would cause contagion across the system. Perhaps, as many have conjectured, other factors, including SVB’s important role as a lender and bag-holder to the speculative tech industry, may have helped its path to salvation.   ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Silicon Valley Bank: doomed to fail?     
The Spectator, 15 March 2023

   The basic question to ask about the collapse of the $200 billion Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is, why did it take so long for such a collapse to occur?

 

The root cause of the bankruptcy is the vast increase in US government spending, which, like that of other governments, was not accompanied by matching increases in taxation. Inevitably, the outcome of that is an increasing money supply monetary policy. And the corollary of that will always be an increase in inflation.

 

When the US Federal Reserve started to combat the excessive supply of money it did so by the only way available – buying up debt – ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Australia: suffocated by regulation and raided by greedy politicians     The Spectator, 8 March 2023

   Gary Banks in The Australian notes how government regulatory measures are destroying our vital comparative advantage in energy supply and promoting inefficient labour relations practices, while spending splurges have brought no improvement in outcomes, especially in health and education.

​

Years of over-regulation and excessive spending have been pushed even higher by Labor. The Commonwealth Government has to maintain the momentum of carbon abatement by massive new regulatory impositions on the major carbon dioxide emitting firms and forcing consumers to fund new spending in the transmission lines for wind and solar.
..... Read online     ..... pdf

Climate change: short on proof, drowning in nonsense

The Spectator, 27 February 2023

   The environmentalist creed in context

 

Environmentalism, more particularly its prevalent global warming strain, dominates politics. It is the fourth such banner raised by the disgruntled that has conditioned politics since Medieval times.

 

Earlier eras saw politics underpinned by a struggle against government taxation which in the anglosphere can be marked by Magna Carta (1215), the English Civil War, and the American War of Independence. France experienced the ‘Fronde’ in 1648, which placed restraints on the king’s ability to levy new taxes, eventuating in the French Revolution a hundred and forty years later when the king was forced to convene a Parliament to seek    ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Is coal making a comeback? Australian mining’s uphill battle  The Spectator,  19 February 2023

   Coal supplies a quarter of the world’s energy, oil and gas account for a half, and renewables – in spite of vast subsidies everywhere they are built – comprise just 7 per cent.

 

While Germany is being ridiculed for re-opening coal mines, even tearing down a wind farm to do so, it is claiming this is only a temporary departure from its decarbonisation transition.

 

Such assurances are not being given by the fastest-growing developing nations.

 

Indeed, Bloomberg reports, regretfully, that coal is making a comeback

     ..... Read online     ..... pdf

Climate ruminations: the markets reject Chalmers

The Spectator,  13 February 2023

   Combatting the perceived incidence of global warming is driving government policies. In Australia this has been obvious for many years, but for the ALP it was clarified by the publication in the Monthly of the Treasurer’s philosophy on the need to remake capitalism. Jim Chalmers claims this is necessary because energy policy cannot be left to genuine market forces when we need to combat the effects on the Earth’s atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels.

 

That rests on the theoretic construct that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is likely to take place in the next 50 years, is causing about a 1 to 1.5°C warming and Australia, with 1 per cent of emissions, can be instrumental in stopping this. Most experts     ..... Read online     ..... pdf

"Chalming" no-one:  Labor rommances communism
The Spectator,  29 January 2023

   Jim Chalmers is proving to be the most iconoclastic Treasurer since the Whitlam government’s Jim Cairns, a man who only joined the Labor Party after his application to join the Communist Party was rejected. Cairns spearheaded a previous assault on conventional capitalist economic theory and, like Chalmers, sought to borrow, spend, and regulate the nation into prosperity with fairness. Both Chalmers and Cairns came into politics with doctorates in economic history – that of Chalmers was a hagiography of Paul Keating, whose policies he now wants to reverse.

​

Like Cairns, Chalmers faced a budget crisis but was unable or unwilling to make the expenditure reductions necessary to rectify this.

   ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Energy chaos: the shape of things to come

The Spectator,  25 January 2023
   Australian governments have made energy policies focused on achieving higher shares of renewable energy that they claim is the cheapest source of power. The Commonwealth government is planning for renewables to reach 82 per cent of supply by 2030, while the Liberal Party’s plan is for 85 per cent by 2050 and 61 per cent by 2030. State governments have additional plans. In pursuit of these goals, governments around Australia are being sucked into a vortex requiring ever-increasing controls, while seeing mounting cost increases.

​

Subsidies that amount to $6.9 billion per year have propelled wind and solar, which had virtually no market presence 20 years ago, to their current market share of 27 per cent. The CSIRO and other    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Inquiry into Australia's transition to a green energy superpower

Submitted 22 November 2022

The inquiry seeks advice on how Australia can “transition to a green energy superpower”.

The Inquiry mentions a number of areas in respect to the “transition”, including:
• where trade and investment activities are already having a positive impact; and
• emerging and possible future trends.

It further seeks advice on how government agencies can assist in identifying opportunities and in assisting and subsidising new investment. It has particular interest in how activities can be assisted in areas the government has determined to be prospective. These, it says, include renewable energy, battery storage, energy supply and infrastructure, electric vehicle industry, infrastructure; advanced manufacturing, and services and technology.

​

The Australian Environment Foundation notes multiple failures where industries designated by governments as being highly prospective have received favourable treatment from tariffs or support through financial assistance. None have succeeded. Some of these have been in the areas now, with little supporting evidence, once again being re-affirmed as worthy of support.     ..... Read the submission here

The Old Man’s Tale

by Viv Forbes


 

 

The council man was adamant:
“The Law must have its way,
The shed you built is not approved
It must come down today.”

 

“No doubt the shed is safe and strong
And no one has complained,
But plans and rules must bind us all
Or anarchy will reign.”

​

The old man clenched his horny hands,
He gripped the planner’s arm,
Then changed his mind and led him out
To look around the farm.

​

“You see that shed” the old man said,“With shingle roof and wattle wall,With no advice from coots like youMy Grandpa built it all.”

“He came out here from Birmingham
With no help from the Crown,
Without a passport or a card
He sailed to Sydney town.”

 

“He got himself a riding horse
Bought cows and found a dray,
But sought no travel permits
As he left for Moreton Bay.”

 

“There were no maps to guide him
Once he left the city blocks,
And flooding of the Richmond
Cost him half his mob of stock.”

 

“But when he got to Moreton Bay
A sickness swept the place,
So Grandpa saddled up again
To see a safer base.”

 

“For weeks he struggled northwards
Thru the bush and hostile blacks,
Until he reached a mighty stream
Which stopped him in his tracks.”

“The soil was deep and fertile
And the flats were green and lush,
So Grandad thought he’d squat a while
He had no need to rush.”

 

“He cleared the scrub and dug a well
And found himself a wife,
He brought her to that wattle shed
To start their married life.”

 

“Then rangers tried to take his land
(For squatters rights were spurned.)
My folks were forced to sell their stock
To buy the land they’d earned.”

 

“My Pa was born in that old shed
He worked to earn his land
‘Twas he who built the homestead
And no planner lent a hand.”

 

“The sweat of generations
Feeds parasites like you,
And now you tell us builders:
‘This shed will never do.’

“With subtlety and cunning
You have nibbled at our rights,
You’ve taxed away our substance
So now we cannot fight.”

 

“But this is where I draw the line
And I won’t be alone,
So if you try to smash my shed
I’ll fight for what I own.”

 

“So clear off or I’ll clout you
Do not bother us again,
Take all your forms and files and fees
And shove them up the drain.”

 

The planner started shouting
But old Nigger bit his leg.
He cleared the fence, and yelled a threat:
“When next I come you’ll beg.”

 

The wreckers came next morning
But the neighbours got there first.
They stood six deep across the gate
And bid them do their worst.

Before the planners could react
Before the police could call
The old man’s son, a barrister,
Restrained them with the law.

 

He quoted laws and precedents,
He combed the ancient books,
He tied the council up for months
In writs and counter suits.

 

By then there were elections
And the old man led a team;
They sent the planners packing
And restored the builder’s dreams.

 

Once more a man could build a shed
Without a planner’s chit
And no one could invade his home
Unless he had a writ.

 

The planner got an honest job
The red tape was undone,
The Old Man got a Knighthood
His mighty fight was won.

Collapse of the $35 billion Sun Cable

The Spectator,  16 January 2023
   Last week saw the collapse of Sun Cable, a pie-in-the-sky $35 billion plan by alternative energy enthusiasts, Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes, to generate solar energy and transport it by cable 4,200 kilometres to Singapore. The taxpayer provided $14 million for the project’s solar system, Australian-developed 5B. But major spending, which amounted to $210 million before Andrew Forrest pulled the plug, came from the two entrepreneurs.

 

Last week also saw Energy Minister Chris Bowen release his consultation for the disarmingly named Powering the Regions Fund. A centrepiece of this was weaponising the ‘Safeguard Mechanism’ from the emission reporting requirement that the Coalition  ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Dark money

The Spectator,  11 January 2023
   Recent years have seen a strengthening dominance of politics over individual and commercial decision-making. This is readily evident in the growth of regulations and government spending increasing from under 20 per cent of the economy a century ago to around (and over) 50 per cent today.

 

Within democracies, these developments are due to electorates demanding income redistributions and tolerating increased national debt – oblivious to the adverse effects on their own future living standards. There are very few political leaders of stature like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Margaret Thatcher, or Donald Trump who seek to persuade voters of the folly of such demands. Most opt for.    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Batteries not included

The Spectator,  29 December 2022

Renewable energy battery farms threaten to cripple the economy with cyclic costs
   The replacement of fossil fuels (and nuclear) by wind and solar is said to be a ‘transition’ implying, like that from sail to steam and horse to motor power, that this is being inexorably pushed by consumers adopting a lower cost technology. In fact, the ‘transition’, wherever it is taking place, is due to government subsidies and regulations. Not one significant unit of wind or solar power generation anywhere in the world has been installed without such assistance

 

Moreover, a wind/solar-rich electricity system requires expensive features that are naturally present or available at a trivial    ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Chris Bowen’s rendezvous with bad ideas

The Spectator,  22 December 2022
   Back in July 2022, Chris Bowen the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, launched the latest CSIRO electricity costs report which says wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity supply. He said, ‘This underlines the need for Australia and the world to invest heavily in renewable energy sources to put downward pressure on power prices.’

 

He continues to call for eliminating coal and gas in Australia, claiming this is necessary to prevent harmful climate change. Climate change was the focus of his September address to the American Australian Association. He said 80 years ago, ‘Curtin and Roosevelt had a rendezvous with destiny. Our job is to avoid a rendezvous with  ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Energy collapse: it all begins with a market cap

The Spectator,  14 December 2022
   Thousands of years of experience – from the ancient Babylonians and Roman Emperor Diocletian, through to modern times – have demonstrated how price controls prevent the allocation of scarce goods to their most valuable uses, lower short-term production, and cause investment to seize up.

 

The inevitability of such outcomes is lost on Australia’s political class. Politicians, egged on by self-interested and socialists, are once more embracing price controls that were abandoned in the 1980s when the Hawke-Keating government accepted market prices stemming from supply and demand as the most efficient means of running the economy

..... Read online  ..... pdf

ESG: climate virtue bleeding super dry

The Spectator,  7 December 2022
   B usiness, where the profit motive is explicitly dominant and where the hundreds of millions of direct and indirect owners want to see it remain the crowned ruler, might be expected to reject spending that syphons off profits to political causes… And yet, nearly every firm funnels funding to politically acceptable causes, in the main involving those of a social and environmental nature.

 

Sometimes, pressured by governmental regulatory stances, like the soon-to-be mandatory reductions on the top Australian emitters, a growing number of firms also engage in expenditure that replace fossil fuel derived energy with more expensive wind and solar. Also important is the avoidance by superannuation fund managers of ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Dan enters the pantheon of ‘great’ leaders

The Spectator,  28 November 2022
   N ow the hurley burley’s done, and Dan Andrews is in the pantheon of the state’s great leaders, it’s time to see what Victorians voted for.

​

Like other electorates in the Western world, Victorians proved themselves to have a large appetite for government spending. The Lib-Nats joined Labor (and, of course the Greens) in proposing big increases in hand-outs. For Labor, these included subsidies for electricity, travel, kindergartens, and ‘infrastructure’.

​

But, reflecting voter preferences for free stuff, Labor was reticent in approving tax increases to cover these increases. These election gifts therefore (as did the Liberals’ offerings) add to the ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Victoria’s looming energy disaster

The Spectator,  23 November 2022
   A centrepiece of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ campaign is to renationalise Victoria’s privately owned electricity businesses. He claims that the private owners have scammed ‘$23 billion in profits off pensioners, families, and businesses’.

​

The state’s electricity assets, previously managed by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) were sold under the Kennett government in the 1990s. Kennett inherited a near-bankrupt state.

 

The SECV had been a drain on government finances due to its excessive levels of staffing. Over-staffing is a hallmark of ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Our retreat from rational economics

The Spectator,  16 November 2022
   In today’s world, government spending accounts for up to and (in the EU) over 50 per cent of GDP – Australia’s at 38 per cent may be understated due to it being a federation. In the 1920s, no significant government spent more than 20 per cent of its nation’s GDP (federal spending in America and Australia was 4 per cent 6 per cent respectively).

​

 

Sovereign debt is now well in excess of 100 per cent of GDP in most EU countries, America, and Japan – Australia’s is 57 per cent. Until 100 years ago no state went into debt except to combat an existential crisis – indeed few states had the creditworthiness to do so.

 ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Greta and her green-communism

The Spectator,  8 November 2022
   Many breathed a sigh of relief when Greta Thunberg announced she was not going to attend COP 27 Climate Change meeting which is now underway at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The COP process is a ‘greenwashing scam’, she explained.

​

It seemed that the girl, although not even having reached the age of 20, had already emerged from the catharsis of teenage simplistic idealism. Was she having doubts about promoting a goal of dubious worth at a cost that is unknown but without a scientific breakthrough is incalculably high? Seemingly so, and that corroborated the notion that at a coming of age (historically at 21), she reached a maturity society expects of each emerging generation to take balanced judgements ..... Read online  ..... pdf

Andrews’ Leninist approach to power

The Spectator,  24 October 2022
   Last week, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews paraded his inner Lenin. He attacked Victoria’s privately owned coal generation businesses, claiming that they have taken ‘$23 billion in profits off pensioners, families and businesses’ and announced that they must be effectively driven out of business by state-owned alternatives.

 

Those facilities were sold to the private sector during the 1990s.

 

Jeff Kennett and his Treasurer Alan Stockdale pushed through the privatisations, which netted $11 billion for the   ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dirty dependency: superannuation and ESG

The Spectator,  21 October 2022
   Condemning those who have glued themselves to roads to create chaos, the (now former) UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman hit out at ‘the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, Wokerati anti-growth coalition’. Her indignation about the economic damage caused by climate radicals is warranted, but she said nothing about the economic harm stemming from the fund-manager/governmental institutional wing of the anti-coal climate alarmists, which uses the Environment Social and Governance (ESG) pastiche as cover for its control aspirations.

​

Indeed, as she was speaking the Bank of England..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dead-weight drowning productivity

The Spectator, 14 October 2022
   Productivity growth is the key to income growth – we can’t have the latter without the former. A matter that has troubled many economists in the Western world during recent decades is a slowdown in productivity growth. 

​

Australia is typical. Multi-factor productivity – the overall return on labour and capital inputs combined – has been growing at only 0.3 per cent per year in recent years, while the more commonly understood, labour productivity, has also seen growth at only 0.9 per cent a year. These are half the levels seen in the 1990s. 

​

That slowdown is less evident in many countries ..... Read online      ..... pdf

The price of environmental activism

The Spectator, 7 October 2022
   The environment social and governance (ESG) movement commenced life over 100 years ago with wowser investors avoiding shares in brewers and distillers. Embargoes on the merchants of sin, with gambling and smoking joining alcohol, have long ceased to be the primary target. The sin is now hydrocarbon energy (particularly coal), with gas and oil as secondary prey. That other bête noir of green agitators, nuclear, is considered an additional activity to be avoided and divested.

 

With this agenda, ESG investors have come to dominate stock exchanges, and their funds expected to total $50 trillion by 2025 which is over one-third of total global stocks.       ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Argentina’s socialist demons are coming for the West

The Spectator, 26 September 2022
   How did we arrive at the position where, throughout the Western world, political decisions to undermine the cheapest and most reliable energy sources are bringing about economic stagnation and possibly collapse?

​

Notwithstanding evidence of this, why are policy settings intensifying the very measures that have created the breakdown?

​

Europe is seeing record energy prices and the America’s renewable subsidy-oriented Inflation Reduction Act portends a following of suit.

​

For Australia, similar measures are intensified by law courts deciding that individual Indigenous voices, now extending to a  ..... Read online      ..... pdf

The sharp decline since Paris

The Spectator, 14 September 2022
   Returning from the 2015 Paris Agreement, former Clinton Energy chief Joe Romm, proclaimed:

​

‘You know, change happens slowly, until it happens quickly.’

He was talking about climate ‘guru’ Michael Mann declaring that the Paris Agreement signalled the end of ‘the age of fossil fuels’.

​

Of course, there was a major speed bump along that road in the form of Donald Trump, who commenced dismantling the subsidies and regulations that were forcing this rapid change in the world’s biggest economy. And, to the ridicule of the German UN delegation including its Foreign Minister, Trump presciently urged Germany to.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Transition teething problem or permanent disaster?

The Spectator, 27 August 2022
   Politicians, regulators, and subsidy-seekers portray the present difficulties in the energy market as being part of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy – and perhaps to more exotic forms of energy derived from extracting hydrogen from water.

​

They go on to claim that transitions always involve teething problem difficulties.

​

This is false.

​

Transitions in the past from horse-drawn transport to trains, motor vehicles, and aeroplanes involved only benefits to    ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Dangerous energy politics

The Spectator, 02 September 2022
   Electricity has properties that require supply and demand to always balance every few seconds.

​

This means, firstly, that there has to be a considerable surplus of supply in order to cope with swings in demand. Secondly, a large share of supply (and/or demand) has to be capable of rapidly switching on and off. 

There is probably no other area of the economy with such time-sensitive complexity and an array of different providers with vastly dissimilar cost profiles.

​

Electricity is an area of commerce that is highly unsuitable for political control.     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

An Open Letter Concerning AEMO’s 2022 Integrated System Plan

By Dr James Taylor PhD

Independent Engineers and Scientists     ..... Read here

A mild case of split portfolio disorder

The Spectator, 18 August 2022
   As a one-time senior public servant, I find the debate over Scott Morrison’s supposed power seizure of separate ministries to be based on somewhat unrealistic depictions of the powers of individual ministers.

 

There are two issues in Prime Minister Morrison’s visits to the Governor-General. The first concerns the massive overreaction to Covid and the Prime Minister’s decision to formally appoint himself as several ministers as an insurance against his colleagues’ incapacitation and, astonishingly, doing so without informing those colleagues. The second was the insertion of himself as de facto Minister in the Department of Industry, Energy and Resources.

​

With regard to the latter, Morrison has said,     ..... Read online      ..... pdf

Labor’s Climate Bill is an economic precipice

The Spectator, 08 August 2022
   In what The Australian called a ‘capitulation of the Greens’, the government’s Climate Bill has passed the House of Representatives. Its passage through the Senate is a formality.

​

With the Bill’s central requirement being that greenhouse gas emissions fall by 43 per cent (from the 2005 base), it amplifies the 28-30 per cent formal reduction level set by the previous Coalition government. In pursuit of decarbonisation to combat a mythical ‘climate crisis’, the Bill is designed to stymie the use of coal and gas. In doing so, it will increase the costs of mining, manufacturing, and other services; it will also increase costs in the farming sector – including by diverting the use of productive agricultural land into a carbon sink.      ..... Read online      ..... pdf

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Wrecking a Nation One Electricity Bill at a Time

Quadrant Online, 29 July 2022
   The first thing to recognise is that for many years now governments — Labor and Coalition alike — have been hard at work destroying the low-cost electricity market that Australian businesses and consumers once enjoyed . The second thing to note is that there is an actual undertone of energy realism — yes, really! –about the Albanese government, but it is no portend of good news: “You’ll know what we’re up against when your electricity bill arrives,” the Treasurer said on Thursday (July 28). That would be the bill we were assured during election season would fall by $275 once Labor waved its magic wand. 

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We can see the degeneration of Australia’s electricity security graphically presented in the chart below which tracks July electricity    ..... Read online

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Politicians destroy nuclear when the world needs it most

The Spectator, 25 July 2022
   Human advancement has rested on harnessing increasingly dense sources of energy from non-human origins. Animal power, burning wood, wind technology, and water power were crucial in allowing early civilisations to develop.

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The Industrial Revolution that gave humanity income levels 10-100 times higher than those of antiquity was driven by hydrocarbons which brought over 100 times the power density of wind.

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Nuclear, with 10,000 times the power density of coal, has been heralded as ‘the next step’ for the last fifty years.      ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Europeans punished by expensive renewables backed by Russian gas

The Spectator, 14 July 2022
   Europeans are now paying heavily for their shift in abandoning coal and nuclear and adopting renewable energy supported by Russian gas.

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Across the continent, coal generators have been closed as have nuclear facilities in a headlong pursuit of the ‘transition’ to renewables. Throughout the Western world, that transition has been touted as inevitable by the ‘experts’ now dominant within government and among their advisory detritus.

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Only this week Australia’s very own CSIRO           ..... Read online     .....pdf

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The (expensive) brave new world of ‘clean energy’

The Spectator, 09 July 2022
   The market was working pretty well 20 years ago and is not expected to be much larger by 2030. It involved a capital asset base in terms of transmission at about $22 billion and for the electricity energy itself, in today’s dollars about $100 billion.

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We now have two national plans for the future: Rewiring the Nation,  ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Climate Justice? Victoria’s fresh assault on businesses

The Spectator, 01 July 2022
   Last week’s restoration of the electricity market, following the regulator assuming full control on June 15, means the energy crisis is apparently over. But spot prices remain at around $230 per megawatt hour – a mere sixfold their historical levels. As for gas, well that’s still price-controlled and consequent supply shortages are causing business closures.

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Victoria has done his bit to create the crisis.

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Premier Dan Andrews tripled the royalty tax on coal – the straw that broke the back of the Hazelwood Power Station, which produced a quarter of the state’s electricity. Then, as with South Australia’s  .... Read online  ...pdf

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Climate Change's 'Pigouvian' tax

The Spectator, 27 June 2022
   Rod Sims, formerly head of the ACCC, advocates a carbon tax as a ‘Pigouvian’ solution to the global damage which he says is being created as a result of burning coal, gas, and oil.

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A ‘Pigouvian’ tax is set at a level where the damage from distorting the economy, which any tax inevitably causes, is offset by the rectification that it brings about. Such a tax is generally considered superior to having the government centrally determine measures to redress inadvertent damages resulting from production. This is because it incentivises firms to seek out the cheapest solutions and avoids governmental failures inherent in ‘winner picking’

Henry Ergas points out that the proposal Rod Sims .... Read online  ...pdf

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Standard of living to fall sharply

The Spectator, 24 June 2022
   In the pre-Covid days, strike activity was fast disappearing. In Europe, the average days lost from strikes more than halved.

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In Australia, the fall was even more dramatic – from over 500 strike days per 1,000 workers in the 1970s, to just 14 in the decade to 2020.

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Suddenly, in Europe a spate of strikes is underway. They are in England and threatened in France, Spain, Italy, and even Germany. These are taking place ‘amid spiralling increases in the cost of living’ which describes EU annual wage increases averaging 2 per cent compared to price increases of 8.8 per cent.     ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Albo's war against Capitalism

The Spectator, 21 June 2022
   Seeking to disabuse critics of the notion that his interest and expertise in economics were Whitlamesque, Anthony Albanese released a couple of pages of an undergraduate essay on economics he wrote nearly 40 years ago. The material was replete with supply and demand curves to burnish his credentials on any sceptic.

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Mr Albanese’s economics degree was from the ‘political economy’ school of Sydney University – which had a strongly Marxian focus – stressing on how the economy should best be managed by those who consider themselves well able to understand and manipulate it. The university mentors favoured central direction rather than what they perceived as the anarchy and heartlessness of the market system. ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Politicians have sabotaged the energy market

The Spectator, 13 June 2022
   'After a decade of denial and delay, Australia deserves a better future – one with cheaper power, more jobs, and less emissions,’ said Energy Minister Chris Bowen, in his last media release prior to gaining government.

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Mr Bowen advocated replacing coal generators with wind and solar, with their shares of electricity supply to increase from 30 per cent to 82 per cent by 2030. To facilitate this, he proposed spending $80 billion on transmission, thereby quadrupling its present costs.

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He also ridiculed a Morrison government that ‘does not believe renewables are the cheapest form of energy, or that the    ..... Read online     .....pdf

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Customers won't like the new energy game

The Spectator, 3 June 2022
   Right now in Australia, we are seeing some smaller electricity retailers being forced out of the market and voluntarily shedding customers. One example came this week, when ReAmped Energy told customers they should leave because bills were set to double.

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These sorts of retailers have gained a few percent of the overall market by offering cheap prices via wholesale purchases on the electricity spot market, which is usually cheaper than arranging supplies through long-term contracts with generators.

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But with shortages of electricity (which are from time to time inevitable) come very high spot market prices. What we are  ..... Read online     .....pdf

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This is worse than we thought

The Spectator, 24 May 2022
   It’s much worse than we thought.

The ALP will govern in its own right, but will be forced into extreme positions by a Green-left Senate.

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The first thing to recognise is that the result demonstrates a new consensus.

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There are some differences between the ALP, the Coalition, the Teals, and the Greens. To placate its funders within the union movement the ALP will seek to abolish the ‘gig’ economy and promote a 5 per cent wage rise, something the Greens would also support. But that apart, the consensus represents a goal of abandoning the fossil fuel    ..... Read online     .....pdf

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The Seinfeld election: a show about nothing

The Spectator, 17 May 2022
   With the virus abating, and with the confected anger over supposed government inadequacies for compensation owed to those harmed by adverse weather conditions losing topicality – the issues that should be dominating the present election campaign are taxation, spending, energy costs, industry policy, and defence.

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The Coalition and the ALP have tried to minimise their differences on these matters.

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For its part, the Coalition has little alternative after five years of clothing itself in the ALP policies it claims to oppose. It has been spending in Whitlam-esque proportions since its MPs ..... Read more     .....pdf

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Build More Dams

Letter to the Editor, Regulation Economics (from Viv Forbes) - 12 May 2022​

   Since the days of Joseph in ancient Egypt, droughts have periodically rationed water and food supplies for humans and wildlife. Sensible peoples store water, but it is about 40 years since Australians built a big dam – young Aussie engineers have no damn experience.

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Even beavers build dams and weirs to provide long-term wetlands and food supplies along rivers. Dams also moderate floods downstream.

See here for pictorial comment (right):
 

Foolish children and Green politicians think that floods are caused by carbon dioxide, but farmers know that it is La Nina that brings flooding rains to Eastern Australia             ..... Read more

beaver-dam.jpeg

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The politics of an energy dystopia

The Spectator, 10 May 2022

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   We are seeing unprecedented prices in the Australian gas and electricity wholesale markets.

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The first five days of May saw electricity prices average over $400 per MWh in Queensland and NSW, and over $150 per MWh in Victoria and South Australia. Compare this with the historical average daily prices of $40-$80 per MWh.

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Forward electricity prices for 2023 averaged 122 per cent higher than in 2021. 

 ...... Read online     ..... pdf

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Stoking the fires of energy policy

The Spectator, 26 April 2022

   Stung from previous election losses, the ALP is at pains to deny that it will introduce a carbon tax. The Coalition is trying to claim a Labor government would do so.

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That aside, both sides are seeking to marginalise environmental issues and their all-important impact on the economy. Many on the government side believe the Matt Kean dogma that there is an inevitable ‘transition’ away from coal, while others feel obliged to murmur assent in the face of popular support for that same view, funded as it is by subsidy-dependent renewable energy interests.

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In fact, we already have carbon taxes and an ALP ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Scomo, Albo, and their fantasy Net Zero policies

The Spectator, 15 April 2022

   Both the ALP and the Coalition have the same Net Zero goal for 2050, but that time frame is, at best, aspirational and is contingent upon technological breakthroughs many of which verge on the fantasy.

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A 2030 time-horizon is a more realistic means of comparing the two sides of politics.

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For 2030, the Coalition has a goal of a 26 per cent reduction in emissions compared to the base year of 2005 and hopes to achieve a 35 per cent reduction with its present policies.

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The ALP is targeting a 43 per cent reduction on  ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Renewables subsidies: $22 billion by 2030

The Spectator, 5 April 2022

   Energy Minister Angus Taylor noted that the Commonwealth Budget added $1.3 billion to assist uneconomic renewable energy, bringing the total support to $22 billion by 2030. Added to direct budget support are the regulatory subsidies that force consumers to pay for otherwise unviable wind and solar energy as well as the networks that have to be built to bring their energy to market. 

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Green energy enthusiasts and vested interests fraudulently claim wind and solar are cheaper than coal-generated electricity. Some also concoct data purporting to prove that fossil fuels benefit from enormous subsidies.

..... Read online     ..... pdf

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You can't save the world with Net Zero

The Spectator, 24 March 2022

   Ever since socialism’s credibility collapsed in 1990, environmentalism has increasingly dominated the political agenda. Central to this was the global warming scare and its implications for energy supply and economic activities in general.

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Environmentalists’ pressures ensured that this agenda was widely embraced. Every Western country agreed to pursue ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions, replacing hydrocarbons with wind, solar, and prospectively hydrogen as power sources. In most countries, this was combined with rejecting another environmentalist bogeyman – nuclear power.

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China, India, and other burgeoning economies ..... Read online     ..... pdf

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Will war end the climate alarmist zeal of the central banks?

The Spectator, 21 March 2022

   Faced with implacable opposition from the Senate, Sarah Bloom Raskin, President Biden’s pick for supervising banks within the Federal Reserve (Fed), has withdrawn her candidature. During the Obama administration, she was one of the Fed’s seven governors and a Treasury deputy secretary.

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Her rejection by the Senate was a result of her expressed intent ‘to incentivise a rapid, orderly, and just transition from fossil fuels and other high-emission investments’.

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Not so long ago, that opinion would have not been a barrier to the job – indeed her appointments under Obama faced   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Practicalities in addressing autocrats’ aggression

The Spectator, 11 March 2022

   The shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that it demonstrated a form of aggression most people thought belonged to an earlier time.

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Following the Napoleonic era, a war of conquest against a recognised sovereign state was considered legitimate only if fought in the name of national self-determination.

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National self-determination remained a worthy goal in the Wilsonian world of 1918, but its practicalities were always uncertain in the mix of languages and what were deemed to be ‘races’ that still characterised Europe. Even territorial claims based on national coherence disappeared post-1945, though in certain circles aggression     ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Fresh gunpowder in the nostrils of politics

The Spectator, 2 March 2022

   Fresh gunpowder in everyone’s nostrils has brought a new political reality.

It was only this month that US Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth demonstrated where her focus lies by introducing emission reduction plans, which would de-fang her nation’s military with features like:

  • Investing in an all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035.

  • Significantly reducing operational energy and water use.

  • Buying electricity from carbon-pollution-free generation sources.

  • Reducing direct greenhouse gas emissions that result from Army

       ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Closing coal? The real victims are Australian energy consumers

The Spectator, 23 February 2022

   If software billionaire Mike Cannon Brookes is Australia’s latest corporate raider, his bid for AGL redefines the whole notion of a corporate raider.

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Historically, corporate raiders have sought to profitably reinvigorate under-performing assets, but Mr Cannon Brookes ostensibly seeks to close down the target firm’s assets whether or not they are under-performing. Cannon Brookes is the junior partner in the bid which is led by Brookfield, a $250 billion real estate developer and manager with renewable energy comprising about ten per cent of its assets.

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AGL has developed from a Sydney gas         ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Let’s remove government regulations that undermine electricity

The Spectator, 17 February 2022

   Today’s announcement of the early closure of the Eraring power station means that, with the Liddell station scheduled to close next year, almost half of New South Wales coal generation capacity will have closed.

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Contrary to the propaganda, those closures are not because the coal stations have become uneconomic. They are due to competing energy supplies – wind and solar – having been subsidised by governments. This lowers the market price when those intermittent sources are running (while raising the overall price to consumers) and imposes stop-start costs on coal generators.

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The loss of the coal generators will mean much ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Future Policy Directions For Australian Electricity Supply

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A Submission to the Draft 2022 Integrated System Plan for the National Electricity Market of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)

9 February 2022

................ ..... Read submission here

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Can Big Tech remain as the arbiter of politics?

The Spectator, 4 February 2022

   Increasingly, climate change is coming to dominate energy supply and indeed the whole economy.

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Modest changes to the climate are taking place as a result of human activity releasing CO2 – mainly by burning oil, coal and gas – but this isn’t bringing adverse outcomes like fires, floods, hurricanes, pestilences, etc.

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Combatting emissions by seeking to replace hydrocarbons with wind, solar and hydrogen is, however, having very serious economic consequences in costs to consumers and taxpayers while bringing about deindustrialisation of western economies, like Australia, which are implementing policies to restrain CO2 ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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The re-enthronement of capitalism: are ‘woke’ investment funds falling behind?

The Spectator, 26 January 2022

   Over many years now, superannuation funds have been orientating their investments towards options that avoid unapproved Environmental and Social goods or Governance structures (ESG).

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The governance part involves avoiding firms with boards and senior executives containing too many white males and, therefore, inadequate ‘diversity’. The Environmental and Social parts used to mean avoiding firms in the defence and tobacco industries, but the pariahs in the modern woke world are hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil. These and some other industries, like forestry and nuclear power, are targeted by the legions of non-government organisations which are largely funded by governments and wealthy elites, some of whom owe their for ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Australians mugged by taxes and regulations

The Spectator, 18 January 2022

   Issued last Friday was a new Victorian government review of ‘embedded networks’, which act as the electricity retailer to co-located customer groups in dwelling clusters like flats and caravan sites. The panel of four conducting the review included two consumer activists from the Victorian Government-funded Consumer Action Law Centre, and another member from the renewable energy lobby group, the Clean Energy Council.

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The panel’s recommendations purport to introduce some measures that will prevent cheating of consumers by suppliers and other measures designed to give consumers better value. While speculating about how consumers served by embedded networks    ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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The four horsemen of the economic apocalypse

The Spectator, 6 January 2022

   The appearance of Covid brought a resurgence of fears of Armageddon.

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Conscious of mankind’s imperfections, ancient settled societies envisaged a destructive reckoning that could only be averted by the people’s acceptance of and subservience to a warrior god. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have their own versions, as does Marxist Leninism.

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The Christian version features the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, each one soothing personal unhappiness with measures that carry seeds that worsen it.  ..... Read online       ..... pdf

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Is Frydenberg’s post-Covid economic optimism justified?

The Spectator, 21 December 2021

   Josh Frydenberg was pleased with last week’s midyear economic review issued by Treasury. He preened himself, opining that the Covid spendathon had kept the economy ticking over and that the future was a deluge of new jobs, higher incomes, and what he described as one of the world’s ‘strongest recoveries’.

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He declared, ‘Our economic plan is working!’

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Glossed over was some of the enduring economic damage which government policies have left in their wake. The bottom line is that we’ve seen a permanent uplift in government spending. At a level of 28.7 per cent of GDP this year, it barely falls in future   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

 

There will be a reckoning for renewables

The Spectator, 13 December 2021

   With COP26 a recent memory, the looming federal election has again pushed renewable electricity into the limelight.

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Despite the campaign promises of federal politicians, electricity systems are constitutionally the responsibility of state governments. Accordingly, in the push for glory and accolades from the media and the renewable lobby, state governments have foisted a series of renewable electricity targets onto their constituents.

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In 2015, the Queensland government committed to supplying 50 per cent of the state’s electricity demand from wind and solar by 2030. The effect of this on the existing Queensland government- ..... Read online       ..... pdf

Is the ALP ‘powering the future’?

The Spectator, 7 December 2021

   With the collapse of the Soviet bloc came a disenchantment with socialist planning as an alternative to market capitalism.

 

Environmentalism, seeking to reverse specious damage allegedly caused by market capitalism, became the alternative paradigm.

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In the context of confected global warming alarmism, the enemies of free markets now focus on interventions to prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Central to such interventions is a forced replacement of hydrocarbons – coal, gas, and oil – by wind and solar. In addition, we have unattainable technologies like hydrogen being crowbarred into prominence by faddists and subsidy seekers.   ..... Read online       ..... pdf

Remembering Adam Smith before it’s too late

The Spectator, 3 December 2021

   Adam Smith in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, marvelled at the way the factory system made vast improvements in productivity due to its division of labour.

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In his pin-making factory example, he estimated that this allowed 4,000 pins a day per worker to be manufactured, while one man working alone would probably only make one such pin. A modern manufacturing plant, like a car factory, assembles in pre-arranged formats tens of thousands of ‘pins’. Many, like semiconductor chips, are manufactured in climate-controlled facilities largely by robots.

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Smith attributed the success of the nascent  ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

Why are we borrowing from Build Back Better?

The Spectator, 25  November 2021

   Seventeen Nobel winning American economists have said that the Biden Administration’s $1.7 trillion “Build Back Better” program, will increase growth without inflation. They include well-known names like George Akerlof – husband of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz. Other US based Nobel economists, of which there are 27, (incongruously, including the left-wing Paul Krugman) did not sign the petition. Almost all Nobel Prize-winning economists are US based.  

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The President claims the “Build Back Better” program’s cost, itself seriously underestimated, is fully offset by taxes. This is untrue and, moreover, not relevant since increased taxation will cause   ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

ScoMo’s climate modelling is even dodgier than his climate policy

The Spectator, 14  November 2021

   The government went to Glasgow to sell its net zero emissions by 2050 policy to world leaders. 

  

The policy was based on heroic assumptions like green hydrogen – at present not even a pistil hoping to be fertilised — becoming the cheapest source of electricity, and solar power, which presently costs $70 per MWh as long as suppliers dictate demand, falling to $15 per MWh. Its low credibility was recognised by the legion of green left loonies in Glasgow, who awarded Australia the “Colossal Fossil” for measures that least promote the undermining of current living standards. 

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Now we have the “modelling” ostensibly behind ..... Read online       ..... pdf 

COP26 and the climate cult’s schizophrenia

The Spectator,  7 November 2021

   British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in addressing the fashionable fiction of human-induced climate change used the hackneyed phrase “It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now”. He even conscripted Prince Charles’ relatives to the cause, thereby lighting a slow fuse under the 1135-year-old monarchical institution.  

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President Biden has taken leadership of the issue but due to the failure of Congress to pass the “build back better” spendathon, Myron Eball of the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that the US has ”little to offer but hot air” but that its policies will bring “increasing energy prices and economic collapse”.      ..... Read online         ..... pdf 

Farewell ScoMo, hello crippling costs of climate fantasy

The Spectator,  28 October 2021

   Scott Morrison is heading off to lead Australia’s team at the Glasgow climate change meeting. He goes with a formula that will continue the nation’s shuffling towards diminished income levels from the politically motivated sabotage of the economy.   

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Like Joe Biden and most other leaders who have decided to attend, Scott Morrison brings nothing extra to the table. Amidst the Conference’s impassioned pleas and scary stories, there will be no dramatic new pledges, no carbon border tariffs, no methane-driven constraint on beef growers and further deferrals in the promised gifting of $100 billion a year “compensation” the rich nations have promised poor nations. Voices from climate realists and alarmists alike     .... Read online         .....pdf 

ScoMo, net-zero, that deal – and the death of the Nationals?

The Spectator,  24 October 2021

   Like MPs from other political parties, the Nationals are motivated by self-interest with rare infusions of the public interest represented by Matthew Canavan and few others.  Apparently, enough rural MPs have been persuaded by opinion research purporting to show that rural seats’ voters believe the loud voices declaring “net zero” will be good for the regions. Others realise that any funding and regulatory compensations offered for sacrificing mining and farming would be meagre.    

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Deputy Nationals leader  David Littleproud says that cast iron guarantees can be offered to protect regional Australia. He claims the Nationals have triumphed in “securing but also growing regional jobs into the future.”  This is absurd.     .... Read online         .....pdf 

Why won’t the advocates tell us the cost of net-zero?

The Spectator, 17 October 2021

   Nowhere in the world can wind and solar compete without subsidies which drive out more competitive supplies and eventually raise electricity costs and/or taxes. One manifestation of the cost stemming from increased renewables supplies can be seen in the price of electricity. The average electricity price alongside the penetration of wind/solar for the 15 largest economies in the world shows this pattern.  The relationship of wind/solar and price indicates the share of renewables accounts for 64 per cent of the difference in prices between these major economies.  (Other causes include policies on nuclear energy as well as natural endowments and pricing regulations). 

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Most of Australia’s more grounded      .... Read online   .....pdf (unedited)

Much Pain for Net Zero Gain

Quadrant, 13 October 2021

   It is this simple: skyrocketing world electricity prices stem from renewables policies. Notwithstanding the avalanche of propaganda we are seeing throughout the country, no wind or solar gets built anywhere in the world without subsidies paid by taxpayers and customers.  In Australia’s case these costs are $10 billion a year in grants and network spending. 

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The genesis of the current malaise has been closures of generating plants which have been demonised by the politically correct. In Europe this mainly involves coal.  Those countries that have been particularly severely hit by the present crisis are the UK and Spain, both of which have closed 80 per cent of their coal capacity – and Germany, which has closed about one third of its coal.  Germany also suffers from having closed  .... Read online

The Business Council of Australia’s green schizophrenia

The Sepctator, 11 October 2021

   The Business Council of Australia is a pale imitation of the body that pioneered economic reform and deregulation 30-40 years ago. Nowadays it is dominated by firms in service industries who support green policies which for many of them are important sources of revenue in trading and advisory functions.   

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Most of the rump of BCA members involved in mining production, gas and electricity and manufacturing are acutely aware of their dependence on government.  In addition to commercial support this includes protection from the NGO activities that impaired business in recent decades but also against the increasing numbers of green left regulatory and judicial appointments.    .... Read online          .....pdf

Beware a blind charge to net-zero emissions

The Spectator, 30 September 2021

   In the prologue to the UN Glasgow meeting on climate change, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been preparing the ground for an Australian statement announcing a goal of “net zero” emissions.  He is doing so on the basis of “if rape is inevitable lie down and enjoy it”, arguing that banks and investors are increasingly requiring net-zero and that there is increasing investor appetite for Australian renewable energy (wind and solar) with $35 billion invested in it since 2017.    

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Left unsaid was that all that $35 billion in investment was made possible by the direct and indirect subsidies to wind and solar.  This was made clearer by New South wales Energy Minister, Matt Kean, who has no misgivings about the forthcoming triumph of ren ..... Read online      .....pdf

Australia’s Obscene Green Subsidy Machine

Quadrant, 6 October 2021

   When an ALP government introduced a “carbon price” on electricity in 2012 it was sold as a neutral tax. It was, of course, nothing of the sort.

 

The tax was on the carbon content of fossil fuels, but a neutral tax would have had the new tax replace other imposts. In fact, mandatory levels of renewable energy required of every retailer, which were the major Commonwealth subsidies to wind/solar, were left in place, as were other support mechanisms. In addition, there were state schemes, though at the time these were still modest in scope.

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At its 2014 rate of $24 per tonne, Labor’s carbon tax, if applied to all fossil fuel inputs into electricity, would have raised $3.7 billion  .... Read online

If we’re all such good friends and allies, there’ll be no carbon tariffs? Right?

The Spectator, 20 September 2021

   Almost daily, supposedly pro-business outlets publish material calling for net zero emissions, carbon taxes and the abandonment of coal in the cause of curing the synthetic problem of human induced dangerous climate change.  Never do they disclose the existing $7 billion a year cost of subsidies, further boosted by frequent spending announcements like the $1.5 billion pursuing of will o’ the wisp schemes for energy from hydrogen.  Only occasionally, for example in addressing the mounting costs of Turnbull’s Snowy 2 folly, does it refer to other expenses being incurred, and even then it is from a perspective of seeking even more subsidies to renewables.  

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The Financial Review’s Jennifer Hewitt is not be the ... Read online     .....pdf

There’s so much wrong with Anthony Albanese’s ‘Green ANZUS’

The Spectator, 15 September 2021

   Rehearsing what he says is Labor’s long commitment to the American alliance, Anthony Albanese has sought to modernise this, saying, “ On coming to office, I will make comprehensive US-Australia co-operation on climate change a hallmark of our alliance.” 

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That agenda is being set by political commentary on the recent IPCC report’s climate forecast.  The report, delivered last month, contained some concocted data on previous centuries, temperature data that disappeared the warmer climate in Roman times and the Viking era and cooler eras post 400 AD and in the four centuries to 1850.  That apart, the recent IPCC report was rather less gloomy than some earlier ones regarding adverse temperatures and climatic .... Read online     .....pdf

The ongoing woke undermining of Australia’s economy

New Catallaxy, 7 September 2021

   The march of the woke inspired destruction of the free-market economy continues apace. The additional baggage it is being required to carry is evident from articles and views from the past couple of day’s media.

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The Business Council of Australia continues to call for additional costs to be imposed on the firms it is supposed to represent. Its CEO Jennifer Westacott wants to make domestic violence leave a right.  The sixty something says her mother was abused so why should not employers be required compensate women for being assaulted by their husbands/lovers?!                                                                        .... Read online

The UN says no coal by 2030

The Spectator, 7 September 2021

   Reminding us of what a difference a year makes was yesterday’s exhortation by UN Climate Action Team head Selwyn Hart, that Australia abandons coal by 2030. That means replacing electricity from coal which, in spite of facing incessant government penalties, provides two-thirds of the supply.  It also means sacrificing a fifth of our exports.   

 

A year ago, the 2015 Paris climate treaty appeared to be dying. With President Trump coasting to re-election, China simply mouthing support and India using the treaty as a fulcrum to extract rents from the west, only the EU was taking it seriously. And in doing so the EU was completing its decades-long transfer from industrial powerhouse to an interesting place to visit that had outsourced its carbon-emitting   ....Read online      ..... pdf

When Liberals Gussy Up in Green Drag

Quadrant Online, 2 September 2021

   The advice to governments from the Energy Security Board (ESB) recommendations on the post 2025 electricity market has brought howls of outrage from the renewable energy sector. Wind and solar electricity suppliers, who already get half their revenue from subsidies, were hoping for more of the same.  The ESB does envisage additional subsidies in the form of transmission lines to link remote supplies but the centrepiece proposal is a “capacity” payment to generators.  This rewards those generators able to be dispatched by the market manager, as opposed to relying on the weather to make them available.

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The ESB policy proposal was motivated by fears that the breakneck increase in supply of inherently intermittent and unreliable ....Read online

Kabul: the harbinger of western decline or the catalyst for Trump’s return

The Spectator, 20 August 2021

   Recently revealed from the fall of Afghanistan is that President Obama exchanged Kairullah Khaikhwa, the public face of the Taliban leadership, along with four other jihadists for Bowe Bergdahl, a United States soldier turned traitor.  One interpretation of this deal is that it stemmed from Obama’s political naivete, or even contempt for his own nation.   

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An alternative view is that the deal was the action of an imperious grandee confident that a benevolent gesture to a conquered backward adversary would do no harm. The latter interpretation is consistent with that of a woke administration that trumpets its cultural sensitivity but flies the rainbow flag on the US Embassy in Kabul.  To the  ....Read online      ..... pdf

The IPCC buries two millennia of fluctuating temperatures

The Spectator, 13 August 2021

   Probably nobody in the world has read the 3,949 pages of the latest IPCC report.  But many people have studied the 41 page politically determined, Summary for Policymakers.   Aside from rhetorical conjecture about increased human induced emissions of carbon dioxide bringing more storms, fires and pestilence, the following killer dual chart is placed at the outset of the Summary.   

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If this is accurate, it means human actions have changed the climate by at least the 1.1°C temperature increase estimated by the world’s most distinguished and celebrated atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen.  Lindzen’s fastidious reliance on science, positions him as estimating that a (human-induced) doubling of atmospheric CO2 will mean a 1.1°C global temperature rise. On his estimates, almost all of   ....Read online  ..... pdf

Will big financial institutions destroy our resources sector before the Greens?

The Spectator, 2 August 2021

   Last month Paul Kelly wrote that Australia was being inescapably propelled to adopting a Net Zero CO2 emissions policy, not by green activists or government policies but by global investment funds, “now mobilised in the climate cause”. 

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Traditionally, investment funds have been passive stakeholders, buying and selling shares based on prospective returns.  An active approach, based on environmental, social, and governance — ESG — criteria is replacing this. The cornerstone of ESG is net CO2 neutrality.   

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The common view is that investment in firms with rich ESG pedigrees is “closely linked with business resilience, competiti  ....Read online  ..... pdf

Another Green Spruiker Takes AEMO’s Helm

Quadrant, 17 July 2021

   As well as subsidy-seekers, governments, international institutions, business leaders and investment managers all conspire to close down cheap energy. The confected notion of harmful climate change is the justification for the dethronement of market forces and their replacement by a new clerisy of politicians and bureaucrats controlling the world’s economies. Though market forces would normally bring the demise of higher-cost suppliers, political and administrative, impediments under the Paris Accord on climate change are designed to prevent this, as my recent piece in The Spectator  explains. 

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Although Australia is not (yet) formally adopting “net zero” emissions, there are strong pressures to do so.  In any event, Australia is   ....Read online

Net zero emissions? That will be $3000 for each of you, each year

The Spectator, 15 July 2021

   In a widely accepted assessment, Energy consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimate the carbon price must rise to $160 per ton by 2030 to restrict emissions to the “net-zero” level that the IPCC claims is necessary to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius.  

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In crude terms, for Australia with CO2 equivalent emissions at an annual 500 million tonnes, net CO2 neutrality means a cost of $80 billion a year, or over $3,000 per head. The outcome would also entail closing much of the primary and secondary industry which define a modern economy.  

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There is no shortage of interest groups seeking   ....Read online     .....pdf 

Forget the virus. We should be panicked by lost productivity

The Spectator, 30 June 2021

   The very definition of harmful advice is found in the Treasury’s five yearly Intergenerational Report, the latest edition of which was handed down on Monday.  In The Australian, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg acknowledged “there remains much work to be done”, but praised the report for its policy guidance.    

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In his piece, Josh quoted one of Paul Krugman’s rare insights “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it’s almost everything”.  

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But that quote was probably Josh’s sole contribution to the piece.  You see, Josh has an economics degree and not all of it involved erroneous Keynesian macroeconomics, which advocates  ....Read online     .....pdf 

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Also read about the Intergenerational Report on:   Catallaxy Files

Why don’t we hear about the $40,000 per household cost of decarbonisation?

The Spectator, 25 June 2021

   T he Irish Times reports that an IMF study of Ireland estimates that the nation will need to spend 20 billion euros a year – or five per cent of GDP – to meet its 2050 goal of net zero emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil.

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In Australia, we are already edging towards the deplorable net zero target while not even formally embracing it. According to RBA estimates, we spend some $7 billion a year on large-scale renewables plus $3 billion a year on rooftop facilities.  

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Wind and solar facilities cause so much damage ....Read online     .....pdf 

The western world’s elites conspire to outlaw cheap energy

The Spectator, 16 June 2021

   Aspirations of the “have nots” or “have too littles” have, through their elected representatives brought an inexorable growth in the size of government. Government in most western nations controls over half of GDP (it is 45 per cent in Australia) compared to under 25 per cent a century ago. Ironically, some notionally communist nations that ostensibly favour an enhanced government economic presence have relatively small government GDP shares – China (37 per cent) and Vietnam and Cambodia (23 per cent).   

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Notwithstanding their diminishing non-government sectors, western economies have, to date, still retained scope for markets to bring about cost efficiencies and innovation — and hence rising living standards.    

But a corrosive undermining of economic         ....Read online   ..... pdf

The western world’s wealth-busting corporatist conspiracy against hydrocarbons

Catallaxy Files, 16 June 2021

   I have a piece in the Spectator this morning addressing how the world elites have conspired together ostensibly to combat a harmless gas (CO2), no conceivable accumulations of which could have more than a negligible affect on climate.  Politicians, national and international bureaucrats, financial institutions, leading business actors and the ‘intelligentsia’ have agreed to direct investment away from the hydrocarbon energy sources that have been essential to creating modern-day living standards.

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As a backstop against capitalist competition finding chinks through the arrays of impediments to using the cheapest sources of energy, the western world is edging towards a complex system of carbon-content tariffs that will reinforce their wealth-busting iron grip.   ....Read more 

The G7, woke corporates and the end of capitalism

The Spectator, 9 June 2021

   The Bank of International Settlements, the G7 Finance Ministers and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission have amped up carbon emissions-based “climate risk” warnings to Australian firms. This represents a new triumphal procession of green activism through international business institutions.  

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Environmental crusaders’ colonisation of business is most evident in that nadir of wokeism, the annual Davos meetings, attended (remotely this year) by business leaders who pay up to £480,000 to listen to nagging strictures of figures like Greta Thunberg and Prince Charles.  

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The first Davos meeting in 1973 emphasised the    ....Read online   ..... pdf

ScoMo and Josh’s irrational exuberance

The Spectator, 1 June 2021

   Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released figures showing new private capital expenditure rose 6.3 per cent in the March quarter. 

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told parliament, “Manufacturing investments had the biggest jump for 16 years. This is the product of our policies.”  

Well, yes.  There are lies, damned lies and statistics.  

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If the increase in manufacturing investment was to be welcomed, it also has to be recognised as a cherry on a paper maché ice cream.  In aggregate terms, the value of new private investment in the March quarter 2021 was just one per cent above that of a year earlier.

 

And, though the December 2020 to March 2021    ....Read online   ..... pdf

Will we get mugged by the return of inflation?

The Spectator, 19 May 2021

   The recent lift in the United States annual inflation rate to 4.2 per cent, the highest in ten years, has caused fears that the massive injection of money into the economy (33 per cent in the latest month) might now be igniting a general lift in prices. Below is the Consumer Price Index (in red) and money growth (in black).                                         ....Read more   ..... pdf

Enjoy the sugar hit as we flirt with economic ruin

The Australian, 17 May 2021

   Economic growth requires political stability and secure property rights. Its drivers include low taxation, an educated, skilled workforce, and technological innovation. But the overwhelming influence for nations such as Australia is investment in business activities, roads and other infrastructure.

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The budget papers note that Australia has weathered the COVID crisis better than other nations. Treasury maintains, “new business investment has picked up alongside Australia’s broader economic recovery, supported by government policy incentives implemented in response to the pandemic”. In fact, Australia actually shows a disturbing trend in the business investment component of GDP.                    .....Read more   ..... pdf

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Budget week is looming - as are electric shocks over power prices and reliability

The Spectator, 5 May 2021

   Last month energy minister Angus Taylor cited analysis by the Australian Energy Market Operator showing falls in wholesale electricity to nine-year lows as “an outstanding result [that] demonstrates how effective the Government’s actions have been”.  For example, he said, “In New South Wales, prices fell to $38/MWh, down from $86/MWh in the corresponding quarter in 2020”.  

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Self-serving distortion is unremarkable among politicians and the true situation is far less rosy.  For a start, added to the wholesale price are other elements, one of which, environmental charges, has shown a rapid increase in recent years as a result of the subsidies that have fed wind and solar into the system. In NSW the environmental   .....Read more   ..... pdf

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Higher prices, lower competitiveness as Daniel Andrews goes it alone on emissions

The Spectator, 3 May 2021

   Victoria has announced its intent to go much further than the federal government in requiring the substitution of renewable energy for the much cheaper and more secure energy that is provided from its endless supplies of high-quality brown coal.  Compared with the national policy of reducing emissions by 26 to 28% by 2030, Victoria is opting for a 45 to 50% reduction. Not only does this introduce another variation on what should be a national energy policy but it consigns Victoria to further losses of industrial competitiveness and households to higher energy costs.  

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Victoria’s intervention in the energy markets is long-standing. The state’s brown coal reserves have formed the basis for its electricity generation for 60 years. Gradually that generation became to be seen as a means of providing jobs and the union-controlled power    .....Read more   ..... pdf

Climate follies: more than half a billion new spending to keep Joe Biden off our backs

The Spectator, 22 April 2021

   The Government is desperate to appear to be doing more in the run-up to Joe Biden’s Climate Summit for Thursday US time. While professing support for decarbonisation, the Prime Minister is looking to spend money in ways that do as little damage as possible to the economy. 

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Commendably, Scott Morrison has said Australia would not, “look to reduce our own emissions by shutting down our existing export industries like agriculture, aluminium, coal and gas”. 

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Per capita, Australia is already the world’s biggest spender on wind and solar, two expensive electricity sources that have negative value because, supported by subsidies, they drive out lower-cost coal and gas. Our subsidy-supported national spending on wind and solar is twice that of Japan and the US, three times that of Germany and .....Read more   ..... pdf

Joe Biden’s bid to enforce climate club

The Australian, 22 April 2021

   The urgency of the Biden administration in pursuing green policies signifies the prominence of the issue in terms of world diplomacy and domestic policies in the US, Australia and elsewhere.

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Even though the long-planned UN Climate Change Conference will take place later this year in Glasgow, the Biden administration determined that it would call a two-day online conference, scheduled to begin on Thursday US time, addressing the issue of energy, climate change and the actions it deems necessary.

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The US administration now proposes to spend $US2.9 trillion ($3.76 trillion) on infrastructure, most of which is climate-.....Read more   ..... pdf

Big government is watching you

The Spectator, 16 April 2021

   Sexual issues have come to dominate the news cycle. This week’s headlines have been dominated by Christine Holgate. Last week sexual harassment formally become a ground for dismissal in Australian workplaces, with both parliamentarians and judges subject to the Sex Discrimination Act, in measures unveiled by Scott Morrison and Attorney-General Michaelia Cash in response to Sexual Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins’ Respect@Work report on workplace sexual harassment.

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Like walruses being driven off a Siberian cliff by a handful of polar bears, ministers in the Morrison government are scrambling to avoid femocratic attacks on real or imagined male bad behaviour.

In doing so, they may be changing our politics  .....Read more   ..... pdf

Let us give thanks to politicians for correcting our failings

Catallaxy Files, 9 April 2021

   Discovering and exterminating the hidden code in words is yet another reason why we lesser people need the wisdom and perspicuity of those we elect to Parliament.  Politicians’ extraordinary intellects see the Big Picture and are able to garnish our incomes to correct our misconceptions.

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Most of us will have seen ads like the one where a father watching his son competing in a team sport urges him to “stop playing like a girl!”.  Some old geezer, castigates him by asking “what is wrong with playing like a girl”?  While the father might simply have been urging his son to be more competitive, perhaps misunderstanding that girls on average are just as strong, run just as fast, and jump just a high as boys, he was .....Read more

EU strongarming Australia on CO2

Online Opinion, 1 April 2021

   The EU has long sought to impose its carbon dioxide abatement policies on the rest of the world. A major setback to this was the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 where Kevin Rudd sought to play a major role. Clearly operating under the EU Commission's strategy, the European Ambassador in Canberra Australia, Michael Pulch, has been making increasingly aggressive threats to Australian market access.

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He now says we will face tariffs unless we further lift the penalties we place on the use of the low cost, high CO2 emitting coal that accounts for two-thirds of our electricity generation. In recent developments, the EU Parliament has lifted the bloc's emission reduction ambitions to 55 per cent below the 2005 level (Australia's remain at 26-28 percent ...Read more

Why we must beware American senescence

The Spectator, 1 April 2021

   Sometime in the next five years, the Chinese economy will overtake that the United States.  China’s workforce may already have peaked but still has surplus labour in the 25 per cent of people working in agriculture, a share that is likely to fall to under 5 per cent.  Savings, the engine of growth, as a share of China’s GDP remain well in excess of 40 per cent – twice that of the US (and Australia). 

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By 2030, the Chinese economy, even if its growth rate falls to 5.5 per cent, will be 15 per cent greater than the US.  The US will see its growth rate stagnate to below 1.5 per cent under a Democratic Administration seeking income redistribution, diversion of capital to unproductive venues like renewable energy, allocating vast sums to raise  .....Read online   ..... pdf

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An Extended Romp Down the Green Garden Path

Quadrant, 24 March 2021

   If you have ever wondered how green absurdities become articles of faith and public policy, look no further than the mainstream and specialist media, which has long ignored the maxim that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Case in point: the rise of Sanjeev Gupta and, just at the moment, the state of the “green steel” titan’s empire as it wobbles on the brink. For those who haven’t been following the story, the BBC has a very good primer on the Indian tycoon’s woes, albeit focusing almost exclusively on his UK operations.

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Closer to home,  those who look askance at the way woke world fantasies of cheap renewable energy are endorsed with taxpayer cash will know of Gupta from his much-lauded arrival in Whyalla, the            .....Read online

Saving the Portland smelter: one problem solved, others created

Catallaxy Files, 20 March 2021

     With its rescue package of a low-cost electricity supply for Victoria’s Portland aluminium smelter, the Commonwealth and Victorian governments have reprieved the smelter from a hangman’s scaffold that they themselves built.

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The Portland aluminium smelter, along with Tomago (NSW), Boyne Island (Queensland) and Bell Bay (Tas), is among the nation’s highest value-adding manufacturing facilities.  Aluminium smelting accounts for about 12 per cent of total electricity usage.

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These facilities located to Australia during the 1980s in response to our dependable, coal-based electricity supply, which became  .....Read online

Green Eurocrats threaten our industries

The Spectator, 17 March 2021

     The EU has long sought to impose its carbon dioxide abatement policies on the rest of the world. A major setback to this was the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 where Kevin Rudd sought to play a major role.

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Clearly operating under the EU Commission’s strategy, the European Ambassador in Canberra Australia, Michael Pulch, has been making increasingly aggressive threats to Australian market access. He now says we will face tariffs unless we further lift the penalties we place on the use of the low cost, high CO2 emitting coal that accounts for two-thirds of our electricity generation.

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In recent developments, the EU Parliament has lifted.....Read online  .....pdf

Why did Cormann get the top job at the OECD? His track record shows he won’t upset woke globalists

The Spectator, 15 March 2021

     Having gone to considerable lengths in lobbying for one of our very own, former finance minister Mathias Cormann, to become Secretary-General of the Paris based OECD, the Government — at least the international set – would be very pleased with itself.    

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Unfortunately, the OECD has long outlived its former fervour for economic rationalism: balanced budgets, low tariffs, and small government that leaves competitive free markets to be the essential supply force (with agriculture always an exception given the protectionism of its key European membership).   

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In more recent times it has focussed on decarbonis .....Read online   .....pdf

The Cormann factor

Catallaxy Files, 14 March 2021

     The OECD in times gone by was the spearhead of economic reform promoting smaller government, free trade, dismantling of industry support (with agriculture always an exception given the protectionism of Europe and Japan).

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In more recent times it has focussed on decarbonisation, gender issues (there is a “gender portal” and many lectures about how progress-on-gender-equality-is-too-slow).  The OECD is also – probably always was – a proponent of Keynesian stimulus. The present Secretary General is the Mexican socialist José Ángel Gurría.

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When Matthias Cormann threw his hat into the ring for the .....Read online

No upside for electricity customers in the early closure of coal generators

The Spectator, 10 March 2021

     The announcement that EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power station in Victoria is to close in 2028, two to four years earlier than had been expected, is an inevitable outcome of the subsidies that governments provide to wind and solar. Yallourn supplies one-fifth of Victoria’s electricity and about eight per cent of that in the National Electricity Market.  

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The rapid expansion of wind and solar – all of which is subsidised – has seen their market share lift from virtually nothing 20 years ago, to over 20 per cent.  Because it is subsidised and receives payment even when (as is increasingly the case) wholesale prices are negative .....Read online   .....pdf

If Craig Kelly wants to strike while the iron’s hot…

The Spectator, 28 February 2021

     When he resigned from the Liberal Party last week, Craig Kelly signalled that he would be seeking to highlight the catastrophic consequences of failed energy dogmas. Indeed, he flagged that energy policy was the one area where he could well vote against the government.

Kelly will have his work cut out in assessing what to target among the $7 billion a year multitudinous subsidy schemes for renewables overseen by ministers more intent on placating green activism than restoring a low cost, reliable electricity supply and green activists actually controlling state government policy.

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An immediate issue concerns the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), just one government institution in the energy   .....Read online     .....pdf

A warning on windpower from deep in the heart of Texas

The Spectator, 17 February 2021

     Were the South Australian blackouts in 2016 precursors to those that have occurred in Texas during the past few days?   

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In both cases, an electricity system that has been force-fed with subsidised wind and solar suddenly failed.  The total blackout that was seen in South Australia was more severe than the Texas failure but in both cases wind and solar played a prominent role.  Those renewables normally account for 23 per cent of the electricity in Texas.  This is somewhat less than in South Australia where wind/solar is half of supply but the inherent intermittency of wind in South Australia is cushioned by links to Victorian coal.    

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Texas, without similar such links, saw 98 per cent .....Read online     .....pdf 

No, the climate wars aren’t over

The Spectator, 11 February 2021

     For over a dozen years, shills in the media and among the subsidy-seekers have been declaring the ‘climate wars’ to be dead.  Yet the disputes over policy involving reducing carbon dioxide emissions, having previously dethroned prime ministers Rudd, Gillard and Turnbull, continue to be central to Australian politics. Anthony Albanese has indicated, notwithstanding Jennie George warning about the ALP losing its worker constituency by getting too cosy with the greens, that he will embrace legislation for “net zero” emissions.

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Australia has incurred more costs per capita in suppressing greenhouse gases than other countries.  Major programs for .....Read online     .....pdf 

Pressure is on as developed world champions net zero

The Australian, 4  February 2021

     Energy and greenhouse gas emissions are once again central to political turmoil in Australia.

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The opposition has moved Mark Butler, its most active promoter of the “green revolution”, from climate change and energy policy control but offered no indication that its policy will change. Indeed, Butler’s replacement, Chris Bowen, has warned jobs will be decimated if the nation does not move away from carbon-intensive industries.

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In expressing faith in renewable energy, such views portray a remarkable incuriosity about why all the world’s rapidly growing economies, including China, India and Vietnam, are using coal, not     .....Read online     .....pdf 

Energy prices: the new fault line in politics

The Spectator, 28 January 2021

     Energy has emerged as the clear new faultline in Australian politics. We see today Anthony Albanese is removing his fellow Left faction member Mark Butler from the environment portfolio in a bid to boost not just Labor’s electability, but his chances of survival. Yet the issue is not just a matter for the ALP.

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The Nationals are saying they want to see 800,000 new manufacturing jobs in the next 15 years.  This is less ambitious than at first sight but it would mean over a fifth of new jobs being created in the sector that has seen its share of jobs shrink from 15 to 7 per cent over the past 30 years. 

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The idea is to leverage the jobs from our intrin   .....Read online     .....pdf 

ScoMo runs up the white flag on carbon

The Spectator, 25 January 2021

     It was only at midday Friday The Spectator Australia asked Will Australia face carbon tariffs under the Biden regime? By that evening, the Prime Minister had pre-empted any trade war with an immediate surrender or, as his spin on the front page of The Weekend Australian put it, declaring that the “Politics of carbon has ended“.

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The Biden Administration’s flurry of energy and carbon emission-related measures during its first day have had an immediate effect on Australian policy, with Scott Morrison declaring that political debate about reaching a carbon-neutral future is over.  

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Overturning Trump’s policies, Biden has recommitted the United States to the Paris Climate Accord, rescinded approvals for  .....Read online     .....pdf 

Will Australia face carbon tariffs under the Biden regime?

The Spectator, 22 January 2021

     Day 1 of the Biden Presidency saw the reversal of several of the Trump administration’s environmental policies, including tighter vehicle emissions standards, a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and revoking the permit for expanding and re-routing the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Biden also announced that the United States will re-join the Paris Climate Accord and has previously raised the possibility of a carbon tax.   

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These and other measures are likely to undermine the conditions that have given low electricity costs to many parts of the US and made the US an oil and gas net exporter for the first time in 60 years.   

But as is the case around the world, business in  .....Read online     .....pdf 

Why is so much big business leaning left – and what will it mean for jobs and growth?

The Sepctator, 18 January 2021

     One of the truly remarkable developments over the past half-century is the reversal and the relative flows of electoral funding going to parties of the right and parties of the left.  

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Fifty years ago, parties of the right had a colossal advantage tempered only by support of the left by unions.  In the recent United States election, the Democrats outraised and outspent the Republicans almost to two to one.  Open Secrets adds, “Even when excluding the money spent by billionaire presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, Democratic candidates and groups have spent $5.5 billion compared to Republicans’ $3.8 billion.”  But that is also remarkable in so far as two billionaire candidates were seeking to represent the Democ .....Read more     .....pdf 

Yes, the energy system is broken – but because of ministers, bureaucrats and regulators rush to renewables

The Spectator, 7 January 2021

     Kerry Schott, head of the Energy Security Board, the most senior of the dozen or so Australian regulatory bodies, is scolding state ministers for trying to “speed up” what she sees as an inevitable transition to renewable energy.   

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Schott’s focus on state interventions is a response to the new assertiveness of state government in providing renewable subsidies through power purchasing agreements with renewable suppliers and forcing vast increases in expenditure on transmission and on-grid management.    

But for 2018/19, as shown below, state government subsidies to wind and solar were dwarfed by those from the Commonwe .....Read more       .....Pdf

Doug Anthony, not the Hayseed of Popular Memory

Quadrant Online, 23 December 2020

     For a period of nearly six months in 1979, as the Trade Department’s chief economist, I was seconded to become Deputy PM Doug Anthony’s Acting Principal Private Secretary. Nowadays the position is called Chief of Staff but in those far-off times ministerial staff were only one quarter as numerous as today.  The job meant speech writing and providing briefings on other departments’ Cabinet submissions.

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Anthony himself, though affecting the air of a hayseed, was well read and open to different ideas.  He was appalled at the Whitlam Government’s policy excesses — though the extremism of some of those have been since surpassed by Coalition governments!  Naturally, he shared none of the Whitlam government’s hostility to the mining industry which led it to micro-managing price negotiations, but it was not until the  .....Read more

The state have hijacked power policy – and activists are coming for the sceptic’s seats

The Spectator, 17 December 2020

     State governments have now taken control of electricity policy from the Commonwealth. Although state control potentially allows alternative approaches to be tested and compared, all states currently have similar policies. They are signing purchasing agreements with renewable suppliers and requiring customers to fund the associated transmission, batteries and pumped hydro, which is needed to shore up the intrinsically erratic supply that wind and solar generation entails. Energy Ministers Matt Kean in New South Wales and Lily D’Ambrosio in Victoria are now doubling down on the renewable energy-oriented policies pioneered by South Australia, policies that delivered crippling outcomes in terms of price and reliability.   

The Commonwealth has become little more than a paymaster supporting state measures, with a fire-fighting role to avert or .....Read more       .....Pdf

Adding to our climate change woes, Garnauteconomics is back

Catallaxy Files, 11 December 2020

     Now that they have assured themselves of a Biden victory, the forces profiting from Australian deindustrialisation – the woke and subsidy seekers – are rampant.  The AFR has long benefitted from its renewable energy clients.  Today it featured Garnauteconomics in urging we impose further burdens on the economy by intensifying the assault on modern energy.

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Net zero emissions is the modern clarion call.  Oblivious to this requiring a carbon tax of $190 per MWh tax according to the IEA estimated or $650 per MWh estimated in an NZ government analysis, Garnaut urges us to push ahead with new impositions, saying the

big risk to Australia is that it will be left isolated from its        .....Read more  

Subsidies drain power from the electricity market

The Australian, 2 December 2020

     Last week’s virtual Climate and Energy Summit screened politicians, industry leaders and bur­eaucrats, many of whom have been responsible for destroying the world’s most competitive electricity industry. The sledgehammer has been subsidies through regulations and government spending, which are running at $7bn a year.

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Speakers included US Democratic Party activist Audrey Zibelman, who came to Australia as a refugee from the 2016 Trump victory and is returning as a Google executive to help refill the Washington swamp. Zibelman heads the Australian Energy Market Operator, which she transformed into a policymaking body fostering increased renewable energy supplies by spending $17.4bn on new .....Read more      .....pdf

Will a Biden win put pressure on our power prices – and more – with climate demands?

The Spectator, 18 November 2020

     Australia will face much-increased pressure to increase its greenhouse gas emissions abatement if Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on 20 January next year; pressures that may even encourage us to redefine our economic and political relationships.   

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Biden’s “Climate 21 policies” is his blueprint to reorientate the economy towards the climate-change programs that are central to his political manifesto.  Climate 21 would establish a National Climate Council to move the U.S. and global economy to a low-carbon trajectory. A Biden Administration will rejoin and revitalise the Paris Agreement and will publish a four-year Climate Ambition Agenda containing action plans for “greenhouse gas mitigation”.....Read more      .....pdf

Joel Fitzgibbon’s departure shows the new fault line in Australian politics

The Spectator, 11 November 2020

     Joel Fitzgibbon’s resignation as shadow minister for resources and agriculture and his departure to the Labor backbench is symptomatic of the new fault-line in politics.

 

Belief in catastrophic climate change activates policies for agriculture, energy, manufacturing, product standards, recycling and water – all the way to zoology. Irrespective of the absence of human-induced climate change and climate emergencies – bushfires, hurricanes, coral loss, heat waves etc – alarmists’ control over government institutions, the education establishment and the media has led many people to unquestioningly accept the imminence of harmful human-induced climate change.     ..... Read more    .....pdf

Joe Biden’s Green New Deal is a setback for jobs and income

The Australian, 11 November 2020

     Last week’s was America’s most important election, but it also has profound implications for Australia. The Green New Deal is what most distinguishes the Democrats’ program from that of President Donald Trump.

As Jennifer Oriel has noted, Kamala Harris and ­Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez plan to use energy policy not only to fundamentally reshape the American economy but as a means of redistributing wealth and income to “low-income communities, indigenous peoples, and communities of colour”.

With the Green New Deal, the Democrats’ policy target is ­focused on zero net emissions of CO2. This means eliminating coal and gas and sharply winding back oil consumption. Nuclear power as an alternative has no place. .....Read more  ..... Pdf

Has climate change replaced socialism as the dominant political divide?

Catallaxy Files, 11 November 2020

     With the US Presidential election still undeclared and the ALP joining the Liberals in tearing itself apart on climate policies and support for renewables, I had two pieces published today.

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The first in the Australian (ungated version here) observed how a Biden victory “will bring increased pressure on us to introduce more regulations, subsidies and other measures to reduce domestic emissions. One upshot, aside from higher household electricity bills, will be closure or contraction of Australian industries previously benefiting from low cost energy. A corollary is lower living standards.”

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The second article in The Spectator concluded, “Donald Trump, in renouncing the carbon agenda, was poised to undermine it .....Read more 

Subsidies Blowing in the Wind

Quadrant Online, 29 October 2020

     Victoria Bitter, Bunnings and miner South32 have joined the banks in being the latest to proclaim their carbon free emissions, signalling a certainty, at least from firms’ PR departments, that the future belongs to renewables.  Nations around the world – the latest being South Korea – are committing to carbon neutrality thirty years hence. The triumph of renewables was seemingly underlined by South Australia going from zero to hero. On Sunday 11 October, solar alone powered the whole state for an hour, apparently wiping away the dudgeon renewables incurred by causing a statewide blackout in September 2016.

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With all the creativity involved in finding ways to avoid reporting Hunter Biden’s laptop contents, the righteous within the media ..... Read more  

Read the report on the cost of climate policies and renewables:

Reflections on the cost to thesidies to

How Daniel Andrews added another $400 million to the power bill

The Spectator, 16 October 2020

     The Andrews Government is not telling us but it looks like they’ve lost the taxpayer some $400 million in long term power purchasing
contracts. Only a year ago they claimed they’d made a $285 million
profit on those same contracts.


Last November, Victoria’s Auditor–General’s Office waved through 15-
year contracts signed by the state’s Department of
Environment, Land, Water and Planning for renewable energy. The contracts were on a “contract-for difference” basis, under which a price is agreed and the supplier pays the difference to the government if the spot price is higher, while the government pays the difference to the supplier if it is lower. ..... Read more     ..... pdf

National Water Week reveals a policy drought

The Spectator, 23 October 2020

     This is National Water Week.  Its theme is “Reimagining our Water Future”. Proclaiming water to be one of the seven priority areas for agriculture Minister David Littleproud says “In agriculture it’s a case of just add water”.  In fact, water and infrastructure is the seventh priority behind “stewardship”, a euphemism for climate change.  Stewardship “reforms will empower farmers to diversify their income and earn credits under the $2 billion Climate Solution Fund”. In other words, it offers farmers a chance to earn income by avoiding farming.  

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In an apparent consensus, both the actual and shadow minister for agriculture have endorsed a National Farmers Federation “Roadmap” to almost double agricultural output by 2030. 

..... Read more     ..... pdf

Budget 2020: Government keeps feeding poison to the power system

The Spectator, 10 October 2020

     The budget allocated $8.7 million to assist the Vales Point generator in New South Wales in a $100 million upgrade that is now virtually complete.  The funding is so conditional that it is unlikely to be used, yet the decision has sparked outrage from the wind and solar lobby — a lobby lubricated by $7 billion a year in subsidies, one thousand times that conditionally offered to Vales Point. 

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The subsidies to wind and solar come directly from the taxpayer and, indirectly, from regulations that force consumers unwittingly to accept growing proportions of high-cost wind and solar within their electricity supplies.   

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Even excluding direct taxpayer funding,   ..... Read more     ..... pdf

New wind and solar generation being built in spite of low prices

Catallaxy Files, 5 October 2020

     Why, in spite of a glut, are new renewables still being built?

2020, like 2019, will see $9 billion spent on new (large scale) wind and solar generators. That is over 6 GW in each year (Hazelwood was 1.6 GW but could run for 90 per cent of the time, whereas wind runs at 33 per cent and solar less).

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An apparent anomaly is that, though the Commonwealth’s Large-Scale Generation Certificate (LGC) subsidy for wind and grid-supplied solar continues to be paid to existing supplies, it is not abvailable for new supplies.  It is capped at 33,000 GWh, a level which will be surpassed by supply reaching 40,000 GWh in 2021. New supplies can only get a Commonwealth subsidy by buying out existing facilities.

Even so, the Clean Energy Regulator expects new supplies  ..... Read more

A Fool’s Bargain Trades Gold for Green

Quadrant Online, 28 September 2020

     Australia’s green-ink profligacy is evident in great abundance in Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s First Low Emissions Technology Statement – 2020, grandly proclaiming “global leadership in low emissions technologies”. Masquerading as a technology fix to all our problems in ‘decarbonating’ the economy, it contained hand-outs from the Australian taxpayer for worthless returns.  It:

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  • offered funding for researchers into the ever-elusive modern Philosophers’ Stone, energy (and not the nuclear version) from hydrogen.

  • promised even more subsidies to capture and bury carbon dioxide from burning coal and gas.

  • said how essential it is to provide more funding for   ..... Read more

Ms Zibelman Pulls the Plug

Quadrant Online, 3 October 2020

Audrey Zibelman, the American head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), one of the electricity industry’s four national regulators, is to leave before her contract expires to join a Google startup.  The other national agencies regulating the industry are the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the Australian Electricity Market Commission (AEMC) and the Energy Security Board (ESB).

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Zibelman’s announced departure was not accompanied by universal praise.  One significant electricity industry player, Danny Price, the head of Frontier Economics, has long been dismissive of her understanding of how markets work best.  Though not hostile to her stance in support of renewables, Price said, “I think it is time that we have a respected, competent Australian engineer running AEMO, not  ..... Read more

Inside the federal by-election you may not have heard about

The Spectator, 25 September 2020

     Due to the impending Queensland state election, there has been little discussion about the federal seat of Groom, which is now vacant following the resignation of John McVeigh.  Centred on Toowoomba, Groom is a seat which the Coalition had a 70-30 two-party preference at the last election. 

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Matt Canavan is said to be mulling over the switch from the Senate and relocating his family 600 kilometres down the A3 from his home in Rockhampton.  Though the candidate would be ‘Liberal National’, if he did contest the seat, he would be pressured to sit in the Liberal rather than the National Party room, though he could insist on a Nat filling his Senate vacancy.  

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Canavan is said to be unwilling to switch to the Liberals but doing so would suit his purposes if he is to make a future run at the prime ministership.   

 

In this respect, Henri de Bourbon comes to mind. A Protestant, he was offered the French throne in 1593 conditional on him becoming a Catholic. “Paris is well worth a mass”, he allegedly said. Crowned King Henri IV a year later, ruling with “weapon in hand and arse in the saddle”, he oversaw a ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Bludgeoning the electricity industry corpse: the government’s technology policy

Catallaxy Files, 23 September 2020

     Compounding the further retreat from a rational energy policy that the government announced last week, this week the government announced the curiously titled ‘First Low Emissions Technology Statement’.

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The statement flags further interventions in energy supply and elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I have a critique of the policy proposals in the Spectator, The low emissions technology statement: a (hydrogen) bomb.  Essentially, the Statement involves an $18 billion ten-year program of support for:

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• R&D and energy funding, the highlight of which is funding hydrogen R&D, the “stretch” goal of which is get hydrogen at $2 per kilogram in order to displace fossil fuels; even if achievable this would price hydrogen at over $16 per gigajoule, three times the cost of the natural gas it is supposed to supplant!
• Measures, costing at least $15 billion, to ameliorate the adverse effects of high cost and unstable wind and solar, now comprising 15 per cent   ,,,,, Read more 

The low emissions technology statement: a (hydrogen) bomb

The Spectator, 23 September 2020

     Matt Canavan’s lucid insights published in the Australian this week show how little understanding politicians and officials have of the electricity industry where supply must exactly equal demand and into which they have “force-fed” intrinsically unreliable, high cost renewables.  This created a Frankenstein made more monstrous by every additional piece of tinkering.    

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Yesterday’s Low Emissions Technology statement and announcements last week show the government pursuing a further iteration of its tragic energy policy.  It is sinking the industry deeper into a morass of central planning and control conditioned by carbon dioxide mitigation.  

Angus Taylor now defines policy as resting on five pillars: clean hydrogen; energy storage; green steel and aluminium; Carbon Capture and Storage; and soil carbon projects.  It is supported by $1.9 billion in new expenditure commitments.   

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All of these pillars can only exacerbate the migration of the electricity industry from the low-cost competitive energy which created present living standards.  The new agenda maintains the ascendency of raucous climate activists and venal renewable energy subsidy seekers in replacing cheap .... Read more     ..... pdf

This week’s big energy announcements? Just another nail in the coffin of low-cost power

The Spectator, 17 September 2020

    The government’s energy policy announced this week is another milestone in the demise of what was once the world’s lowest-cost energy market. The slow fuse priming the bomb was lit in 2001, when Prime Minister John Howard Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) requiring electricity retailers to include two per cent of exotic renewables (wind and solar) into their electricity supply.  This gave a 50 per cent subsidy – paid for by customers — to these renewables.    

At that time renewables were confidently forecast to be fully competitive within a few years.  Twenty years later wind and solar still require assistance to compete with fossil fuels and their further shortcomings of variable power supply have become more evident.  

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But policy augmentations from John Howard’s modest interventions mean wind and solar are now are responsible for over a fifth of demand.  And the MRET subsidies remain in place, compounded by additional support in the form of assistance for transmission, grants and soft loans –- in all, the equivalent to $13 billion a year.  Aside from this cost, these measures bring about highly volatile prices –- especially in the current COVID-abnormal era.  

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Moreover, by forcing coal generators to operate uneconomically with stop-start operations both increasing overhead expenses and adding to wear and tear, government interventions have raised costs for those generators, which remain the dominant sources of supply.  This is making them  ..... Read more     ....pdf

Can democracy survive an increasingly biased media?

The Spectator, 16 September 2020

     The ACCC is seeking to force Google and Facebook to pay for the media content they redistribute which has led to their capturing the advertising revenue that previously went to newspapers.  The issue is ostensibly one of bargaining imbalance but behind it is the notion that social media is undermining a vigorous free press.  

 

The struggle for freedom of expression was not one of “the people” but one of what we would today call the liberal elites seeking to promote their political preferences.  It developed in England and in 1640 the press became free, allowing the Puritans to campaign against the Crown.  Having executed the king, the Puritans quickly reimposed censorship in 1643.  This lapsed 50 years later and in what would become the United States, de facto press freedom was formally established in a 1734 trial fronted by Alexander Hamilton; it was enshrined in the First Amendment in 1791.  Many other nations have adopted this, mostly without practicing it.  

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Most people, especially the press itself, see unbiased freedom of reporting as a buttress against tyranny.  Objectivity in newspapers, however, only emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century due to advertisers coming to dominate the media’s finances and generally seeking that  ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Governments have made this recession worse. They can’t now impede recovery

The Spectator, 2 September 2020

     A 7 per cent fall in GDP during the June quarter is pretty much to have been expected. Led by spending falls on transport (down over 80 per cent) and in cafes (down 56 per cent), household spending was down 12 per cent.   

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But there is no shortage of demand – the household saving rate has shot up from 6 per cent to nearly 20 per cent. Though precautionary saving is doubtless a factor, people have limited opportunities to spend their money rather than being short of funds.

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The consumption foregone in the recent quarter is lost – and further losses will be recorded during the current quarter. And there will be lasting changes in demand, including a permanent dip in demand for office facilities, which will require building modifications and adaptations.  Nonetheless, the crisis has not impacted the fundamental production base of the economy — its facilities and skills. Left to itself output will mend and do so quite rapidly – the high pent-up savings, low interest rates will help considerably in this respect. ..... Read more     ..... pdf

Biden’s handlers track away from lunacy in energy policy

Catallaxy Files, 1 September 2020

     Joe Biden’s new claim to be in favour of law and order is not the only area where the Democrats are tracking away from the radical left.  Among the crazy policies that the Democrats have been promoting (with disastrous consequences in California) are a conversion of the US electricity system to wind/solar even faster than Australia’s.

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I touched on Biden’s energy policy in the September edition of Climate News.

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In May, Biden announced a Dream Team of climate advisers co-chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “the avatar of the Green New Deal”, and John Kerry, architect of the Paris climate accord.  One former adviser not included is Hillary Clinton’s presumptive Energy Secretary, Audrey Zibelman who, since Turnbull fingered her to head the Australian Energy Market Operator, has been mustering new regulatory accretions for electricity in the Australian National Market.

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The Dream  Team, which also included Rep. Kathy Castor, the chair of Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, seemed to presage  .....Read more

We can still have a V-shaped corona recovery. Here’s how

The Spectator, 11 August 2020

     The shutdown in Victoria is devastating the state economy retarding the national recovery.

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The data on which to assess the actual downturn and longer-term national costs is confusing.

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Measured GDP has seen a reduction of only 2.75 per cent.  But this is largely a consumption-based measure and has been underpinned by JobKeeper/JobSeeker payments that represent borrowing from the future.  Such payments unsupported by production cannot continue for long in spite of the hopes of Modern Monetary Theory supporters and the illusions of leftists who think the economy produces irrespective of government measures.

A better measure of reduced output is the number of hours worked, which are down 9.4 per cent.  This is imperfect because, on the one hand, largely unproductive public sector employees have been unaffected and, on the other hand, so also have the most productive jobs in mining, agriculture, processing industries, telecommunications and finance.

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In terms of costs that have been imposed, government supporting actions will have increased debt by some $330 billion.  The average Australian ..... Read more

How a Premier should shoulder the burden of office

The Spectator, 3 August 2020

brooding%20premier_edited.jpg

We can but wish…

“It’s only fair”, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said as he announced that he and his Cabinet would work for no payment over the course of the Phase 4 Shutdown he’d just introduced.

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“Backbench MPs and their staff, who like a million other Victorians are unable to go to work, will surrender their salaries and accept the same JobSeeker payment as other workers no longer able to earn a living.  We are seeking to introduce the same conditions for all state public servants other than those in ‘front-line’ positions performing services that are even more critical in these troubling times.”

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The Premier continued, “As a government, we believe in equally sharing the pain that we, as decision makers, have visited upon the state as a whole.  And the measures will assist in alleviating some of the costs to the economy stemming from these actions.”     ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Confucian wisdom

The Spectator, 28 July 2020

     The International Energy Agency is just another international agency that Australia finances in order to receive advice that, if taken, would cripple the economy. At the latest Clean Energy summit, IEA’s agitator-in-chief Fatih Birol continued to push for a COVID 19 recovery with its central theme involving substituting high cost renewable energy for coal.

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In its coverage of the summit, RenewEconomy, one of many Australian wind/solar energy propaganda publications, applauded Birol’s call for an expedited closure of all Australian coal plants.   

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Birol does not stop at exhorting his flock to stop building new coal fired power stations but urges a decarbonisation program for the existing ones as well as for steel plant, cement factories and other emission-intensive facilities. Mentioning carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, he described finding the technologies to do this as “big homework”. Big homework it is! For coal, the massive Australian government spending on CCS – including bankrolling the highly secretive Carbon Capture and Storage Institute – would deliver electricity at three times the cost of existing High Efficiency  ..... Read more      .....pdf version       

Sorry Alan, but Modern Monetary Theory is a load of cobblers

The Spectator, 20 July 2020

     Alan Kohler considers the current crisis provides the ideal laboratory for applying the catchily titled Modern Monetary Theory — MMT.  He sees this as a paradigm change whereby the government just keeps spending money with little concern for debt in order to maintain employment.  He considers this to be a modern version of the stimulus to counteract a downturn, one that goes much further than policies favoured by Keynesian economics.   

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Keynesian economics is a prescription for ironing out the peaks and troughs in an economic cycle.  It would never have achieved its current popularity had it been seen as the permanent stimulus that Kohler advocates.  Even in its pure form it had become discredited in bringing about “stagflation” in the 1970s rather than its intendedeconomic recovery.  And in the Global Financial Crisis in 2007, Australia recovered not from the wasteful Kevin Rudd/Ken Henry stimulus policy of “Go hard, go early, go households” but from a genuine increase in demand brought about by the booming Chinese economy. 

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Keynesian policy prescriptions as advocated by Keynes himself, at least in his later years, contra Rudd/Ken Henry, involved investment spending to provide a platform of higher future incomes.  The problem with this is that government is likely to be wasteful its allocations and such ..... Read more     .....pdf version

On the Road to Ruin for no Good Reason

Quadrant Online, 12 July 2020

     This week’s announced closure of New Zealand’s only aluminium smelter presents the shape of things to come for Australia. Aluminium producers gravitated to these shores, attracted by some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. Those prices appeared to be sustainable, founded as they were on extensive low-cost and well-situated coal resources.

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A wake-up call might have been the closure six years ago of the Port Henry smelter near Geelong. Although an old facility, no suggestion of it being replaced was entertained.  Already, with carbon taxes and governments determined to reject coal in favour of subsidising high-cost and unreliable wind, the bounty of new, world-class new aluminium smelters had become a history lesson.  

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Things have only grown worse. 

Australia’s energy politics, in the form of subsidies and other favours to renewables — constantly punted as being on the cusp of being competitive with coal or gas — have left our own remaining smelters requiring government assistance to stave off bankruptcy. Hence, we have government subsidies in place to counteract the damage done by other subsidies!

Australia’s energy interventions come in three flavours:

1 Direct Commonwealth and state payments to renewables and vaunted new sources, with hydrogen ..... Read more

Do we want to follow St Jacinda and price our industry out of existence?

The Spectator, 10 July 2020

     Rio Tinto’s announced closure of its aluminium smelter in New Zealand due to uncompetitive power prices this week is a reminder of the vulnerability of Australia’s four remaining smelters, all of which face sharply higher prices courtesy of government energy policies.  With energy costs comprising about a third of their total costs, smelters are industry’s bellwethers of future energy competitivenessand all four of Australia’s are on national suicide watch.  

As a result of subsidies to wind and solar, these expensive and unreliable energy sources have caused high customer costs, both directly and indirectly, while also diverting the nation’s investment resources into avenues that actually damage the economy.   

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Commonwealth and state subsidies to wind and solar energy are running at just under $7 billion a year.  $4 billion of these are as a result of requirements imposed on consumers by the Commonwealth’s Renewable Energy Target and its similar provisions for roof-top installations and measures taken by state governments.  Some $2 billion of assistance to renewables comes from direct subsidies.    

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The effect of these subsidies is compounded by their forcing out of production lower-cost coal generators.  As a result, prices ar ..... Read more     .....pdf version

Albo’s Claytons climate policy switch

The Spectator, 24 June 2020

     In the media today, we see two contrasting ALP position papers, by Kevin Rudd in the AFR, and by Anthony Albanese in a Press Club address pre-released to some media outlets.  

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Kevin Rudd, in ranting against “the faceless men of the factions” claims among the ALP successes that, “We ratified the Kyoto Protocol, (in 2007) legislated a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target now delivering 20 per cent clean energy, and legislated twice for a carbon price only to be defeated by the Liberal-Green coalition”. 

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Rudd’s measures accelerated the trend to subsidised wind and solar, the upshot of which became clear in 2016. At that time, the increased market share of difficult-to-control intermittent generation finally forced the departure from the market of two very significant coal generators, the Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria. The upshot was first, the collapse of the South Australian electricity supply system, demonstrated the vulnerability of a system that is dependent on renewables, and secondly the doubling of the wholesale costs of electricity.     ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

A Democracy if We Can Keep It

Quadrant Online, 18 June 2020

     In an AFR column, former Liberal leader Alexander Downer has reprised a conversation with the late Lord Carrington in which Britain’s one-time Home Secretary suggested democracy would struggle to survive. It was a view Downer rejected at the time but of which he is not now so sure.  I have visited this theme in the past – for example here, here and here — and in these times of madness, when popular movements demand the sacking of entire police forces and an incident in Minneapolis sees statues of Captain Cook vandalised in Australia, I return to the theme with a marked degree of pessimism.

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The reverence for democracy arose only over the last a century or so. Prior to then, rule by consent – especially with regard to taxation – had been common, as affirmed in 1215 by Magna Carta. But that did not mean rule by the people.  The great Greek philosophers were acutely aware of the deficiencies of mob rule in Athens, and American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century were similarly concerned that the gentle tyranny of King George could be replaced with something much, much worse.  Their belief was in life, liberty and property.  John Adams wrote:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty … The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

..... Read more

Like it or not, Australia needs Donald Trump

The Spectator, 18 June 2020

     It is difficult to imagine a more critical juncture in Australian history: 

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  • We confront a world downturn, accompanied by a new kind of cold war between the United States and China,  

  • Our international protector, the US is going through a crisis of confidence, if not a populist revolution, that is engulfing the rule of law while within the Democratic Party, younger progressives and socialists are displacing moderates.  

  • Australia’s helicopter money, response to COVID-19 has further damaged an economy weakened by decades of punitive energy and environmental regulatory measures undermining its comparative advantage in manufacturing, agriculture and mining. At the same time, these productive sectors have been carrying an increasing burden of social services. All this is compounded by the military folly of selecting politically correct soldiers and hardware.  
     

President Trump right now is trailing by 13 points in the polls.  The constellation of forces creating this are the virulently hostile Democrat establishment, pushed further by the rising influence of its younger green left, supported by anti-capitalist organisations like Sunrise and Antifa.  They also include the Never Trumpers who preferred the corrupt Clintons and now acquiesce in a Democrat candidate under radical  ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Coronavirus: We can’t spend our way to wealth

The Australian, 11 June 2020

     In addressing the effects of the pandemic lockdown, the Morris­on government has injected $84bn under the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs and another $688m for home renovations. The Reserve Bank of Australia has, in addition, engineered cheap loans of at least $90bn, and possibly much more.

Though sometimes referring to these measures as a stimulus, the government would deny it is going down the same path as Kevin Rudd, who spent $200bn attempting, ineffectually, to combat­ the global financial crisis.

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A justification for this generous support is that shutdown polic­ies causing workers to be evicted from their jobs were taken in the national interest. But now we face an economic slump.

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While the federal bureaucracy, and Treasury in particular, is full of credentialed economists, they are, for the most part, Keynesian — and therefore to counter a fall in output they prescribe demand stimuli through government spending, or tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts.

 

A minority would have been schooled in Friedman’s monetar­ism and would favour creating phantom savings, which depress ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop

Quadrant Online, 9 June 2020

     Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an archaic source of electricity now being battered by upstart competitors wind and solar. Bear in mind that world electricity supply pans out at 38 per cent for coal, 23 per cent gas and 26 per cent hydro/nuclear. Wind/solar supply 10 per cent.

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IRENA tirelessly advocates for renewables, saying they “could form a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” And in the purple prose so common with these green-spruiking agencies it claims, “Scaling up renewables can boost struggling economies. It can save money for consumers, pique the appetites of investors and create numerous high-quality new jobs.” Investment in renewables is amplified by other benefits, the story goes, as it is alleged to bring “health, sustainability and inclusive prosperity.” When it comes to renewables, no snake-oil salesman of old could hold a carbon-neutral candle to the likes of their modern green-lipped urgers.

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IRENA would have us see renewable power installations as a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 ..... Read more

Is a COVID based slump causing an energy policy re-think?

Catallaxy Files, 2 June 2020

     I have a piece in the Spectator this morning that builds upon the challenging commentaries by Senator Canavan and Craig Kelly calling for termination of subsidies to renewables and leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  These measures, and those earlier under the Kyoto Accord, drive up energy costs and are destroying manufacturing which would be flourishing under the low energy costs we could have.

Some in the ALP, especially Joel Fitzgibbon representing a coal mining seat, also agree.

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Australian electricity supply has, in the course of 20 years, moved from just about the cheapest in the world to one of the most expensive.  The present relative position is indicated by this graph. ..... Read more

If we want to rebuild manufacturing post coronavirus, we need to cut the cost of energy

The Spectator, 2 June 2020

     In one of the most challenging commentaries by a senior politician, former resources minister Matt Canavan, advocates leaving the Paris Agreement under which Australia has agreed to take actions that will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.  He argues that Australia cannot afford to meet the treaty obligations which require replacing electricity generated from coal by expensive wind and solar. The subsidies this requires drive up the cost of energy and, with our high wage economy, prevents us having a vibrant manufacturing sector.  

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Steep electricity price increases have undermined the nation's ..... Read more 

 ..... pdf version

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Energy policy disaster continues; more intervention, less market

Catallaxy Files, 21 May 2020

     The Commonwealth keeps pressing policy issues that, on the one hand, dilute the spending egregiously allocated to renewables but then divert it to the failed carbon capture and storage (CSS) adventure and to the highly speculative unleashing of cheap energy from hydrogen.  It released a report of an activist-stacked and serviced committee chaired by Grant King that promoted this, as well as inching the nation closer to a cap-and-trade emission reduction program.  I wrote this piece for The Spectator yesterday.

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In a new initiative, the government has again appointed another committee of people who are wedded to the green energy revolution to advise on new gee-wizz tech issues.  It will get the answers it expects to get and embark on another spending spree.

The government has also provided yet another “road map” compiled by the environment department for a grateful minister. This favours gas (which it says is cheaper than coal – an absurd statement regarding Australia) and the colossally expensive pumped storage option.  Like all previous reports it predicts the dawn of an era when renewables will be the cheapest form of energy but does say they need to be “firmed” by attendant supplies of controllable energy (hence gas and pumped storage).      ..... Read more

Why is the Morrison Government leaving the back door open to a carbon tax?

The Spectator, 20 May 2020

     As part of the ABC’s climate conspiracy agenda, Four Corners this week highlighted the “anger” at the government from the senior mandarins from its failure to deliver their goal of a carbon tax.  Their preferred approach was notwithstanding the tax rate would today have to be $US100 per tonne, a staggering $80 billion a year impost.

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Also unmentioned was government action on the chimaera of climate change that presently costs over $4 billion a year in regulatory and direct funding. Included in this are regulatory requirements to support wind and large-scale solar (at a cost this year of $1.1 billion) and rooftop solar which this year is costing $1.7 billion.   

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There are two components of the Commonwealth’s Climate Solutions Package of direct spending budget on emission reductions.  The first is a “$2 billion Climate Solutions Fund to support Australian farmers, businesses and communities to adopt new technologies that reduce ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

Gassed-Up and Light-Headed for Hydrogen

Quadrant Online, 11 May 2020

     There can be no doubting the reversion of businesses’ political advice to self-interested advocacy, in contrast to the glory days of 40 years ago.  At that time there was a strong push for deregulation, but industry leaders have since backslid into promoting their particular interests, seeking subsidies (especially for energy) and, not unrelatedly, virtue-selling to deflect NGO criticism and its associated damage to share prices. I have a piece in The Spectator that addresses this.

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The advice from businesses and their representatives is now best politely ignored.  Firms willvirtue-signal but in acting on the advice they proffer – usually focussing on calls for some form of carbon tax – they face the test of the marketplace.  As I note, business success is dominated by iron laws of profit. Those leaders who implement measures that veer too close to the quicksands of virtue-signalling will be swallowed by it.

In today’s AFR, the superb Joe Aston illustrates this by focussing on Rio Tinto which, having sold its coal interests, has recently assumed the pole position among the climate alarmists. Rio is, with Shell and BHP, dominant among the international Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) which this month has     ..... Read more

Whatever happened to economic leadership from business?

The Spectator, 11 May 2020

     Having reached the pinnacles of their profession, business leaders have earned the right to speak with authority and have become accustomed to having that authority recognised. Their success stems from mastering the intricacies of their own firm: what to buy and sell, how to make savings, what product innovations to adopt and so on. But these skills rarely metamorphose into political leadership – indeed Donald Trump might be unique in this respect among world statesmen.     

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A key reason for this is that business leaders have one overriding goal, maximising the wealth of their shareholders, whereas political success measures are diffuse.  

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Not having time to master wider political issues, business leaders tend to relate national interests to those of their firm, immortalised as “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”, in the (misquoted) words of a former GM president.  Beyond this, business leaders    ..... Read more          ..... pdf version

The COVID lockdown and spendathon – was it worth it and what is to be done?

Catallaxy Files, 7 May 2020

     I have a piece in Quadrant where I estimate the person-years lives saved in Australia at 80,000. Each person-year is worth, on the government’s data, $219,000, hence saving is quantified at $17 billion.

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The cost in outlays and lost production I estimate at $235 billion, fourteen fold the benefits in lives saved.

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If however the initial health experts estimates of likely deaths without a lockdown had proved accurate the value of the lives saved would have been $526 billion, ostensibly far in excess of the costs incurred.

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But we have to be wary of applying these high values per life saved in the context of very large numbers since costs per person become increasingly unaffordable as the numbers to be saved increase. More importantly, we have to have a better fix on health projections than one that, in this cas ..... Read more

The Lockdown Strategy Called to Account

Quadrant Online, 7 May 2020

     Writing in The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen has pointed out that the statistical value of life used in regulatory assessment is $4.9 million for someone expected to live another 40 years — $213,000 per year  Such measures are income-dependent; in the US the value was put at $9 million and a 2012 study for Turkey put it at five and a half years per capita income or $59,000. Such measurements offend self-righteous claims that “every life is priceless” but such notions, if followed, would impose costs that would bring about other and additional loss of lives.​

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While Albrechtsen’s column is written in the context of coronavirus expenditure, she does not extend it to examining the worthiness of..... Read more

Revealed: the true cost of our stimulus spending

The Spectator, 7 May 2020

     Relative to GDP Australian government spending to address COVID-19 has been among the highest in the world.

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The Morrison government seems pleased to have been a world leader in mortgaging the future to combat the crisis.  Its package, totalling $320 billion, comprises five elements: 

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  • The PM’s initially announced health spending $2.4 billion 

  • JobKeeper and JobSeeker business support $168.78 billion 

  • Credit support$125 billion 

  • Access to superannuation$0.876 billion 

  • Income support$23.839 billion 

..... Read more                    ..... pdf version

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A COVID-19 economic recovery program

Catallaxy Files, 23 April 2020

     While the green left will use the crisis to march us to lower living standards and greater losses of liberty, the Commonwealth Government is making the right noises about reducing the tax and regulatory measures that have held us back.  But do they know where to start?

The tax reforms are easy: pare back company taxes and other imposts on production.

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I offered some advice in regulatory refom in an article published in the Spectator.  These regulatory sins comprise areas where real economic dividends can be made, collectively greater than the losses by the Commonwealth’s generosity with our savings and future incomes.  These are

  • Strip Back the Fair Work Commission’s functions to become similar to those in other jurisdictions: oversighting issues of unfair dismissal and human rights abuses etc.

  • Align land regulations for new housing development with those in Germany and US States like Texas, the Carolinas and Ohio, thereby reducing the cost of a new home by $200,000.

  • Curtail the creation of new national parks and address other land use measures that prevent farming, mining and logging in vast tracts of  ...... Read more

Scott, Josh and Mathias: here’s how you get us out of this mess

The Spectator, 22 April 2020

     The Morrison government has flagged tax cuts and aggressive deregulation as part of a pro-business road to economic recovery. A focus on stimulating rapid growth on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic is expected to guide October’s federal budget. — AAP report, April 20.

Future government action must focus strongly upon savings as a result of the 15 per cent of GDP ($340 billion) that has been spent on combating coronavirus.   

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Fifty years ago, the Commonwealth budget accounted for 18.3% of GDP. In the years since then, even before the current spending spree, the share had grown to 24.6%. Right now, with an extra $340 billion budgeted, the share of GDP will have become 35 %.   

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The nation’s phenomenal intrinsic wealth allowed Australia to prosper in spite of the growing claim on income by a largely     .....Read more     .....pdf file

Green Snouts Sniff a COVID Windfall

Quandrant Online, 16 April 2020

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     The Pope, deprived of the counsel of Cardinal Pell, the Church’s most astute voice, foolishly called coronavirus “nature’s response” for failures to act on climate change. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that coronavirus would be recruited to push for additional renewable energy subsidies to reinforce those that have already created today’s high cost, low quality electricity.

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Coal Wire, an anti-fossil fuel publication, was quick to swoop on a Harvard study that said the pollutant PM2.5 exacerbated coronavirus and that coal power stations were an important source of the pollutant.  Actually less than 5 per cent of PM2.5 particulate emissions come from energy production.

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Also fast out of the blocks was the anti-fossil fuel head of the Paris based International Energy  .....Read more

Does the Morrison government have the skills to lead us out of the recession it has created?

The Spectator, 16 April 2020

     The $320 billion in costs the Australian government has incurred to sustain and stimulate the economy in light of the COVID-19 crisis is money spent for consumption without it attracting any corresponding production. It is a permanent loss that can only be retrieved by increased production. Two areas where reform could compensate for this loss of revenue are the cessation of wasteful spending and regulations in water and energy, where total savings of $50 billion are available.

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But in addition to these direct savings, removal of these regulatory and taxpayer costs would unleash even larger productivity benefits in the two sectors.

For water, in Australia’s most important irrigation area, the Murray Darling Basin, the government’s actions in buying up 20 per cent of irrigators’ water for spurious environmental purposes has brought a tenfold increase in the water price, and hence its cost to farmers. At least $7 billion could be saved by the government reselling the water it holds to irrigators and recalling the funds yet to be spent.

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In addition, the economy would make other gains. Water is an essential input to agriculture and the increased output restoring ..... read more      .....pdf version

ScoMo’s gone as crazy as Kev, but we can still save the economy

The Spectator, 2 April 2020

     When the Prime Minister and Treasurer appointed Stephen Kennedy as the Treasury Secretary, they opted for a bureaucrat who had been the architect of Turnbull’s potentially disastrous carbon tax. They would also have known him to have been a senior adviser on Kevin Rudd’s exorbitant spendathon following the 2008 global financial crisis.

 

Unsurprisingly, the Secretary of the Treasury recommended that the government implement a “Full Rudd” coronavirus program, suggesting the British approach was insufficiently stimulatory.  Ministers need little encouragement to embark on spending sprees but in times past Treasury used to be a brake on their ambitions. 

 

Australia’s spending now totals $320 billion. At 14 per cent of GDP this is a magnitude similar to that of the UK program, though larger than that of the US at least fivefold that of Japan, Canada, Korea, Norway or New Zealand. Commonwealth spending programs go well beyond maintaining the nation’s businesses and sustaining those who are unemployed and extends into Keynesian economic stimulus territory. The stimulus effect will be ..... Read more     ..... pdf version

Emergency Measures in Need of an Exit Strategy

Quadrant, 25 March 2020

     It started with Mirko Bagaric in The Australian — “Release super to boost economy” — who, while justifiably railing against the superannuation funds’ fees, argued that allowing people to access 10 per cent of their super could inject up to $300 million into the economy.  Mirko has separately suggested that the actual amount might be $150 billion.

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Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has accepted a watered-down version of this, which he thinks might inject $27 billion into the economy by allowing people to access $20,000 of their superannuation savings, interestingly, over two years, an indication that the malaise won’t be over soon. This is part of the fiscal package which is now at $189 billion. That’s 9.7 per cent of today’s GDP but considerably more down the road, with GDP contracting by maybe 20 per cent.

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Much of the expenditure, that which seeks to cushion the costs to those worst affected, is sensible. But, even so, there has to be be an exit strategy.  We have doubled the dole, for example, but when do we return it to previous levels?

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Some of the money is conjured up by the Reserve Bank, which is buying shares and bonds to depress interest rates.  This “quantitative easing” ..... Read more

Revealed: the Deep Green State

The Spectator, 24 March 2020

     A story in the Guardian demonstrates the impotence of government against the Deep State machinery that it nominally controls.

 

This involved an attempt, in line with government policy, to divert money from the Emissions Reduction Fund to less harmful activities than efficiency-undermining promotion of green energy that it normally funds. The case under review was an attempt by Delta Energy to get some $14 million support for refurbishing its Vales Point plant, an outcome that would extend the plant’s life (and incidentally reduce its greenhouse gas emissions). The Guardian notes that “energy baron” Trevor St Baker is a part owner of the plant.

 

The Emissions Reduction Fund was set up by the Abbott Government following its election in 2013. Its Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, was an avid promoter of “direct action” which involves buying out firms’ greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing emissions by taxing coal. In fact, buying out emissions simply funds canny firms who can offer a good story, while providing negligible effects on total emissions, since the cashiered production ..... Read more     pdf version

Danandrewstan: two steps forwards, one step back as energy security matters more than ever

The Spectator, 18 March 2020

     The latest energy policy from the Victorian government is to place a constitutional ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration but once again permit the search for conventional gas in the state.   

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The proposed policy was developed in consultation with an industry/activist Independent Stakeholder Advisory Panel. The panel was chaired by the Lead Scientist, Amanda Caples, a pharmacologist, who was previously responsible for developing the state’s “strategic industry growth plans”. In announcing the policy, the Premier said it was “a science-based approach”. Presumably, he had in mind political science. 

The exploration bans were first implemented in 2012 by the Coalition government under the then minister for energy — and now opposition leader — Michael O’Brien. For the Coalition back in 2012 seeking to blunt opposition from green radicals, a ban on new gas supplies seemed like good cynical policy. 

 

There were ample supplies of Bass Strait gas and some farmers opposed gas exploration, with others wanting more  ..... Read more          pdf version

How to Make Things a Whole Lot Worse

Quadrant Online, 17 March 2020

     Deaths from coronavirus were up yesterday (March 16) on the previous day. Although death rates lower than one per cent are being quoted, the macro data (deaths/deaths-plus-recoveries) is 8 per cent, and 15 per cent in Australia (see the chart below).  Hopefully that will improve. Otherwise, if Angela Merkel is correct in estimating that 60 per cent of humankind will eventually contract the disease, we can expect over 300 million deaths.  Tomas Pueyo’s brilliant analysis suggests a death rate levelling off at 3-5 per cent for countries or areas that are unprepared, but one-tenth of this for those quickly identifying and isolating those affected, and intensely treating the 20 per cent who develop the most serious symptoms.  Among the latter are South Korea and China outside of Wuhan, the coronavirus’ origin and epicentre.

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Despite an inevitably horrendous death toll the world will recover, leaving the virus as just another background killer, like its garden-variety cousin influenza.

For the present, the world is now in a very deep economic depression.  There is no shortage of consumer demand but the basis of that demand, income from the supply of goods and services, has been or soon will be sharply curtailed. ..... Read more

Coronavirus: Pump-priming is economic folly

The Australian, 17 March 2020

     In normal times we have a healthy disdain for the insights and capabilities of our political leaders. In Australia, the commentariat has just emerged from agendas that blamed them for not acting fast enough to combat the bushfire crisis — even having contributed to it — and from looting taxpayer funds to curry favour with voters in the sports rorts saga. In the US, half the population thinks their President is so corrupt that he should be placed on trial.

Yet suddenly, with the coronavirus crisis, politicians and their advisers are thought to have powers and the wisdom to turn back tides and lead us out of the wilderness.

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The US is focused on stopping the spread of the disease, finding a cure and easing the discomfort of those afflicted. Britain, like Australia, has added measures to assist business with investment support. .....Read more             pdf version

The Coronavirus stimulus package: not just another trip down the Swanee?

The Spectator, 12 March 2020

​     We have mixed messages on coronavirus: Angela Merkel has said 60-70 per cent of Germans will contract the disease, while the latest data from China and South Korea shows new cases having peaked and, in the case of China, recoveries closing in on new cases.

 

Aside from spending on health precautions and seeking to staunch the spread, what do governments do? 

 

The Trump Administration is talking about ensuring those thrown out of work are looked after financially – the equivalent of community action in medieval plagues when stricken villages were isolated but fed by those nearby.  In a rare flash of economic lucidity, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said the government should focus on guaranteeing paid sick leave for infected workers and extending unemployment insurance for people put out of work.  But Trump is also urging the Federal Reserve to embark on a financial stimulus. 

 

Australian politicians look likely to avoid panicky measures involving economic stimulus. Hopefully this means they have learned from past ..... Read more

The last thing we need now is more costly climate virtue signalling

The Spectator 10 March 2020

     Desperate to attend the September 2020 Glasgow climate change summit with a positive program, the Coalition government continues to promote, at the expense of national living standards, elitist-appealing measures that force lower greenhouse gas emissions. 

 

The new elixir is to boost investment in CO2-free hydrogen technologies which, if not mystical, hardly require funding from Australian taxpayers.  New support measures add to the $1.5 billion annual funding of a bewildering acronymic gaggle of institutions (including CEFC, ARENA, CER and CSIRO) and at least $2 billion in subsidies to wind and solar.   

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The Glasgow meeting is the third phase of climate change programs.   

 

The first phase was established by the Kyoto Agreement in 1997, in which rich nations pledged to stabilise their emissions.  Although only ..... Read more

Toilet paper shortages – why is Australia not a net exporter?

Catallaxy Files, 7 March 2020

     It was a relief to learn that Australia is 80 per cent self-sufficient in toilet paper and there is, therefore, no need for panic buying.

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But hang on a minute.  First, that 80 per cent is for a market that has suddenly grown – perhaps doubled.  So, there may indeed be a shortage.

What should be more worrisome is that Australia is only 80 per cent self-sufficient in an industry sector which we should be a massive net exporter.  We actually import 50 per cent more wood and paper products than we export.

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In days of yore, governments were always looking for value-added industries that could leverage off our natural advantages.  Because we had cheap energy and bauxite, we were world leaders in aluminium production and this led to fantasies that we’d become a key part of the global supply chains for industries like automobiles (engines) and – I kid you not – for windmills (blades).  Governments sank considerable funding into these ventures.

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They were doomed by the labour market arrangements that, with the connivance of governments and the legal system, have priced Australia .....Read more

George Calombaris gets done like a dinner

The Australian, 14 February 2020

     George Calombaris is a victim of the Australian regulatory state. The failure of his restaurant businesses has been greeted by a mixture of schadenfreude that a tall poppy has been exposed for having cheated his employees, and tut-tutting for not being sufficiently alive to the regimen under which his industry’s labour hire regulations operate.

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In between, there have been pointed remarks about how other miscreants — for example, the ABC — have not been subject to the indignation that a commercial operator has faced for not having paid his staff in accordance with the labyrinthine government-specified rates.

There are three points that better describe what has taken place.

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First, other than in the context of the highly regulated labour arrangements that cover the Australian hospitality industry, there was no fraud involved. The employees agreed on a package of wages, hours and other responsibilities; they were for the most part seasoned workers ..... Read more     .....pdf version

One Word: ‘Klobuchar’

Quadrant, 14 February 2020

     When the US Presidential polls had the triumvirate of Biden, Saunders and Warren (above) vying for the November 2020 date with destiny, President Trump was sitting pretty. As the poll leader, Biden was a known quantity.  He was showing his age in mangling words, he had a legacy as an Obama failure, was an insider in an era when this is poison, and had a son who had benefitted immensely from his patronage and protection in getting paid handsomely for a job in Ukraine for which, aside from his father’s political clout, he was utterly unqualified. He would have been crushed by Trump’s relentless pressure as the campaign progressed.

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Elizabeth Warren adoption of far-left socialist ideas combined with a fraudulent invention of indigeneity would have likewise been a victim of Trump’s acidic bluntness.  Trawling the depths of wokeness (“reparations for gay couples”) she would have ended the campaign humiliated.

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Bernie Sanders has never pretended to be anything other than a Communist sympathiser.  He encapsulates the anti-Americanism that is ..... Read more

How the rise of environmental politics is threatening traditional allegiances – and world trade

The Spectator, 10 February 2020

     Some 172 years ago Karl Marx opened the modern era of politics in proclaiming that a spectre was haunting Europe. The spectre he referred to was in the title of his “Communist Manifesto”. 

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Marx was talking in the context of the series of political disturbances in major European capital cities in 1848.  He interpreted these as bookending the ancien regime, the evolution from which had been brutally signalled in 1789 with the French Revolution and perhaps even back in 1649 when Charles I paid the price for his “high crimes and misdemeanours”. Marx saw the events of 1848 as presaging revolution and a new era of peace and prosperity where private property would be abolished and income would be earned “by each according to his abilities” and apportioned “to each according to his needs”.     

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The shift to the modern state had been and continued to be evolutionary and founded on individual private proper..... Read more          pdf version

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