When I first entered the Australian Parliament, in my maiden speech, I spoke about how we were entering the era of rights. And in that era, we would be forced to choose between competing claims to determine whose rights should prevail.
More often than not, the ‘rights’ claimed are just desires—a wish for an individual peccadillo to be endorsed by society to make someone feel better about themselves.
It’s an insane pursuit for any developed society to indulge in. The ultimate result is widespread unhappiness, disillusionment and anger.
We are seeing that play out in the real world in real-time. One person’s pronoun choice is another compelled speech. We are told that men are actually women, and we must have pride in all manner of perversions.
In a social sense, we’ve suspended reality in favour of feelings.
But we are also doing it in the economic space.
You may have received an electricity account this week. I certainly did.
My consumption was up 39%, primarily due to the freezing weather, but my account went up nearly 400%, partly thanks to all that free renewable energy.
There was no sign of the $275 saving promised by the Labor government either.
Oh, that’s right, they changed that promise to the mealy-mouthed 'it would have been worse if not for us’ political rubbish.
It is the government's policies that are making things worse. This push to renewables is killing our household and business budgets.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the latest report from the Australian Energy Regulator.
In NSW, the reduction in black coal capacity largely reflected Liddell power station’s exit… While other black coal generators in NSW shifted some capacity to lower price bands, had Liddell’s capacity still been available, prices would have been lower.
Funny that. Despite continually being told that renewables are the cheapest, prices would be more affordable if we had more black coal power generation!
That’s one of the new ‘competing rights’ I mentioned.
The government wants to signal their green credentials, and they want you to pay the price - that price being foregoing cheap and reliable electricity.
Of course, they also ignore the complete environmental disaster that solar, battery and wind power offer over the long term. The mining, manufacture and disposal of these toxic elements is the dirty secret of the green goody-two-shoes.
But it gets worse than that.
While the government continually regurgitates the big lie of how renewables are saving the planet, they’ve been caught in a ‘rights’ dilemma of their own making.
This week, the climate kool-aid drinking Minister, Chris Bowen, removed a proposed offshore wind farm development from an approved zone to appease a group of Aboriginals.
The Spinifex project proposed by Alinta Energy has been abandoned because the minister has said there will be no developments within 20km of Portland in Victoria.
This was done to prevent interference with the spiritual connections of the local Aboriginal tribe.
I have to admit that I never knew the nomadic tribes of Australia wandered ten or more kilometres offshore to cultivate their spiritual connections.
They may have walked there tens of thousands of years ago, although that suggests sea levels have risen and have nothing to do with man's carbon dioxide emissions.
Do you see the problem?
Do we save the planet or appease the spirits of the local tribe?
If only Alinta had more money to make this problem disappear, we could all be worshipping the offshore deities that the political left insists will be the saviour of mankind.
