It’s rare for first-time governments not to be given a second term (indeed, it hasn’t happened since 1931), but there is now a real potential for that to occur to the Albanese Labor government if the Coalition play their cards right.
The Prime Minister’s recent push to speed up the transition to renewables, already under pressure from reality, will only make that possibility more likely.
It seems to be physically and financially impossible to get to 82 per cent of our energy needs powered by wind and solar by 2030. It seems we just don’t have the capacity to build the 20,000 kilometres of power lines and the thousands and thousands of solar panels and wind turbines needed to achieve this. Even with huge subsidies, the private sector seems reluctant to play, and the problems of destroying thousands of hectares of good farmland, the destruction of koala and other native animal habitat, plus the killing of whales and bird life from wind farms are turning off many Australians. The environmental damage of attempting to go down this path is prohibitive.
I, for one, would happily emulate our good Senator David Pocock, and lie down / chain myself to a bulldozer to stop the destruction of koala habitat or the wrecking of Australia’s food bowl. There is the further problem of being overly dependent on China for 90 per cent of our solar panels and wind turbines. (Most of which use materials mined by child slave labour and constructed by Muslim Uyghur slave labour.) Peter Dutton’s call to lift the ban on nuclear, so we can get to net zero without destroying the place in the process, now seems to be polling at over 50 per cent, as opposed to about 30 per cent against. There is the further problem of rising energy prices worsening our cost-of-living crisis: electricity prices are now hundreds of dollars a year more expensive for the average household. Whatever happened to Albo’s election promise of $275 cheaper electricity?
If the next year brings blackouts due to unreliable, intermittent, renewable power; further energy cost rises; destruction of food-producing areas; unhappy farmers – who may even restrict food supplies to the city (that would wake up the inner city Melbourne and Sydney latte set!); and the loss of jobs from the closure of what’s left of our manufacturing industries, you have a perfect storm for which the current Labor government and their Green and Teal mates will be rightly blamed.
The Coalition needs to forget about the inner city elite Green and Teal seats, and concentrate on the bush and the traditional outer suburban seats that voted for Labor in the past. Nearly 50 per cent of Labor voters voted “No” in the Voice referendum. It’s those same people who will suffer from the federal government’s policies, and who can become the new Howard battlers. The good old-fashioned traditional Labor voters have been abandoned by the current Labor government, and are ripe for the picking by an opposition that finally stands for something and can deliver what ordinary Australians want.
