Turnbull’s coal delusions as COAG “changes course” on energy

It is getting increasingly hard to make sense of exactly what is happening in Australian energy policy these days. Just ask comedian Rob Sitch, who looked at the industry while researching for his new series of “Utopia”, where he plays the head of the fictional National Building Authority.

From ABC TV’s Utopia series.

Looking for “grand plans” that his character could announce, he conducted a mini Finkel review of his own and looked specifically at Snowy Hydro, even before the Turnbull government’s announcement of Snowy 2.0. What he found wasn’t so much an energy industry as a market more in common with junk bonds on Wall Street.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” he said in an interview last week. In the end, he just found it too bizarre, even for a program like Utopia, which specialises in improbable projects that have the lure of being “announceble” even if they are never built: Essentially a Snowy Hydro, for government naming rights.

There has been more than bit of that sort of caper in the last few months, and the late John Clarke summed it up neatly with Bryan Dawe in one of the last episodes of their weekly satire, in a memorable interview with “Wal Socket.”

Read the story by Giles Parkinson on RenewEconomy - “Turnbull’s coal delusions as COAG “changes course” on energy.”