Aghast, dumbfounded and damn mad

- by Robert McLean

A recent press conference with Australia’s Prime Minister, the country’s Treasurer, and the Environment and Energy Minister left me aghast, dumbfounded and damn mad.

Leadership Australia so urgently needs was absent; while rhetoric and the attribution of blame for Australia’s energy difficulties was at full throttle.

That trio, who between them can pull the levers to transform Australia’s energy profile, seem to prefer rhetoric to action, allowing the country to muddle along with mid-twentieth century values, ideals and ideologies, and slide into difficult times.

What does all this have to do with us here in Shepparton? Well, everything really for we live under a representative democracy and you and I, that’s right, you and I, elected this trio and their coalition cohort.

Malcolm Turnbull (centre), Scott Morisson
and Josh Frydenberg.

The trio quickly attributed Australia’s energy chaos to the former national Labor Government and their present state counterparts, arguing the former had the rights to our gas deposits and that the latter had a moratorium on fracking, using hydraulic fracturing to unleash land based gas.

Obviously, the Labor was wrong when it preferenced overseas interests for our gas, but the states, conscious of the community safety difficulties with fracking, have put the welfare of people ahead of profit, as they should.

The bluster, the white noise, and the dog whistling was such that there was no mention of the fact that the coalition, led first by Tony Abbott and now Malcolm Turnbull, has had its hands on the levers since 2013, that’s four years ago, and nothing has happened that might give Australians confidence about their future energy needs.

It is clear that a secure and reliable energy future is to be found through renewable energy and while Turnbull and his cohort have largely sat on their hands, procrastinated and appear agents of the fossil fuel industry, the switch to a renewable power source has largely left up State and Local Governments, including the City of Greater Shepparton, which is close to backing a large solar farm near Mooroopna.

Shepparton recently endorsed and embarked on an ambitious program of creating an urban forest throughout our the city, acknowledging that additional greenery makes living here more comfortable, even as temperature records continue to tumble.

Just recently a study by people who work at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and published in the journal “World Development”, noted that the world’s fossil fuel industry received annual subsidies of more than $5 trillion.

An injection of that among of money, just once, would see the world well placed in a wholesale switch to renewable energy.

Also, the Australian based website, RenewEconomy, reported that Australia would need 75% of its energy to be sourced from renewable energy by 2030 if it was to have any chance of achieving its Paris climate promises of 2015. That is just over a decade away.

These verses were skipped as Messrs Turnbull, Morrison and Frydenberg sang in unison from their ideological hymn sheet.