Slipping on the banana peel, now let's unpack that

Our supermarkets seem determined to prove the adage that life is stranger than fiction, or at least more absurd.

Bananas in nature's packaging.

Here I was, planning to write about recycling and casting about for the perfect metaphor to encapsulate our warped attitude to waste.

Enter Woolworths and the case of the pre-packed bananas. A Reddit user posted a photo of bananas in plastic packaging at a local Woolies, the thread went viral and the media followed up.

A Woolworths spokeswoman defended the packaging, saying customers preferred it and anyway it only happened in Queensland.

Let’s, er, unpack that for a moment.

Read the comment by Caitlin Fitzsimmons in The Age - “Slipping on the banana peel, now let's unpack that.”

The current energy debate is farcical. What does this government stand for?

How bizarre can the energy debate get? Every time I think that we have heard it all, reached the “bottom”, or whatever, even stranger things happen – now almost daily.

Malcolm Turnbull.

Our political leaders have now spent years scoring points on each other, and attempting to shift the blame, indeed, doing everything they can to avoid addressing the issue of rapidly rising electricity and gas prices. Yet, ironically, they are collectively to blame.

In all this “colour and movement” neither the government, nor the opposition, has yet produced a believable and deliverable energy policy. That is, a policy to specify the path forward to a low-carbon society, demonstrating a genuine capacity to lower power prices and to guarantee supply.

Read John Hewson’s opinion piece on The Guardian - “The current energy debate is farcical. What does this government stand for?”

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.”