Paul Murray: Nothing ambitious about fighting an unwinnable battle that’s destined to ravage our economy

Other than when we became involved in two world wars, no Australian government has taken a decision with more far-reaching economic consequences than Anthony Albanese’s latest reckless gambit on net zero.

Labor’s new uncosted and accelerated emissions reduction plan for the next 10 years relies on so many factors outside the Federal Government’s control — the biggest being uncommitted private sector investment in renewables at heroic levels — that it verges on a fantasy. Or lunacy.

Albanese has declared war on carbon dioxide by conscripting every Australian into his army, but has no idea what constitutes victory.

If we win, will we have stopped and even reversed global warming? If that isn’t the measure of potentially sacrificing our national prosperity, what is?

Nowhere in the overblown documentation purportedly justifying Labor’s 2035 emissions strategy is the climate end game factually enunciated.

The simple proposition of a government providing clear objectives for national economic sacrifice is swept away on political “ambition” fanned by community fear.

In my view, Albanese is treating Australians as gullible fools on climate change. He may be right.

Having put Australia on this path in 2021 with a now-broken election promise to lower domestic electricity costs by $275 a year if voters signed on to his renewables transition, Labor is ominously refusing to commit to any figure on future power bill reductions.

If Treasury has not modelled power costs under the new plan, the government is derelict. If it has, and is refusing to tell the public the truth, the political reckoning will be even worse.

Albanese won’t be able to hide for long because householders will see their bills continue to climb — the pre-election handouts can’t continue with endless deficit Budgets — along with every other consumer item tied to the cost of energy.

Many of the assumptions in the heavily-politicised Climate Change Authority’s modelling on which the government’s new 2035 decision was based — like the massive take-up of electric vehicles over the next 10 years — fell apart within days under scrutiny.

Adding insult to injury, the Net Zero Australia report this week by an expert group of international academics showed Labor would not hit its 2030 target of 82 per cent renewables — as this column has been arguing since the promise was made — falling short by three years or 12 percentage points.

Further increasing the trajectory of the transition to 2035 makes no economic sense and can only increase pressure on energy costs while risking system security.

As recently as three weeks ago, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen was assuring Australians the 2030 targets were achievable, doubling down on the importance of the 82 per cent figure.

When are Australians going to wake up to this flim-flam man?

A nation once known for a larrikin spirit that picked a bullshit artist in a blink has become fearful and overwhelmingly susceptible to mass panic created by irrational alarmism.

Australia has now adopted as its economic priority an escapade to cut carbon emissions at any cost on the illogical premise it will reduce global warming.

That premise is provably false, but few Australians are willing to accept the truth. Our emissions are too small to be significant.

The Albanese Government’s decision to set a world-leading target for cuts by 2035 cannot realistically have the effect of dragging the world’s big carbon emitters along at the same pace to 2050. Our influence is too limited.

We could only be part of some success in cutting global carbon emissions if the biggest emitters made the same proportionate reductions that Albanese claims are achievable.

But they can’t — and won’t. So global net zero at 2050 is already dead.

Albanese has pandered to an indoctrinated sentiment that we must be seen to be doing the right thing by going harder than anyone else.

But the “right thing” can never be damaging Australia’s economy to achieve goals that change nothing.

This is the closest Albanese got to explaining his motivations when announcing the new target on September 18: “It’s the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs and to ensure that we act in our national interest and in the interest of this and future generations.”

But Australia achieving net zero without the rest of the world can have no effect on “our environment”. That is decided globally.

And the predictions of trillions of dollars in economic growth and a jobs bonanza have been ridiculed by credible economists like the ANZ’s Shane Oliver who called the government’s transition figures “dodgy” and “very dangerous”.

“You’re trying to speed it up, then you’re naturally looking at higher costs associated with that transition,” Oliver said.

Not one journalist at the announcement of the 62-70 per cent emissions reduction target by 2035 asked Albanese the simple question about what affect Australia achieving net zero would have on the climate. Not one. Didn’t even get close.

At the event, both Albanese and Bowen chose a ridiculous historic comparison for their reckless folly: “The global shift to clean energy is the biggest economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution and it presents Australia with our best-ever economic opportunity,” Bowen said.

“If we get it right, if we make the right investments at the right time, we can grow our economy, create good jobs for Australians.”

Note the “if”.

Also note that the Industrial Revolution is generally regarded as taking place between 1750 and 1900, giving the world factories and coal mines and prosperity over a century and a half.

These jokers propose that their intermittent power revolution will be compressed from the Paris accords in 2015 to 2050, exterminating coal mines and eventually gas, but probably shutting down factories as well.

And potentially destroying Australian prosperity.

Ironically, the words “ambitious” and “ambition” were used 21 times during the press conference as a foolhardy rationale. Liberal turncoat Matt Kean, head of Labor’s Climate Change Authority, won the day with six mentions in his short statement.

“Our range positions Australia as a global leader on climate ambition,” Kean gushed. “In fact, we are presenting a higher ambition than most other advanced economies.”

Why? What Kean describes must by definition harm Australia’s international competitiveness, on top of the damage it will do to domestic costs.

Since that press conference, Bowen has been crab-walking away from putting any facts around the projections in Labor’s plan.

The very next day, he repudiated modelling by the Australian Energy Market Commission predicting a 20 per cent reduction in household energy prices within the decade, annualised as a $1000 saving, which recalled the RepuTex farrago on which Labor based its $275 election promise.

Instead, they went up nationally around $1300 when stripped of the constant government “cost-of-living” subsidies, which in most cases were more about the cost of getting re-elected.

Why would anyone believe these new figures when we know how hollow such modelling is in reality?

“I’d point you to the modelling by . . . the AEMC model yesterday,” Bowen stuttered. “That’s not a political promise. It’s a statement of modelling by an expert agency.

“We’ve already made decisions about subsidies and their levels at different points, and that work will continue.”

However, the public never gets to see one consolidated figure for all the taxpayer money being washed down the toilet on this farce in subsidies for renewables rent-seekers.

Trying to justify its previous 43 per cent emissions cuts by 2030 promise, that is now confirmed as a dud, Labor points to a 28 per cent reduction achieved since 2005.

However, almost all of that figure has not been from cutting emissions, but is calculated from changes to land use which sequester carbon. That “reduction” is not ongoing.

Falls in actual emissions are around a measly three per cent — after spending tens of billions in subsidies — and the rate has flatlined in recent years, other than in WA where emissions are growing.

At a time of great regional insecurity demanding Australia remains economically strong and wealthy to defend itself, Labor’s uncosted net zero chimera is making the nation weaker and poorer.

China will not need to overpower Australia. We are doing it to ourselves.

The now-despised baby boomer generation which prospered from cheap energy will be lucky enough not to be around when the economic carnage from this fear-induced national self-harm takes hold.

The worst part is that it will be irreversible. One of Labor’s key strategies is to burn the bridges behind them to ensure there is no retreat from their ideological escapades.

Labor’s transition is too fast and too renewables-dominant to provide affordable and reliable electricity. And it won’t be long until we regret its demonisation of nuclear energy.

Why Australians are prepared to go to climate change war behind someone like Albanese baffles me.

If the Prime Minister won’t stand up to a bunch of pro-Palestine miscreants stopping those he represents from entering his electorate office, what hope do we have that he will defend the nation under serious threats?