Suddenly, superannuation has become a hot-button issue in Australia.

Germany was the first modern state to introduce old-age pensions. That was in 1889 when Bismarck required all employees to contribute to funding their retirement incomes.

Australia and Britain introduced means-tested but non-contributory pensions in 1908. Britain’s was shifted to a (partial) contributory basis in 1925. In principle, Australia began moving to a fully contributory scheme in 1992.

Virtually all but the poorest of countries now have some form of old age pension.

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Most nations’ schemes are funded out of general taxation. Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, Switzerland, Denmark, and Israel, like Australia, are among the few with compulsory superannuation designed to ensure the beneficiaries, not the next generation of workers, pay for it. Even in Australia, some 56 to 66 per cent (depending on definitions) of retirees currently receive a state pension funded from general taxation.

When the Hawke-Keating government introduced compulsory superannuation in 1992, superannuation covered only about 30 per cent of private sector employees, mainly at a lower rate than the current 12 per cent (the rate was staged to increase from its initial 3 or 4 per cent). Compulsory superannuation was controversial when it was introduced; conservatives like John Howard and Tony Abbott opposed it on the grounds that it ran counter to freedom of choice. In addition, there were concerns that, with union appointees dominating industry super funds they may invest unwisely and (as has eventuated) cream off income to provide an income stream for the Labor Party.

The funds now have assets of $4 trillion – considerably greater than Australia’s annual income.

Superannuation funds will always be hostage to socialistic governments that see themselves as better at directing investment than individuals and wealth-oriented managers. But few at the time of the policy’s introduction raised concerns that funds would be directed toward investment areas favoured by the government itself. Recently, the Albanese government and former Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen floated such an option. Political allocation of funds would have adverse consequences for the income stream.

Industry super funds have placed financial pressure on firms they invest in to adopt Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies – especially decarbonisation. Adopting such policies will generally adversely affect profitability. One Nation recognised this as a political risk with union-dominated superannuation funds, though private funds led by BlackRock and State Street have also adopted such policy; funds pressing DEI have tended to underperform their competitors, and many have abandoned it.

Having initially opposed compulsory superannuation, the Coalition came to accept it as settled policy, though in government it has occasionally delayed the staged increases.

A catalyst for the more recent revisiting of the policy has been that younger people have their savings tied up in superannuation and would prefer – or at least should have the option – to access these funds for home purchases.

In fact, house prices in Australia have not performed better than share prices over the past century, and in jurisdictions like Texas and Germany, where land constraints on new housing developments are not at Australia’s draconian levels, house prices have barely kept pace with general inflation. Moreover, house prices are vulnerable to short-term tax measures. Thus, in response to what it claims are modest new imposts on owners of multiple residences, house prices in Sydney fell by 5 per cent in 2026.

In the longer term, Australia and other wealthy economies face a fertility rate of only about 1.4 children per female. If this continues, the population will halve over the next 50 years. That will likely be accompanied by reduced demand for housing and, therefore, lower prices.

But the most persuasive case for mandatory superannuation is that without it, a higher proportion of older people will demand an alternative retirement income. Both the voting power of older people and compassion for hardship will, as happened in the early part of the 20th Century, bring compelling pressure on governments to provide for retirees by increasing taxation on those earning incomes.

As with all such interventions, this will have other repercussions. For younger people, it will bring a diminished willingness to work – or at least declare incomes. And the expectation of income support in old age will discourage people in general to lower the proportion of their income they allocate to savings. Both outcomes would, overall, lower aggregate income levels.

‘Moral hazard’ is the term used to describe behaviour that changes when people do not face the full costs of their behaviour. If people think that the government will pick up the tab when they under-provide for their own future, they will shift their expenditure patterns more towards consumption. Mandatory superannuation is designed to counter this and, in my opinion, is preferable to placing the costs of pensions onto future generations – the more so since demographic trends are likely to reduce their numbers.

Superannuation reforms can be made: in particular, to eliminate the role of trade union custodians within funds. Trade union officials bring no expertise in fund management and, with membership covering less than seven per cent of those in the private sector, do not even have credible claims to be representative.

Other roles for government might be to ensure that there is full information available on funds’ performance and objectives, though there are private sector bodies that collect and publish such information.

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Another week, another subsidy for renewable energy and greenhouse gas abatement. Last week Mr Bowen added an extension of the subsidy to roof-top solar installations to factories and farms and foreshadowed an intensification of the cost of the Safeguard Mechanism (which loads an additional cost onto the top 230 firms).

This week the Commonwealth and NSW governments announced a $250 million per year subsidy to prevent the closure Rio’s Tomago Aluminium smelter in Newcastle. This follows a $200 million a year bailout for Queensland’s Boyne Island smelter announced in March. Victoria’s Alcoa-managed Portland smelter has a less opaque subsidy, usually put at about $60 million a year. In addition, starting 2028, the smelters are to receive $200 million a year from the federal green aluminium production credit scheme; that payment is contingent on them demonstrating new decarbonisation measures, which means it is yet another case of the Australian government pursuing its decarbonisation ideology down deeper and deeper rabbit holes, each move resulting in further costs.

The smelter subsidies add another $710 per year to the $19 billion per year being spent on the dozens of schemes that have been introduced over the past 20 years. In addition, there are subsidies to steel (Wyalla - $260 million in total): Glencore copper ($600 million in total) and Nyrstar smelters in Hobart and Port Pirie $240 million in total). And the government, through the transmission companies, is insisting that new AI installations further contribute to the deterioration of the network by contracting renewable energy supplies as a condition of being granted approval.

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Denied by government policies, the cheap coal under which they had prospered and could again be world-competitive, those energy-intensive businesses have been forced into penury.

With most of its green measures, the government trumpets the advantages to the beneficiaries (mainly the otherwise uncompetitive lavish dispensers of propaganda in the wind and solar industry) but is silent on who pays the costs. Indeed, it was 2011, when a government last identified the aggregate costs of its greenhouse gas abatement programs in its budget papers. Since then, the Commonwealth Government has often obscured the costs of individual programs; the Albanese Government, for its centrepiece Capacity Investment Scheme, involving long-term contracts for green energy, refuses, unlike its UK counterpart, even to reveal the price we, the citizens, are paying.

Also this week, the Commonwealth’s Green Energy Bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), announced that this year was a record year for new spending on green causes. Riffing off Benjamin Friedman’s contention that government investments normally “crowd out” otherwise profitable private sector ventures, the Bank’s CEO Ian Learmonth often claims that its concessional loans actually “crowd-in” investment. In the latest year, the CEFC reported committing a record $9.1 billion in discounted finance over the 2025-26 financial year, helping to drive a total transaction value of $19.6 billion. Of course, that additional $19.6 billion is money redirected from commercial activities to those that are not only non-commercial but are positively destructive in undermining previously profitable activities (in this case, coal and gas generators).

According to Grok, Australia is near the top of the pile in terms of subsidies to suppress CO2 emissions. Whereas the UK spends $US 850 per person per year, and Germany and Australia $US 480, Canada, South Korea, China, India and Sweden spend less than $US 100. The US itself is still investing heavily in green initiatives despite Donald Trump reversing as much of the Biden agenda as he can.

It is no coincidence that the nations with the lowest wasteful spending on renewables and their associated infrastructure have the lowest power prices and, by and large, the more successful economies.

For Australia, Labor has shown no sign that it will draw back from its income-sapping green programs. And while One Nation and, to a lesser degree the Coalition are now hostile to the programs, they have not fully specified the measures: administrative, regulatory and legislative that need to be taken.

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There is a remarkable disconnect between the leftist elites in Western economies and those in the nominally socialist world. The latter have kept wealth creation front and centre, though not always successfully, while in the former, leftist elites have become the permanently outraged, often seeking policy changes that undermine economic growth.

Deng Xiaoping foreshadowed pragmatic socialism in 1962 with his quip, ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it’s a good cat.’

Such apostasy to core communist doctrine led to his being reassigned as a rural factory labourer under Mao, but free markets and private property have been the core of Chinese economic policy since 1979.

Such policies, however, had no support among Vietnamese communist elites when, with massive assistance from the USSR and China, they came to power in North Vietnam in 1956 after defeating the French, and in all of Vietnam in 1975 following the withdrawal of the US. Although enjoying popular support, the communist elites never dared test this in free elections.

But mass refugee emigration from Vietnam, together with its economic stagnation, brought a pragmatic ‘rediscovery’ of the Marxist theology that a capitalist stage must precede socialism. Đổi Mới (renovation) changes in 1986 introduced a market economy, property rights, the right to employ others, and the dismantling of collectivised agriculture. Since then, Vietnam’s economic growth has averaged 7 per cent a year. In addition, the elites in China and Vietnam take great pride in their nations’ histories and tend to embellish those histories.

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Contrast this with the causes that the left has embraced, often violently, in the West. Over the past half century, we have seen rage migrate from unilateral nuclear disarmament (which would have likely brought a communist Western Europe), to prioritising the environment over income creation. A development on top of this has been extreme Marxist radicals like the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction, France’s Action Directe, and the Weathermen in the US.

In addition, we have seen militant LGBTQ+ activists, and, in a misplaced response to the death of George Floyd, new race-based laws. Most recently, we have seen leftist groups allied with Islamic activists against Israel (and Jews generally), a phenomenon that is all the more bizarre because communists and the LGBTQ+ community are clearly at risk where the Islamic regimes they support come to power.

While those spearheading hostile reactions to the status quo in capitalist countries were small minorities, they have often enjoyed broader sympathy from within the political establishment.

A suicidal tendency of democracies to skirt self-mutilation with laws that expropriate property was evident in Australia when the Howard government worked with the NSW and Queensland Labor governments to expropriate the value of farming properties to abate greenhouse gas emissions using regulations on land clearing.

Environmental activism has also brought subsidies to renewable energy, which are de facto penalties on conventional energy supplies and cause wild swings in price. In Australia, these price oscillations include a marked decrease in prices in the latest quarter due to subsidised batteries. But, as Mr Albanese should have learned with the failure of his cunning plan to reduce electricity prices by $275 per annum, such price interventions can be no more than transitory.

It is anomalous that ostensibly communist East Asian governments are practising a more robust defence of individual property rights than is found – with the possible exception of Donald Trump’s America – anywhere in the developed Western world. And even in the US, bequests from wealthy individuals are funding hundreds of activist bodies to promote measures designed to retard growth, and, with the activist Environmental Law Institute, training thousands of American judges on climate-change issues to distort legal decision-making.

China and Vietnam, though enjoying far fewer freedoms than those still remaining in the West, are reaping a reward in terms of ongoing increases in living standards driven by the market freedoms that most Western nations – including Australia – are restraining.

Key US Constitutional framers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were acutely aware of the danger that populist democracy could eat itself. Adams even said, ‘There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’ It would be a tragedy for freedom if these dark forebodings were to be correct.

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On Wednesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen used a National Press Club address to announce another subsidy scheme for renewable energy.

This was intended to cover factory rooftop installations of solar panels, bringing them into the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) that applies to household rooftops.

It is a scheme that provides a subsidy paid by other consumers (but not the aluminium smelters) for up to $40 per megawatt-hour of the energy price. The subsidy is paid up-front based on the notional value of the electricity over the installation’s life. Introduced in 2011, it has long been considered one of the least useful subsidy measures. Indeed Rod Sims, who served as Chairman of the ACCC, later recommended its early scrapping largely because it unfairly forces mainly lower-income people to pay the subsidy. The Coalition considered taking that course in 2019 (when Angus Taylor was Energy Minister) but declined to do so due to the scheme’s apparent popularity in the Liberal Party room.

It has been estimated by a key lobby group for the extension, the Smart Energy Council, that the uptake will be 1.5 gigawatts per year over the next 20 years. Mr Bowen, in his announcement, estimated the benefit (i.e. cost to other consumers) at $68,000 for a typical 250-kilowatt installation. This puts the annual cost at $408 million.

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Labor wants to introduce as many measures as possible to lock-in a future Coalition government to a Net Zero, end-coal agenda. That agenda has been flagging due to a number of reasons. These include the rising cost of new large-scale facilities, which even with (undisclosed) subsidies under the government’s Capacity Investment Scheme, cannot reach commerciality, grass-roots opposition to the necessary transmission lines, and declining household rooftop installations.

The decline in household installations is partly due to saturation (44 per cent of houses now have solar panels) and partly due to the diminished advantage following reduced subsidies for exported power and a daytime supply glut resulting from the program, which has created negative prices when the sun is shining.

And while yet another subsidy for renewables will further restrict the market for coal, the scheme’s most important impact may be on existing grid-scale solar facilities, many of which are constrained off-line due to weak transmission links or voluntarily shut down when daytime surplus supply drives negative prices. The accelerated transmission roll-out is vital to offset this.

Of course, the market distortions resulting from an ever-increasing level of subsidies designed to eradicate coal (and reduce gas to a supporting role) have led to prices that increase in a saw-like pattern. Many new subsidies bring a fall in wholesale prices (not in retail prices for subsidies like the SRES, which are financed by a levy on wholesale prices). This is inevitably followed by price increases as the cheaper coal is replaced by renewables. And each new increment of renewables adds to the precariousness of a system with less resilience than systems dominated by coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro, whose supplies can be controlled. Australia’s electricity prices, once among the world’s lowest, are now 30 per cent higher than the average US prices.

The latest subsidy brings my estimate of the annualised level of subsidies to renewables to over $19 billion a year. The flagship is the $85 billion Capacity Investment Scheme. This, based on its similar UK scheme (the subsidies for which, unlike in Australia, are made public), costs consumers some $7 billion a year.

The aggregate $19 billion annual cost of renewable subsidies is equivalent to almost 20 per cent of private capital investment. Much of this is chasing now largely discredited supposed breakthroughs like green hydrogen. All of it is designed to replace low-cost, reliable supplies with higher-cost, intermittently available electricity. And in addition, the subsidies divert, as intended, private capital towards activities that constitute not simply waste but destruction of genuinely productive capital.

This has been a major contributor to Australian per capita income levels falling short of the growth seen in Singapore and the US – nations that had similar per capita income levels to Australia in 2012 are now respectively 25 per cent and 20 per cent better off.

The deterioration in the Australian economy is gathering pace. With the lower standard of living that policies on climate and other government interventions comes a decreased capability to defend ourselves in a world that is becoming increasingly precarious.

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Britain’s Energy Security and Net Zero Minister, Ed Miliband, and Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, are, in my view, the messianic standard-bearers for the permanently incensed and mirthless green apocalyptics. Equally dedicated to the cause is the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Both Miliband and Bowen have wagered their political futures on the need for renewables to prevent global boiling, while providing a new, supposedly low-cost energy future towards which commercial entrepreneurs need to be guided by farsighted politicians.

Both are hurtling along into the wrong lanes of the motorway, ignoring all information that contradicts their deeply held views.

Thus, the IPCC has recently and reluctantly acknowledged that its favoured ‘RCP8.5’ scenario, which projected warming of 5-6°C by 2100, could never come about. That scenario was the platform on which coal/gas energy policies throughout the world were built, but its discrediting barely perturbed green fanatics and certainly caused no policy reconsideration by the Miliband-Bowen-von der Leyen axis.

They have shown a similar disregard of the graphic evidence from diverse electricity markets that the higher the share of renewables the higher the price. Higher prices for renewables were portrayed as a passing phenomenon, but subsidies to smooth the ‘transition’ from traditional energy supplies began 30 years ago and, despite raising aggregate electricity prices, they remain essential to enabling wind and solar to gain market share. And, as Squadron Energy recently acknowledged, failure to close coal generators is placing downward pressure on market pricing, ‘which makes the investment decision for renewable facilities very difficult’. Well duh!

Moreover, as the wind/solar share is increased, so do blackouts. Politicians blame fortuitous events for the collapses of renewable-rich grids (South Australia, Broken Hill, Texas, Spain, Chile). But the risk of these blackouts increases as the share of wind and solar grows, because their inherent lack of ‘inertia’ removes a buffer that would otherwise avert sudden power loss. Batteries can provide some insurance to moderate normal daily peaks but cannot, except at unrealistic costs, supply coverage for lengthy wind and solar droughts. In South Australia, the green energy poster child, even a tenfold increase in its present battery capacity would not cover an eight-hour lack of solar and wind.

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Miliband and Bowen are promoting expanded energy subsidies for renewables and the transmission required for their delivery. Both have presided over a vandal-like destruction of coal stations – Miliband in the UK is even planning to shut down North Sea gas supplies that, as well as reducing dispatchable energy, will require billions of pounds in compensation to investors.

The upshot of these policies is the destruction of industries requiring low-cost energy.

But the vast majority of politicians still fail to recognise the climate con and the renewables fallacy. This is testament to the incapabilities of the political class.

Donald Trump stands alone among world leaders in fully decrying the ‘climate con’ and economic harm of wind/solar power it has brought in its wake. Radical Opposition leaders in the Anglosphere: Farage and Hanson were always on board – as now are many establishment conservatives, like UK Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and the Nationals’ Matt Canavan in Australia (with Angus Taylor crab-walking towards it).

How will energy-reforming politicians extricate economies from the damage of this green empire in the future? How can they address the problems left behind by the forced ‘transition’ in the commercial, market-oriented energy system?

Well, if they were to try energy policy reform in Australia, some damaging policies can be addressed by simply allowing them to expire or by ministerial discretion. This applies to the renewable subsidies to grid-based roof solar, wind and batteries.

Others, like the lending/direct subsidising agencies, including the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, and Hydrogen Headstart, would be required to cease new lending and call in existing loans. This would also be the case for additional requirements applying to the top 215 businesses under the Safeguard Mechanism.

Some, like the Capacity Investment Scheme, should also be promptly terminated but where ‘sovereign risk’ commitments have been made, pressure may be necessary for the beneficiaries to forego the subsidies inherent in their long-term contracts for renewables. The Trump Administration has used persuasion combined with buy-outs contingent on the beneficiaries investing in gas, coal or nuclear.

In the case of new transmission/Snowy 2, the best approach, in my view, is simply to walk away from incomplete contracts.

With energy balancing, which in yesteryear’s industry would cost under one per cent of energy, the policy must be to make renewables pay for the costs they impose by requiring backup and other reliability features.

Massive savings are also available by downsizing the ‘independent’ energy agencies and the policy-making functions within the energy and other departments. At least this would strip regulatory agencies of powers to plan (AEMO), and set prices (AER), while abolishing the ‘clean power’ regulators, advisory agencies and energy advisory personnel from all departments. Vital for both energy and other commercial investments is the need to pare back the regulatory intrusion of environmental and indigenous regulations and scope for activists to impose costs and delays.

All this said, winning power hasn’t been accomplished yet and that itself is only the first step. The second step is actually dismantling all the features that are suppressing economic well-being, and that too will prove to be a longer process than politicians seeking reforms hope.

After that comes the cleansing of the economy and the associated re-incentivising businesses to invest in commercial energy prospects. All this could take a decade before we return to the sorts of development security that were prevalent 20 years ago.

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One Nation’s climate and energy policy is central to the savings they expect to make if they win the next Commonwealth election.

They have indicated (but not specified) $30 billion in available savings by abolishing measures and subsidies required to pursue the ‘climate change hoax’.

As some $17 billion is readily identifiable in annualised subsidies to renewable industries, something close to $30 billion is achievable, though much of the cost comprises regulatory-induced charges and over-priced contracts for renewables that are off-budget.

And dissolving some contractual commitments might involve compensation.

Thus, the Trump Administration has bought offshore wind leases for $2.5 billion to forestall their development with the condition that the recipients invest in gas, coal, and nuclear. The Americans have seen this approach as preferable to involving themselves in lengthy and uncertain court challenges.

Over the past 25 years, no government has publicly revealed its own estimated costs of these policies.

The Coalition are said to be inching towards programs that, by the time of the next election, will be little different from those of One Nation. However, if this is the case, their progress remains agonisingly slow. Indeed, they still name the Shadow Portfolio ‘Energy and Emission Reductions’ (Victoria’s Shadow Ministry has the same appellation, while that of NSW is called ‘Energy and Climate Change’).

Also, localised concerns may prove insurmountable. This is especially the case with state governments. The NSW and Victorian Oppositions are led by parties that remain wedded to the notion that catastrophic climate change is real, and we need to combat it with a policy of decarbonisation.

The NSW Coalition’s plan for ‘more affordable, reliable and resilient energy’ tells us we have to abandon the over-budget New England Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) and adopt city-based, renewable-energy-fuelled zones closer to where people work and live. Compounding this absurdity (akin to supplying lamb by having sheep graze on rooftop gardens), it also then announces a priority for a Far West Outback REZ, which it thinks will unlock substantial new energy generation.

Somebody should have told the Coalition about the farcical $20 billion now-collapsed proposal to deliver Northern Territory sun-powered electricity to Singapore.

Moreover, while the Coalition (and Labor) are seeking to get more gas into the Australian energy supply, when push comes to shove, key individual proposals fall foul of confected NIMBY opposition. Thus, some energetic locals have noisily opposed PEP 11, a prospective gas area in the Sydney Basin located 50km from the Sydney-Wollongong-Newcastle greater metropolitan area.

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Opposition to this proposal (even the periphery of which would be visible only from a 200-metre-high building) has come from NSW Liberal leaders Kellie Sloane and Mark Speakman as well as prominent Commonwealth Liberal MPs like Dave Sharma and Andrew Bragg.

The ALP and the Coalition federal leaderships support gas, especially in Labor’s case, as a ‘transition’ fuel. To this end, they are planning for 15-25 per cent domestic gas set-asides. This means lower profits and will make some prospects sub-economic (and, if retrospective, is confiscatory – something government used to be worried might harm their constituents).

One Nation is promoting a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth approach which would involve the government taking an equity stake (with associated exploration and development costs). Though this has paid off for Norway, which feared a conventional approach would bring exchange rate revaluations and economic disruption, it is not an axiomatic success formula. The alternative of lowering investment taxes could generally be more successful (though not if, as in the UK and Australia, governments spend the largesse on election-supportive handouts). Moreover, expectations may not be realised – Australian business winner-picking has been an unmitigated disaster. Even in gas and oil, success is uncertain – those sectors do not enjoy particularly high profit returns and this can require decades; thus, from the early 1950s, Chevron spent tens of billions of dollars in exploration in Western Australia with little revenue until 2015 when Gorgon/Wheatstone came on stream.

The abysmal performance of nations that have prioritised energy developments by forcing the closure of fossil fuel plants and replacing them with subsidised renewables is clear. Not only are the renewables intrinsically more expensive but they require expanded transmission and lack features (inertia, voltage and frequency) that are automatically present with coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear.

With 200 years’ supply at present usage levels of coal, the cheapest source of electricity, massive untapped gas and unlimited uranium, Australia’s recent lamentable economic performance, driven by high energy prices, is a monument to the incompetence of our elected politicians.

Will we do better in the future? One Nation’s setting of the agenda in the key area of energy and environment at least gives us a chance.

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Our three energy regulatory agencies and the Productivity Commission, the government’s independent economic adviser, have all issued reports and recommendations promoting the ‘transition’ away from hydrocarbons to wind and solar.

Any replacement of hydrocarbons with renewables is impossible without government subsidies, which currently provide half of the revenue for wind and solar.

The three federal regulatory bodies that control the supply and pricing of electricity and gas in Australia are the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). AEMC is responsible for market rules; AER is responsible for setting the costs that networks may recover from consumers and the maximum prices retailers can charge; and AEMO ensures supply is balanced with demand second-by-second and plans network expansions.

Other regulators, including state bodies and the Clean Energy Regulator (which manages emissions/renewables schemes), also play a controlling role.

Front and centre of the Albanese government’s energy policy is the prevention of greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, government bodies fail to highlight the costs of renewable energy and often appear to. in my opinion, disguise it. The AER in 2024, however, revealed the costs it uses in regulatory evaluation processes. Those costs are equivalent to the carbon price required to drive the ‘transition’ to renewable energy and were $105 and $221 per tonne of CO2 in 2030 and 2040, respectively. They entail a doubling of ex-generator electricity prices in 2030 and a quadrupling in 2040.

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The AEMC has provided little insight in identifying the costs of renewable energy programs. Indeed, upon being appointed, the present Chair discontinued her predecessor’s annual report, which disclosed the contribution of renewable energy regulations to consumers costs. Whether or not that was a condition of being offered the job, it certainly was welcome to the energy ministers themselves, who are notoriously reticent about revealing the costs of these measures. Energy Minister Bowen refuses to release the prices paid for the key subsidy paid under the deceitfully named “Capacity Investment Scheme”, for renewables and batteries, though even in the UK, the counterpart scheme sees the contracts published (revealing that they amount to a subsidy of 38-50 per cent on top of a price that is already inflated by the existing renewable energy subsidies).

Once the costs of ‘firming-up’ renewables with controllable energy (gas, coal, hydro, nuclear) are accounted for, the subsidy is even higher than the estimates proffered by the AER. Based on Lazard’s cost data, the subsidies required for wind and solar in the largest US systems are as follows:

It is little wonder that under Trump’s policies to severely limit future subsidies for renewables, few new facilities are being built. And it is inconceivable that Australian subsidies are below these levels.

In the coming weeks, the AEMC will produce its plan for a ‘consumer-first energy future’.

AEMC, like the other regulators, bases its plans on the assumption that we are heading toward an energy transition to renewables and away from hydrocarbons. It says, ‘We have applied (forward-looking, pragmatic and collaborative) principles to big reforms to bring consumers – and their consumer energy resources – to the forefront of this transition.’ Of course, any such transition can only result from government forcing it, with the inevitable consequences of dearer, less reliable energy.

And there is not a chance that ministers and regulators would allow consumers freedom of choice to buy the cheapest sources of energy when the abiding goal of Australian energy policy is to drive demand away from formerly cheap energy sources.

For its part, the Productivity Commission last week issued a report that provided useful information on the concerning nature of Australia’s productivity performance. But the report, noting that the electricity industry had seen its total productivity drop by 40 per cent since 2001, instead of acknowledging renewable energy regulations as the cause, suggested that it was a temporary and illusory blip, akin to that experienced by the mining industry after an investment surge. This is absurd: while mining developments take up to a decade, renewables are operating within a year or so of capital work commencing (weeks in the case of rooftop solar); and renewable energy investment peaked in 2018. There is no escaping the fact that wind and solar generation, as the subsidies they require demonstrate, has far lower productivity than the coal generation it replaces.

With regard to energy, government institutions appear to have been cowed or reconstituted into politicised bodies that radically diverge from offering the ‘frank and fearless’ advice of yesteryear.

How will these bodies come to terms with One Nation’s Trumpian rejection of renewables as the cheapest form of energy?

One Nation will at the very least be a senior component of a future non-Labor government. How will government agencies come to terms with One Nation’s determination to cease spending on wind turbines, grid solar or anything that supports ‘the Net Zero hoax’?

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Politics is undergoing a transition. In the recent Newspoll, ‘Almost 70 per cent of voters agreed that “the people who built this mess aren’t going to fix it” and that “Australian politics is overdue for a big shake-up”.’

For much of the 20th Century, radical intellectual elites sought to replace capitalism with socialism, recruiting support from working people by dangling the carrot of sharing the profits accruing to capitalists. At least in the democracies, the carrot was not sufficiently enticing – or credible – to attract a majority of voters. But to accommodate the marginal voter, politicians (many of whom sympathised with socialist redistribution) adopted collectivist plans that raised the government share of GDP from under 20 per cent to 40-50 per cent today.

The more extreme forms of socialism in Eastern Europe collapsed in the late 1980s as the contradictions of refusing to reward personal enterprise and savings led to stagnation. The Chinese government managed a transition, albeit imperfect, to capitalism.

Elsewhere, the contradictions inherent in socialist controls and prosperity led to attempts by intellectual elites to find a ‘Third Way’ (the term used by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair), a hybrid in which they retained influence and wealth.

Political interference in commerce by bureaucracies almost invariably brings inferior outcomes. Even so, politicians sought an ever-larger role, imposing DEI requirements on workplaces and requiring the replacement of cheap energy with wind and solar, the additional cost of which is compounded by energy’s pervasiveness across all productive processes.

Australia’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers has, in my opinion, adopted the British political economist Mariana Mazzucato as his guru. Mazzucato has developed an agenda based on the ‘Third Way’. This draws on a modern and re-interpreted version of the development model: a voluntary partnership among government, business, and unions, with government making strategic decisions and incentivising business activities in selected directions. It is also founded on the belief that growth is more or less given and that it is up to the government to determine the shares of its bounty. It is possible to draw the conclusion that, as a result of future affluence being predetermined, it allows a prepayment of that bounty, which involves taxing the affluent even before they become so, and an assumption that the impost will not materially affect their saving-consumption-investment decisions.

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Part of the general strategy is for the government to take a share in promising assets – Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is a particular favourite.

But this overlooks the fact that Norway made a conscious decision to share in the investment and risk of its North Sea fossil fuels, whereas the UK (and Australia) used the revenues from these developments to lower taxes and pay off debts incurred by earlier incarnations of the model. And wherever Australian governments have adopted the innovator-capitalist road, the results (wind-farm blade factories, Hydrogen Superpower, electricity generation) have turned to dust.

The belief in this new form of economics does not stop with politicians. Astonishingly, in an interpretation disputed by an author of the report, Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson claims that research finds that favourable tax treatment of capital gains, beyond compensating for inflation, has no influence on investment. That’s equivalent to saying that no matter how high we tax real capital gains, investment is unaffected. A corollary of this is that we should impose a 100 per cent tax on all real gains and deliver a bonus to a spendthrift government at no cost to the economy!

Not only do incompetents in control of the bureaucracy fail to appreciate that if there is no reward for enterprise and frugality, there will also be much less capital accumulation and risk-taking. They also fail to understand that individuals’ capital is two-thirds derived from savings, the result of frugality and successful enterprise. And that capital accumulated from these activities is derived from labour, and has, overwhelmingly, already incurred taxation.

Marxian elites used to explain their failures to persuade workers to throw off the ‘yoke of capitalist exploitation’ to a ‘false consciousness’ that obscured workers’ recognition of the tension between labour and capital. What we really have today is a tension between leaners – those who depend on or benefit from government favours; and lifters – those who actually pay for them. The lifters are not only those in private enterprise but also many in the public sector, especially in health, education, and public works, though few in the ‘policy’ departments, industrial courts, energy institutions, and other regulatory agencies.

Politicians over the past half-century have mainly sought to recruit the leaners’ voting blocs, in recognition of voters’ dispositions to assist the less fortunate. In some cases, they have sought to bring some lifters into the leaners’ tent. Thus, in a ‘subsidies for everyone’ policy, in 2020, Angus Taylor, as Energy Minister, promised to enable agricultural activities that store carbon in soil to generate Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). Farmer bodies never let a subsidy go begging and offered strong support.

The respondents to the recent polling seeking a ‘big shake up’ in politics shows that the blindfolds concealing the majority of voters’ true interests are being removed.

The growth of One Nation is a rejection of the Uniparty’s incessant increase in giveaways from the lifters to the leaners. The most recent budget has accelerated this trend by imposing new taxes on those not yet able to assemble savings to enjoy the benefits of those – including politicians and public servants – who have already accumulated wealth.

Will the blindfolds’ removal be sufficiently comprehensive to bring about the shake-up poll responders say they want?

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Recently, the 193-member UN General Assembly backed economy-crushing climate measures that seek to replace hydrocarbons with the fairy dust of wind and solar.

Endorsing the ‘legally binding’ 2015 Paris Agreement, representatives of nations at the UN approved an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that countries failing to protect the planet from climate change may be in violation of international law. The ICJ President described supposed human-induced climate change as ‘an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet’.

A corollary of the Paris Agreement is the phase-out of coal, oil, and gas for energy, fertiliser and industrial uses. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, declared that the path to climate justice ‘runs through a rapid, just, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy’ and that renewables have proved to be the cheapest and most secure form of energy.

Australia, the EU, and the UK are among many nations that continue to endorse this fantasy of international delegates either hermetically sealed off from reality or voting to win favours from dominant nations and funding institutions.

But dissenting from the UN endorsement of the ICJ ruling was an unlikely eight-nation group, including the US and Israel as well as Belarus, Iran, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

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The UN resolution comes at a watershed in Australia’s Net Zero journey. The Liberal Party was strongly for action under Turnbull (2009), against it under Abbott (2010-15), and for it under Turnbull, Morrison, Dutton, and Ley (2015-26).

The current Liberal and National Party leaders, Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, are on board with the dissenters from the UN near-consensus position. In his Budget response, Taylor said, ‘We’ll abolish Labor’s crippling Net Zero carbon taxes wherever we find them.’ But he singled out only the Safeguard Mechanism, which accounts for about one billion dollars a year, and the vastly unpopular transmission lines that the so-called ‘energy transition’ needs. For his part, Matt Canavan is unconvincingly defending the Coalition’s failure to commit to rejecting the Paris Agreement by claiming it is a mere scrap of paper.

Doubtless, this reflects a desire to keep people inside the tent, especially given the well-funded Teals’ enduring presence and even their consideration of establishing themselves as an official political party. While there are no remaining Parliamentary supporters of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, many Liberals, including Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson and NSW and Victorian state leaders Kellie Sloane and Jess Wilson, remain wedded to the ‘energy transition’.

But opinion polls show a seismic shift underway, with One Nation’s plain-speaking displacing the Coalition parties’ prevarication. On the climate agenda, Senator Malcolm Roberts has identified more than two dozen agencies for defenestration. Though he does not quantify the cost savings this would bring, the various programs have budgets amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Not only is One Nation seizing the support of Coalition voters, but the party is also starting to erode the conservative elements within Labor’s base, which are now scarcely represented as a result of former student activists taking control of the party under Anthony Albanese (judged by Bob Hawke to be ‘not very bright’). The student militants within the Labor leadership include Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is displaying his inner Jim Cairns by trying to recreate capitalism as a system of high taxes, escalating regulation, and income growth driven by a fat public sector. Together, they and other ageing professional agitators, including Bowen, Wong, Burke, Gallagher, and Plibersek, are pushing what I believe is the new Marxist agenda. This builds on taxing incomes and regulating business with an agenda of environmentalism, contempt for the nation, high immigration from areas that don’t share Western culture, and replacing scientific notions of gender with the caprice of sexual orientation.

Not only is Labor suffering from policies that weaken the economy and the ‘social cohesion’ that the party ostensibly champions, but the hypocrisy of Labor in power is also recognised in excessive ministerial travel spending and in their pulling up the drawbridge to prevent others from acquiring property portfolios like those that they themselves have accumulated.

For ALP politicians, the prospects are bleak. Even before the disastrous budget and further expense scandals, Redbridge Group/Accent data gave the party a bare majority. As the year progresses, that will seem optimistic. And Labor MPs, unlike their Coalition counterparts, have no alternative party to join. Waiting in the wings is Prime Minister Rudd’s former economics adviser, Andrew Charlton, perhaps ready to pick up the debris, like a latter-day Bill Hayden seeking to rescue the doomed Whitlam government in 1975.

The Liberal and National leadership have yet to fully grasp the fact that the national mood has changed abruptly, and half-hearted attempts to be Labor or Green Lite are backfiring. Their leadership retains a loyalty to parties with old and hollowed-out memberships established to fight issues that are less easily defined in today’s more nuanced issues

Many hoped that Tony Abbott’s coronation as President of the Liberal Party might, instead, be an endorsement of his presidency of a phoenix amalgamating the like-minded among the Liberals, Nationals and other parties under a new broad tent that would be dominated by One Nation, the party with the largest mass support. But political egos do not readily accept secondary roles, especially when they are subordinate to those they formerly regarded as upstarts. The right can, however, take some comfort in that Australia’s system of preferential voting brings fewer penalties for a lack of unity than in first-past-the-post systems.

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Last week, the 193-member UN General Assembly backed economy-crushing climate measures that seek to replace hydrocarbons with the fairy dust of wind and solar.

Endorsing the ‘legally binding’ 2015 Paris Agreement, representatives of nations at the UN approved an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that countries failing to protect the planet from climate change may be in violation of international law. The ICJ President described supposed human-induced climate change as ‘an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet’.

A corollary of the Paris Agreement is the phase-out of coal, oil, and gas for energy, fertiliser and industrial uses. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, declared that the path to climate justice ‘runs through a rapid, just, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy’ and that renewables have proved to be the cheapest and most secure form of energy.

Australia, the EU, and the UK are among many nations that continue to endorse this fantasy of international delegates either hermetically sealed off from reality or voting to win favours from dominant nations and funding institutions.

But dissenting from the UN endorsement of the ICJ ruling was an unlikely eight-nation group, including the US and Israel as well as Belarus, Iran, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

The UN resolution comes at a watershed in Australia’s Net Zero journey. The Liberal Party was strongly for action under Turnbull (2009), against it under Abbott (2010-15), and for it under Turnbull, Morrison, Dutton, and Ley (2015-26).

The current Liberal and National Party leaders, Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, are on board with the dissenters from the UN near-consensus position. In his Budget response, Taylor said, ‘We’ll abolish Labor’s crippling Net Zero carbon taxes wherever we find them.’ But he singled out only the Safeguard Mechanism, which accounts for about one billion dollars a year, and the vastly unpopular transmission lines that the so-called ‘energy transition’ needs. For his part, Matt Canavan is unconvincingly defending the Coalition’s failure to commit to rejecting the Paris Agreement by claiming it is a mere scrap of paper.

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Doubtless, this reflects a desire to keep people inside the tent, especially given the well-funded Teals’ enduring presence and even their consideration of establishing themselves as an official political party. While there are no remaining Parliamentary supporters of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, many Liberals, including Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson and NSW and Victorian state leaders Kellie Sloane and Jess Wilson, remain wedded to the ‘energy transition’.

But opinion polls show a seismic shift underway, with One Nation’s plain-speaking displacing the Coalition parties’ prevarication. On the climate agenda, Senator Malcolm Roberts has identified more than two dozen agencies for defenestration. Though he does not quantify the cost savings this would bring, the various programs have budgets amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Not only is One Nation seizing the support of Coalition voters, but the party is also starting to erode the conservative elements within Labor’s base, which are now scarcely represented as a result of former student activists taking control of the party under Anthony Albanese (judged by Bob Hawke to be ‘not very bright’). The student militants within the Labor leadership include Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who is displaying his inner Jim Cairns by trying to recreate capitalism as a system of high taxes, escalating regulation, and income growth driven by a fat public sector. Together, they and other ageing professional agitators, including Bowen, Wong, Burke, Gallagher, and Plibersek, are pushing what I believe is the new Marxist agenda. This builds on taxing incomes and regulating business with an agenda of environmentalism, contempt for the nation, high immigration from areas that don’t share Western culture, and replacing scientific notions of gender with the caprice of sexual orientation.

Not only is Labor suffering from policies that weaken the economy and the ‘social cohesion’ that the party ostensibly champions, but the hypocrisy of Labor in power is also recognised in excessive ministerial travel spending and in their pulling up the drawbridge to prevent others from acquiring property portfolios like those that they themselves have accumulated.

For ALP politicians, the prospects are bleak. Even before the disastrous budget and further expense scandals, Redbridge Group/Accent data gave the party a bare majority. As the year progresses, that will seem optimistic. And Labor MPs, unlike their Coalition counterparts, have no alternative party to join. Waiting in the wings is Prime Minister Rudd’s former economics adviser, Andrew Charlton, perhaps ready to pick up the debris, like a latter-day Bill Hayden seeking to rescue the doomed Whitlam government in 1975.

The Liberal and National leadership have yet to fully grasp the fact that the national mood has changed abruptly, and half-hearted attempts to be Labor or Green Lite are backfiring. Their leadership retains a loyalty to parties with old and hollowed-out memberships established to fight issues that are less easily defined in today’s more nuanced issues

Many hoped that Tony Abbott’s coronation as President of the Liberal Party might, instead, be an endorsement of his presidency of a phoenix amalgamating the like-minded among the Liberals, Nationals and other parties under a new broad tent that would be dominated by One Nation, the party with the largest mass support. But political egos do not readily accept secondary roles, especially when they are subordinate to those they formerly regarded as upstarts. The right can, however, take some comfort in that Australia’s system of preferential voting brings fewer penalties for a lack of unity than in first-past-the-post systems.

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Watching Angus Taylor’s response to the Budget on Thursday night, many would have wondered why his policy framework of lowering immigration, cost reductions, paring of regulation, and income tax indexation policies haven’t been central to the Coalition’s agenda over the past 10 years.

Of course, the key reason for the change is the rise in One Nation’s popularity.

Immigration aside, the about-face is driven by a rejection of the renewable energy policies that have come to dominate the economy over the past quarter-century.

While less enthusiastic than the Greens, the Teals, and Labor about the inevitability of the ‘energy transition’ from fossil fuels, the Coalition had increasingly gone along with the fiction of fossil fuels creating dangerous climate change and the need to phase them out. The uniparty politicians have proven themselves unable to understand the importance of cheap, readily available energy in creating prosperity, and the impossibility of wind and solar to deliver it.

Green energy enthusiast Malcolm Turnbull is one reason for the Coalition’s embracing of fairy dust as a source of energy, but Liberal MPs voted him into office knowing his views and, in any case, the Coalition’s policy stance hardly improved during the eight years since his leadership was axed. In fact, it was only five years ago that Angus Taylor, as the Energy Minister, granted Major Project Status to a $19 billion phantasmagorical link that was to send solar-generated energy 4,600 kilometres from the Australian interior to Singapore – and make a profit in the process. At that time, the Coalition had no problem with renewables and, by embracing the Glasgow climate change emissions reduction target, went the Full Monty, ditching low-cost, reliable fossil fuels for high-cost, unreliable renewables.

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Even in his Budget response, Angus Taylor said rooftop renewables would continue to play a role. But, as the highest-cost electricity source, any such role requires ongoing government support. And, in addressing the future of coal, Australia’s cheapest source of electricity, rather than foreshadowing new supplies, he confined his comments to keeping existing plants running as long and as hard as possible. Taylor’s approach to gas is, however, highly supportive, more so than the existing One Nation policy, which at times has opposed the fracking technology that has converted the US from an oil and gas importer to the world’s largest producer.

However, Taylor’s Budget reply contained no statement about closing down the two dozen agencies promoting the national energy debacle (still less about removing the tax advantages enjoyed by green climate agitator NGOs). And while the Coalition will abrogate the doubled carbon tax paid by large firms under the Safeguard Mechanism, there was no discussion on how to curtail the egregious green contracts already signed under the oxymoronically named Capacity Investment Scheme, or to cancel the subsidies of bodies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency with contingent liabilities similar in size to the bloated national debt racked up by the ALP incompetents.

Energy aside, the Coalition’s policy approach includes changes in limiting immigration, doing something – albeit largely unspecified – to rein in spending, to foster more housing, and to join the rest of the world in automatically indexing tax rate tiers to prevent bracket creep from covertly providing governments extra funding.

However, the indexation of taxation is being introduced painfully slowly, especially for the upper tiers, with the phase-in incomplete until 2032. Providing a $50,000 depreciation break for small businesses is welcome, but larger businesses also create wealth and employment, so why discriminate? And why not, in addition to indexing tax rates for inflation, ensure that depreciation in general is also indexed – after all, inflation increases the cost of a replacement pump, but the old unit can only be written off at its original cost?

Of course, the reason these punitive tax policies are not being addressed is the Coalition’s reticence to cut expenditures that, together with regulatory excesses, have been the root cause of the nation’s economic distress.

House price escalation is linked with excessive immigration. Though this is correct, the policy fails to consider why house prices 1950-70 were low in the face of similar shares of net immigration. The landmark plan is an attempt to reduce the Construction Code’s regulations (which are state-based, so good luck!) and to establish a $5 billion Infrastructure Fund that is claimed to reduce costs by $70,000 per new dwelling. Unacknowledged is land availability, the most important cost-enhancing regulatory factor. The tightening of this over the past 50 years has raised Australian house prices to twice those of high-population-growth jurisdictions like Texas and of low-population-growth Germany. Is this because the policy seeks to avoid aggrieving a constituency that does not want housing beyond the 0.26 per cent of Australia already urbanised? Or is it to placate inner-city communities opposed to densification? Probably both.

Angus Taylor’s apparent passion in calling for a reversal of the socialistic measures the Albanese government ghouls have foisted upon us is to be welcomed. But it lacks detail and falls short of Argentina’s President Javier Milei’s chainsaw approach or the cleansing of Democrat corruption that President Trump is pursuing.

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Many governments are suddenly realising that economies do not operate on sunbeams and zephyrs.

This is less so for the ossified EU bureaucracy, which is preparing a ‘catalogue’ of energy-saving and low-carbon investments (to replace oil/gas), including smart-grid upgrades incentivises for better renewable integration.

Germany, however, is going further. Their Energy Minister has prepared the ground for a policy about-face with an apostolic condemnation of wind and solar, stating, ‘an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country’. In addition, Chancellor Merz has described the abandonment of nuclear power as a ‘grave strategic mistake’ and is delaying coal phase-outs. For its part, Italy has deferred the permanent closure of four coal plants from the end of 2025 to 2038.

Japan and Korea are delivering messages similar to those of EU bureaucrats, while also returning to nuclear power and reverting to coal (ostensibly temporarily).

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The UK Labour government has suspended its £18-per-tonne carbon tax on gas and (currently discontinued) coal generation, claiming it has served its purpose by killing off coal. The measure reduces gas and coal generation costs by 7 and 15 per cent, respectively. The Tories have finally realised that the UK’s industry is uncompetitive because the nation’s green energy regime (forged by the Uniparty of Labour and Conservative governments) has driven electricity prices to four times those of the US. Finally differentiating her party from Labour, Ms Badenoch says, ‘It is time to ditch our green levies.’ Badenoch has joined Reform’s Nigel Farage in promoting drill baby drill, a policy towards which even Labour is tiptoeing.

For Australia, green taxes and regulations have undermined the country’s cost advantage as the world’s cheapest, most reliable energy supplier, and have hollowed out industry competitiveness. At the same time, craven pandering to those with no understanding of wealth-creation processes has frozen oil and gas developments, and elsewhere in mining as well as in agriculture. Add to this profligate social spending and the picture emerges of a nation self-destroying both its income and sovereignty.

Prime Minister Albanese, like some overseas government leaders, has aggravated fuel scarcity by slashing petrol and diesel taxes. In addition, the Iran crisis has turned him into an oil purchasing agent. Albanese is traversing the region, extracting slivers of supply assurances from foreign politicians; unbeknownst to the Prime Minister, these entities might not have oil products to sell!

But here, as in the UK, the Uniparty nexus is breaking.

Matt Canavan’s Nationals have now joined One Nation in calling for an end to green regulations and levies that have done the nation such a disservice. Canavan is even advocating that the Capacity Investment Scheme be transposed from a renewable energy boondoggle to one that helps finance coal.

The Liberals are edging in the same direction, desperate to avoid what must surely be their destiny as an archaic shell of the former natural party of government. Labor is urgently searching for ways to negate the exclusion – introduced under pressure from the Greens – of coal and gas projects from the ‘streamlined assessment’ provisions of the Environment Protection Reform Act 2025; (some 36 fossil fuel developments have in fact been approved since 2022 using existing, non-expedited assessment pathways).

In addition, we can expect broader measures to support Middle Eastern oil exports. If controlled by a single party, the Straits of Hormuz has the characteristics of an ‘essential facility’. Political goals aside, its control can be used to extract super profits from users.

Passage through such seaways has always been successfully opposed even where the sea passage has a single nation on both sides, e.g. the Bosphorus (Turkey), Japan’s five major straits, and the Danish Straits. Sea passage is unrestricted by tradition and by international law (though the Danish Straits, like the Straits of Hormuz, have in the past been subject to tolls by their controlling power – in the case of the Straits of Hormuz that was Portugal).

But nobody in the Middle East would have confidence in Starmer-Macron assurances that Britain and France would keep the Straits open and, given its oil and gas self-sufficiency, future US governments may be less resolute. The oil and gas producers in the region have vast wealth but little income other than that from oil and gas. A pipeline from Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia to the Oman’s Muscat area (bypassing both the Red Sea and the Straits) would cost at least $10 billion, but this is dwarfed by the Arab states’ exports of over $600 billion a year, and we can expect several such gas and oil pipelines, including to the Mediterranean.

There are hopeful upshots from the Iran crisis. It has accelerated the collapse of the anti-coal and oil Environment Social and Governance (ESG) agenda globally (even the Woke Australian banks are now lending for coal developments). Multiple new pipelines, a resumption of fossil fuel (and nuclear) generated electricity, hold the promise of greater global prosperity – all the more so for Australia if the developments hasten the restoration of a goal of increasing living standards and using rather than sealing off the nation’s resources.

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It is easy to forget that what we think of as ‘constitutional democracy’ covers fewer than half of the world’s sovereign states.

Constitutional democracy as we know it was developed in England over the course of about 500 years, and was only fully consolidated with universal suffrage in the early years of the 20th Century.

It was facilitated by having a monarch who was increasingly becoming a figurehead while retaining the power to dismiss a government that was exceeding its authority.

A significant precursor to constitutional democracy was the leadership of Robert Walpole, 1721-42, the first to be called by the, originally pejorative, title of ‘Prime Minister’. Walpole was the first such leader not to be impeached for the ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ (which led to the execution of Charles I) or otherwise punished upon leaving office; provision for judicial-style impeachment ceased to exist in the UK after 1806 and is not part of the Australian system.

The conditions that nurtured English constitutional democracy were threefold.

First, a limited franchise in which the (more numerous) poor had no vote and therefore were unable to use political power to expropriate the wealth and income of the minority. Secondly, an acceptance, quite rare in the history of organised nations or empires, under which the gold standard prevailed, and governments had to balance their budgets and could not, except in periods of dire necessity, incur debts to be paid by future generations. And, thirdly, where those who failed to win elections accepted government by the majority.

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This third condition also required restraint by the majority. The American Civil War stemmed from a large minority fearing that Lincoln’s Republican victory meant their property rights in the form of slaves would be seized. Similarly, the Spanish Civil War was triggered by fears that the 1936 election results foreshadowed land expropriation and nationalisation. And the military overthrew Chile’s Allende Government in 1973 when (with a vote of under 40 per cent of the electorate) it gained government and embarked upon an aggressive policy of expropriation, wage hikes, and deficit spending that within a few years were crippling the economy. Radical post-1945 nationalisation programs in Britain and France ignited no similar opposition.

With its legitimisation of revolutionary seizure of power, elements of the political left reject constraints on their ability to act in the name of the proletariat; once having seized power communists in Russia, China, North Korea, and elsewhere have never tested the popularity of their actions in free elections.

The latest assassination attempt on President Trump has called into question the acceptance of his election victory. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Democrats of putting the President’s life in danger with inflammatory rhetoric. ‘When you read that manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves, how different is that rhetoric from this almost-assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forms every single day? The answer, if you’re being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all.’

Trump ushered in a political agenda involving reduced spending and a deep-seated reversal of energy policy accompanied by attacking the global warming fundamentalism that had justified the previous administration’s decarbonisation strictures. He also initiated a more rigorous prosecution of illegal immigration.

These have ignited ‘No Kings’ demonstrations in June 2025, October 2025, and March 2026 with up nine million reported participants who accuse him of somehow undermining democracy.

Policies on energy and immigration analogous to those of Trump are likely to be introduced following elections in Australia over the next two years and in the UK. In both cases, grossly incompetent governments have brought spending and energy policies that have paralysed their economies with high-cost renewable energy requirements, impediments to fossil fuel developments and government spending that has cannibalised investments and productivity.

Will we see a similar level of venomous opposition?

One difference from Trump’s America is that other countries (the EU, as well as the UK and Australia) will benefit from observing the success of the Trump Administration’s rejection of green energy policies. That success and the awakening caused by the Iran crisis is already influencing policies of Labor and the Liberals/Nationals in Australia (as well as Labour and the Conservatives in the UK) that have adopted similar policies to those of the incumbent governments. Added to this, in both Australia and the UK, environmental opposition to wind and solar along with their transmission lines degrading rural areas has arisen while the emergence of One Nation in Australia and Reform in the UK has demonstrated the political imperative of reversing course on energy policies.

The problem for Australia and the UK is how to unravel energy policies that are in place and being nurtured by vested interests in the bureaucracy, industry, and well-financed environmental groups which provide grants to activists of some $60 million a year. Moreover, government contractual lock-ins (in Australia likely to be renegotiated at even higher cost to the taxpayer and energy consumer) could entail tens of billions of dollars in compensation, costs that will suffocate the economy for many years.

Perhaps we need to renew the power of impeachment!

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Headlining the latest climate talkfest taking place this month, The Guardian gushed, ‘Historic breakthrough: Colombia climate talks end with hopes raised for fossil fuel phaseout.’ And though the article soberly noted that most of the world’s biggest emitters were absent from the group of 59 participants, they labelled this as a strength since the participants were a ‘coalition of the willing’.

This is a path down which the EU and UK continue to hurtle. Indeed, this year the EU commenced a program of systematically defining imports by category and source to levy an equalisation tax on products by exporter. As it is phased in, it is intended to cover hundreds of thousands of different products with different rates for each of the world’s 200 countries, a gargantuan process that would, if implemented, redefine the basis of world trade.

But it won’t be implemented. The fact is the EU is a regulation-corroded set of nations – many of which are nice places to visit – with a 15 per cent and declining share of the world economy.

Australia has its own set of self-imposed penalties – the Safeguard Mechanism – which requires declining emissions baselines for ~215 large industrial facilities emitting over 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year). That involves some 11 million tonnes of additional reductions by these large firms; at a cost of $39 per tonne this costs them over $400 million a year, an impost that is rising annually.

This cost is additional to that all businesses must incur as a result of governments forcing the replacement of low-cost, reliable coal generation by high-cost, intermittent wind and solar energy.

This replacement of modern controllable technology by energy that is far less dense and intrinsically dependent on natural elements has already more than doubled electricity costs, as shown below for New South Wales.

Over that same period in the US (where requirements for increased renewables have been less radical than in Australia), electricity prices increased by only 30 per cent.

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Recognising the harm their policies were doing to Australian competitiveness, the Albanese government commissioned a report which recommended a frontier tariff along similar lines to that being introduced in the EU. Needless to say, while benefiting some import-competing businesses, this would increase costs for other businesses and for consumers generally.

The assault on hydrocarbons has proven to be a familiar case of a regulatory measure leading to unanticipated detrimental outcomes, prompting calls for additional regulatory measures that compound the original damage. Doubtless, carbon taxes on imports will entail additional harms and necessitate subsequent tiers of regulation, all of which augment the damage of the original measures.

There are cases where measures to ban or drive out the supply of products bring little economy-wide cost. But hydrocarbons comprise four-fifths of the world’s energy while 60 per cent of the world’s fertilisers are replaceable only at massive cost in many sectors of production. These uses are not optional luxury goods but are essential to the bedrock of modern world livability.

Energy regulations are not alone among virtuous egalitarian slogans in leading to the opposite of the outcomes claimed.

Thus, housing rent controls (currently prominent on the Greens agenda) lead rental property owners to leave the market or cut back on maintenance, resulting in fewer available properties and higher rents for those not fortunate enough to be initially allocated a fixed-price rental home.

Similarly, ‘land redistribution’ shifts farming into the hands of those with little expertise, as in Zimbabwe, where the key tobacco and maize crops dropped 75 per cent and 30 per cent respectively, transforming the nation from the ‘breadbasket of Africa’ into a net importer with malnutrition becoming common.

In the case of hydrocarbons, some of those who are sloganising for their elimination either think the detrimental effects are worth it or that something will turn up to offset them. But we now have had 20 years’ experience of measures to squeeze out hydrocarbons, and the outcome in terms of living standards is plain to see.

This month’s Colombian UN meeting is a last hurrah of the declining rump of activists promoting the Net Zero ideology.

In the UK, even the Labour Party grandee, Tony Blair, is urging his comrades to abandon the cause, and will undoubtedly be listened to more closely as his party examines the loss of 75 per cent of the seats it sought re-election in.

In Australia, Coalition MPs, other than those in Teal seats, are reading the public mood and accepting a need to exit the cause.

In both the UK and Australia however, the issue for Conservatives and the Coalition is whether they can remain viable rather than joining the populist parties (Reform/One Nation) to which most of their own supporters and some of those supporting Labour/Labor are switching. And both countries have the task of identifying strategies to reverse the damage without having to pay compensation to those benefiting from the subsidies that the Net Zero policies have entailed.

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Grantlee Kieza’s biography of Mary Reibey (1777-1855), the woman pictured on the $20 note, provides a splendid account of how Australian pioneers’ self-reliance and can-do approach to tapping the continent’s latent wealth brought living standards 30-50 per cent above those of England within a generation.

Convicts and emancipists still comprised half of the adult population in 1850 (surely the world’s highest proportion of felons) when the colonies became self-governing democracies.

As in Hong Kong, prosperity grew under a gentle autocracy. Contrary to later myths, transportees were not unfortunate victims of a distinctly harsh legal regime. Overwhelmingly, they were guilty of persistent theft or very serious property crimes (Mary Reibey herself was a rebellious middle-class teenager, who stole a horse, a crime which at that time brought the death penalty more or less everywhere in the world). Some 95 per cent of transportees stayed in Australia as free citizens, partly because of the cost of returning to Britain.

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As Kieza dispassionately relates it, the Indigenous hunter-gatherers were obviously dispossessed, but they were not exploited; conflicts largely stemmed from their seizing settlers’ property (or, if you prefer, reclaiming property they considered to be their own). A few thousand Indigenous people absorbed themselves into settler society, contributing to and enjoying the wealth created.

The success of pre-1850 Australia was notwithstanding high crime, resulting from frontier friction and settler lawbreakers. However, most former criminals sent to Australia in the 19th Century prospered. Many, like Mary Reibey, became successful merchants and farmers. Some, like Dickens’s apocryphal Mr Micawber, corroborated redemptionist notions to become magistrates; others became prominent politicians.

19th Century government was largely invisible. Its share of national income is estimated at just 4 per cent compared with today’s 40 per cent. While the greater part of today’s government spending is on health, welfare, education, and infrastructure, most of this output is low-productivity, and much of the other spending actually yields negative returns by creating and managing the gargantuan enterprise-suffocating regulatory regime.

Prior to 1970, the growth of government featured labour and product market regulations (especially tariffs). The 55 years since then have seen accumulations of regulations – especially at the interface between the environment and the economy.

Labor is ushering in new draconian workplace regulatory changes and environmentally-oriented restraints on the lowest-cost energy, which is seeing investment diverted offshore, particularly in the mining industry. There is a whole portfolio of wealth-stifling regulatory measures.

Mining restraints that have extended the timeline for new mine developments from a couple of years 30 years ago to 10 or more years today and have involved a considerable increase in spending to please the regulatory authorities and to counter, sometimes unsuccessfully, specious grounds for arresting development.

Twenty per cent of the irrigation water from the Murray-Darling, which accounts for ~35 per cent of Australian agricultural output, has been diverted to serve contested environmental uses.

No-take fishing covers as much as 25 per cent of the Australian coast, with the objective of raising this to 30 per cent by 2030. With the world’s largest sea resources, we actually import 70 per cent of the fish we eat.

About 24 per cent of Australia is out of bounds for farming or mining; although this includes little of the 15 per cent of the nation cleared for more intensive cropping or pasture, no further clearing is permitted on that land and ‘remnant’ patches of native vegetation must be protected.

Above all, we have the accumulation of measures ostensibly aimed at reducing ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions.

Starting with the Howard government’s 2002 provisions requiring ‘2 per cent of additional energy’ to be from wind and solar, the cost of energy subsidies has grown from a few hundred million dollars a year to over $16 billion a year, due to the ‘Capacity Investment Scheme’ (which seeks to lock future governments into providing renewables subsidies for 20 years), excessive transmission spending to accommodate renewables and direct support through loans and on-budget subsidies.

Over the past two decades, in current dollars, over $150 billion has been wasted on these measures, resulting in escalating electricity costs.

Twenty years ago, Australian electricity prices were in lockstep with those of the US (where the government-induced renewables malignancy was less pervasive), but as regulatory measures were ratcheted up, we now have electricity prices 80 per cent higher.

It would be impossible to return to the low-tax, low-regulatory regime of the 19th Century. But the upshot of the present regulatory regime is stagnation – average productivity has declined over the past seven years. Business investment, the key promoter of productivity, has fallen from around 18 per cent of GDP to 12 per cent – and much of that 12 per cent is in renewable energy, delivering negative gains in real income.

A new bonfire of regulations and sharply reduced government spending generally is vital if we are to raise living standards (and buttress our security). A start could be a program to build coal power stations to double the existing capacity. This would cost about $70 billion and offer electricity at a world-beating price of $60-70 per MWh, half our current prices. Such a policy, of itself, would resolve the loss of secondary industry resulting from subsidies to renewables.

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The Iranian war and consequent reduction in fuel supplies has brought diesel, petrol, and LPG price increases for consumers with widespread reported shortages. In one response to this, the state opposition leaders in South Australia and Victoria have called for a compensatory reduction in excise taxes. These calls have been echoed by One Nation and even some Teals. Treasurer Jim Chalmers accused shadow treasurer Tim Wilson of dropping “a clanger” in claiming the government was benefitting from increased prices on fuels when the main revenue is a fixed excise (52.6 cents per litre).

In fact, a tax cut to mitigate the effects of diminished supplies is exactly the wrong policy response. Lower supplies require some form of rationing, at least eventually, and prices (perhaps with subsidies to some “essential” services) offer the best, most neutral means of doing this. Higher prices tend to choke off the least essential and least valued uses, thereby somewhat offsetting the scarcity aspect, even for products like petrol, diesel and LPG, the demand for which is relatively unresponsive to price changes.

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Whilst state and federal treasuries normally push back against notions that taxes are hypothecated for specific expenditure lines, the various vehicle taxes were originally justified as revenues earmarked for public road spending. They remain so – hence the exemption of diesel fuel for off-road usage. In this respect, Tim Wilson’s claim of over-recovery remains correct. Data shows that spending on roads has been considerably lower than the specific road-use taxes collected, although the difference has narrowed in recent years.

Part of this narrowing (about $1.5 billion of $45 billion in taxes collected) is due to EV/hybrid vehicle tax concessions. These include lower direct taxes and the absence (partial for hybrids) of fuel excise taxes. The revenue foregone due to the increased number of EV and hybrid vehicles is small but showing explosive growth. In 2025 EV/hybrids represented 13% of new vehicle sales and now account for 6% of the national fleet. This is causing Treasury to revise its view on hypothecation and seek ways to restore the revenue loss.

The EV lobby and climate activists justify tax concessions on the basis that these vehicles reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, greenhouse gas emissions in general, and certainly the one per cent global share of gross emissions attributable to Australia, are groundless causes of concern — and even if they were, Australia’s massive area makes it a net sink of such emissions. Moreover, it is doubtful that the saved emissions from oil are offset by those from the coal-based electricity charging batteries.

But even though the government continues to accept the specious claims about EVs reducing emissions, these fears are trumped by its interests in maintaining its tax base. Unsurprisingly, Treasury is reportedly running the numbers for restoring revenues by a fuel-equivalent tax on EVs/hybrids. At the same time, the differentials of diesel, petrol, and LPG taxes should be eliminated. In terms of energy content, petrol is presently taxed at about 10% more than diesel and LPG is taxed at half the rate of diesel.

But governments typically and unblushingly value a dollar that accrues to themselves as more valuable than the dollar extracted from taxpayers. Hence, it is unlikely that the Treasurer, who has never seen a tax he doesn’t like, will take this review of vehicle taxes as an opportunity to restore a balance between the sums raised and those spent on roads.

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By demonstrating the reality of One Nation’s rise, the South Australian election confirmed turmoil in Australian politics.

This brought to the surface a new contempt for the politically correct agenda that has come to dominate politics in Australia. Not only did One Nation savage the Coalition vote, but it also ate into that of Labor.

Labor is responding by pirouetting towards a form of hybrid patriotism with multicultural Australia that encourages people to share a drink and argue about the footy… Meanwhile, the Liberals and Nationals are torn between fighting One Nation by adopting its policies or continuing to product-differentiate themselves from Labor and the Greens.

These developments are superimposed on Donald Trump’s radical departure from the post-1945 international framework, particularly with his use of industry protection to drive domestic manufacturing growth.

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For the developed OECD nations, the average tariff rate was reduced from 20 per cent in 1950 to 10 per cent in 1970, 6 per cent in 1990 to about 2 per cent by 2020. This created an integrated global economy and prosperity came to tiers of previously poverty-stricken countries – first the Asian tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea), then China, and latterly India.

Australia came late to the trade liberalisation party. Forty years ago, we had perhaps the highest levels of tariff protection on manufactures in the developed world. Tariffs on some goods, like motor vehicles and clothing, averaged over 100 per cent.

In 1983, under the Hawke government, Australia commenced a determined program to reduce industry protection. Average tariffs and their equivalents for manufacturing followed the global downward trend, falling from 35 per cent in 1970 to 6 per cent in 2000 and 4 per cent today.

By raising tariffs on manufactured goods, not only those of militarily strategic importance, Trump legitimised similar actions for other nations. Australia had always retained some such interventions, largely justified on the grounds that the government’s ‘holistic’ capabilities made it well suited to selecting and nurturing particular emerging industries. But all such ‘winner-pickings’ by Australian governments have proved to be a total waste of taxpayer funding.

In recent years, the policy has been mainly linked to the fabled emergence of renewable energy that zealots claim will inevitably supplant oil, coal, and gas. This remains central to Labor and the Greens (and Teals) policy frameworks.

It has also featured in that of the Coalition.

Angus Taylor, as Industry Minister in 2021, looked to support ‘an “Australian way” to Net Zero by 2050 that supports manufacturing through technologies like hydrogen, carbon capture, and ultra-low-cost solar’.

For his part, Nationals leader Matt Canavan has advocated aggressive anti-dumping action against China; Chinese, like other sellers, do sometimes offer their goods at below-cost prices both to establish a market presence and in response to market gluts, though dumping, in the sense of selling below cost to drive out rivals, is an impossible business strategy. To his credit, Canavan has, however, consistently, with his recognition that renewable energy cannot work, pushed back against White Elephants like the proposed Queensland CopperString wind/solar-based electricity network, first broached at a $1.5 billion cost and now proceeding, with the support of the Queensland Crisafulli Coalition government, at a cost of $14 billion.

But the ALP has provided the most serious funding for ‘winner picking’.

Combining the party’s proclivity towards government planning with its modern green ideology, its Future Made in Australia program, announced in the 2024/25 budget, earmarks $22.7 billion for various green energy projects. As in the past, it is my belief that most of these projects will fail – already one project worth $400+ million is having to progress under a new funding structure following the departure of its energy partner.

High natural gas prices in Australia have contributed to the closure of local manufacturing facilities – notably Qenos, Australia’s sole manufacturer of polyethylene, and fertiliser producers across the country. As a result, there is now a political consensus (excluding the Greens) to get cheaper gas to Australian users by requiring producers to allocate more to the local market.

This form of industry assistance avoids the detrimental effects of government or bureaucratic control over supplies, but it still entails costs.

These are illustrated by construction choices, such as one LNG company preferring an 890-kilometre pipeline to Darwin rather than a 220-kilometre pipeline to Western Australia which avoids allocating 15 per cent of production to the local market. At a local price of about $7 per gigajoule, compared to a netback export price (after transport and liquefaction) of $18 per gigajoule, the lost revenue of a WA-landed project would be 6 per cent (with the Commonwealth’s proposed 20 per cent local domestic reservation, there would be a revenue reduction of 8 per cent). That would lead to a far greater reduction in profit (and therefore in tax paid).

As a rule of thumb, deep-sea gas pipelines cost $4 million per kilometre; hence why it’s plausible companies might be willing to pay an additional $2.68 billion to avoid landing gas in WA to maintain commercial viability.

In requiring a domestic gas reservation, governments need to assess whether the cost imposition plus the possible loss of projects offers better value than diverting the gas to local supplies. This is unlikely to be the case for offshore projects, but in any event, the only reason Australia has a gas problem is the political discouragement of new projects (including the forbidding of technologies, like fracking, with a proven safety record).

Aside from interventionist industry policies, the Coalition parties are being crushed between two forces.

On one side is the dominant establishment with policies of mass immigration, soft on crime, attempts at social cohesion by granting privileges to particular groups, and the economic distortions of Net Zero. On the other side is the backlash against the all-too-evident failures of these policies.

Attempts by the Liberal and National parties to find a path between these forces will fail, not least because post the South Australian result, Labor is already beginning to occupy some of this ground. An alternative would offer a more comprehensive set of reforms than those of One Nation but the Coalition parties may not have the stomach for such changes, carry the baggage of their existing policies and have seen their supporting cadres deserting to One Nation or the Teals.

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The world faces increased insecurities as a result of the US and Israel (with little help from others in the West) finally confronting the Iranian theocratic reaction to the modern world.

However, in addition to having brought about economic weaknesses, the Australian government is mired in an inability to change course.

Growth-stifling policies commenced under the Turnbull government and have been turbocharged by the Albanese government’s breakneck spending and regulatory measures on welfare and energy.

These have led to reduced investment and misdirected capital and human resources, lowering living standards.

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Misdirected capital resources into government services and low-quality wind and solar energy have resulted in capital productivity now being 19 per cent below its 1995 level. This is aggravated by government spending that reallocates labour from high-productivity private-sector activities to low-productivity government and government-funded activities.

The government – and the hand-picked officials it has selected to advise it – remains incapable of understanding what drives productivity.

Wedded to a crude Keynesian economics, they see spending – government or private, consumption or investment – as having the same effect. For the Prime Minister, his Treasurer, and Finance Minister, the science of government takes income levels for granted, with the key issues centred on how to allocate that income in ways that perpetuate their political support, regardless of national well-being and security.

As a result, this prevents policy changes in the face of adverse external developments.

Thus, while the Canadian Prime Minister, in this week’s address to Parliament, steered clear of the Net Zero rhetoric that has conditioned his politics, Anthony Albanese spent fully one-third of his own address defending the income-sapping renewable energy measures he has presided over, which have caused escalating electricity costs.

In this respect, Labor’s policy is being advanced through measures that build upon long-standing penalties to commercial energy, including:

• The Safeguard Mechanism which is essentially a tax on the top 220 firms, forcing them to abandon energy-intensive activities like agricultural fertilisers.

• The oxymoronically named Capacity Investment Scheme which aims to lock-in two decades of contracts for renewables and the batteries that do very little to enhance their reliability.

• The expensive and environmentally calamitous transmission networks that are necessary to collect energy that is only one-third of the density and far less reliable than the coal and gas it is designed to replace.

In fact, the only way these policies, which drain over $16 billion a year from the economy, can be insulated from causing the inherently precarious system reliability that they deliver is by having a parallel system of reliable fossil (or nuclear) facilities.

The result is a far higher system cost than one without any wind and solar.

Similar economic ignorance is evident in other recent government statements.

These include the announcement by Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek of 500 additional workers as part of a $4 billion-plus ‘investment’ in tackling family, domestic, and sexual violence.

This was business-as-usual, given that roughly 80 per cent of new jobs have been government or government-funded and bring negative productivity gains.

Similarly, the government introduced new penalties on superannuation earnings, which continue its assault on savings. Blinded by a soak-the-rich philosophy, with this measure, the government further constricts the accumulation of new savings while encouraging the liquidation of existing savings – again unperturbed by and blissfully ignorant of the implications of this for investment, the meat and drink of the productivity increase it purports to be pursuing.

And, again demonstrating its economic ignorance, the government’s priority to addressing the fraught nature of fuel supplies in the wake of the Iranian War turns out to be preventing ‘price gouging’ by energy suppliers. In fact, with thousands of different suppliers, no attempt to obtain such monopoly profits is possible. Oil and gas prices will rise because supply is constrained and because customers, reacting to this, will increase their self-storage in car petrol tanks. Even if this were not the case, holding down prices runs contrary to the beneficial price signal, which discourages demand and encourages the search for alternatives.

The detrimental effects of the current government’s ignorance of basic economics and hostility to those who have accumulated savings have been clear over the past four years in the stagnation they have caused.

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The renewable energy bubble is popping globally – though not in countries run by green socialist governments, including the UK, Spain and, sadly, Australia.

Following Angus Taylor’s elevation, an urgent task for Australia’s emerging anti-socialist forces is to unwind the energy tragedy caused by successive government attacks on coal generation.

Having once supplied 85 per cent of electricity, coal is now down to 40 per cent and scheduled to be phased out in the next dozen years.

Globally, the US under Trump is leading the way in unravelling damaging government policies that promote wind and solar at the expense of lower-cost, reliable supplies.

Having exited the Paris Agreement on emissions reductions and terminated most federal subsidies, the Trump Administration has gone even further, recently announcing $175 million in assistance for six coal plants. The US has also repealed the Obama-era ‘endangerment’ scientific finding, under which greenhouse gas emissions, at a claimed one trillion-dollar regulatory cost, were weaponised to prevent new coal and gas generation plants.

The US is moreover proselytising: Secretary of Energy Chris Wright noted, ‘Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid, and today produces 20 per cent less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.’

Ouch! However, Germany is now taking baby steps toward dismantling renewable subsidies, including ending the free provision of new networks.

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No such luck for Australia.

ALP and Green politicians continue to promote lies about the nation needing to replace coal with wind/solar generation to prevent wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones, or whatever is the unfortunate weather event of the day. And the subsidies to renewables, now running at $16 billion a year, continue to be augmented. Importantly, alongside direct subsidies, regulations requiring the use of renewables, new transmission lines, and soft loans, we now have the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS).

Under the CIS, Minister Bowen plans to spend $85 billion in contracting renewable energy at unrevealed prices (likely more than double those from coal generators). Wind/solar currently provide 36 per cent of Australian electricity from a capacity of 22 GW and the CIS will add another 40 GW (half of which is already contracted). This will displace the remaining 23 GW of coal, which is not subject to the climate/day-night intermittency of wind and solar.

These plans, building upon the existing damaging measures, mean a catastrophic economic outcome is in the making. As a result of the forced replacement of coal by renewables, Australian electricity prices have risen from among the lowest in the world to among the highest. They are now more than double those of China and India, and 50 per cent above the US average (the wooden spooners – Germany and the UK – have even more wind and solar than Australia and are saddled with energy prices 30 per cent higher). This is forcing the closure of refining industries, where energy typically accounts for a third of total costs; the Albermarle lithium plant in Western Australia is the latest victim of this.

It is inconceivable that the ALP/Green Commonwealth government can extract Australia from this burden. Those MPs, and many within the Coalition, are too wedded to the support they obtain from the beneficiaries of renewable subsidies. Some also feel too indebted to the electoral support of voters who have been convinced, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that carbon dioxide emissions threaten humanity, and to the propaganda that renewables are the cheapest form of energy.

One Nation, with Senator Malcolm Roberts (and now MP Barnaby Joyce) as key policy formulators and with energy/climate expertise, has been well placed to set the agenda. This includes:

• withdrawing Australia from the Paris Agreement

• repealing legislation that enables ‘Net Zero’ and abolishing subsidies

• severely restricting renewable energy installations and transmission lines

• mandating the use of environmental rehabilitation bonds on all energy projects

One Nation’s policies require further thought – for instance, the gas policy seeks more regulation on supply and extraction, and it is unclear whether rooftop solar is included within the subsidy abolition. Even so, they provide the basis for a Taylor-Hanson partnership to proceed.

But the Albanese government’s policy settings, centred on the CIS, include poison pills ostensibly to reduce commercial risk (thereby increasing taxpayer risks and costs). The CIS contracts are set to cover 15 years, the intent being to bind future governments.

Attempts to unravel these contracts will be met with advice from the same bureaucracy that designed them, that doing so would expose Australia to ‘sovereign risk’. The advice will be that to renege on commitments signed by the responsible Minister would be unacceptable to the global business and financial community. Public servants will point to the Victorian Andrews government, which cancelled the East-West road contract and, even though they had foreshadowed this when in opposition, paid compensation of $1.1 billion. Advisers will further argue that such actions would result in higher interest rates, which could easily cost the Commonwealth over $10 billion a year on its $1 trillion national debt.

Hence, a reforming government is best placed to seek the cancellation of these crushing economic (and environmental) contracts by strictly enforcing delivery milestones and insisting on the necessary permits. It might also, depending upon the specifics of a contract, seek to encourage cancellation by imposing additional charges for grid connection and (as One Nation already proposes) land remediation. It may also impose additional unforeseen taxes on renewable energy, a measure contemplated by the Trump advisers in repealing the Biden Administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable energy policies.

One thing is certain: the long tail of costs from energy contracts entered into by the Albanese government will poison the economy for a decade and a half, perhaps indefinitely, if left to fester.

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Anyone who rules out the possibility of a seismic change in the political scene in Australia is not paying attention.

The rise in popularity of One Nation is unparalleled in Australian history and there will be many career politicians extrapolating a trend that we have seen in less than 12 months.

Simplistically, we’ve seen One Nation’s share of the vote market rise from 6.4 per cent in May 2025 to 17 per cent by the end of the year and now to 25 per cent.

And this is not based on a few outlier polls; it seems pretty consistent across all pollsters.

Fanciful though extrapolation can be, even with some inevitable deceleration, it cannot be discounted that One Nation’s support will crest at 40 per cent. And the ALP political machine is far too sophisticated to be fooled by previous preference allocations that would see it retaining a ‘two party preferred’ majority.

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The causes of this cataclysmic/euphoric political shift are clear. They are dominated by concerns about excessive immigration (especially from those, lauded by the tireless protesting class, who do not share ‘Australian values’), and rising costs.

The latter are due to government forcing commercial energy out of the system and replacing it with subsidised renewables; excessive spending that has resulted in four out of five new jobs being in the public-funded sector, preventing productive new investment while facilitating wasteful capital expenditure; and an utter inability to facilitate increased home building.

The problem for the government is that it has economic policy incompetents – Albanese, Chalmers, and Gallagher – in political control and has populated its bureaucracy with like-minded individuals. And, lacking self-awareness, their hubristic claim was that they will create a better capitalism.

The consequent policy delinquencies are now being magnified by a Reserve Bank that has finally recognised that we cannot have endless wish-lists of new, ideologically motivated spending without this cratering productivity and causing economy-crippling inflation.

So now we have a compounding effect of interest rate rises. The most immediate outcome of this week’s 0.25 per cent rise is a $1,200-$2,400 per year housing cost hit for the average family and there is a fat chance that this will be the only increase. Moreover, increases in interest rates will have a further dampening effect on investment and, hence, on national productivity.

The ‘protest party’ can now claim that the Coalition, on 19 per cent, is cannibalising the conservative vote and even Peta Credlin, the custodian of the Liberal Party flame, is moved to warn, ‘If it’s not careful, it could be down and out.’

Her hope that a John Howard may arise and recapture the centre right is less likely than a Farage-type bleeding of talent to One Nation, followed by some form of electoral alliance with those parts of the Liberal Rump who do not secede to the Teals. For its part, the ALP, recognising a decline in Green support, can only see slim pickings to tap from the left.

The establishment parties’ claim that One Nation is bereft of policies is inaccurate. That said, they need resources to flesh out the topics they have covered and to address others.

The importance of this was underscored by the first Trump Administration, which had policies but no government machinery, and thus achieved very little. The difficulties are further illustrated by Trump 2.0, which had detailed plans including personnel lined up to implement them but, notwithstanding Elon Musk’s DOGE, has made little headway in balancing the budget because of long-tailed policy commitments of the previous administration. Especially with programs like the Capacity Investment Scheme and the Future Made in Australia, the present government has inserted many poison pill commitments that it hopes will prove difficult for a successor administration to unwind.

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