“Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. As you may remember, the Government went to the last election with a policy of reducing accidental deaths in the workplace by twenty percent. We’re pleased to say that, not only are we on target to achieve this, the current indication is that we should exceed this target by a third. Obviously, this means that we can now announce that safety equipment should be considered optional and no new money should be spent on workplace safety.”
Mm, doesn’t sound plausible? What about:
“Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. As you may remember, the Government went to the last election with a policy of reducing government waste by twenty percent. We’re pleased to say that, not only are we on target to achieve this, the current indication is that we should exceed this target by a third. Obviously, this means that we must now embark on a spending spree so that we don’t exceed this target. Please send us your suggestions as to how we can spend frivolously to ensure that we only just meet our aim because to exceed it would be silly.”
All right then, so why does the Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane think that it’s fine to reduce the amount of energy produced by renewable energy projects by 2020 from 41,000 gigawatt hours to about 26,000?
“It won’t be a 27 per cent renewable energy target, it will be 20 per cent renewable energy target.”
But we all know that renewable energy costs more, right? Well, it does for the moment but according to the Murdoch Government’s own review, it should be cheaper by 2020, so we don’t want too much of that renewable stuff floating round. I mean, don’t wind farms slow down the wind which’d make the planet hotter? Doesn’t using too much solar risk us having less sunshine in winter? Not to mention those “unsightly wind farms” that so disturb Joe Hockey.
You know, Joe Hockey who assured the British that we have the “cleanest coal in the world”. After all, we have lots of brown coal and that must surely be cleaner than black coal, in spite of what the scientists say. Scientists, as we all know, would say anything if it suited their agenda of turning the world into a place where research was valued as much as the winner of the Melbourne Cup. (Personally, I like Guest of Honour and Side Glance for the Cox Plate, even though they’re both foreign horses!)
The Warburton Review found that this change to renewables would have the effect of redistributing wealth. From the fossil fuel industry to the renewable sector. And it might even lead to lower prices, which would mean that they were paying less tax and that’d mean that there’d be less money to spend on schools, hospitals, jet fighters, Middle Eastern Crusades, public information campaigns, shifting tables to the G20 and paying ASIO to troll the internet and change websites from what people had actually written to what they were actually thinking so that we didn’t have to wait until they’d actually done something before arresting them.
- * *
Can’t finish without paying tribute to Gough. It’s all been said, so all can do is add my “Vale Mr Whitlam”.
Of course, Mr Pyne thought it appropriate to mention that the news of the dismissal occurred while he was watching “Adventure Island” and that his mother was crying tears of joy while she was doing the ironing. I guess she was just one those lucky women who got a lot of pleasure out of ironing…
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