Now I could start this evening’s meal by telling my wife that I’m leaving her for Kate Middleton but I’m not going to do that for a number of reasons:
- My wife would find it annoying.
- Kate Middleton is far too young for me.
- I don’t know if I’d like her.
- Even if I did meet up with her, I couldn’t be sure it was really her and not some body double.
- No matter how much time my wife and I spent discussing it, it’s not remotely likely to happen and we’d be better off discussing plans for things that might actually happen rather than wasting our time having a pointless discussion about something that’s not going to happen.
I know that most of you will have read that last point and gone, “Well, of course, you stupid old fool, I don’t know how your wife puts up with you. Why would you even bring up something as ridiculous as this?”
To which I would simply say that I’m considering going into politics and one thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the most important thing in politics is to ensure that people are talking about something completely irrelevant so they don’t start talking about the things that matter or the things that we can actually do something about.
Take the recent “nuclear debate”. At the 2019 election the suggestion that the Coalition was interested in nuclear power was denied by Scott Morrison who dismissed it as a “scare campaign” but now it’s apparently not scary at all and a great solution to rising energy prices and “the only way to achieve net zero”. Leaving aside everything else, the debate now centres on how long they’d take to build and the Party that found it too difficult to build all their promised car parks in three years and who promised to have Snowy Hydro 2.0 up and running by 2024, assure us that they could do it in ten. Again, leaving aside the fact that we don’t have any way of processing our raw uranium yet and leaving aside we don’t have a workforce trained to build such a power station, I can only suggest that the new LNP policy must be for immigrants to come here to do the job, which is at odds with the whole we have too many immigrants stance.
So let’s be quite clear here: Whatever the merits or otherwise of nuclear power, the simple fact remains that it’s not going to reduce anyone’s power bills in the near future and, if anything, the cost of building such plants is more likely to increase them, even though David Littleproud seemed to think that they didn’t need power lines because he asserted that the trouble with renewables was that the power lines sometimes blew over with strong winds.
So we spend time talking about something that is only slightly more plausible than my relationship with Princess Catherine, instead of things that are actually happening such as the Liberals removing a woman, Ann Ruston, from the top of their Senate ticket only to replace her with Alex Antic. While Ruston retains the number two spot and is still likely to be elected, the symbolism of replacing a woman with an anti-abortion, anti-vaccination, anti-woke Anti-Antic does tend to suggest that the South Australian Liberals see their woman problem as not knowing their place, which is apparently behind a man.
There are so many things that we could be discussing instead of nuclear power. If I were to compile a list of such things that we have managed to avoid talking about I would include:
- Is it time to for a Universal Basic Income and to remove all the time-wasting that goes with mutual obligation and unemployment benefits?
- Would a HECs style scheme where the government paid the up-front costs of roof top solar and batteries, only to have the cost repaid through the power fed back into the system or when the house was sold?
- Should The Greens be condemned for threatening to hold up the reduced vehicle emissions legislation or applauded for making their support conditional on Labor ditching their fast-tracking of gas approvals?
- Why is nobody pointing out that, apart from opposing just about everything, Dutton’s duds have declared they oppose any action on misinformation, as well as opposing an Indigenous truth telling? Do they just have an aversion to the truth?
- Power prices have just come down slightly. While the Coalition will make a big point of the fact that they haven’t come down by the $275 promised by Labor – or even the $500 promised by Tony Abbott – in the current inflationary times, the fact that they haven’t risen is significant.
- While Labor’s changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts have been generally well-received, there seems to be a focus on the fact that those on $150k will get a smaller tax cut than originally proposed. Why is nobody pointing out that they’re still getting a cut of over $100 a fortnight which is much more than someone on $60k so they’re still getting the best of the deal?
There are a great many other things that could be on the list but no, let’s discuss whether it’s really the Princess of Wales in the video or Coalition thought bubbles, rather than anything that’s actually happening.
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