It’s not every day that Malcolm can say that the party room agrees with him. In fact, judging by the way he was gloating today, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a pretty rare occurence.
Well, at least Mr Turnbull kept his promise about not being prepared to lead a party that wasn’t as committed to fighting climate change as he was. For a start, nobody could suggest that he’s ever actually led the party but, more obviously, judging from his rhetoric, he seems about as committed to fighting climate change as Tony Abbott. While there was the odd mention of how the NEG was going to reduce emissions, there was no mention of the reason why we wanted to reduce emissions in the first place.
And Malcom and his Malfunctionaries even started to borrow Tony’s line about the “unreliability” of renewables. One businessman said on Sky today when explaining about the need for dispatchable baseload for “when the wind goes down and the sun stops“… Mm, I tend to think that when the sun stops, baseload power will be the furtherest thing from our mind.
You certainly have to give the Liberals credit for their success in making people believe that blackouts are a relatively new phenomenon, solely caused by adding renewables to the mix. At my house, we had a power blackout a few weeks ago, caused by a car hitting a powerpole in the area. I guess the driver must have been blinded by a solar panel. On occasions, car accidents and weather events have caused a loss of power for as long as I remember, but this doesn’t seem to be acknowledged in any discussion about reliability. No, we still hear people banging on about South Australia’s loss of power after the worst storm in decades. And even that wasn’t directly caused by their reliance on wind power.
Of course, the other reason we have power blackouts is when we don’t have enough supply to meet demand. This is never because an aging coal-fired station breaks down. This often happens in Summer when everyone turns on their airconditioners. I guess, the solar panels that thousands of households have installed don’t help on such days because they don’t work when the sun isn’t shining and we can’t expect the sun to be shining on days when it’s excessively hot.
I’m probably not the only one to notice this but did you think it strange that our bills are going to come down by $550 – the same amount which the abolition of the carbon “tax” reduced our power bills by. Or should I say the same amount that we saved when it was abolished because as we were told a year later, while power prices haven’t come down they would be $550 more if they hadn’t got rid of the carbon tax. Seems as though all their modelling comes up with one number. One presumes that it’s an average, but I’ve only ever heard them tell us that household power bills will drop by that amount. Mm, perhaps it’s actually the total for all of Australia.
Anyway, the government has managed to get the NEG passed the most difficult naysayers, their own backbench. After that, the states should be a piece of cake.
