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Where’s Uncle Arfur when you need him?

Here’s a quiz for you !

You are the prime minster and you want to stop Barnaby Joyce shouting in your ear about building coal-fired power stations in Queensland. You have a slush fund – well several actually – and decide to allocate $4 million dollars to fund a feasibility study on the merits, both economic and environmental, of building a coal-fired power station in somewhere like Collinsville in central Queensland.

To carry out this feasibility study you need to appoint an entity who will approach the matter with academic and scientific rigour ; but probably not too much –  do you select :

A. a small mining company with no money and no experience but with a strong desire to operate a publicly funded coal-fired power station and who are well connected with the National Party ?

B. the CSIRO or other suitably qualified impartial body with the ability to objectively review the options from a scientific, economic and environmental perspective ?

OR

C. Matt Canavan’s Uncle Arfur ?

If you chose C. you are clearly a ‘woke’ person in tune with the nuances and subtleties of present day political life. But you would be wrong as Matt Canavan doesn’t have an Uncle Arfur and despite Barnaby Joyce calling this a mere technicality, we are after all talking about taxpayers money and the National Audit Office will be looking over your shoulder.

B. is also incorrect, as Barnaby has noted of the CSIRO : ‘they are all sandal wearing, latte sipping, chardonnay gulping leftie wankers, with namby-pamby university degrees and doctorates : clearly socialists and entirely unsuitable for a scientific appraisal of this type.

So you turn to option A. which quite obviously meets all the criteria and even Bridget McKenzie with one eye closed could have told you this is the way to go.

So, how do you find this small, impecunious shelf company with aspirations to operating a coal-fired power station  : well, here’s a clue, you don’t need to refer to the Yellow pages as Barnaby and Matt have a lot of mates.

The government have decided that $4 million will be given to Shine Energy to conduct the feasibility study for the proposed 1GW HELE [high efficient low emission] coal plant at Collinsville. Shine Energy, depending on what their feasibility study shows, want to build a 1-gigawatt plant at a cost of $2 billion which evidently would be funded by the person you see in the mirror every morning. Shine Energy had an engineering firm conduct a concept study which it has refused to release publicly, but CEO Ashley Dodd said it found the project was viable – of course it did ! Let’s hope that the feasibility study, which we have no doubt will find a new coal-fired power plant eminently desirable, is not hidden from public view.

So, are Shine Energy the best people to be conducting this feasibility study ? According to media reports :

“The only physical trace of Shine Energy, which wants to build a $2bn coal-fired power station in north Queensland, is a small post office box next to an Asian grocer at a suburban Brisbane shopping complex. The same mailbox is shared by more than a dozen online businesses, including the maker of a metal card that spuriously claims to improve the quality of wine.

Company documents show Shine Energy is worth a nominal $1,000 on paper. It has no registered financial obligations, and no physical office at its listed address.

On its website, Shine describes its business as providing “renewable energy solutions”, but the company could offer no evidence that it or its directors, mostly Birri and Widi traditional owners, has ever previously worked on an energy generation project.”

Clearly Shine in the cynical view of this government are the best people to be carrying out this feasibility study – I beg to differ. I tend to be dismissive of so much of the bumbling malfeasance of this coalition government, but somewhere, sometime we have to draw the line and to be using public money as a pacifier for the National party loudmouths is just going too far.

Enough is enough !

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20 comments

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  1. Phil Pryor

    Barnaby Joyce, a country party clapped out cloaca, is as low as a bug’s bum on the intellect scale and should try night school to study up and become a dill. As a barely acceptable Kyogle accountant, he has come a long way per graft, corruption, outrageous outbursts and patronage, all to balance the rooting, rorting, robbing, raving, ransacking, ridiculous rubbish. An Australian disgrace…(burp)

  2. Harry Lime

    Phil, you’ve just explained why he keeps getting elected,herein lies part of our problem: our country has more than it’s fair share of half witted morons.See the rest of the Morrison misled rabble.

  3. New England Cocky

    @Phil Pryor: Uhm Phil ….. Barnyard’s family property is at Danglemah, a bend in a back road coming up the mountain from Tamworth. It is about 200km south of Kyogle. For his sins, Barnyard attended UNE Armidale NSW and was given an accountancy degree for playing football (much like the Rhodes Scholarship given to Toxic RAbbott for boxing). He had two unsuccessful accountancy business ventures in Manilla NSW and St George SW Qld, before entering politics as the last elected Senator for Queensland in 2007. One of his first political atrocities was using his casting vote to privatise Telecom so that Little Johnnie Howard, other politicians and senior pubic servants would get a higher superannuation payout.

    @Harry Lime: Sadly your description of too many New England voters is far too precise.

  4. DrakeN

    Harry,

    By definition, half of the polpulation is of below average intelligence and is unevenly distributed.
    A majority of the other half of the community tend to congregate in places also occupied by: “‘…sandal wearing, latte sipping, chardonnay gulping leftie wankers, with namby-pamby university degrees and doctorates” as described by Terence, creating a dearth of mentally and emotionally competent individuals in regions such as New England.
    Ergo – National Party acolytes in abundance and plentiful examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

  5. Phil Pryor

    Cocky, I knew all that, but was sure (me?) that long ago, as I was told, he tried or was associated with, some accounting venture in Kyogle, perhaps some franchise attempt. But I have no proof, just a flawed memory, from long ago. What a prick (U N E type comment; I’m an alumnus)

  6. whatever

    “For long-time observers, questions linger like blowflies around Joyce’s pair of Gwabegar properties, purchased in 2006 and 2008 on land covered by an exploration tenement in the vicinity Santos’s Narrabri CSG proposal.

    Speculation abounds on social media about Joyce’s motives. Did Anderson tell Joyce where the gas was? Will Joyce’s properties align with the Inland Rail corridor proposed to connect Brisbane to Melbourne? Will the Inland Rail corridor facilitate a gas pipeline? Is the gas from Santos’ Narrabri proposal destined for Queensland export?”

    Investigation: Barnaby’s gas bonanza and the pervading influence of the gas lobby

  7. Geoff Andrews

    whatever
    These and a thousand other similar questions will be answered in 2022 when Mr Morrison (the prime minister) is re-elected so youse “progressives” are gonna have to suck it up, get used to it and bite a pillow while yer bein’ rogered.

  8. pappinbarra fox

    A rotting beetroot’s rotten fart.

  9. David Evans

    Another day, another scam.

  10. Henry Rodrigues

    Being constantly and regularly rogered by the LNP and Barnaby and company, stimulates LNP supporters so much that they cannot dream of life otherwise and so they look forward to 2022.

    Oh the agony and the ecstasy.

  11. Phil

    This LUSH, this bag of shit tied in the middle, is an embarrassment to Australia. And hey just think, we will be keeping him his first family and his second carnal delight, for the rest of their miserable lives. They are laughing at us, while they laugh all the way to the bank. When the revolution does come and if I am alive, I could if invited, pull the lever to send this over bearing, over weight bag of shit into eternity and I would sleep like a baby. I wish I was kidding. As each day passes, another dead Koala, possum, kangeroo, etc, etc is sending me into a rage of helplessness. Dave Allen the comedian use to say at the end of his show ‘ May your God go with you ‘ He wasn’t fking kidding. .

  12. RomeoCharlie29

    Oh, Geoff Andrews, wonderful satire.But I missed the reveal.

    To the substantive matter, giving the Shine mob’s inadequacy, contracting them for the power station survey is comparable to getting Hanson to head up a DV review which even Mr Potatohead had difficulty defending. Though he did try on Insiders. All in all, it was one of his (many) less than stellar PR outings of recent times.

  13. New England Cocky

    @whatever 12:34PM: The two “grazing properties” in the Pilliga Scrub purchased by Barnyard Joke were allegedly going to be divested upon his election to New England. Another untruth from Barnyard, because he is still the proprietor and alleged his considering selling at least one of those properties to finance the divorce settlement with his former family.

    Barnyard may be lucky if that is all that is sold up to finance the divorce as betrayed wife Natalie has a long marriage duration that with kids in tow could cost anything up to 70-80% of all accumulated wealth and assets.

    Couldn’t happen to a worse Nazianal$ scum-bag. It will make raising the two bastards a little more difficult, but expect a continuation of the numerous claims on the Parliamentary Allowances Scheme to keep the wolf from the door.

  14. wam

    A paltry $4m to a post box. What a pittance in comparison to $400m for a beach shack and another $440m to a company of 4.
    Wonder if albo has seen fit to ignore this little gift to give a paper approval of another Sunday afternoon cigars and grange decision.
    The lnp since the lying rodent has found the thrill of outsourcing is the outsource. The responsibility of evaluation is with the recipient who has no compulsion to give any proof to its outcomes

    Sadly draken it was the left hand side of the curve that didn’t have the intelligence to see through boobby’s bullshit in Queensland and ran scared to phon and smirko the capital city latte mob gave the loonies an extra $3 million.

    ps a good follow up of the opinion of the qld detective that Hannah may have provoked the attack was on the front page where the heading blared “only 3 years for a life”.
    The story was of a woman admitted to hospital for injuries from family violence on multiple occasions. When her ex broke an AVO and tried to get a root she stabbed him and rather than the medal she deserved she was found guilty of manslaughter (notice that ‘laughter’ is following man?) and sentenced to 5 years suspended after 3 years. The conservative boy’s culture bemoans the leniency of the sentence.
    Good one nec I hope the lawyers hit his super for all its worth

  15. Patagonian

    Barny’s beaut Chrissie video, aka Old Man Shakes Fist at The Sky,and his lunatic rant in the halls of Parliament last week left me wondering if he hasn’t become un-tethered in more ways than one. Apparently it’s hard to keep that particular dog on the porch.

  16. Neil Hogan

    If Ben Smee & Ben Butler from The Guardian had actually looked into it before writing their story they would have easily found the information they were looking for about Shine Energy, but for some strange reason it seems they took the lazy option & wrote a piece to try & get the hounds running into all sorts of conspiracy theories instead of a simple Google search.

    https://www.shineenergy.com.au/about-us

    And this would have added to their story too…

    https://www.michaelwest.com.au/shine-energy-behind-the-push-for-a-new-coal-fired-power-station/

  17. Neil Hogan

    I’m sure no one, apart from a few Nationals, ever think this will ever get off the ground, let alone find someone to fund the program apart from the government which would be political suicide if they did & I can’t see that happening.

    This is merely a $4 million deal to try & keep the Nationals quiet for a while.

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