Australia’s future now hangs on a complex international chess game involving ships carrying liquid fuel from distant refineries across the oceans to our shores.

It is sobering to track this traffic in real time on a Kpler dashboard, where loaded vessels appear as green arrows inching towards their destination. Touch an arrow and the name of the ship appears, along with its cargo, the port it left and the one it is bound for. That thin green line pointing towards Australia is all that stands between continuity and crisis in this island nation. If it breaks, or even slows, the effects here will be swift and severe.

Kpler is a global trade intelligence company that sits at the nerve centre of the physical economy, stitching together billions of data points to show how energy and commodities are actually moving around the world. It has generously given this column access to its data.

Isolate the trade in diesel, petrol and jet fuel to Australia and it shows 36 ships on their way at the time of writing. Twenty-eight are coming from the Asian refineries that usually supply 90 per cent of our fuel. More than two of these ships must off-load at a port here every single day to feed our voracious appetite for liquid fuel, as more than 40 per cent of all the energy consumed in Australia is burned in the engines that drive transport, mining and agriculture.

The notable recent shift in the fuel trade is the emergence of long-haul supply. Four ships have crossed the Panama Canal after loading on the US Gulf coast. Two more have sailed from a refinery in Washington state and another was loading there on Thursday. Historically, fuel imports from the US have been rare, so a distant and more expensive supply line has been tapped to keep Australia moving.

But one cargo now slowly tracking down the west coast of Africa stands out, and its journey here tells the story of a nation scrounging around the world to fill supply gaps at any price.

The STI Solace set sail from Southwold Anchorage, off the Suffolk coast, on March 19 and is due to dock in Sydney on April 29. It is a mid-sized tanker carrying nearly 654,000 barrels of fuel, or about 104 million litres. It sounds like a lot but Australia uses about 173 million litres of refined fuel every day. So the STI Solace has enough fuel in its tanks to keep the country running for little more than half a day.

On paper, this cargo looks like a shipment from the UK. But the fuel did not originate in Britain. It was transferred there.

Another tanker, the Oslo Star, loaded this cargo from a refinery in Kuwait in mid-February and sailed out of the Gulf before the shooting started. It then tracked west into the Red Sea and up through the Suez Canal, emerging into European waters in early March. As it crossed the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic, its destination shifted repeatedly, first towards North Africa, then Rotterdam and finally to an anchorage off the Suffolk coast.

When it reached Southwold on the morning of March 19, the cargo was transferred ship-to-ship on to the STI Solace, which set sail that evening and is now carrying it halfway around the world to Australia.

Kpler’s data goes back to 2014, and this is the first time the company has recorded such a trade.

The complex logistical dance was choreographed by the Scorpio Group, a Monaco-based company that operates large fleets of tankers moving fuel between continents. Firms such as this do not produce energy. They move it, trade it and, since the war in the Gulf kicked off, redirect it in response to price and scarcity.

Forgive the blizzard of detail, but it reveals something important. This was not a shipment planned for Australia. It was a cargo looking for a buyer and in the end Australia paid the highest price. So this is not a straight supply chain, it is an expensive relay where each baton change adds costs and complexity.

Australia is now engaged in a bewildering and increasingly desperate global scramble for fuel in a deeply fractured market. Our security sits largely in the hands of major producers and international traders who are constantly reshuffling cargoes to meet demand. When supply tightens, the system stretches. Cargoes are rerouted. Ships change hands at sea. Fuel travels farther, costs more and takes longer to arrive.

The world entered this crisis with good supply and a significant volume of oil, including a black fleet of sanctioned Russian cargoes, sitting on the water in tankers. That floating stock is now being rapidly drawn into the market at higher prices. No one is knocking back Russian fuel any more. But this is a limited buffer. As those cargoes are absorbed, the global chessboard will start to lose pieces and supply will tighten further.

In the gap between supply and demand lies the risk. The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained and under the control of Iran, the more precarious this market becomes. It should be noted that Iran is still shipping oil and making a hefty profit on it.

In the supply chain chess game the Albanese government is a bystander.

That was writ large in the Prime Minister’s address to the nation and his speech at the National Press Club. When asked about the fuel crisis, Anthony Albanese talked about tempering demand by travelling less or lowering costs by cutting the heavy vehicle duty, the fuel excise and the GST.

These are price and demand Band-Aids on a haemorrhage of supply.

The government’s only supply-side moves have been to change rules to allow the limited amount of fuel we refine to stay onshore and to let the Export Finance Corporation underwrite additional fuel shipments. This is to provide comfort to the big energy companies that source the fuel.

The cargo on the STI Solace would have come at a premium. If the price drops in the month it takes to get here, the taxpayer will wear the cost.

When asked about his long-term plans to secure supply, the Prime Minister said everything was on the table but then ran through the usual bureaucrat’s list of reasons that most of it would be too hard, take too long or be too expensive.

It should be self-evident to even a casual observer that our future depends on becoming self-sufficient in liquid fuels as rapidly as we can. It will not be quick, cheap or easy, but contemplate the alternative. If the fuel stops, Australia stops.

That means using conventional and unconventional methods to secure the fuel we need to run the nation. Western Australia and Queensland have oil. NSW has gas and, as Robert Gottliebsen has argued in these pages, Victoria’s vast brown coal reserves should be tapped. Technologies now exist to convert coal into diesel and aviation fuel, turning a stranded resource into a strategic asset.

Energy security is national security and our security is now out of our hands. This was a wilful, catastrophic failure of the political class more than 20 years in the making. This crisis should be the catalyst to fix it but the early signs are not good.

Anyone who says electric cars are the answer is not serious. They have a role, but truck traffic between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway alone runs at 1900 B-double equivalent trips a day. That is 700,000 trips a year. The technology to rapidly replace all that traffic at the same cost and efficiency as diesel does not exist.

Just before Albanese addressed the press club, Donald Trump spoke to his people. The American President made the point that the US could walk away from the war in Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz because his country did not rely on it for fuel security.

He is right. After decades of declining oil production, something extraordinary happened to US energy supplies from 2010 on. The shale oil revolution turned the US into the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas.

Trump can walk away from the war with Iran and his country will absorb the shock. Prices may rise. Consumers will feel it. But the system holds. The US has choices. Europe and Australia do not.

That is what makes this moment so stark.

The world is organised around energy. As the world’s best energy analysts at Doomberg argue, power, prosperity and security flow from those who produce it. For decades, globalisation obscured that reality. Oil moved freely, trade routes were protected and supply chains, though complex, were dependable. The Gulf war has exposed how fragile the old system was. That world is breaking and will not return to business as usual.

Supply is no longer guaranteed. It is contested, disrupted and increasingly weaponised as the global energy market fragments into competing spheres of influence.

In the emerging world order, geography and resources matter again.

The US, Russia and China are well placed in the new order. They have energy within their borders or within their reach. Europe does not. Australia has it but has chosen not to use it. Both have come to rely on long supply chains in a world where distance is now a vulnerability. Both have demonised the fuels on which their societies run. This virtue signalling is a vanity we can no longer afford to indulge.

Doomberg’s central insight is that energy systems do not evolve gradually. They appear stable, then shift suddenly when a shock hits. When that happens, the system does not return to what it was. It reorganises around new realities.

For exposed, import-dependent nations such as Australia, the implications are profound. Energy is not just another commodity. It is the foundation of economic life and national security.

We can ignore that truth or we can act on it. Because if we do nothing and that thin green line breaks, so do we.

This article was first published in The Australian

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In February 1977 the new economics teacher at Marist College in Canberra decided to make a dramatic entry.

He strode into the fifth form classroom, picked up the chalk and scrawled one word in capitals across the top of the board: stagflation.

He underlined it and turned to explain. This was a new economic concept, designed to describe our times, when high inflation and high unemployment collided. The word was an inelegant blend of stagnation and inflation, and it was a child of the 70s oil shocks.

Why?

Because oil was not just another commodity. It was the master resource that made and moved economies. When the flow of oil was constricted, the price surged and raised the cost of almost everything at once: transport, manufacturing, farming, plastics and food. Prices rose everywhere because the cost of the lifeblood of the modern world had spiked, and the shock ran down every artery and vein.

The constriction of oil supply also slowed the world’s heartbeat. Households had less money to spend after filling the car and paying the bills. Businesses faced rising costs, shrinking margins and weaker demand. Investment stalled, production slowed and jobs were lost.

Economists had long assumed there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, captured in a neat model called the Phillips curve. The oil crisis delivered both together. Growth weakened, unemployment rose and inflation surged. The real world broke the model, as it so often does.

With the third Gulf war raging, everything old is new again and a word not discussed outside universities in nearly a half-century is coming back into vogue. The threat is real. The toxic cocktail that could breathe stagflation back into being is being mixed again.

Jim Chalmers did not invoke the term in his speech to business economists this week but all the elements were there.

The Treasurer told the audience the oil price was up 80 per cent since the start of the war, “adding upward pressure to global inflation, interest rate expectations and bond yields, while international equity markets and sentiment more broadly have fallen”.

“It means the prospect of inflation peaking in the high 4s or even higher this year is very real,” he said.

The world’s economic heartbeat is slowing and Australia’s already anaemic growth will weaken further. The longer the oil clot lingers, the greater the damage.

“Treasury estimates that GDP would be 0.6 per cent lower in 2027 and even by 2029 would still be below where it would have been without the conflict,” Chalmers said.

On a flying visit to Australia, International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol warned world leaders had yet to grasp the scale of the damage done to the “vital arteries of the global economy”.

Birol says his agency calculates that the shock from the Gulf war outstrips the twin oil crises of the 1970s, combined with a cut to gas supplies bigger than the one that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The world has lost about 11 million barrels of oil a day, roughly one in every 10 it consumes. And 140 billion cubic metres of gas have evaporated, the equivalent of stripping a major industrial economy’s entire supply out of the global system.

Some of the damage is structural because, in its fight to survive, Iran has bombarded the energy assets of its neighbours. More than 40 oilfields, gas plants and export terminals across the region have been hit.

Even if there were a swift end to the third Gulf war, the world is a long way from turning its oil and gas tap back to anything approaching normal.

Despite the military dominance of the US and Israel, the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz is effectively controlled by Iran. Trade through that waterway now depends on what the bloodied, battered but still unbowed theocratic regime will allow. Even if an agreement to open it were reached tomorrow, trade would take months to normalise.

But you cannot export oil and gas you do not have.

The Economist reported this week that Brent crude, at $US112 a barrel, is 54 per cent higher than before hostilities began. Gas prices in Europe are up by 85 per cent and the damage will not end when the shooting stops. Ships are in the wrong place, insurance has been shredded, production has been cut and refineries that have gone idle cannot be flicked back on like a light switch.

Restoring energy flows is a long industrial relay. Gulf producers must bring damaged or idled output back online. Tankers must be willing and able to return. Refiners in Asia and elsewhere must restart plants that have been starved of crude. None of that happens quickly. Some liquefied natural gas plants, such as Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, will take years to recover. Even under the best case, The Economist says it could take around four months for markets to regain some semblance of normality.

Each day Australia wakes up to the reality that oil and gas do far more work in our economy than most people realise. Rising costs are already feeding through to everyday goods. Building materials are climbing sharply as the price of oil-based goods rises. The spike in transport and production costs are moving through the food chain and that will soon be felt at the checkout.

That is how a war in the Gulf turns up in suburban Australia. Not just at the bowser but in the cost of building a home, fixing a pipe or filling a shopping trolley. Hydrocarbons are everywhere; if they do not help make a good, they move it. When their supply is choked, inflation spreads like wildfire.

The pain could get a lot worse. The biggest risk is that the steady flow of more than two vast oil tankers a day is interrupted. If that happens, Australia would be forced into fuel rationing, as others already have. So far the chain has held but the links are straining and the longer the crisis lasts the greater the risks that one will break.

It is worth repeating that it is a national disgrace that a generation of politicians, of all colours, has allowed this country to reach a point where 90 per cent of its liquid fuel is imported. Worse, they assumed the supply lines would never fail and allowed fuel reserves to fall to barely a month’s cover. That is not misfortune. It is an abject policy failure.

We were warned.

When I left the ABC in 2017, the first story I filed as political editor for Nine News was that Australia was in breach of its obligations to the International Energy Agency to hold 90 days of fuel reserves. My new bosses were a bit bemused by my energy obsession but they humoured me.

I don’t claim credit for the insight. I was persuaded by the argument of a man I had come to know well, former fighter pilot and retired air vice-marshal John Blackburn.

In 2014, Blackburn wrote a report for the NRMA warning that Australia’s fuel reserves were running on empty. This fossil-fuel rich island nation had lost the capacity to produce and refine its own fuel. We had become dangerously dependent on imports, with reserves so thin we were counting tankers at sea as part of our stockpile.

Then, as now, 90 per cent of the liquid fuel that keeps this country running came from overseas. We were told the problem would be fixed by 2026. Clearly, it wasn’t.

Coalition and Labor governments have tinkered at the edges of a solution because the real fix was too expensive, too difficult or too politically inconvenient. The threat always seemed so distant. Now the wolf is at the door.

When the smoke clears, the world will reorder its energy priorities, just as it did in the 1970s. Energy security will again become the central concern of governments everywhere.

The danger for Australia is that we learn the wrong lesson and waste this crisis. The early signs are disturbing.

The response now taking shape is to double down on an electricity system built on intermittent generation, backed by storage, in the belief that electrifying everything will deliver security. It will not. It risks replacing one vulnerability with another and building a single point of failure into the nation’s operating system.

If that system fails, everything fails with it. And maybe the people who are building this system should ponder whether it is wise that so many of the components in its nervous system are made in China.

There is a question almost no one in government or the bureaucracy seems willing to ask. What is the relationship between the kind of energy an economy uses and the productivity it can sustain?

For two centuries growth has been built on dense, reliable energy, first coal, then oil and gas. Now we are shifting towards sources that are diffuse and intermittent, and compensating with vast spending on storage, transmission and backup. That makes the system more complex, more expensive and less predictable.

Is it just coincidence that as this transition has gathered pace, productivity has stalled and costs have risen? Or is there a link we are refusing to confront?

Australia has a choice. It can use the advantages it has in coal, gas, uranium and, potentially, oil or it can squander them.

Yes, the world will become more efficient. Yes, more vehicles will be electric.

And yes, there is an opportunity to expand the mining of the critical minerals that underpin that shift.

But the immediate reality is that the world still runs on hydrocarbons and will for decades to come. With major suppliers of oil and gas shut down there is a clear opportunity for Australia to fill the gap, to strengthen our own economy, and to build security and resilience against future shocks.

We should be producing more energy, not less. We should be expanding exports of coal, LNG and uranium. We should be building nuclear power plants. We should be exploring for oil and developing the capacity to turn coal and gas into liquid fuels.

Above all, we should ensure that this country never again finds itself so exposed.

The lesson is not complicated. The world runs on the dense energy of oil, coal and gas. Ignore that, and the real world will blow up your operating model.

I was a bad student, but Les Roberts was a good teacher. I’d like him to know that, in at least one lesson, I was paying attention.

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This article was first published in The Australian

This was the first story I filed for Nine. At the time, my new bosses were a little bemused by it, but they humoured me.

I don’t claim credit for the insight. I was convinced by the power of an argument I had heard from a man I had come to know well, former fighter pilot and retired Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO.

In 2014, Blackburn authored a report for the NRMA warning that Australia’s fuel reserves were running on empty. This fossil fuel–rich island nation had lost the capacity to produce and refine its own fuel. We were dangerously dependent on imports. Our reserves were wafer thin.

So thin that we were in breach of our obligations to the International Energy Agency.

We counted fuel on tankers at sea as part of our stockpile.

Nearly 90 per cent of the liquid fuel that kept this nation running came from overseas.

Even then, the picture was clear. We were dangerously exposed in a world that was becoming less stable.

Now the echo from the past is all too real. Today, that vulnerability is no longer theoretical.

The Third Gulf War has choked off the oil that feeds the Asian refineries supplying this nation with diesel, petrol and jet fuel. Prices have spiked. The threat of rationing is real. Parts of regional Australia are already running on empty.

We are hostage to long and fragile supply lines in a world now gripped by an energy war. Our economy depends on more than two massive tankers arriving on our shores every single day.

If that flow is disrupted, even briefly, the consequences will be dire. Oil and gas underpin the price of everything. When they rise, everything rises.

If supply stalls, road transport stops, shelves empty, and the economy collapses. This is a crisis we were warned about.

This is what a just-in-time nation looks like when time runs out.

So the question arises: will we learn the right lessons from this crisis?

The lesson is simple.

Fuel security is national security. We need to be far more self-sufficient in the fuels that keep this country running. We need to tap our vast resources of coal, oil and gas. We need to explore the possibilities of converting coal to liquid fuel. We need to explore for oil. We need more gas.

Otherwise, the next shock will not just test our economy. It will test our sovereignty.

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Few figures in history embody humanity’s maze of contradictions more starkly than German chemist Fritz Haber. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “making bread from air” and used the same skill to conjure poison gas and feed the machinery of war.

More than a million men were wounded by gas in World War I and it killed nearly 90,000.

Haber pioneered this diabolic slaughter in defiance of international agreements, overseeing the first large-scale use of chlorine gas on the Western Front at Ypres in 1915.

There was a personal toll. His wife, Clara, was also a chemist who was horrified by his work on chemical warfare. In the wake of his grim triumph at Ypres, she took his service pistol and shot herself.

Yet Haber also tackled one of humanity’s most enduring problems: famine.

The historic limit on crop yields was the availability of nitrogen. This essential element is abundant in the atmosphere but is locked in a form plants cannot use. Haber found a way to unlock it, forcing nitrogen to combine with hydrogen under heat and pressure to produce ammonia. The hydrogen comes from natural gas, which also provides the energy to drive the reaction.

The idea was industrialised by Carl Bosch and without the Haber-Bosch process billions would starve. Synthetic fertiliser cannot be made cheaply and at scale without fossil fuel. A century on, we still haven’t found a better way to feed the world.

In 2021 Sri Lanka conducted a demonstration of what not to do by banning chemical fertilisers in favour of organic farming. There followed the decimation of tea and rice crops, food shortages, soaring prices, riots, the resignation of the prime minister, a presidential apology and the abandonment of the fertiliser ban.

Synthetic fertiliser is just one example of where fossil fuel is buried so deep in the sinews of our civilisation that most people do not see it, just as most have no idea that the toothpaste they use and most of the medicines they take are petrochemical products. Oil is also the raw material for plastics, packaging, fabrics and thousands of other everyday products.

Politicians and activists talk as if energy systems can be easily unwound, but we are still bound to them in ways they barely understand. The modern world was built by fossil fuels, runs on them, and replacing them is not a choice we can simply will into existence. If it were easy, someone would already have done it.

Civilisation’s root-and-branch dependence on the continuous flow of hydrocarbons is why nations reeled when the Strait of Hormuz was shut down and, with it, one-fifth of the planet’s supply of oil and gas. The latest Gulf war is a rude awakening as the world of wishful thinking collides with the one we live in. This is the real energy transition, from having abundant, invisible supply to a vivid and punishing awareness of what scarcity might bring.

Australia’s governments are now terrified as they stare into the abyss of the damage a liquid fuel shortage could deliver. Shaken from their sleepwalk, leaders are beginning to understand how profoundly exposed we are. More than 90 per cent of our total energy consumption still comes from coal, oil and gas. Jet fuel, petrol and diesel dominate that mix. Diesel matters most as it drives agriculture, mining and transport, and if it runs out the nation will grind to a halt.

Successive governments have manufactured this scarcity and there is little the incumbents can do at the 11th hour beyond praying that the arteries of supply from Asia are not cut.

We sit at the end of long supply chains, and our energy security rests on an endless procession of ships ferrying oil, petrol, jet fuel and diesel. Every single day deliveries arrive on enormous, slow-moving tankers that creep across the oceans at a pace slower than a car edging through a school zone. Trips from refineries in Singapore and South Korea take between one to two weeks.

The major players in our market are Viva, Ampol, BP and Shell. Each has long-term contracts that secure these deliveries but Asian refineries cannot make fuel if they do not have oil. The risk is refineries run short of fuel to deliver and countries preference their own needs over exports. Talk of China halting shipments of jet fuel sent a shudder through our region.

The fuel shortage in regional Australia was triggered by its reliance on second-tier traders who get fuel from a spot market that dried up almost as soon as the first missile was fired at Iran. And it shouldn’t surprise politicians when some stampede to the bowsers to try to secure fuel when they wake up to the fact the government cannot guarantee it.

The longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and more damage is done to Middle Eastern oil infrastructure, the more pressure will build on refiners. The slow march of our fuel trade means there is a lag between a shock at the top of the supply chain and delivery to our market. If we hear of contracted cargoes not being loaded, it will signal that we are about to suffer real pain.

If the Albanese government gets that news, it will have to move to rationing well before our supplies begin to dwindle because we have so little fuel in reserve. There will be a hierarchy of priorities that will probably begin with supplying health and defence, then move to keeping the wheels of transport, agriculture and mining turning. Motorists present a big political problem because no government on Earth wants to suffer the consequences of what cutting their supply would mean. Our newly minted fuel tsar can do little beyond being a central point of contact in the crisis. We cannot distribute fuel we do not have.

For now, the supply ships are still sailing and one of the reasons we have cause to hope that will hold is because of our much-maligned trade in coal and liquefied natural gas. Our region relies on the fuels we ship to secure its energy security. We should be grateful that those who fight to end this trade have, so far, failed because if we undermine the security of those who make our liquid fuel, we cannot expect them to care about us.

Australia faces a witch’s brew of dilemmas, some beyond our control and others of our own making. The long-term danger is that we learn the wrong lessons from this crisis. The biggest mistake would be to believe there is a quick dismount from dependence on coal, oil and gas, and that electrifying everything will deliver energy security.

There seems to be a smug belief among electric vehicle owners that they will dodge any fuel crunch. That feeling may sour as their cars whirr on empty roads to deliver them first to empty supermarket shelves. There is no electric road train on the horizon that could swiftly replace our fleet of diesel trucks. The green hydrogen balloon has burst. There is no scalable replacement for making synthetic fertiliser or most of our medicine. We have yet to invent or scale up the industrial processes we will need to reach the mirage of a carbon-free world.

Our other dilemma is the American President. Remember all those stories fretting that Donald Trump was an isolationist? Would to God it was so. There is no ally on Earth that he has not insulted, few countries he hasn’t threatened, and the list of those he proposes to assault grows by the day. Cuba is the next cab off the rank.

Let’s list the Trump triumphs in the war against Iran so far. On the plus side of the ledger the despotic regime’s leadership has been culled and much of its war machinery damaged. But whoever believed it would fall or that the next supreme leader might not be worse than the last? And what is the incentive to stop fighting and open the Strait of Hormuz when Iran has demonstrated that is its nuclear option? The regime can now teach the world a lesson it will never forget, that an attack on Iran can shake every Western capital.

Continuing down the list of unintended, but not unexpected, consequences of this war, Iran is now selling more oil at a better price than before hostilities kicked off. Alarmed by rising prices at the pump in the US the Trump administration has eased restrictions on Russian oil. Moscow is raking in billions to help fund its war against Ukraine. China has been stockpiling oil for years in preparation for a potential conflict over Taiwan and Iran will continue to supply it as long as it can. Beijing is watching Washington exhaust its weapons inventories and shift assets from South Korea and Japan to the Gulf.

So, what does victory look like? How does Trump dismount? Marines are on their way to the Gulf. If the strait stays closed, they will be sent in and Tehran will have a single, narrow target on which to concentrate its fire.

If those forces move on Kharg Island, the terminal that handles most of Iran’s oil exports, they will be sitting on a hydrocarbon bomb. Would Iran’s mullahs hesitate to detonate it, sending body bags back to America and shockwaves through the global economy? Who can say.

The only certainty is that one day Trump will declare victory as he walks away from this mess, and that he will be as deserving of a Nobel prize as Fritz Haber.

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This article was first published in The Australian.

When oil and gas prices rise, the cost of living rises with them.

Australia is especially vulnerable because it still depends overwhelmingly on fossil fuels, particularly imported liquid fuels. Diesel keeps freight, farming and mining moving, and without it the country stops.

See more of Opinionated, on Sky News hosted by Danica De Giorgio.

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When a US nuclear submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship last week, the three Australians on board the American boat were reportedly ordered to their bunks.

This astonishing news nugget was unearthed by The Nightly’s Andrew Greene and the government has not denied it. We do not know whether our sailors were instructed to pull the doona over their heads, but Acting Defence Minister Pat Conroy did confirm that “they played absolutely no role in the offensive operation”.

It is hard to conjure a more perfect metaphor for Australia’s mindset in the face of grim realities: when the world gets rough, Australia reaches for the security blanket. We prefer the comfort of bedtime stories about international law, global order and middle-power potency to hard truths about real political and material power.

One of the Albanese government’s favourite fables is that the world is undergoing a rapid energy transition to cut carbon emissions. In this tale the shift from fossil fuels is swift, painless and profitable as the globe is saved from Armageddon by multinational wheels whirring in electric harmony. Hydrocarbons vanish as wind, solar and batteries power nations, electric vehicles hum through the streets and green industries sprout like flowers on the graves of dark satanic mills. Australia emerges as a clean energy superpower.

This story is echoed by a revolutionary guard of energy-illiterate politicians, bureaucrats, activists and subsidy-harvesting businesses. They are now on a unity ticket claiming the war-induced shortage of oil and gas proves Australia’s energy security lies in ditching fossil fuels and hitching our fortunes to the whims of the weather.

To believe this you have to ignore a basic truth: fossil fuels built the modern world and still sustain it. Wealth is energy converted into work. The more energy a society commands, the richer it becomes. The price of oil and gas underpins the price of everything.

Australia is rich in hydrocarbons and could shield itself from global shocks by exploiting the wealth beneath our feet. Instead our rulers have chosen to restrict the fuels that power our economy.

The irony is stark: the loudest voices warning about energy scarcity are the ones working hardest to create it.

The latest Gulf war is a brutal reminder of which fuels actually matter. This war is being waged by combatants who know that targeting energy sources cripples nations. Iran may be helpless to stop American and Israeli strikes but it can inflict worldwide pain by choking oil and gas supply through the Strait of Hormuz and bombing the regional infrastructure that keeps hydrocarbons moving: refineries, export terminals and fuel depots. This is now a global energy war.

Despite decades of talk about transition, the world still runs predominantly on oil, gas and coal. When the flow of those fuels slows, the consequences rip through the international economy.

Not convinced? Try this pop quiz.

After 20 years of “transitioning”, what percentage of Australia’s total energy demand do you reckon comes from fossil fuels and how much from wind, solar, hydropower and the egregiously named biofuels?

Primary energy is the best measure of how an economy actually runs because it counts all the fuels that power it, not just electricity generation. That matters because the things that keep the real economy moving, such as transport, mining and agriculture, run overwhelmingly on liquid fuels.

We do not have to guess at the numbers because they are reported by the government in Australian Energy Statistics under energy consumption.

“Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) accounted for 91 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2023-24,” the government website says. “Oil accounted for the largest share of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2023-24 at 41 per cent, followed by coal and gas both at 25 per cent. Renewable energy sources accounted for 9 per cent.”

To put this in perspective, the global primary energy mix is about 82 per cent fossil fuel dependent. So even by the hydrocarbon-guzzling standards of the world, Australia is unusually gluttonous and nowhere more so than in transport.

This is because we live in a huge, geographically dispersed nation where most of our goods travel by road.

This point was underscored in the final report of the 2020 Liquid Fuel Security Review.

“Liquid fuel is the backbone of the Australian economy,” the report says. “It underpins every aspect of our daily life, from our groceries to our commute to work and our emergency services. On average, each Australian uses nearly three times more energy from liquid fuel than they do from electricity.”

Given our heavy dependence on liquid fuel, and recognising that we live on an island, how much of our own oil do we produce and refine?

“Over the past two decades, our overall domestic production and reserves have been in decline,” the fuel security report says. “In today’s market, Australia imports over 90 per cent of the refined products and crude oil we need to meet our demand.”

About 80 per cent of the diesel, petrol and jet fuel here comes from refineries in Singapore and South Korea. Only about 20 per cent is produced at the country’s two remaining refineries in Brisbane and Geelong, and they rely largely on imported crude. It all arrives in a steady stream of about two tanker deliveries a day under long-term contracts, with prices typically benchmarked to the Singapore fuel market.

For now those supply chains are working. The pressure here has come from a surge in demand as bulk buyers, particularly in industries that depend on diesel, move to secure fuel. Major suppliers are prioritising contracted customers, but some independent wholesalers that relied heavily on the spot market have struggled as cargoes dried up.

The deeper risk is the reliance the Asian refineries have on Middle Eastern crude. If the source of oil fails or foreign governments prioritise domestic markets, existing contracts could be revoked. Some energy traders and refiners supplying other countries have already declared force majeure, the contractual clause that allows them to suspend deliveries when extraordinary events make them impossible.

Australia is profoundly exposed. Decisions made in other nations will determine our fate because we have deliberately chosen to become an energy vassal.

As this column was going to print, China, Australia’s biggest supplier of aviation fuel, has told oil refiners to halt exports. One thing is certain, countries will act in their own self interest.

Repeating the point that we live on an island, and these risks are obvious, surely we stockpile fuel? We do and the numbers are reported in the government’s minimum stockholding obligations. The last readout says we have 36 days’ worth of petrol, 32 of diesel and 29 days of jet fuel. This is a vanishingly small amount in reserve.

The world is now being reminded that the International Energy Agency was created after the oil shock of 1973 and its primary task was to build a buffer against supply disruptions. Australia is one of the IEA member states that signed an agreement that required each to hold oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net imports. Australia has been in breach of this agreement since 2012. This column has been banging on about this, in several venues, since 2016, clearly with no effect. All political parties are responsible for where we find ourselves today.

The stockpile system was designed to cushion the world against sudden supply disruptions by releasing oil into the market during a crisis. Stabilising supply also helps prevent the kind of price spikes that can tip the global economy into recession. That is why there will now be a co-ordinated release of fuel from the member countries.

Proper energy security is a deeper problem and one no Australian government has ever been serious about tackling. We might get lucky this time, but one day our luck will run out.

You do not need much imagination to conjure a scenario where our fuel lifeline of supplies from Asian refineries is cut. That trade comes through the South China Sea. What do we imagine will happen to those supply lines if there is ever a war over Taiwan?

The longer the world’s supply of fuel is choked, the more the pain will grow. It will be measured here in inflation, not just in fuel prices but in every piece of road freight. All we can do is hope that The Gulf war ends soon and that this crisis is enough to spark some real change in our leaders’ approach to energy security.

Right now, depending on the day, the price of oil and gas rises and falls on the musings about the war made by the American President.

Stung by the domestic price rises, Donald Trump has said he will call the conflict to an end soonish. Interesting that he believes he can turn wars on and off and that those he attacks have no say in the matter. What if the survivors of the Iranian regime have no interest in shouldering arms?

The end of the despotic medieval mullahs’ tyranny over its citizens is devoutly to be wished, but it seems unlikely. And while Trump’s war aims meander, the Iranian regime has one crystal-clear goal: survival. The hangman’s noose tends to concentrate the mind.

If the only way Iran’s mullahs can inflict real pain on the US and the rest of the West is to push the globe into a recession, that is what they will do.

They can also focus all of their effort on a strait that lies just off their coast and is only about 33km wide at its narrowest point, with tanker traffic confined to shipping lanes about 3km wide in each direction. They do not even have to sink ships. The trade stopped when war risk insurance disappeared and tanker owners refused to sail.

Trump says the US will underwrite insurance and lead convoys with warships. If form is any guide that service will not come cheap. It is also doubtful he will want any Australian sailors on board.

This article was first published in The Australian

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The current Middle Eastern war underscores how the world really works and what fuels it runs on.

First, as Chairman Mao Zedong put it, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

International law is a mirage that middle powers cite, evil powers exploit and superpowers honour in the breach. If you have the guns and are willing to shoot, you make the law. There is no international police force and no penalty for starting wars beyond the unimaginable consequences that flow from them and the high risk that you will shoot yourself in the foot.

Second, the world runs on hydrocarbons. This is also real power. The troika that delivers more than 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy is still coal, oil and gas. Energy security is essential and green energy an aspiration. With the war choking off one-fifth of the world’s supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas, the price of both has spiked. So has the price of coal because it can be substituted for gas in power production. If this persists for any length of time, the world will rediscover a brutal truth: energy shortages spread quickly from stalled tankers to inflation, industry and politics.

Europe has seen its natural gas prices surge by 70 per cent because it has decided it is best to import every molecule of the fuel that is essential to keep the lights on in its weather-dependent electricity system. To lose one gas supplier may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

First, Europe bet on the goodwill of a gangster in sourcing gas from Russia, then on enduring stability in the Middle East as it switched sources to Qatar.

Energy security is national security, and Europe is an energy vassal. That Australia is determined to mimic it is an act of supernatural stupidity.

In passing, let’s also add that Iran is specifically targeting energy infrastructure right across the Middle East as it lashes out in self-defence. Here it is following a playbook used by Russia in its war on Ukraine. This underlines the fact that despots understand what our government does not: energy is the economy. Cripple a nation’s power supply and everything else collapses. Note that no one is blowing up wind farms.

Finally, no one knows where this conflict will lead and there is every chance that 25 years from now we still will be kicking through the rubble, marvelling at what new horror has slithered out.

When God banished Satan from heaven in Paradise Lost, the Prince of Darkness simply set up shop in hell, determined for the rest of eternity: “To do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight.” Humanity was collateral damage. Satan no doubt has welcomed Iran’s recently arrived supreme leader to Hades as a handy utility player on Team Damnation.

Working on a documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the election of the Howard government served as a timely reminder that wars bleed into each other.

The 2003 US-led coalition that deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein removed Iran’s main rival in the Persian Gulf and reshaped the region’s balance of power. Tehran exploited the vacuum by backing Shia militias in Iraq and expanding a network of proxy forces across the region, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. This entire edifice was aimed at erasing Israel from the river to the sea.

No less an authority than Donald Trump agrees. At the February 2016 Republican debate in South Carolina, he called the Iraq war “a disgrace and an embarrassment”.

“I said it loud and clear,” Trump said. “ ‘You’ll destabilise the Middle East.’ That’s exactly what happened.”

There is no doubt John Howard sincerely believed the US and British intelligence assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when he committed Australian forces to the fight. In an interview with Sky News, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the war was a massive mistake but defended Howard’s reasoning.

“John always had this view, rightly or wrongly, that the British had insights into the Middle East because of historical connections that were separate and, in some respects, better than those of the United States,” Turnbull said. “So, he was comforted by the assurances he was getting from London more than he was comforted by the assurances he was getting from Washington.”

The Iraq war was a case of imperial overreach that did great damage to the US domestically and internationally, and the consequences echo to this day.

But it should be remembered that president George W. Bush followed a long and public road to it. Congress authorised the invasion, the UN gave Iraq a final warning to comply with weapons inspections or face “serious consequences” and secretary of state Colin Powell made the case before the UN Security Council.

Howard believes his decision to support the US was right.

“I think both as a foreign policy decision, but also as an expression of our closeness to the United States,” he told Sky News. “I mean, we expected them in a pinch to help us, and although they didn’t physically need us, they wanted … a coalition of the willing.”

That coalition grew to 49 countries that supported the operation, though only a handful contributed combat troops. It is timely to remember that one of those countries was Denmark, which deployed a combat battalion to Basra and lost seven soldiers during four years of fighting.

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer believes “it was a great thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein”.

“I think that the counterfactual is the world would have been more unstable and worse with Saddam Hussein remaining in power, even though I can see the Americans handled the post-invasion period very, very badly,” Downer said.

That they did, and those errors linger to this day. Now there is another war to fix the problems left by the last and we are promised this one will go better, though no one in the Trump administration can say with any clarity what better looks like. Time will be the only judge.

We cannot foresee the future but we know this much: we live in a more uncertain world than the one we thought was enduring after World War II. In many ways it has returned to type: the powerful do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.

This world demands prudence and that is an enduring value that this era could learn from the Howard government.

It began with budget discipline. On day one of its tenure, treasurer Peter Costello discovered he had inherited an $11bn deficit, despite the Keating government insisting the books were in surplus. That shortfall was about 2 per cent of GDP. The government took out the razor, made tough choices and two budgets later delivered a surplus. With persistent surpluses, net debt was reduced from 18 per cent of GDP in 1996 to zero a decade later. For a few brief years the commonwealth was worth more than it owed.

Now the budget has a decade of deficits ahead of it and net debt stands at about $620bn, or roughly 21 per cent of GDP. We are in no fit state to deal with a crisis. Budget repair is a national security priority.

And the Howard government understood that defending a nation began with defending its borders. It took a hard line on illegal boat arrivals, insisting that control of Australia’s borders was not a matter of sentiment but sovereignty.

Those decisions were bitterly contested domestically at the time and deplored in the polite parlours of Europe and denounced in the UN. Now most nations understand that deciding who comes to a country and the circumstances in which they come is a bedrock function of the state.

Nations that cannot control their finances can’t afford to defend themselves. Nations that cannot defend their borders risk societal collapse. And energy-poor nations are just poor.

Watch John Howard: A Life in Politics on Wednesday 11 March at 7.30pm AEDT on Sky News. Stream at Skynews.com.au

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The childhood memory may be unreliable but it is vivid: a chalk inscrip­tion of a single word slashed on the pavement in Sydney – Eternity.

Our family was usually a long way from Sydney in the 1960s, traversing the country following my soldier father’s postings. But between 1964 and 1966 we were within striking distance, living on the outskirts of a then embryonic Canberra, just a five-hour drive from the Emerald City along an old Hume Highway that used to weave through every town.

My maternal grandmother lived in a Housing Commission home in Malabar on the edge of the eastern suburbs and we visited her twice: once to go to the Royal Easter Show and once for Christmas. We made several journeys into the city on green and cream double-decker buses.

Everything in Sydney seemed big, brash and vibrant. On one of those trips, I recall Nanna drawing our attention to the word Eternity chalked in fading, fluid copperplate on the pavement and passing on the lore that no one knew who the mysterious draftsman was or why he scrawled this one word everywhere.

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We do now. Illiterate reformed alcoholic and World War I veteran Arthur Stace converted to Christianity in the 1930s and spent the next 35 years writing the same word on walls and pavement in the hope that passers-by would turn their thoughts to heaven. Prosecuted in his day for defacing property, he was celebrated at the 2000 Olympics when Eternity lit up the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Stace’s Sydney and the mark he left on it are long gone, eroded by the ruthless footfall of time.

These memories of an exciting, optimistic and vanished Australia came flooding back on Ash Wednesday. The news was awash with stories about Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar New Year while Lent barely rated a mention. All three of these events move with the moon, and surely this rare convergence was noteworthy.

Anthony Albanese, had posted a video for the Chinese Lunar New Year and released a statement to mark the beginning of Ramadan. Again, there was no word about Lent from our culturally Catholic leader. Perhaps he had boned up on the scripture readings of the day, which cautioned against pompous displays of piety. Perhaps he just forgot.

But forgetting, too, tells a story.

It is good that the Prime Minister offered his best wishes to the Chinese and Muslim Australian communities, but surely the most important season on the Christian calendar also rates a mention. It is the tolerance of the Western tradition we inherit, with its deep roots in Judeo-Christian beliefs, that allows all faiths, and none, to flourish here.

You can over-read these things, but it is easy to place this wilful forgetting within the canon of a creed that deems white settlement an irredeemable stain on the national soul. Yet the fault is not shared. The burden of guilt falls only on what we might call, borrowing an old colonial insult, the currency lads and lasses. These locally born children of settlers were seen as lesser beings than the British-born “sterling”. The crime of dispossession is thus laid solely at the feet of the descendants of the various waves of largely British, pre-World War II settlers. Later migrants enjoy a kind of automatic absolution, despite sharing fully in the benefits of colonisation.

This dismal doctrine of hereditary sin pervades our academic, bureaucratic and cultural institutions and stains our national discourse. It is a joyless, nihilistic cult with a discipline of endless penitence that is robbing us of hope. A once optimistic Australia seems trapped in a permanent Lent with no promise of Easter.

This caricature of our history is deeply damaging and our national story is sorely in need of resurrection. Former prime minister Tony Abbott has done the nation a great service in producing his short history of Australia, which does not shy away from the stains on our past but does seek to reclaim the good in it. And there is much good.

It is past time to redeem the stories and storytellers of the currency lads and lasses who built one of the fairest and freest nations on Earth. Among those storytellers was journalist and poet Kenneth Slessor. There is no one working in the media today who matches Slessor’s gift with words.

He was highly cultured, steeped in literature, and loved Sydney, warts and all. Save for a couple of “vexing intervals”, Slessor lived on the margins of Kings Cross for 40 years, with the harbour “never out of my window”. In a poem on the hidden virtues of a seedy William Street, his refrain is, “You find this ugly, I find it lovely.”

In an essay on the city he wrote: “The character and the life of Sydney are shaped continually and imperceptibly by the fingers of the Harbour, groping across the piers and jetties, clutching deeply into the hills, the water dyed a whole paint box’s armoury with every breath of air, every shift of light or shade, according to the tide, the clock, the weather and the state of the moon. The water is like silk, like pewter, like blood, like a leopard’s skin, and occasionally, merely like water.”

The harbour looms large and foreboding in his masterpiece Five Bells. The poem meditates on time and the death of his friend Joe Lynch, a tall, gaunt, red-headed “mad” Irish cartoonist.

One rainy Saturday night, Slessor and Lynch heard there was a party in Mosman and jumped on a ferry. Lynch had his coat pockets stuffed full of beer bottles and, when the wake of a big liner hit, Joe fell into the water near where the Sydney Opera House now stands and drowned. His body was never recovered.

In Five Bells, Slessor says time “moved by little fidget wheels is not my Time”. He recalls when time on the harbour was measured by the tolling of ships’ bells and says he has lived many lives, including this one life “Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells”.

He is haunted by the memory of his friend, who has gone from earth, “Gone even from the meaning of a name”.

“Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips

“And hits and cries against the ports of space,

“Beating their sides to make its fury heard.”

I remember a lunch with renowned Australian artist John Olsen who, even in his 80s, radiated delight as he retold the story of discovering Five Bells and of finding an ageing Slessor playing pool at the Sydney Journalists’ Club. The poet and his poem inspired the mural Olsen was commissioned to create, which now sweeps across the Northern Foyer wall of the Sydney Opera House. An echo of Joe Lynch can be heard there.

The poet and the artist are both dead. The old Journalists’ Club is long gone. But their stories remain, for those who care to look.

Memory is a strange custodian. It preserves, it disturbs, it distorts, softens and erases. Without actively working to protect memories, they can fade, and a nation’s understanding of itself can blur.

But forgetfulness is never neutral. If we do not reclaim our past, others will decide what is remembered. It falls to us to beat against the ports of space to make our story heard.

Or, like chalk on concrete, what was once vivid will vanish.

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“There is little more infuriating to voters than to hear politicians tell them they have never had it so good when lived experience reflects the complete opposite.”
— Mike Newman

As a preamble, it is worth noting that the recent 0.25 per cent rate hike marks the first time ever that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has been forced to raise rates after only three cuts since systematic inflation targeting was introduced in 1990. Headline inflation is now set to rise to 4.2 per cent by June 2026.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers gaslit the public in typical fashion, blaming everything else for inflation. Never mind. He assured we minions that his government understands the pressure of rising interest rates on families and businesses. Damn that evil private sector demand driving inflation and forcing the RBA’s hand to initiate a 25-basis-point rate hike.

Even after Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock linked government spending to inflation, the Treasurer dug in over the weekend, claiming “public demand was making a smaller contribution, private demand a bigger contribution” to rising prices.

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It just wouldn’t be cricket to accept that his government’s spending is out of control. Over the past two years, Labor’s budgets have blown out to an all-time record of almost $100 billion. Hardly a rounding error. We do not need to dig too deep to discover gross mismanagement. Did the Treasurer forget that multiple federal departments were recently exposed for exceeding staffing budgets by $841 million in 2024–25?

Has it escaped Dr Chalmers’ attention that 21,000 new federal recruits (+5.6 per cent), coupled with average public-sector salaries costing an extra $3.54 billion per annum (+9.5 per cent more than in 2023–24), are adding fuel to the inflation fire? The total wage bill for federal government employees is now $41 billion—almost double the level before the pandemic. Nothing to see here.

Still, Labor politicians took the opportunity to heckle, scoff and jeer at the fractured opposition in parliament on February 3 instead of showing contrition for incompetent economic stewardship. Only the Coalition’s disarray could have managed to steal the limelight and allow Labor off the hook over such a disastrous state of affairs.

The factors behind inflation are not rocket science. Chief among them is energy. Energy prices jumped 21.5 per cent annualised in the fourth quarter of 2025. This impacts every input—from farming, transport and refrigeration to simply turning on the lights or the air-conditioning.

The Treasurer continues to indulge Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who regularly celebrates the success of his 200,000-plus home battery program. Never mind that the $2 billion originally slated for the scheme has blown out five-fold to $12 billion. That’s right: those who can afford home batteries are being subsidised by those who can’t. You cannot make this stuff up.

Focusing on cost of living for families?

Those with $1 million mortgages will be on the hook for another $1,800 per annum due to the interest-rate hike. If Dr Chalmers truly understands voter “pain”, why, on February 1, did he sneak in fuel and alcohol tax hikes if his aim is to assist battlers struggling to make ends meet?

Labor might argue it is committed to rolling out more “cost-of-living” relief, but that always equates to more of our own money raised through higher taxes, then recycled back to bail us out of problems we should never have been in if we had sensible energy policies.

The latest annual report from the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) reveals that average energy debt across residential customers suffering from energy poverty is up 19 per cent ($1,367) on 2024 levels, despite bill-relief rebates.

By the AER’s numbers, in 2020–21 there were 182,655 households in energy debt. In 2024–25, that figure has almost doubled to 336,615 households. Of the 122,000 households on official hardship programs, almost 40 per cent have been on them for more than a year. Of the 150,000 that exited the programs, 64.6 per cent were discontinued because households failed to meet agreed payment plans. For the cost of the Voice referendum, Labor could have paid off the $450 million in outstanding residential energy debt that exists today.

Switching to business

The impact of energy prices has hurt small businesses too. Average energy debt for businesses reached $2,516 in 2024–25, 40 per cent higher than in 2022. There are now 45,000 companies in energy debt over the same period—28 per cent more than when Labor took office.

Perhaps if the Treasurer truly grasped the corporate drivers of financial markets, he would understand that businesses do not invest solely on the basis of low interest rates. They invest because they can see the cycle ahead. Therein lies the problem. Australian companies cannot see favourable winds because of onerous regulatory frameworks. Why does a café in Victoria need 37 licences to open?

Net private business investment as a share of GDP languishes at just over 12 per cent—levels last seen around the severe 1990s recession. A decade ago, it sat comfortably between 14 and 18 per cent. Put another way, private enterprise sees mounting challenges because productivity growth has become so anaemic that the economy is red-lining and overheating at a puny 2 per cent.

If the private sector is driving inflation, why has the Australian Securities & Investments Commission recorded 14,722 insolvencies in 2024–25? Perhaps the Treasurer and Housing Minister Clare O’Neil—when she is not debating Senator Murray Watt on social media about the ranking of böreks, jam doughnuts and cinnamon rolls—can explain why 9,500 construction companies have collapsed since 2022, a 79 per cent jump since Labor won office. Why is almost 50 per cent of the cost of building a house now accounted for by government regulation and taxes?

This government’s obsession with spending and taxing more lies at the heart of the problem. Here is an idea: cut red tape. Reduce approval times. Consider an investor waiting up to 10 years for approval while simultaneously weighing capital allocation decisions. If that timeframe were reduced to 18 months, government would not need to spend a cent. Attractive policy settings would drive investment through ease of doing business. The departments advising ministers simply do not understand business—hardly surprising when the average tenure of top public servants is 28 years.

Not much hope overseas either

Having just returned from an overseas visit with a client, the prognosis is bleak. When government is indirectly told by a reputable third party that senior executives within the ministry of a major trading partner are “developing an Australian allergy”, one would hope this would trigger urgent self-reflection.

Instead, when investor feedback that “confidence is falling” was relayed to diplomatic outposts, the response was that the bilateral relationship has never been better. Officials pointed to regular consultations as proof. This carries about as much sincerity as telling a five-year-old that his favourite Tonka dump truck will be placed on a higher shelf—visible but out of reach—to encourage him to play with more climate-appropriate toys.

In any private business, damning feedback is treated not just as a warning but as an opportunity to fix problems quickly. Failure to do so risks lost profitability—or worse, collapse.

More disturbing was unsolicited commentary during a roundtable discussion. One trading outpost is actively pushing overseas investors to participate in smelting opportunities, especially those with green credentials. Forgive the confusion, but isn’t the government already spending billions to subsidise the survival—under the banner of energy transition—of once-profitable fossil-fuel-powered smelters such as Mount Isa Copper in Queensland, Tomago Aluminium Corporation in New South Wales, Nyrstar Port Pirie in South Australia, and Hobart Zinc in Tasmania?

Dig deeper and the futility becomes clear. Tomago is the largest electricity user in NSW, with a 904-megawatt peak load, consuming the equivalent of the entire Australian Capital Territory’s annual electricity use. Energy accounts for 40 per cent of its operating costs. Aluminium smelting requires temperatures of around 950°C during electrolysis. Due to grid instability, Tomago warned regulators almost a decade ago that while it could manage load-shedding with one hour’s notice, “catastrophic potline freezing” would occur if outages extended beyond three hours. In a 2017 letter to the NSW Energy Security Taskforce, Tomago stressed that “the early demise of baseload power generation only pushes up energy prices and represents a significant risk to the long-term viability of the smelter.” Climate zealotry has created precisely these conditions. Embarrassingly, taxpayers are now being used to flog a dead horse.

None of this is new. International investors across multiple industries continue to warn that Australia’s energy prices are simply too high to support competitive manufacturing. Add new workplace laws, productivity at six-decade lows, glacial approval processes, and investment-attractiveness scores worse than Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Ivory Coast—and the mess becomes obvious.

Inflation is a problem. But inflated egos inside a party bathing in its own hubris have nemesis written all over them.

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It has been an uneasy summer in Australia after the Bondi massacre, and the year ahead shapes as a difficult one for the nation.

In the wake of the tragedy, the government flailed in its response and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed the test of leadership. But, showing an almost supernatural capacity for self-harm, the Opposition managed to make itself the story as it tore itself apart. Liberal Sussan Ley’s troubled tenure as party leader is now on life support and it will be a miracle if she makes it to Easter. Nationals leader David Littleproud has also been badly damaged. Meanwhile, the stocks of the right-wing populist party One Nation have surged, as voters toy with alternative forms of power.

Beyond its loss of authority over the handling of the massacre, the government is exposed for a runaway budget that is fuelling inflation and its absurdly expensive energy transition. It would be in deep strife if there were a half-way decent Opposition — but no such beast exists.

Let’s kick off February by looking at some of the energy stories that crossed the Powerlines desk over summer — because beneath the political noise, the real world is the real opposition to this government, as its policy idols are dashed on the rocks of physics and economics.

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Germany admits its energy transition is a train wreck

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made headlines when he conceded the bleeding obvious: that shutting the country’s nuclear power plants had been a strategic mistake. But there were even larger admissions about the failed Energiewende (energy transition) in a speech to the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Dessau in mid-January.

I went in search of an English translation of this speech and could not find the detailed energy quotes, because the best material came in the question-and-answer session after the address.

Thanks to YouTube’s translation function, what follows are some of Merz’s most interesting observations. What is stark is that he says Germany is “undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world”. He says he knows of no other country making things as difficult — perhaps because he is unaware of the yeoman efforts being performed down under by our Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen.

More than once, Merz says Germany does not have enough “generation capacity”. This is a striking admission, because Germany has built nearly three times as much generation “capacity” as it once had — but of course most of it is wind and solar, which makes it worse than useless during Germany’s famed dark doldrums, the Dunkelflaute.

Capacity that cannot be switched on when it is needed is not capacity at all; it is incapacity. It appears that Merz has got the memo.

What Merz wants is dispatchable power and lower costs. He admits that subsidising energy is unsustainable, that high power prices are destroying Germany’s once-mighty manufacturing base and beggaring its people.

Germany’s example is not one that any rational nation would follow. But of course reason and physics do not drive this debate — the creed of climate alarm does.

Here are Merz’s most revealing quotes from the Q&A:

“One thing that needs solutions are our very high energy costs. In the long run we will not be able to subsidise them through tax revenue.”

“We need energy production capacities.”

“What we are seeing in Germany with heat pumps is one of the most expensive experiments being conducted in all of Europe. I believe we can do better.”

“Above all it is crucial that we now create the necessary energy generation capacities. I just mentioned the power plant strategy. The difference between our power plant strategy and the one planned by the previous government is that we can now build gas-fired power plants without having to make them hydrogen-capable from day one. We don’t have the hydrogen.”

“I want to have acceptable market prices for energy production again and not have permanent subsidies for energy prices from the federal budget.”

“I want to say it again. It was a serious strategic mistake to phase out nuclear energy. If you are going to do it, you should at least have left the last remaining nuclear power plants on the grid three years ago so you could retain the generation capacity we had. We are now undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world. I know of no other country that makes things as difficult and expensive as Germany. We inherited something that now needs correcting, but we simply don’t have enough generation capacity.”

“Of course we need the wind and the sun, but there are also days and weeks when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow — and then we need baseload energy generation. That is precisely our goal, and we want to achieve that quickly.”

Electricity Is Physics, Not Politics

In an important opinion piece in the the Australian Financial Review, Stephen Anthony — director of Macroeconomics Advisory and former chair of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Independent Pricing Committee — argues Australia’s electricity system has drifted away from the physical fundamentals that make grids work. He emphasises that:

“Electricity is not a policy construct. It is physics — and the physics have not changed since Michael Faraday and the steam engine.”

The core message is that policy must be grounded in how electricity systems actually operate, not abstract targets.

Anthony warns that two decades of prioritising weather-dependent generation has left the system neither cheap nor secure. Renewables require extensive transmission, storage and backup to maintain reliability, and planners have underappreciated the engineering challenge of matching supply and demand continuously. His critique is as much about modelling and markets as emissions goals: without firm capacity and proper incentives, reliability and cost outcomes will be poor.

He calls for a reset in 2026 that realigns energy policy with the first principles of system design — recognising that supply must be dependable, grid stability must be engineered, and the transition must balance emissions, reliability and cost.

In 2019 Anthony and Professor Alex Coram co-authored an outstanding report for Industry Super Australia Modernising Australia’s Energy Systems where they point out an electricity system is a physical machine, not a spreadsheet exercise. Power has to be produced at the right moment, delivered through a stable grid, and backed up when things fail. You can’t modernise a system like that by comparing headline costs of individual technologies and hoping the rest will sort itself out. Generation, transmission, storage and demand all have to work together over decades, because once you build this stuff you are stuck with it for a very long time.

A wind-, solar- and battery-heavy grid looks cheap only if you examine technologies in isolation. When you step back and look at the whole system, they argue it becomes capital-hungry and operationally complex. You must overbuild generation, add long-distance transmission, install large amounts of storage, and still keep dispatchable backup for when the weather fails. Batteries help smooth short gaps, but they don’t solve multi-day or seasonal shortages. The authors’ key point is that a renewables-dominated grid shifts risk from fuel costs to system risk — reliability, coordination failure and the danger of locking in ever-rising capital costs — whereas nuclear shifts risk upfront but stabilises the system over time.

Their conclusion is not “nuclear versus renewables”, but that excluding nuclear forces the system to do far more work, at higher risk, to achieve the same reliability. In their framework, nuclear is valuable precisely because it lowers the burden placed on everything else.

Minister blocks FOI on renewables deal

Environment Minister Murray Watt’s office has declined a Freedom of Information request seeking documents on a Victorian solar and wind farm agreement, claiming disclosure would harm Commonwealth–state relations.

The rationale is absurd and undermines the principle of transparency in major energy approvals.

This is not a technical exemption; it is a political choice with broader implications for public trust in energy planning. Blocking access to basic approval justifications for federal–state collaboration sets a worrying precedent, especially at a time when energy policy decisions carry enormous economic and strategic weight.

Of course, there is no intention to have any transparancy in the enery transition and burying body bags full of facts and costs is now and industrial exercise.

Bowen to lecture the Saudis about oil

Australian energy minister and “president of negotiations for COP31”, Chris Bowen, has signalled he plans to engage Saudi Arabia and others in an effort to stop them hindering “progress” at UN climate summits.

Bowen singled out the oil-rich Gulf state, long accused of obstructing efforts to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels.

“We won’t get anywhere if we just have a jamboree of the willing,” Bowen said.

Oh to be a fly on the wall for these conversations. One suspects the Saudis might point to Australia’s exports of coal and gas as an inconvenient truth, and watching Bowen unleash one of his signature word-torrents in response would be a marvel to behold.

The language tango is Bowen’s great gift. Verbal missteps are all part of the great dance between the real world and the imaginary one he wants us to join him in. Who can forget his 2022 pledge to cut retail power bills, only for Australian taxpayers to cough up $6.8 billion in subsidies as electricity prices soared. In the tounge tango that followed the subsidies were branded as a cost of living triumph and proof that power prices were… falling

In 2023, Bowen told the council of parties meeting hosted in Saudi Arabia that fossil fuels must have “no ongoing role to play in our energy systems”. Yet the weather-dependent grid he is building cannot function without dispatchable power, and he is now desperately seeking gas while coal-fired power plants have their lives repeatedly extended. No matter how much the music changes the dancer blunders on.

With domestic and international roles this year Bowen will be dancing between landmines at home and abroad. It will be quite a show and Powerlines looks forward to writing the reviews.

The Productivity Commission joins the activist chorus

The headline act in Australia’s bureaucracy-wide institutional collapse came on December 19 with the release of the Productivity Commission’s Orwellian-titled Investing in cheaper, cleaner energy and the net zero transformation.

The demonstrably false slogan on the cover reveals the document for what it is: activism dressed up as economics. Powerlines has already dissected that report in detail in an earlier post.

Australian Aluminium Finishing collapses

Australian Aluminium Finishing (AAF), a Sydney-based architectural aluminium finisher operating for more than 40 years, is expected to enter liquidation by mid-February after collapsing under more than $18 million in debt.

The company went into voluntary administration on January 7 and has not traded since. Escalating costs — particularly electricity — are cited by workers and administrators as a major pressure, though filings make clear this was not the sole cause.

AAF operated plants in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, along with 11 production facilities across Australia and South-East Asia. It is headquartered in Wetherill Park and owned by Australian Aluminium Holdings, with William Anthony Wyllie as sole director. The administrator has flagged a formal investigation into the company’s failure, while chemical supplier Alpha Chemicals has sought a court-ordered winding-up.

UNSW finds solar panels fail faster than promised

A University of NSW-led study has found that up to 20 per cent of solar panels in large-scale photovoltaic plants degrade far faster than expected, in some cases cutting effective operating life to around 11 years rather than the assumed 25.

The research identifies a “long-tail” problem in solar deployments, where a minority of panels suffer severe and premature performance losses that materially drag down overall system output. Using a large dataset from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the study concludes this effect is structural, not incidental.

Researchers identify three pathways: accelerated degradation driven by interacting failure mechanisms; early-life “infant mortality” caused by manufacturing defects; and random late-life failures such as solder fatigue or cell cracking.

The findings have serious implications for investment models, warranties, insurance and recycling planning — and undermine the comforting fiction that solar is a predictable, plug-and-play 25-year asset.

Funke Kupper: beyond 2050, nuclear matters

Writing in the Australian Financial Review, former ASX and Tabcorp chief Elmer Funke Kupper argues that Australia’s energy policy is distorted by an overly narrow focus on 2030 and 2050 targets, which favour renewables on paper while ignoring long-term system costs and reliability risk.

He accepts the CSIRO/AEMO GenCost conclusion that renewables look cheapest at a 2050 snapshot, but argues this breaks down once asset lifetimes are considered. Solar, wind and batteries must be rebuilt every 25–30 years, while nuclear plants can operate for many decades.

Over a 75-year horizon, he argues, a mixed renewables-nuclear system is cost-competitive and materially lower risk. Without it, Australia risks de-industrialisation as energy-intensive industries lose confidence in long-term power security.

Trump pulls the US out of the UN climate framework

Donald Trump has ordered the United States to withdraw from dozens of international and UN-affiliated bodies, arguing they operate against US national interests.

The decision includes exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — the parent treaty to the Paris Agreement — making the US the first country to leave it. The White House says the move is part of a broader review aimed at ending funding for “globalist” and ineffective institutions.

Meta goes nuclear to power AI

Meta has announced a major expansion of its nuclear energy commitments, striking agreements with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo, following an earlier deal with Constellation Energy.

The deals make Meta one of the largest corporate purchasers of nuclear power in US history, aimed at securing clean, firm electricity for its rapidly expanding data-centre and AI infrastructure.

South Australia price spike exposes grid fragility

The Advertiser reported on January 28 that a sharp electricity price surge in South Australia — with wholesale prices spiking close to the $20,000/MWh cap — triggered warnings of catastrophic grid failure during a multi-city heatwave.

The spike occurred on a still summer evening when household batteries were depleted and wind generation fell, prompting a low-reserve notice from AEMO.

Frontier Economics chief Danny Price warned the system is becoming more fragile as coal exits faster than firm replacement arrives. He said it is only a matter of time before a multi-day, multi-state heatwave exposes the system’s weaknesses through outages and extreme prices.

Dispatchable power is non-negotiable.

Again in the Australian Financial Review, Patrick Gibbons — a former Tehran-based diplomat and now a partner at corporate advisory firm Orizontas — argues that the energy and climate debate is shifting as hard demand collides with soft assumptions. When BlackRock chief Larry Fink openly warns at Davos that data centres and artificial intelligence cannot run on intermittent wind and solar alone, it signals what power-sector insiders have long known: dispatchable power is non-negotiable.

“You cannot rely solely on intermittent sources like wind and solar. You need dispatchable power because these data centres cannot simply turn on and off.”
— Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager

This matters acutely for Australia, where electricity demand — long stagnant — is now rising again, driven by data centres and the political imperative to preserve what remains of the industrial base.

Gibbons notes that for two decades Australia absorbed coal closures because demand was flat, manufacturing declined, and rooftop solar suppressed daytime load. That era is over. Electricity consumption has risen by about 7 per cent in four years and is set to accelerate. At the same time, the energy transition is slowing: coal plant closures are being pushed back, transmission build-outs downgraded as costs surge, and wholesale price volatility has increased even as average prices plateau — volatility that flows directly into higher retail prices as risk is priced in. The long-promised cheap power has not materialised, not simply because of Ukraine-driven fuel shocks, but because of the real system costs of integrating large volumes of renewables.

The political response is already visible. Governments are extending coal plants across Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, backing aluminium smelters such as Tomago, and quietly acknowledging that gas will be required to replace ageing coal — even as state policies restrict new gas supply. Data centres now enter this mix, with governments spruiking digital ambition while remaining vague about where the electricity will come from. Gibbons’ conclusion is blunt: power prices will continue to rise, coal will stay longer than planned, and the energy transition is about to get messy. Larry Fink is right — dispatchable power is essential — and in Australia that reality arrives well before nuclear even enters the conversation.

Australia’s agencies of state have become a danger to the Commonwealth. Instead of acting as a handbrake on bad ideas, they share the delusion that government fiats on energy can override physics, conjure cheap power and invent new industries.

These institutions inhabit a model world, where real-world hikes in retail power bills, the hollowing-out of industry and the growing risk of blackouts are dismissed as trivial, anecdotal or transient. Evidence is an inconvenience to be explained away as bureaucrats recast themselves as co-authors of a modern morality play.

Worse, the blizzard of government publications produced in 2025 does not even cohere into a single, consistent whole. A survey of the past year’s documents on the energy transition, churned out by some of the world’s highest-paid bureaucrats, delivers a cacophony of confusion. Outdated information is embedded in new advice, assumptions grow ever more heroic, and mantras masquerade as policy.

The essential purpose of the grid, delivering secure, reliable and affordable power, has been relegated in pursuit of the ideological goal of cutting carbon emissions. Once the core function of a system is perverted, everything that depends on it begins to fail. Prices rise and reliability erodes as policy drifts into fantasy, sustained by the conviction that everything is justified by the cause of saving the planet.

The architects of this disaster appear not to understand that they are conducting surgery on the nation’s central nervous system. Get this wrong and the damage is catastrophic and permanent. And this is only the beginning: electricity is merely the first stop on the road to a much broader and more destructive dismantling of the energy system.

This is not a dispute about climate change or the demand to cut emissions. It is about whether the Australian state understands the physical system it is attempting to command, and whether it grasps that what it is doing will depower the economy, drive up costs across the board and place the nation on a path to poverty.

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Study last year’s blizzard of official advice underpinning Australia’s emissions target and it is littered with glaring errors, deliberate sins of omission and fragmentation, as old assumptions are preferred over real-world limitations.

Start with the Australian Energy Market Operator. AEMO’s Integrated System Plans are the sacred text on which the mantra of the “least-cost” path to a decarbonised grid rests. Let’s be clear, these documents are explicitly about hitting government-decreed carbon-cutting targets, not delivering cheap, abundant energy. The 2024 ISP assumed rapid coal exit, an unprecedented build-out of renewables, firming and transmission, and smooth delivery across multiple states. Ministers cite it. Regulators lean on it. Every other agency inherits it.

Then, in August last year, AEMO began rewriting it.

In its Electricity Network Options report, AEMO admitted that transmission costs had surged, in some cases by up to 100 per cent, driven by supply-chain constraints, labour shortages, project complexity, social-licence issues and rising contracting risk.

It made this admission:

“AEMO recognises that increases in costs for electricity transmission network development would impact bills for electricity consumers.”

The message was clear: the 2024 “optimal development path” was no longer reliable and would be rewritten in the 2026 draft Integrated System Plan. That should have triggered a pause across government. Instead, the machine chugged on as it prepared for the September release of the 2035 emissions target.

The Climate Change Authority’s advice that Australia should cut emissions by 62–70 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035 is explicitly anchored to the central scenario in AEMO’s 2024 ISP. That pathway assumes coal-fired generation largely exits the system by the late 2030s, and that replacement renewables, firming and transmission are delivered on time and at scale.

“Scaling up capacity in the National Electricity Market (NEM), including six-fold growth in utility storage, quadrupling wind capacity, tripling utility solar capacity and doubling rooftop and distributed solar capacity by 2035, consistent with the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO’s) Step Change scenario,” the report says.

But the Authority was leaning on a grid plan the system operator had already flagged for revision. When that revision arrived, in December’s draft 2026 ISP, coal’s exit was pushed back by a decade, with closures no longer smooth or front-loaded but slower, lumpier and far more dependent on announced retirements rather than modelling ambition. Transmission delivery was treated with greater caution. Workforce constraints, supply-chain delays, social-licence barriers and system-security risks were elevated from footnotes to central planning assumptions.

The certainty that underpinned the 2024 Step Change pathway, and on which the Authority based its advice, had evaporated. That is not a minor technical adjustment. It goes to the credibility of the entire advice chain on which the government’s 2035 target rests.

And, as Powerlines has pointed out in an earlier post, AEMO has yet to revise its outdated assumptions on worst-case wind droughts. The critical generation gap in the 2024 ISP was identified by Queensland-based Global Power Energy, a specialist consultancy whose 15-strong leadership team has more than 400 years of combined technical, regulatory and commercial experience across generators, networks and the market operator.

The eastern grid is being built on an AEMO model that assumes wind power will never fall below 14 per cent of capacity for multiple days. Yet a GPE study of the real-world 2024 autumn wind drought shows wind collapsing to roughly half that level during three separate week-long slumps, raising serious questions about whether a weather-dependent grid can keep the lights on.

When Treasury rolled out its modelling of the net-zero transition, it assumed decarbonisation of the electricity sector would proceed “consistent with recent trends and the (outdated) ISP”. It does warn that a disorderly transition would drive up wholesale prices and undermine investment. But the disorder it imagines is political. The disorder now confronting Australia is structural.

So Treasury is no longer stress-testing policy. It is amplifying error and manufacturing reassurance. And when the nation’s most important economic agency starts publishing comfort fiction for government instead of confronting reality, it betrays its heritage and the community it is meant to serve.

The headline act in this bureaucracy-wide institutional collapse came with the December 19 release of the Productivity Commission’s Orwellian-titled Investing in cheaper, cleaner energy and the net zero transformation. That demonstrably false slogan reveals the document for what it is: activism dressed up as economics.

The Productivity Commission was established to be a guardian of economic rationalism, providing governments with independent, evidence-based analysis to enhance productivity and economic welfare, not to act as a cheerleader for political objectives. Its legitimacy rested on its willingness to pull bad policy apart, test assumptions and champion markets.

All pretence of that evaporates here. The opening paragraph declares, without qualification, that “reducing emissions from greenhouse gases is an important national priority”. There it is: the cart of net-zero ideology placed firmly ahead of the horse of productivity.

From that point on, the conclusions are foregone. Markets are no longer trusted. Capital allocation is no longer disciplined by price signals. When the sole goal is to nail down a carbon target, everything is hit with the hammer of government intervention. An institution created to interrogate political ambition has instead absorbed it, transforming itself from devil’s advocate into preacher.

One recommendation is to accelerate the closure of coal-fired power stations by expanding and repurposing the Safeguard Mechanism, shifting from a sector-wide approach to facility-level emissions constraints, tightening the screws until coal generators are squeezed out, starting with brown coal in Victoria and moving on to black coal in NSW and Queensland.

This is not productivity reform. It is environmental activism by regulatory attrition.

The Commission claims faster decarbonisation will reduce the overall cost of the transition, while ignoring the constraints AEMO flags in its 2026 draft plan. It assumes gigawatts of reliable power can be conjured on demand and that the known risks of premature coal closure, price spikes, reliability failures and rising system-security costs, can be waved away.

The report’s superficiality is striking. It advocates a rapid build-out of renewables and transmission as markets struggle to meet existing targets. It favours large-scale wind even as private capital retreats due to rising costs, planning delays and community opposition.

Reliability is treated narrowly, with scant regard for system security. Coal closures require extensive stabilisation infrastructure, synchronous condensers with lead times of four to five years and price tags approaching $160 million each. Transgrid alone plans around ten in NSW by 2030. This barely registers in the Commission’s analysis.

The Commission also urges fast-tracking approvals by privileging the energy transition over biodiversity, heritage and community objections. It proposes a federal strike team and coordinator-general to bulldoze resistance. It calls for expanding the Safeguard Mechanism by lowering thresholds to 25,000 tonnes, dragging hundreds more businesses into carbon compliance.

More costs. More intervention. How does any of this improve productivity?

Now consider the reports from all these agencies alongside the draft 2026 ISP. What matters is not a single number but the tone. Where 2024 was confident, the draft is hedged and conditional. It flags workforce shortages, long lead times, higher costs, social-licence barriers and sequencing risk. Caveats multiply.

This is how engineers write when they are no longer confident the system can be bent to a timetable.

Politically and institutionally, however, the language has hardened. Targets are higher. Regulatory pressure is intensifying. The insistence that the transition will be “orderly” grows louder even as disorder spreads.

AEMO revises its assumptions. Other agencies build their case on the old ones. The Productivity Commission abandons markets in favour of coercion. Each institution amplifies error. Collectively, they appear to believe their policy prescriptions can dominate physics.

The only glue binding this together is ideology, the belief that net zero by 2050 is paramount and the real world will comply if pushed hard enough.

All this for what?

Australia produces around one per cent of global emissions. China produces roughly 30 per cent and continues building coal-fired power stations to guarantee energy security, industrial dominance and political stability. Coal is a strategic asset baked into China’s future.

Australia, meanwhile, is destabilising its electricity system, driving up costs and hollowing out energy-intensive industries. Next comes the push to torch the billions in export income that comes from coal and LNG in exchange for hypothetical green industries. Then we will impose more costs on transport and agriculture.

This is not climate leadership. It is unilateral economic disarmament and an act of deliberate self harm.

Reality will not bend to ideology. It never does. And the longer Canberra pretends otherwise, the higher the price Australians will pay, in bills, reliability and lost industrial capacity.

This is institutional betrayal.

As with the electricity system itself, the bureaucracy has lost sight of its purpose. Once that happens, everything that depends on it begins to fail. Agencies meant to test ideas, restrain excess and ground policy in reality have instead become ideological amplifiers. When the state forgets its obligations to the community, to security, prosperity and resilience, it ceases to be a steward of the Commonwealth and becomes a risk to it.

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In 2003, I visited the Auschwitz concentration camp. As a father of a three-year-old daughter at the time, among the thousands of family pictures, one of a similarly aged Renia Kohn brought me to tears and, 22 years later, still does. Much like Matilda, she was murdered simply for the crime of being Jewish.

Prime Minister Albanese’s “love is more powerful than hate” comment proved beyond all reasonable doubt that he is unfit to lead this nation. If his government’s failures everywhere else weren’t bad enough, his insincere platitudes with respect to the Bondi massacre and subsequent responses only confirmed his trademark as an appeaser. His lack of authenticity during this crisis has been exposed for all to see.

The jeers directed towards him at Bondi outwardly expressed the mood of a nation tired of his government’s political cowardice. The Jewish community only invited Albanese to the eighth day of Hanukkah out of respect for the office. The fact he was given no speaking role, despite his offering, speaks volumes, sending a not-so-subtle message by shining light on the darkness he has presided over.

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Bondi has tragically exposed what happens when political expediency is put ahead of principle. The Albanese government has spent its time in office ideologically prioritising virtue ahead of values.

The fact Albanese refuses to call a Commonwealth Royal Commission into the worst radical Islamic terrorist attack on Australian soil reveals two things: contempt for Australians, especially the Jewish community, and a shameless attempt to bury scrutiny surrounding the systematic failures by his government that would surely be exposed by it.

While Albanese can reflect that he “could have done more” to protect the Jewish community, the following data reveals just how much antisemitism he chose to turn a blind eye to on his watch. This has been a pogrom.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Australia’s peak Jewish representative body, documented more than 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the two years following October 7, 2023, a rate five times higher than the decade prior to the massacre in Israel.

2023

October 8 – Sydney Opera House: pro-Palestinian protesters chant “Where are the Jews?”, “F**k the Jews”, and “Gas the Jews”.

October 8 – In Western Sydney, Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun addressed a large protest rally glorifying the October 7 massacre, shouting to the crowd: “I’m elated. It’s a day of courage, it’s a day of resistance, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory.” Prime Minister Albanese attended the National Iftar Dinner hosted by the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) in early 2023, where Dadoun gave the vote of thanks and closing prayer.

October 8 – Two individuals walked past a New South Wales synagogue, shouted “Allahu Akbar”, and threatened to “blow up the synagogue”.

October 9 – A 44-year-old Jewish man in Sydney called a “Jew dog” and assaulted in a public park, sustaining concussion and spinal fracture.

October 11 – Melbourne synagogue receives a bomb threat.

November 23 – A large mob of anti-Israel protesters descended on a Melbourne synagogue, rioting and throwing rocks, forcing evacuation by worshippers.

December – Multiple bomb threats made to synagogues across Australia.

2024

January – Foreign Minister Penny Wong visits Israel and other Middle East states but does not visit sites where the October 7 massacres took place. Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Alex Ryvchin, stated her actions were “a serious error of judgment” and that a visit to the sites was “essential to understanding the depth of evil that Israel faces”. Albanese defended Wong, saying her visit was “not about an opportunity for a photo op”. In December 2025, Wong said, “I regret how people perceived the situation”.

March 15 – Australian government lifts suspension on $6 million in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a group that aided and abetted Hamas terrorists.

May – Jews attending the “Never Again Is Now” anti-antisemitism rally in Melbourne physically assaulted by anti-Israel mobs.

May 25 – Australia’s largest Jewish school in Melbourne graffitied with hate speech.

July 4 – Free Palestine protesters breach Australian Parliament House security in Canberra and hold banners from the rooftop.

October 13 – Antisemitic graffiti reading “Be careful” sprayed on a Jewish bakery in Sydney.

October 17 and 20 – Bondi-based Curly Lewis Brewing Company torched by mistake. The intended target was the Jewish-owned kosher deli Lewis’ Continental Kitchen next door, which was attacked three days later.

October 24 – Albanese alights from his government jet wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, the name given to the sexual slavery wings in Nazi concentration camps, in full knowledge of its meaning.

November 19 and 21 – Cars set on fire and buildings vandalised with “F**k Israel” in a Jewish neighbourhood in Sydney.

November – Melbourne synagogue defaced with “Free Gaza” and “Jews kill babies”.

December 5 – The Great Synagogue in Sydney besieged by unauthorised anti-Israel protesters, forcing Jews to shelter inside.

December 6 – Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne set ablaze in an arson attack.

December 9 – Australian Federal Police launch a dedicated antisemitism taskforce under Special Operation Avalite.

December 11 – Suburb of Woollahra in Sydney attacked again. Cars set on fire and buildings vandalised with misspelled slogans including “Kill Israiel”.

2025

January 4 and 7 – Man threatens worshippers exiting Chabad North Shore and Kehillat Masada synagogues in St Ives.

January 10 – Allawah Synagogue in southern Sydney vandalised with swastikas and “Hitler on top” graffiti.

January 11 – Newtown Synagogue vandalised with swastikas; arson attempt made after accelerant poured but fire failed to fully ignite.

January 15 – Multiple cars firebombed. “F**k the Jews” spray-painted on a car. Jewish home splashed with paint in Dover Heights, Sydney.

January 21 – Jewish childcare centre in Maroubra, Sydney, set on fire and vandalised.

February 12 – Two Sydney nurses suspended after declaring on social media that they would murder Jewish patients inside a New South Wales public hospital.

July 4 – Twenty people attending a Shabbat dinner at East Melbourne Synagogue targeted in an arson attack.

July 5 – Synagogue door set alight; Israeli restaurant stormed by protesters in Sydney.

August – Pig’s leg thrown into kosher establishment in Waverley, Sydney.

August 3 – Palestinian march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge featuring Taliban, Islamic State, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Hamas flags, images of Ayatollah Khamenei, chants of “Death, death to the IDF”, and burning of Australian flags.

August 10 – Prime Minister Albanese announces Australia will recognise the State of Palestine at the 80th United Nations General Assembly.

August 26 – The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) determines Iran was behind the Adass Israel Synagogue and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen arson attacks.

September 7 – Ehtesham Ahmad rides an Arabian horse along Bondi Beach while waving a Palestinian flag.

September 21 – Formal recognition of Palestinian statehood by Australia.

December 1 – A 71-year-old woman arrested for antisemitic graffiti in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

December 14 – Mass shooting at the Bondi Beach Hanukkah festival claims the lives of 15 innocent civilians, including Matilda, a 10-year-old child, and injures more than 40 others.

What more evidence did Albanese require to take firmer action?

One day before the Bondi massacre, I had breakfast with a close Jewish friend. We had been flatmates during our time at university. He told me just how unsafe his community had been feeling and that the authorities were doing so little to stem growing antisemitism.

He had been celebrating Hanukkah at another location with other members of his local synagogue, and it was ordered to be closed immediately after the attack in Bondi commenced.

Unfortunately, for a man who has been behind so much division, Australians must not accept his dilemma of “how hard it is to legislate” against such evil by wrapping it in tighter gun controls, further limits on free speech, and dragging in extreme-right actors as a deflection. Had the vile attack been carried out with a vehicle ploughing into victims, would the government be seeking to toughen car licensing laws? We must not allow Albanese to obfuscate.

As of December 2025, Australia lists 31 terrorist organisations under the Criminal Code, of which 27 are Islamic, three far-right, and one ideological. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess has consistently stated in official briefings that “religiously motivated violent extremists remain the majority of ASIO’s counter-terrorism caseload… to be clear, I am talking about individuals who follow a perverse interpretation of Islam, not people of Islamic faith”.

Bondi hero Ahmed al-Ahmed embodied courage under fire and deserves our highest praise. Boris and Sofia Gurman showed equal strength in their attempt to thwart the massacre despite their tragic fate. Countless first responders and others should hold their heads high for their selfless acts, despite being uniformly let down by a government seeking not to offend certain radical groups due to the insidious poison of political correctness.

This is not a time for politics but a clarion call for real leadership to enshrine shared values that ensure all Australians never again have to experience such an atrocity. If our government refuses to accept accountability, Australians must vote with their feet and rid themselves of those who lack the courage to do the right thing.

It is time to reflect on the pictures of beauty personified in Matilda and Renia Kohn and take remedial action against the scourge of ideological and religious hatred that ended their lives before it is too late.

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The beach is soaked in blood no tide will wash away, and among the dead lies a child with that most Australian of names: Matilda.

Her murder, along with 14 other souls, stains the Bondi sand and our nation. The horror lies in knowing this was no senseless slaughter of innocents. This was a cold, calculated assault on a ­people whose only crime was their ­religion. Terrorists’ rifles were aimed at snuffing out lives, leaving permanent physical and spiritual wounds and cleaving our community.

As the Children of Israel celebrated their festival of light, darkness came in the shape of executioners bearing a flag that soils the name of the God they feign to sanctify. Words fail before the brute desire to kill. The crack of gunfire drowns out all reason, and we are left bewildered at a hate so raw it could stare down a gunsight at a child and pull the trigger.

This visceral hatred has a diabolical heritage, rooted in the desecration of a faith. What we witnessed was a religion corrupted into a nihilistic cult, where death is sanctified as an oblation to a false god. To insist this has nothing to do with Islam is cowardice. It is to evade the truth that a worldwide battle is raging for the soul of that faith, and it will not be won by denial. Many of its victims are Muslims. We should stand with those within Islam who reject this rank corruption of their beliefs and are willing to name it, confront it and defeat it.

Because only one name befits this act: evil. That evil now lurks in our suburbs and infects the minds and hearts of many more than just two assassins. This is a dangerous age, and what we do from here will define us. Fortune will not favour the weak.

In the wake of the slaughter, images play relentlessly on every screen, as clip by clip of a dozen minutes of chaos are drawn from hundreds of cameras to fill the jigsaw of the killers’ murderous arc.

And we are left to wonder what this picture means. What is this Australia?

We woke up in a foreign land.

But in the darkness there were flashes of light. Ahmed al-Ahmed lived up to his poetic name: the praised one, son of the praised. His is the courage all hope they will show in a crisis, as he wrestled the gun from the assailant. It was an essential reminder that Islam is not owned by those who defile its name with their bile. It now falls to Australian Muslim citizens, with our support, to deal with the extremism in their community.

Then there was the defiance of Reuven Morrison, who picked up a brick to throw at the killer before being gunned down. In an echo of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, his dignity shone in how he chose to die, the act of a man who would rather be killed than be cowed.

As Viktor Frankl observed in the death camps, the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose one’s response to abject evil.

Then Boris and Sofia Gurman, who tackled a gunman before the shooting started and died side-by-side on the footpath, ending 35 years of marriage in each other’s arms. May they stay that way for eternity.

Then all the ones we did not see. The silent moments of heroism from citizens who saw their civic duty as selflessness. The police and the surf lifesavers who chose to risk their lives for others. This is not a job; it is a vocation where routine sacrifice is too little honoured.

But beyond the heroes, hard questions remain for our country. Are we to be a nation of tribes? A place so shattered by the insidious politics of identity that it has no idea what it is? What are the values that we share?

There is too much diversity and too little unity hidden behind bunkum words like multiculturalism. The balance is tipped too far by those who denigrate our history, ignoring that the democratic foundation stones on which we stand were laid by those they deplore. The rights we take for granted are inherited, and Bondi’s heroes remind us that citizenship is also a responsibility.

A nation cannot thrive without a common set of values. What are ours? What is worth honouring, what is worth sustaining? What should we never countenance? What would we be prepared to die for?

Too often we hear cant phrases about shared values from those who cannot define them. Values have a spiritual dimension. Values were demonstrated in the actions of Ahmed al-Ahmed, and when the Gurmans gave up their lives in an act of grace to protect people they did not know.

Their courage personified that value best articulated in the testament we inherit from Jewish scripture: you shall not kill. The moment murder is justified, everything collapses.

There is only one religious reference in our Constitution, where the authors say the colonies “ … humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth”. If we plan to remain indissoluble, then Australia’s values must be anchored in more than mechanical refrains about institutions or trite tilts to “fairness”.

In his wartime reflections, Liberal party founder and former prime minister Robert Menzies said: “It is only that democracy which sees the ­superb spiritual value of the individual … which can really win a crusade against tyranny and force, and lead the way into a ­better world.”

Our values did not emerge from nowhere. In this country, as in every Western liberal democracy, they rest on a moral inheritance that is unmistakably Judaeo-Christian, articulated most clearly in the Decalogue. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not bear false witness. These are not sectarian curiosities or private articles of faith. They are the moral guardrails that make freedom and civilisation possible. You do not have to believe in God to live by them, but you cannot abandon them without consequence.

A society that refuses to name its moral foundations will not long be able to defend them, and a nation that cannot say what it stands for will discover, too late, what others are prepared to destroy.

We need to write a decalogue for democracy in Australia if it is to endure. As Menzies said, the problem of democracy began when democracy was achieved.

“If government were by a despot, amiable or vicious, we, as the governed, might well shrug our shoulders and resign ourselves to fate,” he said. “But when government of ourselves is by ourselves, we must bestir ourselves. If, then, there is tyranny, it is our own.”

Soon it will be Christmas. It is a time to celebrate the birth of a child, which is understandable in all faiths, and none, as an enduring symbol of hope.

But this Christmas will be different. Here it will carry the un­settling tone of T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi when he asks: “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?”

“There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were ­different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.”

We need a new democratic dispensation that finds a unity of purpose and a genuine sense of a shared national mission. It is a hard journey that begins with sacrifice. It will be found in the spirit of Bondi: valuing your community above all else.

As Menzies said, “If man is to be adjusted to man, if we are to live together in mutual amity and justice, if we are to be dignified without being proud or overbearing, we must be givers rather than receivers; we must be quick to discharge our duties and modest about our rights.”

Amen. Light a candle for ­Matilda and each of the fallen this Christmas to drive out the darkness. And let us pray that, somewhere, they are waltzing.

This article was first published in The Australian.

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Australia is a continent shaped by fire. Long before the first people arrived one tree, the eucalypt, rose to dominate the landscape and create the conditions in which fire became the signature of the land.

In his masterpiece Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Stephen Pyne calls the eucalypt the universal Australian: “Found virtually nowhere outside Australia but, within Australia, found virtually everywhere.”

Here there would emerge a powerful alliance, “a triumvirate that eucalyptus formed with fire and the genus Homo”.

During an era Pyne called “the Great Upheaval” the continent dried as aridity became the norm and humidity the exception. The eucalypt was well placed to thrive. It had deep roots and foraged widely. It could hoard nutrients and store them for up to a decade. When drought came it could tough it out. It could grow where other trees starved.

“But if the eucalypt animated the bush, fire animated the eucalyptus.”

The tree is a pyrophyte, built to endure fire. At its base there are swollen woody organs called lignotubers that act as protected reservoirs of living tissue. They store carbohydrates and nutrients and sit insulated beneath the soil, ready to drive new growth even if every branch above ground is scorched. Many eucalypts also shelter epicormic buds beneath their bark. This is the tree’s dormant memory of itself; when the bark burns, these buds drive fresh shoots up the trunk.

“The eucalypt forest became a fire forest,” Pyne writes. “The eucalyptus could capture nutrients released by fire. Bark was thick and tough and it shed as it burned like the ablation plates of a descending spacecraft. If branches were seared off new ones could sprout from beneath the protected layer. If the bole burned, new trunks could spring from beneath the buried lignotuber.

“For most eucalypts, fire was not a destroyer but a liberator.”

Then, 60,000 years ago, the first people came, carrying their own deep, symbiotic relationship with fire.

“The bush was perhaps too dominated by eucalyptus and eucalyptus perhaps too closely reliant on fire and, through fire, on Homo. The eucalypt was less a pyrophyte than a pyrophiliac: fire became a near addiction with its own peculiar perils.”

By the time the first Europeans arrived Pyne says, “the structure of the forest reflected tens of millennia of Aboriginal fire”.

Virtually the entire landscape of Australia was, as archaeologist Josephine Flood concluded, “an artefact created by Aborigines with their fire sticks”.

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When English explorer James Cook encountered Australia’s east coast, his logbook records: “At noon on Sunday, 13 May, 1770 we were between three and four leagues from the shore, the northernmost part of which bore from us N13W, and a point, or headland, on which we saw fires that produced a great quantity of smoke. To this Point I gave the name of Smokey Cape.”

Fire has been scorched into the records of Australian summers ever since and the most eloquent report on one dark chapter is the royal commission into the Victorian bushfires that burned from December 1938 to January 1939.

Coming at the end of a long drought, fire burned two million hectares and killed 71 people. The worst day came on January 13 and would be dubbed Black Friday.

On that day the commissioner, judge Leonard Stretton, wrote that “it appeared that the whole State was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps worked to make safe their families and belongings. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness.”

These fires, he concluded, were lit “by the hand of man”.

“It is not suggested that the fires of 1939 could have been prevented, but much could have been done to prevent their spread and attaining such destructive force and magnitude,” Stretton wrote. Had “preventive burning been employed … such spread would have been retarded and such destruction would have been avoided”.

Stretton worried that “townships have been allowed to be encroached upon by scrub” and urged that “fire prevention must be the paramount consideration of the forester”.

“There is only one basis on which that policy can safely rest, namely, the full recognition by each person or department who has dominion over the right to enter the forests of the paramount duty to safeguard the property and rights of others. No person or department can be allowed to use the forest in such a way as to create a state of danger for others.”

As bushfire season returns there is much talk of conditions worsening with climate change. That may well be true, but the deeper truth of Australia is that our safety has always begun with how we manage the land.

As Stretton concluded, fires cannot be prevented but their worst effects can be mitigated through vigilance, good planning and sound land management.

As Pyne notes, two truths govern fire: “The more fuel the more vigorous the fire; the more wind the more rapid its spread.” We cannot dictate the wind but we should at least understand, and try to limit, the threat posed by fuel load.

Mark Adams was a member of the expert panel that assisted the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. He is blunt in his assessment of where we need to focus our mitigation efforts.

“As every person of Aboriginal descent, gardener, bushwalker and boy scout knows, dead leaves on the floor of eucalypt forests are highly flammable, accumulate quickly, burn fiercely, and physics dictates they are the crux of the Australian bushfire problem,” Adams told this column.

Yet Adams says much of Australia’s fire policy now rests on a model of leaf litter born in the 1960s, inspired not by ecology but by nuclear physics. It assumes that litter accumulates in a neat curve until it reaches a stable limit, like radioactive decay.

Adams has shown this is dangerously wrong.

His fieldwork, and that of others around the world, shows no such balance exists. Litter varies wildly with every hectare, every season, species and fire history. It never settles into a predictable, uniform state.

But because the model is simple and convenient, it has become embedded in the software and hazard maps used to determine fuel loads and shape hazard-reduction programs. This leads to false assumptions about risk and leaves communities exposed.

Mark Adams was a member of the expert panel that assisted the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. He is blunt in his assessment of where we need to focus our mitigation efforts.

“As every person of Aboriginal descent, gardener, bushwalker and boy scout knows, dead leaves on the floor of eucalypt forests are highly flammable, accumulate quickly, burn fiercely, and physics dictates they are the crux of the Australian bushfire problem,” Adams told this column.

Yet Adams says much of Australia’s fire policy now rests on a model of leaf litter born in the 1960s, inspired not by ecology but by nuclear physics. It assumes that litter accumulates in a neat curve until it reaches a stable limit, like radioactive decay.

Adams has shown this is dangerously wrong.

His fieldwork, and that of others around the world, shows no such balance exists. Litter varies wildly with every hectare, every season, species and fire history. It never settles into a predictable, uniform state.

But because the model is simple and convenient, it has become embedded in the software and hazard maps used to determine fuel loads and shape hazard-reduction programs. This leads to false assumptions about risk and leaves communities exposed.

Adams says the job of being an ecological scientist has been changed by the availability of computing power. The modelling culture, which seems to infect every aspect of modern life, has displaced the hard, slow work of science. To measure litter properly takes days of work for a single site and decades to compile enough data for each forest type. To build a national picture takes hundreds of person-years. State land management agencies once did this work but abandoned it in the 1990s. Today, fuel loads are often assessed visually or simply inferred from ageing models.

The consequences are serious and the clearest example is in NSW. There the Rural Fire Service’s fuel reduction burning is built almost entirely on fuel-load maps based on the assumption that every forest type has a single litter limit, supposedly reached within 20 years and unchanged after that.

Adams says this is dangerously wrong. No eucalypt forest is uniform. Litter, biomass and species mix can vary tenfold over short distances, largely shaped by the irregular legacy of past fires. The idea that fine fuels stop changing after two decades is equally absurd. If the underlying maps are wrong, and grow more wrong with time, then they are a flimsy defence against fire.

Adams argues that Australian fire science is decades behind where it should be and sliding fast. Research funding structures reward conformity. Serious researchers are sidelined unless they align with the dominant ideas of agencies. Modelling dominates because it is cheap, rapid and publication-friendly. Observation, the bedrock of science, is neglected.

This is a land that burns. For as long as humans have walked it, it always has. Climate shapes the weather, but fuel shapes the fire. We neglect this abiding truth at our peril.

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“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.” — Milton Friedman

Having spent the last two weeks meeting with senior executives from Japanese and Korean energy giants, the message to Australia is simple: we are sleepwalking into oblivion.

Let us start with the facts. Japan and Korea have been responsible for over $1.1 trillion of export value in coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) over the past five decades, not to mention over $150 billion in royalties. Australia could be the net beneficiary of far superior outcomes for the coming fifty years, but we appear to be doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening. We are the poster child for economic suicide. Driven by ideology, it is naively assumed we can guilt-trip nations like Japan and Korea to follow our path to impoverishment.

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As the former NSW Senior Trade & Investment Commissioner, this is a message I have made patently clear to our federal and state governments for years. Whether coal reservations, arbitrary royalty hikes, or spirit whales killing LNG projects, I have voiced concerns that my dear North Asian friends view our relationship as having drifted away from the foundation of mutual understanding to one based on transaction. As someone who has lived a quarter century in the region, the bilateral relationship with both North Asian nations has never been worse. Forget the kumbaya you may hear from bilateral conferences. There are a herd of elephants in those rooms.

The recently updated Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) has just put another nail in the coffin of two of our most reliable partners. Put simply, the Act extols the virtues of making it even harder to invest in coal and LNG assets.

Several of these international investors have seen federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) Secretary Mike Kaiser’s LinkedIn post celebrating “securing prosperity.” For someone earning A$930,000 per annum, Mr Kaiser seems not to understand that to “secure prosperity” it is necessary to have satisfied customers. Using hashtags #proudsecretary and #publicserviceisaverb may be a positive way to praise the internal collective, but the private responses of energy giants more closely align with hashtag #Australiaisbecominguninvestable.

The Japanese and Koreans see the addition of ever more onerous regulatory tape as lessening investment attraction against jurisdictions that are cutting the cost of doing business.

Japan and Korea run energy out of their economic development agencies — namely the Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) and the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE) respectively. Environmental agencies to date have played little part. METI and MOTIE work hand in glove with industrial giants Toyota, Panasonic, Hyundai and Samsung to ensure they can secure cheap, reliable energy that will deliver considerable competitive advantages.

It is no surprise that Japan ranks first place in the Harvard University Economic Complexity Index (ECI). Australia ranks 105th out of 145 nations, behind Yemen, Uganda and Iran. In a decade’s time the index is expected to rank us 137th, presently occupied by Cameroon. The Fraser Research Institute conducts a global survey on mining investment attractiveness. No state makes the top 10, and NSW has fallen from 27th to 62nd over the past five years out of 82 jurisdictions, behind the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. Victoria is ranked 63rd.

When a nation lacks natural resources, necessity becomes the mother of invention. Energy security means national security. Despite being so abundantly self-sufficient, our governments appear ambivalent about killing off our second- and third-largest export markets and, with them, our domestic industry.

The unpalatable truth is that the Japanese and Koreans have admitted they have no issue with buying high-quality, cheaper Russian coal as a substitute. Once they switch to long-term, multi-decadal contracts, Australia will struggle to find like markets. It is not as though we have not been warned.

In recent years, Japanese companies have started to raise their frustrations publicly. This year, JERA (LNG) and Idemitsu (coal) made their frustrations about our increasingly difficult-to-navigate policy settings known. We are on notice. Australia needs to recognise our friends have shifted to DEFCON 2 on resources. There are unlikely to be further warnings.

Our government has lost its compass.

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Catholics of a certain era know there is a smorgasbord of sins that can stain the soul, but all fall into two broad categories: sins of omission and commission.

A sin of commission is what you do; a sin of omission is what you choose not to do: the truth withheld or the duty neglected. In some ways a sin of omission is more insidious because the fault hides in the gaps of a good life.

This week, two articles on what is pushing energy prices ever higher contained both kinds of sin.

The first article was by millionaire political dilettante Simon Holmes a Court in The Australian Financial Review; the second was by seasoned economist Rod Sims in The Australian. Both claim that wind and solar generators are innocent bystanders in power price hikes, despite the evidence written in your bill and the experience of every country attempting to gather most of their fuel from the heavens.

The Holmes a Court article says more about the author than the subject. He wasted most of his column inches in insults aimed at perceived energy transition heretics, including the 18-year-old founder of Nuclear for Australia, Will Shackel. One day that young man will cast a long shadow over the puerile taunts of the Luddite left.

Sims is a former chairman of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and his arguments deserve a serious response.

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His starting point is that in 2005 “Australia had some of the lowest electricity prices in the world”. This is beyond dispute and this huge competitive advantage on the east coast was built on black coal in Queensland and NSW and the dirt-cheap brown coal from Victoria.

Three things to remember before we continue.

First, it is the highest-cost generator running at any given moment that sets the wholesale spot price on the eastern national electricity market.

Second, while wind and solar do deliver nearly zero-cost power when they generate, they are off more often than they are on. They almost never set the wholesale price at times of peak demand because those moments come when the sun is rising or setting and the breeze is fading.

Third, wholesale costs make up only about one-third of your bill; you pay the total system cost, which includes network and retail charges and the permanent green subsidies.

The cheap coal-fired power we enjoyed in 2005 cost between $30 and $50 a megawatt hour. The Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest figures show that in the third quarter of this year, brown coal delivered electricity at $37/MWh and black coal at $81. But when demand rises, or the weather turns, the market is forced to higher-cost plant: hydro at about $111/MWh, gas at $167/MWh and batteries at $185/MWh. Ponder this and fear the future: the highest prices are being delivered by resources essential to turn a flukey wind and solar-dominant grid into an electricity system.

The story for households and business is simple. Electricity is only as cheap as the most expensive generator needed to keep the system standing. Coal still delivers the most consistent, on-demand, low-cost electricity on the grid. As it exits, the price will rise as higher-cost generators set the wholesale price more often.

The great sin of omission in this debate is the omission of reliability created by a weather-dependent grid, the one thing a power system cannot live without. Wind and solar leave massive supply gaps. Filling those gaps comes at immense cost. Sims unintentionally underscores this when he notes “the four most severe price events of the past seven years were driven by unplanned coal generation outages”. Those events were not a warning about keeping coal; they were a warning about losing it.

The sin of omission here is that those price shocks prove that wind and solar cannot step up to meet demand when a dispatchable unit fails. They will give whatever the weather delivers, not what we need.

Whether it was the Victorian heatwave in 2019, Queensland’s coal-fired plant explosion in 2021, the June 2022 market suspension or the NSW spikes in 2024, the pattern was identical. When the system came under stress the weather-dependent fleet routinely clocked off as everything that could be directed into supporting demand was working overtime.

What these events show is not that coal is unreliable but that without coal the system is exposed to violent price shocks whenever the weather turns against us. And that creates another problem. More volatility means more risk, and more risk pushes up the cost of hedging contracts in the forward energy markets. Those contracts are meant to contain power prices and their cost is rising. When volatile weather drives the power system, everyone ends up paying a premium simply to manage the uncertainty.

The costs of the system Sims champions go well beyond the cost of wholesale electricity. He notes that most people do not realise transmission makes up “around 45 per cent” of a household bill and points to big price increases between 2005 and 2015 coming with the “gold-plating” of the network.

“This self-induced problem saw Australia go from having relatively low to relatively high electricity costs by OECD standards,” he wrote. “Household prices doubled in real terms.”

But Sims then falls silent on what this means in a weather-dependent grid. Moving from dense, dependable coal to widely dispersed, unreliable wind and solar demands a far larger geographical footprint of generators linked to distant cities.

If gold-plating a compact, coal-centred grid doubled household bills, what happens when you apply the platinum coating of 10,000km of new high-voltage lines to service wind and solar farms scattered from sea to shining sea?

But wait, there is more. The market operator has warned recently that shutting coal-fired plants also means unplugging the system strength and stability services that come as a free by-product of their generation. Inside each unit is a huge steam-driven wheel spinning at 3000 revolutions a minute. That spinning mass sets the system’s heartbeat and acts as a giant shock absorber. Without that beat the electricity organism dies.

Wind and solar farms are limbs without a heart. They supply energy only when the weather delivers it and they cannot form a functioning 24/7 electricity system on their own. To make them behave like one requires an elaborate and costly life-support system of batteries, pumped hydro and gas peakers to cover massive, routine generation gaps, and synchronous condensers to give the system a heartbeat. Every piece of that machinery adds substantial cost.

This transition is not swapping one machine for another. It is creating an entirely new organism, one that is inherently less stable and less predictable than the coal-fired system it replaces. It demands new Renewable Energy Zones, new interconnectors, new substations and new system-strength equipment. All of it is fixed cost, added to your bill at a regulated rate of return and locked in for a quarter of a century.

And all of it must be backed up by a shadow system that runs on gas and diesel.

The astounding network costs of overbuilding, stabilising and providing 100 per cent backup for a weather-dependent grid are a design feature. This is why South Australia led the nation in high electricity prices. It is why crippling electricity bills go hand in glove with the weather-dependent grids in Britain, California and Germany.

Sims points to gas prices linked to international markets as the culprit in driving electricity costs from 2015 to 2025, because gas often sets the wholesale price when wind and solar clock off.

But omitted from this story is what drove the international gas price surge after Russia invaded Ukraine. Germany had built one of the world’s most weather-dependent grids and was shutting its nuclear plants. This system could not function physically or economically without pipelines linking it to cheap Russian gas.

When the pipeline was cut, German demand flooded into global liquefied natural gas markets, pushing prices to unprecedented highs as it scrambled to secure every available molecule.

To any sane observer, this should have been a real-world lesson in what not to do.

To have any hope of bringing down the wholesale price of electricity on Australia’s east coast in the system under construction we need cheap, abundant gas.

Given pipeline constraints from Queensland, getting cheaper gas would be best achieved by developing more domestic supply in NSW and Victoria. But the same people demanding a wind and solar-dominated grid have campaigned against the one fuel that could stabilise a weather-dependent system, halve the emissions of coal and, if abundant, lower the cost of power.

Instead, we now face the absurdity of paying international prices for LNG through import terminals in both states.

Near the end of Sims’s article there is a mortal sin of commission. “Firmed renewables are not weather-dependent,” Sims writes. “Batteries, pumped hydro and low-capital-cost gas peakers can fill any gaps.”

This is simply false. The fuel is the wind, the sun and water. All depend on the weather and all are susceptible to short and long-run droughts. Batteries are not a fuel source. The only technology in this mix that does not depend on the weather is the gas peaking plant. Alas, global demand for fast-start turbines has exploded as system operators twig to the fact that wind and solar-heavy grids cannot work without them and data centres soak up supply. Delivery times have blown out. If you can find one, buy it, because you will make a fortune on the first cold, still night.

Sims has no issue with lifting the ban on building nuclear power but says no one will invest in it because it is too expensive. So let us put that to the test. If the antinuclear brigade actually believes that argument, it has nothing to fear.

Nuclear is no more expensive than offshore wind and it actually delivers reliable power. And if cost is the worry, nothing touches pumped hydro. Snowy 2.0 began life in 2017 as a $2bn project. By 2020 it had climbed to $5.9bn. In 2023 the Albanese government reset the budget to about $12bn. Independent analysts warn the true cost could push well past $20bn. If that is the real-world benchmark for a weather-dependent grid backup project, then nuclear starts to look positively cheap.

To accept the rote slogan that wind and solar deliver cheap electricity demands you disconnect from the real world and move to model land. And how much faith should we put in models?

As this column revealed last week, the market operator’s 2040 system plan vastly underestimates a worst-case wind drought where generation never falls below 14 per cent of its capacity for eight consecutive days. Yet at the moment the model was released southern wind collapsed to half that level. If conditions similar to those in 2024 recur in 2040, the system AEMO has designed would risk blackouts across five states, so its next plan must account for the higher costs of surviving a far deeper wind drought.

This week the Australian Energy Market Commission released its latest Residential Electricity Price Trends report. In just 12 months the commission has gone from saying electricity prices would fall 13 per cent across the next decade to saying they will fall by about 5 per cent in the first five years, then rise 13 per cent in the second five, and end up higher overall.

That is not a minor correction; it is a complete rewrite of the story. What happens next year?

That is the problem with model land. When the assumptions are wrong, they are catastrophically wrong.

The true cost of re-engineering the grid is unquantifiable because there is no single public ledger that captures federal grants, state subsidies, certificate liabilities and off-budget financing vehicles; the bill is scattered across government budgets, network charges and consumer electricity bills. One way or another, you are paying for it.

But we do know this: despite endless pledges of cheap power, both federal and state governments have poured billions into electricity bill subsidies to artificially suppress the pain. And each time a subsidy is removed the price spikes towards its true cost.

The Albanese government now faces a choice: whether to ladle more cash on top of the $6.8bn already sunk into the Ponzi-like recycling of taxpayer dollars into retail electricity bills. If it does maintain the subsidy, it will underscore the government’s lack of confidence in its claim that more wind and solar add up to lower retail power costs.

If the government really believes what it preaches, it should lift the subsidy and let the price speak for itself. Show some faith. After all, the greatest sin is to deceive yourself.

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Keizoku wa chikara nari” (継続は力なり) “

Perseverance is strength” - Japanese proverb

Values are what define us.

Having lived in Japan for half of my life as a foreigner, the beauty of its monoculture is borne out almost every day. Ninety-seven percent of the population is Japanese. Everything functions. Crime is next to non-existent and even kids travel between kindergarten and home unescorted — by bus, train or on foot. They are taught to turn around after crossing the road and bow to drivers to show respect. It is the social fabric, felt across every walk of life, and typifies omotenashi (kindness).

Never was this more evident than when the Great East Japan Disaster struck in March 2011. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake caused a devastating tsunami that destroyed 380,000 homes, killed over 19,000 people, and exposed the human error that led to the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The tidal wave reached as far as six kilometres inland and the main island of Honshu shifted eight metres, forcing GPS maps to be recalibrated.

What happened after was truly remarkable. Never have a people pivoted in an instant. Japanese citizens rallied together and walked home for six or eight hours, knowing trains would be stopped for safety reasons. They lined up at convenience stores to buy one bottle of water to ensure their fellow citizens would not miss out. By the next day — contrary to biased media reports — supermarket shelves were full of fresh food, such is the supremacy of Japanese logistics.

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Had this happened almost anywhere else, it would have been everyone for themselves. Some would have been hawking bottles of water for ten times the price, never letting a good crisis go to waste. Others would be looting and taking advantage of law enforcers being preoccupied elsewhere.

Not Japan. People stopped going to restaurants or any form of entertainment for 49 days (seven days over seven weeks) in Buddhist tradition, to respect those who had lost their lives.

To cut a long story short, everyone was on a mission to rebuild their country. No quarters given.

Despite the declining population, newly appointed Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is pursuing a Japan First agenda and looking at migration as a quality-over-quantity equation. Flooding the country with migrants and risking dilution of its culture is simply not a pathway Japan wishes to go down.

By January 2026, her ministers are expected to produce a comprehensive suite of policies affecting foreigners — from visa categories and naturalisation to property ownership and social security.

PM Takaichi has launched a Ministerial Council on Accepting Foreign Nationals and Realising an Orderly Coexistence Society. It will be led by Minister Kimi Onoda, who has been tasked with coordinating policy on immigration control, foreign land purchases, and over-tourism.

The Japanese word for patience is gaman. The citizens have extremely high tolerance for most things, but this is now being tested beyond design limits.

Most recently, lawmaker Mizuho Umemura of the Sanseito Party — the Japanese One Nation equivalent — rejected the idea of expanding Muslim burial sites, noting that 99.9 percent of locals are cremated, and if those of Islamic faith wished to bury their dead they should return the remains to their country of origin and have them interred there.

Some might call this harsh, but Japan is a country that prides itself on preserving its heritage and sees that there is no quid pro quo on values. They are unapologetic. Unlike Australia, it is a country that believes equal treatment is not a form of discrimination.

Furthermore, Japan is standing its ground about its security situation. When a Chinese diplomat in Osaka threatened to behead PM Takaichi after her comments about Japan’s intention to intervene in any attack on Taiwan, the nation immediately rallied behind her. Sadly, it took the former Japanese Ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, to question whether we could truly be classified as mates, given our politicians said nothing in response.

This is why so much anxiety exists in Tokyo about our empty commitments to underwriting their energy security, which is vital to their national security. The latest Environmental Protection & Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act will only add to those concerns.

Does our government properly understand the threats in Japan’s regional theatre?

The Japanese Ministry of Defense (JMoD) stated in its 2024 Defense White Paper that scrambles to intercept Chinese military aircraft by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) surged from 96 in 2010 to 464 in 2024. While below the peak of 851 recorded in 2016, Japan’s security environment has dramatically changed.

Russia has also been a significant challenge for Japan. Scrambles by JASDF fighters intercepting Russian military aircraft approaching its airspace increased 36 percent to 237 in 2024. Of greater concern is the commencement of joint surveillance exercises with China since 2019.

All told, since 2010, the JMoD has recorded almost 12,000 scrambles to intercept Russian and Chinese military aircraft approaching its sovereign borders — more than twice a day.

At sea, the statistics are not much better. Announcements regarding Chinese combatant ships and aircraft carriers around Japan’s southwestern islands, as well as the Soya and Tsugaru Straits, jumped from three in 2010 to 52 in 2024. Last year, Chinese Coast Guard vessels were active in the contiguous waters around the Senkaku Islands, with activity reaching 355 days and the total number of vessels reaching 1,351 — both the highest ever. 2025 is already on course to exceed these levels, especially after the decapitation threat.

As a distraction from China’s clear internal malaise, provocations surrounding contested waters in the South China Sea are also being ramped up. China conducting live-fire exercises off our shores without warning are not the actions of a friend. When our government shows no strength in condemning this activity, why should we be surprised when they continue to do as they please?

Some might say Ambassador Yamagami’s remarks were at odds with the culture. On the contrary, we crossed the gaman line, and we should be grateful that good friends like this are still willing to call us out.

Australians must recognise that the weakness displayed by Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong continues to undermine our own geopolitical security and that of our allies. We keep feeding our friends to the dragon in the hope it burns us last.

It is high time we looked to Japan for its devotion to its core beliefs and discovered a renewed sense of purpose before it is too late. Time is ticking.

There is a hint of divine comedy in it all. At the very moment Australia’s power system operator delivered its plan for stress-testing a renewables-heavy grid against an extreme wind drought, the real weather delivered a doldrum that blew past its worst-case scenario.

It was as if Zeus had decided to remind the planners how little command mortals have over the winds, and how foolish it is to mistake a model for reality.

Yet we seem fated to live in a real world governed by people who prefer a fantasy. From projections of what carbon emissions will do to the weather, to models that show more wind and solar will cut electricity bills, our politicians cling to the neat certainty of imaginary numbers rather than deal with the unruly and unpredictable world outside.

But every now and then the real world intrudes, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Queensland-based Global Power Energy for the latest reality check.

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This specialist energy company did something that’s too often missing in the debate about the electricity transition: it didn’t model the weather, it measured it. And that scientific process proved, again, that observation trumps assumption.

The company showed that in the same month the Australian Energy Market Operator released its model for a worst-case future wind drought last year, real wind generation collapsed to barely half that level.

It exposed that, under those conditions, the operator’s plans for building resilience into a highly weather-dependent electricity system would fail, risking blackouts across the east coast.

The company’s chief executive, Greg Elkins, was once manager of generator connections for AEMO, responsible for assessing, approving and integrating every new power plant into the eastern grid. His company strongly supports the energy transition, but he believes it has a moral obligation to point out what is a critical gap in the system planning.

“If in God we trust and everyone else brings data, then using AEMO’s own methodology for how that data should be used shows a national security-sized risk,” Elkins told this column.

“There needs to be a national discussion on how to manage renewable fuel shortages in our climate changed future.”

The problem is buried in an appendix of the market operator’s Integrated System Plan, which plots the road map for how the eastern national electricity market will work as coal-fuelled power is largely replaced with generators that run on wind and sunshine.

The operator’s latest plan was released in June 2024 and it explicitly addresses the risk of long-run wind and solar droughts that most likely will fall in winter.

“The national electricity market must be resilient in its capability to provide energy in all weather conditions, including when there is minimal or no sunshine or wind for prolonged periods,” it says.

It then modelled a worst-case scenario by isolating “a historical severe dark and still weather event observed in June 2019” – where only 14 per cent of available wind capacity was producing power – and projecting that across eight days. The operator’s plan for the backup generation needed under these extreme conditions was built around that assumption.

But when the system plan was released on June 26, 2024, the weather in the real world was delivering a far deeper wind drought than its worst-case model assumed.

Global Power Energy mapped what happened to southern wind generation through autumn and winter last year. From mid-April the wind collapsed to about 6 to 11 per cent of generation capacity, with a run of seven consecutive days in that band. From May 12 to 16 , wind generation stayed deeply depressed, hovering around 10 per cent for five days straight. Between May 22 and 27, southern wind generation slumped into one of its deepest lulls, sitting between 4 and 8 per cent for six straight days.

From mid-June through mid-July, the wind repeatedly slumped below the market operator’s 14 per cent extreme line, with multiple dips under 10 per cent – including deep troughs around June 13, June 18 and June 21-22, along with days below 14 per cent, on July 1 and July 12-13 – before beginning to strengthen in the second half of the month.

The market operator’s modelling shows that during a multi-day wind drought the system drains its backup supplies in a predictable order.

Short-duration batteries run flat first because they can shift energy for only a few hours and can’t recharge once wind and solar collapse. After that, the grid leans on longer-duration storage such as pumped hydro and other multi-hour batteries, which begin to run down steadily over the first several days.

As those reserves fall, gas generators must run flat out, but winter gas demand means the pipeline system cannot always supply enough fuel – forcing stations to switch to diesel stored on site. AEMO assumes every new gas unit will carry 14 hours of diesel in tanks, and its modelling shows southern gas plants would burn the equivalent of 30,000 litres of diesel in a single extreme day to keep the lights on.

In short: even in the operator’s best-case scenario, a renewables-based grid survives long wind and solar droughts only by relying on gas and large volumes of diesel stored in tanks beside the generators. But the real-world data shows this plan is undercooked because the system it imagines could not withstand the weather we actually get. The stress test failed before it was even published.

Elkins says this exposes Australia to unacceptable risks. “The gas pipeline is not big enough to cover this shortfall,” he says. “Building three to four times more renewables to cover this gap does not seem logical, cost effective or practical. That’s just building more generation we won’t have any fuel for.” It also underlines the risks of building a weather-dependent grid when future weather cannot be modelled.

“AEMO, the entire energy sector, we all agree we need to design a future grid that is capable of managing renewable fuels short­ages,” Elkins says. “So what are we going to do? Hope we don’t have a fuel shortage worse than 2024 in a climate-changed 2040, 50 or 60? The science has been telling us for more than 25 years that we must plan for a changed climate.”

The irony is, from the moment humanity first burned wood, we have used fossil fuels to protect ourselves from the fury of the weather. Now, just as many warn the climate will become more extreme, we are rebuilding our entire power system on the whims of wind and sunshine.

It has the feel of an Icarus moment: a civilisation convinced it can defy gravity, only to discover the wax melts in real sunlight.

This article was first published in The Australian. Graphic: Global Power Energy.

Free speech is, once again, on trial in Australia. This time those who seek to protect us from dangerous ideas sit on the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy.

There was a telling moment at one of its hearings in Melbourne. The select committee’s deputy chairwoman, Labor senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah, was locked in a robust exchange over climate science with Institute of Public Affairs executive director Scott Hargreaves and his deputy, Daniel Wild.

Ananda-Rajah: “Yesterday we heard 99 per cent of scientists now believe. The thing about science is it is contested until it is not. When consensus is arrived at, it is not contested any more.”

Hargreaves: “I completely disagree with that conception of science.”

Ananda-Rajah: “So you would be the outlier.”

Wild: “That is astonishingly author­itarian.”

Ananda-Rajah: “Certainly it is; that is how science works. It is contested until it isn’t. There is such an overwhelming body of evidence.”

The senator is a medical doctor with a doctorate from the University of Melbourne, so she knows more about science than most. But she must have missed the day they taught the epistemology of science because the greatest minds in its philosophy and practice would disagree with her.

Karl Popper, one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science, argued that science progressed through falsification, not consensus.

Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, warned that “no amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”.

Richard Feynman, Nobel prize-winning physicist, insisted that science was “the belief in the ignorance of experts” and rested on relentless scepticism.

Thomas Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, showed that scientific consensus often collapses suddenly.

But even this cast of giants is not beyond question. I would not want the senator silenced or censured in arguing her ideas, no matter how much of an outlier she is from mainstream thinking.

The problem is she, and most of her committee, would extend no such courtesy to those who demur from their dogmas.

They seek to remove the right to dissent from groups such as the IPA, the Centre for Independent Studies, and a host of regional community groups who dare question the wisdom of destroying Australia’s environment and energy systems in the pretence of saving the planet. Most are not arguing the toss over humanity’s role in climate change. They are disputing the public policy consensus on the solution.

This committee is investigating how false or misleading information about climate and energy spreads, who is behind it and how it affects politics, the media and public debate. It stands on the shaky foundation of a certainty that there is an unambiguous consensus on every element of both.

It is part of a co-ordinated international effort. At the UN’s climate jamboree in Brazil, 13 nations signed a declaration warning of “the growing impact of disinformation, misinformation (and) denialism” and urging governments to build legal and regulatory frameworks to counter it.

This is just the opening gambit. In June, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, delivered a report calling on states to “defossilise knowledge” by criminalising what it defines as misinformation, misrepresentation and greenwashing by fossil fuel companies, as well as criminalising media and advertising firms that amplify it. It also wants bans on fossil fuel advertising, prohibitions on industry lobbying, and criminal sanctions for those deemed to obstruct climate action.

In the long tradition of the political maxim that says you should never hold an inquiry unless you know the result, the Senate committee chairman, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, declared his hand the day the Australian inquiry was born.

“For decades, vested interests have been waging a global war of disinformation against the clean energy transition, including environmental and climate legislation, and these vested interests have recently achieved significant political success in nations such as the US,” he said in a press release.

So, the conclusion has already been written and the committee’s majority is now just trawling for evidence to support its case.

Its agenda is clear: to rigidly define what can or cannot be discussed, and propose that laws be passed to silence dissent. Most of its members are also convinced that there is a vast right-wing conspiracy funded by dark offshore money that is fuelling community-level opposition to wind, solar and transmission projects in Australia.

Big coal, oil and gas are “astroturfing”, funding fake community groups to give the impression of resist­ance where none actually exists.

It is true that millions of dollars a year are pouring into the country through the Sunrise Project, but the committee majority is not interested in that because it supports their cause.

This cash is sprayed through a bewildering array of environmental groups, as long as they back the development of industrial wind and solar and oppose nuclear energy and all forms of fossil fuel. The result is a Faustian bargain that ensures there are few friends of the Earth in the NGO-industrial complex when the wilderness is bulldozed to grow a forest of turbines.

In full disclosure, I was at the Melbourne hearing to sit alongside one of the community groups that does defend the local environment, Rainforest Reserves Australia. I have reported its resistance to wind farms in north Queensland and formed a friendship with its vice-president, wildlife photographer and cartographer Steven Nowakowski.

Nowakowski has produced the only publicly available map of all existing and planned wind and solar farms in Australia. He was pilloried for exposing their massive footprint, despite it being meticulously documented. No government agency has produced anything similar. The day after the map went live Nowakowski’s computer was hacked and all of the thousands of data points that built it were stolen.

Rainforest Reserves is deeply dangerous to the industry-government-activist consensus because it is providing information and advice that is mobilising community opposition to projects Australia-wide. This is the kind of grassroots action the Greens once applauded.

When it was pointed out that Whish-Wilson opposed a wind farm in Tasmania, he argued that was different because he had been “campaigning relentlessly against fossil fuels – something I’ve not seen from Rainforest Reserves”.

Like all of us, Whish-Wilson lives in a world that is marinated in coal, oil and gas. There is not a single structure, appliance or object in the modern landscape that wasn’t made by, moved by, or built from hydrocarbons. So, alas, every member of the global opposition to fossil fuels is living a lie, and they can sustain their position only by lying to themselves.

In Australia the government’s blueprint for a wind-and-solar-dominated eastern grid to 2050, and beyond, demands enough gas to power 15 million homes. The system will not function without it. Yet Whish-Wilson, and many in Labor’s ranks, oppose gas.

Is it disinformation to point out that this is absurd? It is the definition of tyranny to be forced to agree with a fantasy.

The Senate is not engaged in an inquiry; it is running an inquisition. If politicians and bureaucrats get to determine what is true, then every Australian is one opinion away from being labelled a threat. It is hard to overstate how serious this is.

Now we are at war. This is no longer just a skirmish to keep the lights on, to protect our jobs, industry and our local environment. This is a battle for the democratic right to disagree. It is time to mobilise. Speak out. Support Rainforest Reserves Australia in any way you can.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”

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“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of losers.” — Socrates

After the Liberal Party was handed its worst defeat since the 1940s, the responses to the half-pregnant announcement to ditch net zero (but stay in the Paris Accord) are worth a deeper dive because they only serve to prove how empty the locker of informed debate has become.

This is not new — something we witnessed with the juvenile antics over the nuclear debate. Our politicians’ first instinct, instead of factual arguments, was to resort to three-eyed fish memes from The Simpsons. Low-resolution politics at its finest.

Prime Minister Albanese has called the Coalition a “clown show” for abandoning net zero. Treasurer Jim Chalmers resorted to his preferred “cookers and crackpots” narrative. Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen took to social media to say:

“There was once a time when the Liberal Party had values… these days they cater to the extremists in their party and coalition… today’s decision just shows how out of touch they are with modern Australia.”

The Liberal Party should take heart that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Teals are so concerned about its welfare. Oh, to be comforted with the sympathy of hypocrites.

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Cynicism aside, is the ad hominem a sign of the ALP lacking self-belief — despite the overwhelming majority it holds in the lower house — that it feels the need to give oxygen to the net zero announcement? If the ALP were supremely confident that its self-proclaimed mandate on the energy transition was working, the best course of action would be simply to watch the tinderbox Coalition burn to the ground from the other side of the river. Instead, they are watering its garden with gasoline when the global winds are clearly blowing ever stronger in the opposite direction.

The Gucci-green Teal independents are up in arms, too. Why? If the writing is on the wall for a party in such “disarray,” shouldn’t they be popping champagne corks instead of warning their political rivals that such a policy position will make the Liberals unelectable in city seats? If the Coalition has signed its own death warrant, why did Allegra Spender and Kate Chaney feel the need to pen an op-ed in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) issuing concerns about capital flight? If they had done their homework, they would have noted the disbandment of the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) and the record investment in new fossil-fuel projects made since by its former members — events that predate the Liberal decision to become the knuckle-dragging climate deniers they scorn.

Chris Bowen’s appointed climate expert, Climate Change Authority Chairman Matt Kean, streamed from the COP30 summit in Brazil:

“The rest of the world has not waved the white flag just because the White House has… we know also that there is a huge economic dividend for Australia by being part of this global effort… our renewable energy can deliver some of the cheapest energy anywhere in the world, underwriting a new era of prosperity… huge economic growth and great opportunities for our energy-intensive industries… being onshore and thriving in a low-carbon world… whether the deniers or delayers like it or not…”

He then then threw in a plug for COP31 in Adelaide.

Mr Kean may tell us that the meltdown “has nothing to do with renewables,” despite Tomago’s co-owners writing down their investment to zero because they cannot source cheap energy after long-term coal contracts expire. It is likely to join a growing chorus of domestic smelters thriving on government handouts to stay alive. If this is what a new era of prosperity looks like, perhaps they can consult our unemployed miners on how to dig a bottomless pit.

The Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, starkly contrasted Kean’s social-media enthusiasm when he said the quiet part out loud about the torturous death of net zero, in a vain attempt to guilt-trip the shrinking pool of the gullible:

“My message to negotiators at the end of week one at #COP30… I know you are tired. But once again I am asking you to push further… because, in the end, the Paris Agreement is yours to preserve and put to work. The issues that may not be priorities for you are clearly issues and priorities for other nations… if you do not align and find common ground on issues important to others, COP30 will not deliver outcomes that show Paris is working.”

The Paris Accord is clearly not working, given 90 per cent of countries missed the February 2025 deadline to submit their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). At COP30, 82 countries have yet to submit their 2035 NDC targets. Watch the hips, not the lips.

In the “Great Green Grift” on Powerlines, we highlighted the sheer hypocrisy of COP summits and how little these sanctimonious echo chambers have achieved over the past three decades, other than creating an explosion of rent-seekers and frequent-flyer miles. No wonder Boeing and Airbus are forecasting the commercial jet fleet to double over the next two decades.

If Australia wins COP31, then the $1 billion estimate to host it may prove conservative when organisers discover Adelaide Airport will need to significantly expand the aprons to park all the private jets of elitist lecturers. At least it will be a preferable outcome to Brazil felling 100,000 trees of protected Amazonian rainforest to build a four-lane, purpose-built 13-kilometre highway to ferry 50,000 delegates to and from the summit.

Of note, our local climate carpetbaggers and clean-energy councils have been extremely busy writing self-serving social-media posts lambasting the Liberals and highlighting the imperative of securing COP31. This indicates a greater concern for preserving the contents of their bank accounts than for saving the planet.

Perhaps these collectivist climate zealots should take time to read Powerlines’ excellent piece, The World We Model vs the World We Live In. The pro-renewables grifters would wince when forced to realise they are not entitled to their own facts. We are consuming fossil fuels at record levels and polluting at ever-increasing rates.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will no doubt shower us with endless posts from COP30 on the supposed scientific consensus, but the public is fast learning that the ruse is up over his disastrous energy policies, and repetition is not a substitute for evidence. We should remind ourselves that he is putting himself straight back on the same ropes that forced PM Albanese’s henchmen to keep him in the freezer before the last federal election.

Whether it be Solar-Share, the poor subsidising the wealthy to install home batteries, chickens coming home to roost on the Waratah Super Battery delay, or rural communities up in arms over transmission — energy prices keep heading higher. It is clear his Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is the architect of this policy-on-the-go strategy because it is constantly devising new ways to stem the bleeding from the gushing artery of the very non-existent energy statecraft it created and severed with these uncommercial thought bubbles.

Perhaps over a caipirinha cocktail between groupthink sessions, Mr Bowen can ask whether Mr Kean can deny that the delay of his signature policy in his former role will see that department deliver the first cab off the rank — the Central West Orana Renewable Energy Zone — by 2028, five years after he left office, and at a cost more than eight times the original estimate.

“Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as ‘science.’” — Thomas Sowell

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