The poor will be left powerless

IT’S 100 years ago next month that Lenin forced communism on to Russia, sending armed thugs to storm the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

Yet even though he, Stalin, Mao and Castro then put their people in chains and kept them poor, faith in Big Government is miraculously on the rise again in Australia.

See, green is the new red. Global warming is the excuse that has brought back the commissars who love ordering people how to live, even down to the things they make and the prices they charge.

All big parties share the blame. Even the Turnbull Government forces us with its renewable energy targets to use more electricity from the wind and solar plants it subsidises.

True, this green power is expensive, unreliable and driving cheap coal-fired power stations out of business, leaving us dangerously short of electricity for summer.

But the government now has an equally crazy $30 million scheme to fix that, too: it will bribe Australians with movie tickets and $25 vouchers to turn off their electricity when they most need it — like during a heatwave, when a million air conditioners are switched on.

That’s a bribe only the poor will take. Would Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull really turn off the switches at his Point Piper mansion for two free tickets to Hoyts?

And with power prices so high, the very poor would have little real choice. Conclusion: the poor will sweat so the rich may have air con.

But it was actually Greens leader Richard Di Natale who last week took out the Lenin Prize for useful idiocy. Asked on the ABC about our soaring gas prices, Di Natale suggested a solution once found in a Soviet Five Year Plan: “The simple way of dealing with the problem ... is government has got to step in and regulate prices.”

Same deal with electricity prices, which Greens MP Adam Bandt has urged be “capped”.

“Governments absolutely need to step in,” insisted Di Natale.

“They can regulate prices. We’ve got a plan … We build battery storage technology. We get more solar and wind in the system …

“It’s good for prices, it’s good for jobs and most of all, it’s good for the planet.”

All lies, of course. Look at South Australia: the state with the most wind power has the world’s most expensive electricity and Australia’s worst unemployment.

And it’s all for nothing, because our emissions are just too tiny.

As Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has admitted, even if Australia ended all emissions from cars, power stations, factories and cows, the difference to the climate would be “virtually nothing”. But the difference to the economy would be devastating.

To Commissar Di Natale, it all sounds simple: just force business to charge less for the product they risked a fortune to find, extract, market and transport. But which business would risk a dollar to find more gas if they were then forced to charge prices so low that they’d lose their shirts?

Already, Labor and the Greens have frightened off investment in new coal-fired power stations or even in big upgrades to existing ones, which is why we now face summer blackouts.

That’s dragged even the Turnbull Government into considering whether to itself finance a new coalfired plant, just as Lenin would have done and as Nationals MPs now demand.

But Labor last Saturday proposed its own Big Government fix. In a speech in South Australia, federal leader Bill Shorten actually praised the state government for having “climate-proofed” the electricity supply.

Never mind that it’s left the state with power prices so high that businesses have been driven broke.

Shorten on Saturday promised South Australia relief, but not by dropping his own lunatic promise to force all Australia by 2030 to take 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy.

No, he simply promised more subsidies —a $1 billion Australian Manufacturing Future Fund to hand out cheap business loans no bank would risk.

Shorten said this new fund for manufacturers would be like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which hands out cheap government loans for the kind of renewable energy schemes that have helped to destroy our electricity system.

The circle is complete: Labor in effect promises to subsidise business to survive the electricity crisis caused by subsidising green power, while the Liberals subsidise the poor not to use it at all. Meanwhile, we all pay. And all for nothing.

Only Big Government could cause such a dog-chases-tail circus. We didn’t learn from Lenin, did we?