PAINFUL PRICE OF UTOPIAN DESIGNS

SORRY I’m late back from my holidays, but I learned a painful lesson no conservative should need.

“Let’s just trim that banksia,” I said. Who needs professionals? Up a ladder, cut cut cut. View expanded, money saved. Easy.

So there I was on the very top of an extension ladder when I leaned back too much.

“This is serious,” I thought, and it was. Five broken bones, and medical bills high enough to pay for the whole tree to be ripped out twice over.

The lesson: Every plan is perfect, but reality never is.

That’s why I’ve never trusted socialists who plan to destroy what works on a promise to build something more perfect on the ruins. You know, like Cuba.

In fact, we’ve seen the same idiocy right here, I mused in my hospital bed, high on Endone.

A decade ago, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd — also out of his tree — claimed global warming could end civilisation.

But fear not: He would slash our emissions by totally restructuring our electricity supplies. Easy, and it would cost just “$1 per person per year”.

Was Rudd dreaming on Endone, too? Check your monster power bills now.

But who says sorry? It is a sickness of our times that the price of our most fashionable dreams is now waved away as a worry of the wicked.

Take Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who sold us his own warmist plan for a “pumped hydro” scheme to turn a dam into a giant battery.

It would cost only $2 billion, he said last year. A preliminary study now warns it would cost three times that, but who cares? Turnbull remains keen.

When our leaders act like this, why expect better from the rabble?

On Australia Day, Tarneen Onus-Williams, a taxpayerfunded activist identifying as Aboriginal, told a rally: “F--Australia, hope it burns to the ground” — a sentiment endorsed in full by her Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance.

Talk about being up a tree without a twig to cling to. Nowhere did Onus-Williams or WAR explain what would happen once they’d got to “abolish Australia”, this “white supremacist” nation.

They simply burble that all will be magically replaced by “safety and prosperity”.

Don’t bother explaining how or weighing the cost.

Just like my own plan, not to uproot a country but just to prune a tree.