Albo aping Joh with a fairyland energy plan
Long before I was born, the premier of my state, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, appeared in the Queensland capital, Brisbane, to propose the merits of hydrogen – a brand new fuel heralding a sunny meadow of opportunity.
As I look down the barrel of my 40s, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in Brisbane this week, also proposed a brand new fuel heralding a sunny meadow of opportunity.
Both eminent souls looked earnestly at the cameras and told us this emerging energy source, hydrogen power, would save the environment and create jobs for Queenslanders.
Albanese seemed to take his Future Made in Australia fund speech straight from the Country Party leader’s playbook, with spookily similar assertions, in a speech recorded for prosperity in the state’s Hansard.
While Sir Joh claimed, in 1979, that the hydrogen concept “would mean that every country could now have a fuel source in unlimited quantities”, Albo claimed hydrogen could make “Australia a renewable energy superpower”.
While Sir Joh claimed the technology would “alleviate the payment of funds of perhaps many thousands of millions of dollars for overseas sources of energy”, Albo said it was “building the infrastructure and clean energy to power new growth” and “catalysing new investment”.
Sir Joh said the technology could “overcome the urgency of prospective drilling in waters adjacent to the Barrier Reef”, while Albo said the investment was “safeguarding the extraordinary natural treasures of the Great Barrier Reef”.
Sir Joh admitted that he spent hours talking to company heads “in an endeavour to have the new industry centred in Queensland” – as did Albo.
The thought that a socialist prime minister would be channelling Sir Joh is, in itself, a remarkable thing.
We all believed Albo was mentored by Tom Uren when, apparently, the whole time, he has secretly been a student of the Country Party great. They could have shared a speech writer.
Hydrogen is continually regurgitated as a grand elixir of energy that will solve all our nation’s environmental and economic needs, but what remains stubbornly the same is the monumental cost to produce it.
While Sir Joh was guilty of spruiking a fairyland fuel source that worked so well on paper, the decades that followed heralded, instead of sunny meadows, the brutal truth.
At least Sir Joh didn’t kill off Australia’s existing industry to make it work. Albo will be bringing in a Bill to spend taxpayers’ millions on “emerging” powers such as hydrogen while trashing what is already made in Australia: bricks and steel, gas and coal, meat and wool, steak and seafood, fruit and veg, timber, and rich resources in the dirt.
Even Albo appears to know the risk, couching his language with predictive phrases, with companies “looking at” employing people, and even nodding to potential failure before he has signed a cheque.
In other words, while the hydro grifters got in Sir Joh’s head in 1979, they are in our wallet and in Albo’s pocket today. It has never been taken up because it has never been affordable. They got rhetoric from Joh but will get revenue from Albo.
You have to hand it to them, they can pick a mug from a mile away. The Albanese government has a bad habit of coming up with unaffordable plans.
■ Exhibit one: Intermittent power with unknown secret agreements in taxpayer subsidies, solar and swindle factories, and transmission lines.
■ Exhibit two: New electric vehicles that few can afford to buy subsidised new and few wish to buy secondhand.
■ Exhibit three: Green hydrogen. The difference is that when Sir Joh advocated hydrogen, he did not propose eliminating coal or killing petrol. Yet the Albanese government is forcing us down a net-zero road to a dead end.
This proposal will come to the same end as Sir Joh’s. The question is how many excuses will be given and how many taxpayer dollars will be squandered on the way.