This Prime Minister’s leading Libs to oblivion

MALCOLM

Turnbull won’t just lose the next election. He’s now destroying the Liberals so completely they will lose the following election as well.

If Liberal MPs don’t sack this Prime Minister soon they can kiss their party goodbye.

Turnbull last month gave them a Labor- lite Budget — record spending, record debt and higher taxes. Now he wants a Labor- lite global warming policy, too — with a record emissions target and record electricity prices.

What’s the point of a Liberal party that just delivers disastrous Labor policies? This guarantees the Liberals will not simply lose the next election. They will lose it with dishonour — with a legacy of failure impossible to defend.

Do not believe anything Turnbull says about this global warming scheme he is now trying to foist on Liberal MPs, who on Tuesday finally started to rebel in a heated party meeting lasting more than three hours.

True, Turnbull says he hasn’t yet made up his mind about supporting last week’s report on the electricity system by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.

He says he is listening to the objections raised so far by the more than 20 MPs who are rightly scared that Finkel’s plans to ramp up the renewable energy target will inevitably send electricity bills soaring and make the rest of the country look like South Australia.

But it’s too late. Just by hypeing Finkel’s report Turnbull has surrendered the argument on global warming to Labor.

Any retreat now will be seen as a compromise Turnbull had to make on the global warming beliefs he’s advertised even since he was sacked as Opposition Leader in 2009 for backing a Labor carbon tax, declaring: “I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am.”

Even if Turnbull does backtrack, Labor will attack him for believing in nothing. It will rightly say he’s again selling policies he doesn’t believe in, just like he does on same- sex marriage, the republic and his new chest- beating nationalism. And conservatives know they can’t trust him. Just look at this Finkel plan he’s now considering. Turnbull used to claim that Labor’s promise to force us by 2030 to take 50 per cent of our electricity from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar, would “shatter Australian businesses, destroy jobs, hurt households”.

Yet he’s now flogging a Finkel report that says the Liberals’ own 2030 target should jump from 26 per cent to 42. Yes, Turnbull wants you to believe Labor’s target spells disaster but Finkel’s own slightly lower target is salvation — saving us $ 90 a year on our power bills. Only an idiot would believe it. Finkel’s plan requires an astonishing investment of $ 900 billion in wind farms, solar, batteries and the rest to replace our cheap coalfired power plants. Yet somehow you’ll pay less?

Finkel also assumes we’ll reach his 42 per cent target of renewable energy in part by more than quadrupling rooftop solar panels.

But wait. Why would millions more Australians fork out thousands for more solar panels? The only reason: because their power bills had in fact kept rising, not falling, making the panels a better buy.

Maddest of all, though, is that both Finkel and Turnbull assume that we need to wreck our cheap and reliable electricity system to save the planet from man- made global warming. The truth is that nothing we do makes a difference to world temperatures. We are too small.

In fact, this Finkel report is a fake fix to a fake catastrophe. As William Kininmonth, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, said this week, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted the planet to heat by up to 1.6 degrees from 1980.

But satellite monitoring shows just 0.3 degrees of warming. Meanwhile we’ve had record crops, fewer cyclones and none of those predicted dam- draining super- droughts.

Is this why Liberal supporters and donors back the party – to produce not just record debts and spending, but schemes that will just make the poor too scared to turn on the heating?

While Turnbull is there, there’s no point to the Liberal Party. The Liberals must get rid of Turnbull or he’ll get rid of them.