Coal faces stacked deck

AS we prepare for Maroon revenge in Sydney tonight, let’s indulge ourselves for a moment and imagine an Origin match in Townsville. Say what? Here in Townsville?! Well, yes. And it’s not as fanciful as you’d think. This is how it could happen. Our new CBD stadium opens in 2020, the same year ANZ Stadium in Sydney is being overhauled.

So it’s possible Queensland could snare an extra game that year.

Capacity at our ground will be 25,000 — roughly half that of Suncorp in Brisbane. But that can be stretched temporarily to 30,000 for the big game.

So the ticket sales would be 20,000 short. At an average $ 100 a seat, that’s $ 2 million.

We could make up the shortfall with a cash injection from state and local governments.

What better way to invest our tourism marketing budget at a state and regional level than to cross- subsidise this clash.

Perhaps the State Government and Townsville City Council could come up with a co- funding formula.

It would be an extraordinary coup for this city that would deliver many multiples of that $ 2 million outlay in visitation and city brand promotion.

Let’s not forget the State Government threw in cash to bring the Horn- Pacquiao bout to Brisbane.

Moreover, the NRL has pledged to deliver quality content to our new stadium as part of its $ 10 million contribution to the project.

So far, it has been suggested this could include an Indigenous- All Stars game and perhaps an Anzac Test. But staging Origin here in Townsville in 2020 would generate enormous interest across the country.

As for Townsville, it would, in the vernacular of our younger citizens, go off.

Excitement here would begin to build weeks ahead of the match.

Just imagine the scenes along Flinders St and Palmer St in the lead- up. It would be a festival of rugby league for the entire week.

It’s a long shot, but there is absolutely no harm in our city having a crack at Origin.

This week that dream gathered a little momentum with support from Cowboys’ founding father and North Queensland league legend Kerry Boustead, fellow Origin and Test great Wendell Sailor and Treasurer Curtis Pitt. That followed enthusiastic backing from Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk earlier this year.

Who knows? They said we’d never get a stadium, and look what happened. PHILLIP Corey recently wrote that every galah in the pet shop wants to join the energy expert panel.

This rampant disease has obviously spread among the Queensland Cabinet with Townsville’s Minister Assisting ( not) the Premier, our own Mundingburra’s ALP Coralee O’Rourke giving her two bob’s worth.

Brace yourself for this: That the building of a coal- fired power station would increase the costs of electricity price, without any formulaic figures to underpin this breathtaking falsehood. But one should never be surprised, given that her entire Cabinet, including her Minister for Energy, Mark Bailey, is waxing lyrical about the impending drop in energy prices, which in logical economic thinking, is just not attainable.

The Finkel Report handed to the Turnbull Government is, despite denials by the clean energy hustlers, skewed in favour of renewables, especially wind/ solar as set out in Bloomberg’s financial forecasting where by the year 2040, 76 per cent of the $ 88 billion available to investors will be allocated to renewable technologies.

The Finkel Report cutely, wit- tingly or unwittingly, does not factor in the massively expensive costs of back- up battery storage now required. For a lot of this time the back- up plants will lie there idle requiring massive subsidies to be gouged once again from you, the paying customer.

More so, the Finkel Report is intent on raising emission targets rather than dealing with the fundamental economics of sustain- able job generation – cheap, reliable, secure energy for both residential and businesses.

Without a cheap energy guarantee, businesses cannot invest with certainty to drive the sustainable real jobs that clean coal- fired base load power generation can provide right now.

As a bonus, non- green alternatives, ultra- supercritical coal- fired power plants would not require the massive subsidised ( you pay, yet again) investment in back up.

There is no doubt that many assumptions in Finkel’s report indicate that with carbon capture and storage as a prerequisite to coalfired clean energy financial investment leads one to the only conclusion that the odds are stacked against coal.

It’s a favourable “wink and nudge” to clean energy technologies costs as preferred option.

If the debate was hand- onheart stuff, then the nuclear option would be canvassed candidly ... it is not. The anti- coal activism megaphoned from the Greens, Labor, Liberals and inner- city urban terrorists don’t give a toss about the economy in the North.

Economics will clearly tell you coal baseload power in our North will result immediately in considerable energy cost savings.

Mundingburra’s ALP’s Coralee O’Rourke displays both an abysmal economic ignorance and a lack of empathy for those reeling from the impact of ever- increasing power bills.

Aren’t we set to receive another one in July, Ms O’Rourke? PETER J SMITH,

Rosslea.