Sounds specious …
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I have no claim to being an economist, but it ■■■■■ me that we so consistantly fail at turning these sorts of outcomes into opportunities. Maybe it’s the way I’ve been taught to think in my time in the Army but when something falls through I try to think “what can we do to make the best of this situation?”. I certainly didn’t want the car industry to fail (although I suspect some of that was a self-inflicted wound from within the industry itself), but we basically dropped a high-tech, well-developed industry with skilled workers and never thought “how can we take advantage of this situation?”, “how can we turn this negative into a national positive?”. If that means the government has to make some bold investment choices to get the new ball rolling, then that is what should happen. But instead we get pork-barrelling in certain electorates and then a decade of finger-pointing back and forth between political parties, complete with campaign ads telling us how badly they each farked up when none of them actually did anything about it. There are so many facets of the renewable energy industry that we should be world-leaders in, but the gubment has instead refused to invest money into it, stripped the CSIRO of capability and funding, and taken every possible opportunity to tell us that “coal is great, we need more!” and “renewables will give you cancer!”. Talk about failure of governance. But hey, I’m sure Aunt Gina and Uncle Rupert are pretty happy, so why rock the boat?
Geelong has the Ford production-line factory sitting idle, but the gubment decided to build the new armoured vehicles for the Army in Queensland. Is it possible they could look beyond the next election just once in a while?
And I don’t really like comparing the car industry to coal-fired power plants, as we should be actively trying to replace the coal industry (note: replace, not remove!), but we just flat-out dropped the car industry.
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We should have turned our attention to EV. Carve a niche out for ourselves.
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New electric or hybrid Commodore probably would’ve seen more tarmac than the Opel they replaced it with. Reckon I’ve seen two in the wild.
We now have some Manufacturers who are World Leaders in Wind Turbines manufacture, and have massive export businesses, and they struggled to get into the World Markets due to little or no Government support. They persisted and now are really kicking goals. Good Government could do so much more.
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This is pretty farken exciting.
Just flew in from the Sunny Coast.
WTF temperature do you call this?
Are the new Essendon beanies on sale yet?
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Yeah, but coal can store energy for millions of years… checkmate renewablesists!
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Hmmm, how do you plug your PC into a lump of coal and get it to work ?
The same way climate change accepterists plug their PC into the sun or wind turbines! Simples!
Climate Change sounds like a lot of hot air to me. 
Well I have solar panel that power my PC. I tried a lump of coal but it made the screen dirty.
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WTF is with these nut jobs?
Craig Kelly MP mocks climate change ‘exaggeration’ in presentation to Liberal party members
Fossil fuels make us ‘safe from’ climate change, says MP who is working with Tony Abbott to move Liberals to the right
Coral bleaching has been happening for centuries, threats of rising sea levels to countries such as the Maldives and Tuvalu are greatly exaggerated and temperature gains have been grossly exaggerated by scientists.
These are the assessments of the member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, who is part of a Tony Abbott-led speaking campaign to pull the Liberal party back from the centre.
The Guardian has obtained a tape of a presentation by Kelly at the right-aligned Mosman branch of the Liberal party in September that outlines in detail his climate scepticism.
Abbott himself was meant to be the star billing but was unable to attend, leaving Kelly and New South Wales senator Jim Molan to occupy centre stage, after running a gauntlet of about 100 demonstrators who turned up to protestagainst the Liberal party’s lack of policy on climate change.
Kelly’s PowerPoint presentation veered between mocking “the lefties” and arguing that there was no need to tackle climate change because its impact had been grossly overblown.
“Here we are in Paris, France,” he said of his first slide. “A whole lot of lefties here celebrating the Paris agreement, the achievement of the day.”
Kelly then said the debate about global warming was about trying to get “better weather, and that people wanted to dial down the CO2 ■■■■.
“It’s CO2 we are talking about: it’s what turns water into soda water, its what makes chardonnay into champagne,” he said derisively, before claiming that the consensus view among the world’s scientists that the planet was warming was wrong.
Kelly said that “30 years ago, the temperature was the same globally about where it was today” – even though the Bureau of Meteorology and other international agencies estimate the planet has already warmed more than 1 degree in the past century.
“The reality is we live in a time where our generation has never ever been as safe from the climate because of fossil fuels, concrete and steel,” Kelly said. “The climate was always dangerous. We didn’t make it dangerous.”
He also claimed “coral bleaching was a centuries-old problem, science tells us” and that warnings about the polar icecaps were not borne out. While he acknowledged there had been some shrinking in the Arctic, he said this year the north-west passage had been closed owing to ice.
Kelly, who was a furniture salesman before he entered parliament, also cited a study that said Tuvalu was growing not sinking. The peer-reviewed study shows the island’s land mass has grown owing to sedimention and reef growth, but Kelly ignored part of the same study that said climate change remained the single biggest threat to the low-lying Pacific islands and their future.
As for Australia’s Paris target, Kelly said it was “the most onerous of any nation in the world because of our high rates of population growth”, and the Labor party planned to wreck the economy with its proposal to set a target of 45% reduction by 2030.
The chief scientist, Alan Finkel, had said Australia on its own could not change the world’s climate, Kelly said.
Now that “the US was out” of the Paris agreement, and “China and India weren’t doing anything”, Australia had “an escape clause” and it should use it.
I thought China and India were reducing the amount of coal fired power stations.
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It’s called being paid, or looking to be paid a ■■■■ tonne of money by fossil fuel companies
Fark these guys.
Yep. With a huge lump of Coal, … or a very, very big Cuke.
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I get my Dad.
There’s no talking to him, but ■■■■■■ hell I’m disappointed in Mum.
For someone to go through the whole six o’clock swill, ladies lounge, no cheque account if you’re married, expected to resign if you’re married bullshit and Still vote for this bunch of throwbacks…jfc…
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