Originally published by Andrew Bolt of Herald Sun
01.04.2026
Australia is in this fuel crisis because of the kind of astonishing idiocy we’re still hearing from politicians.
Take chief menace Chris Bowen, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, who babbled on Tuesday how Iran’s blockade of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz should make us turn to solar power, because “solar energy cannot be interrupted by any international dispute”.
Housing Minister Claire O’Neil echoed him on Wednesday: “There isn’t a global power that can stop us from using the sun and wind that we’ve been gifted.”
And of course the Greens trumpeted the same nonsense. Leader Larissa Waters rabbited how “the sun and the wind don’t go through the Strait of Hormuz – the time for reliable, clean, cheap renewable energy is now.”
Really? That’s the message?
Fact: what this crisis proves is the very opposite. Without enough fossil fuels we’re dead. Farmers can’t plant crops. Planes can’t fly. Mines can’t run. Cars won’t go.
We can’t pour sunshine into the fuel tank of a tractor. We can’t pump wind into a prime mover. We can’t stick a Bowen battery on a Qantas 747.
Bowen can hand out all his batteries but they won’t change this basic fact: no fossil fuels means no economy. Not when 91 per cent of the primary energy we use comes from coal, wind and oil, despite decades of massive subsidies for renewables.
And our tragedy is that these fossil fuels are right under our feet, but Labor and the Greens think they’re too evil to use for much longer.
But let’s borrow the mantra of Bowen, O’Neil and Waters.
No international dispute could interrupt oil operations and refining on Australian soil. There isn’t a global power than can stop us using Australian fossil fuels for Australians. Australian oil and gas does not go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Just wishing and dreaming of green energy won’t turn the engines of Australia.
I wouldn’t need to say something so bleeding obvious if we didn’t have a government stuffed with ministers whose background is in spin and process – lawyers, party officials, former union heavies and activists especially – but not one who has worked as an engineer or scientist. There’s not one person in high office whose career depended on actually making machines work.
This is the bottom line of this crisis. We’re had the age of spinners and dreamers. Now we need a new age of engineers.