Originally published by Nicholas Spandler of the North West Star
10.04.2026
Chris Bowen singing “it’s all ok we’ve got supplies till May” is cold comfort. May is just around the corner. Somehow we’re meant to be impressed that we’re so low on supplies we had to secure extra deliveries which we the taxpayer are paying for anyway. It also highlights the completely shallow nature of Labor’s energy policies over decades.
Plenty of people are now scratching their heads wondering why we shut refineries. They don’t understand how such an energy-rich country can be in this mess.
The answer is simple. Labor for too long have been promoting policies they thought would, and they did, win over younger pro-environment voters. Too lazy to sell the true story they went along with the populist policies that were labelled pro-environment.
People who use plastic every day don’t give a damn that they label petroleum Mr Bad Guy. These so called environmentalists masquerade as being anti petroleum but use all the by-products they like every day. It’s not about facts, it’s about public virtue signalling. Private hypocrisy however reigns supreme.
Remember when it was all about global warming? Yes, it had to shift to being climate change. Warming wasn’t living up to the dire predictions. One of the most ridiculous, among others from Paul Ehrlich, was that by 1980 100 to 200 million people would be starving. If you want to amuse yourself reading these ludicrous predictions you can search the net. Except it’s not that funny.
These wacky predictions get given plenty of air time. It frightens the hell out of young people who understandably, in one way, call for climate action to avoid these impending disasters. Except they’re not impending at all. So we end up with stupid policies to placate the fears created in young people by fearmongers.
Climate change was much easier to get accepted because the climate has in fact been changing for millennia. Climate change is not in dispute. What is a focus of disagreement is the degree to which man’s activities contribute to that change today through carbon dioxide emissions. You often hear the phrase “listen to the science”. It’s a fundamentally stupid thing to say because science is all about finding out more – in other words it is always about change. It just never sits still. Highly recommended reading is a book entitled Unsettled? by Steven E. Koonin, an under-secretary for Science, US Department of Energy in the Obama administration. He doesn’t buy the man-made panic policy response.
One of the reasons we’re in this position is because of people who make a career by cruising from climate conference to climate conference. They come up with ideas that sound good and flagellate themselves into euphoria. It’s the conference kool-aid that does it. These guys are of course largely anonymous to voters. They are answerable to no one. There are no consequences for them getting it wrong. No. They just high five their way to the post conference celebration of yet another agreement of a target, another communique. It’s like the net-zero 2050 target. Would you believe the promise of a tax cut in 2035? No. So 2050 is just ridiculous window dressing.
More to the point is the failure to assess the consequences of the actions you take to get there. How many of these conference junkies will lose their livelihoods because of some of the stupid policies? You know the answer.
The cruising to conference is at thousands of feet above the earth … in jets spewing out emissions like there was no tomorrow. You’ve heard it before: We don’t need “sound good” policies. We need policies that are “good and sound”. Our emissions are almost negligible. High per capita yes. But not as a whole. That’s no reason not to do sensible things about emissions. Sensible is the key word.
Shutting refineries can now be seen for the stupidity it embodied.
What’s going on with our huge resources of natural gas? We will happily sell it. But you can’t buy a new gas oven in Victoria. Seriously. You either have a deep commitment or you don’t. Saying to other countries you can use it, we will happily make money selling it to you … but we will not use it because we think it’s bad for the environment only makes us look deeply shallow in a policy sense.
It reminds me of the story of the Italian hotel. A prospective customer was anxious about the price of the room. He was told if he left a 200-euro deposit he could inspect the room. So he did just that. As he got in the lift to go up to the room the clerk took the money and rushed over to apologetically pay the butcher a late payment. The butcher grabbed the money and ran across the street to pay the prostitute to whom he was in arrears. She rushed to the hotel, whacked the money into the clerks hand and said she should have paid for the rooms earlier. It’s the same 200 euros on the counter. The tourist has seen his room, the butcher and the prostitute have both been paid … but nothing has changed.
Our so called dirty energy travels around the world just like the 200 euros. Nothing changes because we refuse to use the energy we sell, it gets used anyway. Our policies are stupid window dressing for Labor. And they harm millions of Australians. They cost jobs and put up prices.
Do you hear our government telling the big emitters to stop spewing out emissions? No. If we do it’s so sotto voce no one can hear it. And in any event how could we when we sell the stuff? Our policies are living hypocrisy.
Perhaps the clearest stupidity centres on uranium. We won’t use it. In the long term it’s cheap. It’s very clean and very efficient. Under Labor we may be the last to get on the uranium bus. Just look at our friends and trading partners who’ve been riding it for decades. Canada, France, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, the US, the UK, Japan and more. Do we really think these countries are stupid?
We don’t use it because some think it unsafe. But hey, we will toss our principles and scruples out the window and sell it to others. They can poison themselves for all we care. Actually, it’s us that are missing out.
Everywhere you turn it seems we have a policy that allows, even encourages, the use of fossil fuels overseas but seeks to limit our use at home. And all that hypocrisy for an impact on carbon dioxide emissions that’s negligible. Hypocrisy and stupidity are not a great combination.
We tend to fancy ourselves as pretty straight-up, sensible, down-to-earth people. We tell it like it is. Not too much fancy talk. All this hypocrisy will catch up with the proponents of these stupid policies. My prediction is sooner rather than later.
Amanda Vanstone is a former senator for South Australia, a former Howard government minister, and a former ambassador to Italy. She writes fortnightly for ACM.