True Colours

It hasn’t taken long for the Greens and Teals to reveal their true colours. In the past week Zali Stegall has entertained us with her idea of how we can manage Australia’s teetering power grid without resorting to coal, gas or nuclear power.

“We can replace baseload power by combining natural climate variability between zones with storage. A REST will encourage implementation of storage such as batteries, pumped hydro and green hydrogen. Our fleet of coal baseload generators are expensive to run and unreliable. As CSIRO has reported, gas baseload generators also are prohibitively expensive, even as a mature technology.” [source]

It was lacking any sort of detail but that hardly matters, does it? Her solution is storage of power produced by renewables, distributed on a national power grid. That’s a nice idea but presumably the power will be stored in batteries, which use lithium that cannot be recycled and of which there is a finite supply. Solar power generation doesn’t work at night or when it’s cloudy and wind has to be blowing at just the right velocity for wind power. And let’s not talk about how we dispose of windmills after their use-by date. At the same time, we’re all going to be driving electric cars, putting even more pressure on the grid. And then there’s the power needs of industry. By the way, coal baseload generators are unreliable right now because they haven’t been maintained. They did a pretty sterling job for many decades before renewables was a word.

It’s all very pie in the sky. It’s easy for people who will never form government to come out with impractical, idealistic ideas but I’m a little surprised that they don’t seem to have considered what’s happening right now in Europe, especially Germany, which was the shining example of the movement to renewable power and is now struggling without Russian supply.

As I’ve said before, renewables are a great idea but if we try to move too far in that direction too quickly, then it will be the poor and disadvantaged who will suffer. Pay the electric, or put food on the table?

Then we had Greens senator Lidia Thorpe describing herself as an ‘infiltrator’ into the Federal parliament.

“Earlier this week, Senator Thorpe had said the Australian parliament had no permission to be here, that her role as an Indigenous woman was to “infiltrate” the senate and that the Australian flag represented colonisation.” [source]

Not to be outdone, the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, had the Australian flag moved, refusing to speak with it behind him – although the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags were just fine.

“Apparently, it is Bandt’s normal conduct to remove the flag from any platform he’s on because it “represents dispossession and the lingering pains of colonisation”. He’s welcome to his opinion and to campaign for a “treaty with First Nations people”, plus a republic, as well as changing the flag (all of which just emphasises what a Marxist he really is), but as a member of the parliament that sits under the national flag, and who had to affirm allegiance to the Queen as his mark of loyalty to our country, surely a bit more respect is in order?” [source]

Which could also be said of Thorpe.

For me, this simply highlights how thin the Greens’ policies really are.

Aboriginal leaders were as unimpressed with the posturing of both Bandt and Thorpe as most of the rest of us. Their statements are divisive and they’re virtue signalling. What will all this do to reduce the levels of alcoholism and domestic violence in so many indigenous communities? And aren’t there more important matters to concentrate on?

Here’s a picture of a bunch of politicians to finish.