By Jo Nova
Todays magic trick is how to make electricity look cheaper by taking money from children
Tomorrow — we pretend to control inflation by printing more money.
The Labor Party tried to control the weather with our power stations and promised us it would cheaper. For some reason that every engineer can explain, they damaged the electricity grid and electricity got more expensive.
In order to hide this, they have to borrow money to pay us so they can pretend electricity is slightly less expensive, and inflation figures are not so scary. Since our children will pay off that debt one day somehow, the Labor Government is nicking the money from babies and telling us how compassionate they are.
“This is hip pocket help for households, and it recognises that people are still under pressure,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC.
“Without our assistance and without our interventions, electricity would be more expensive.”
More expensive that what Jim?
The next magical $150 electricity rebate to households will cost $1.8 billion dollars. Think of it as a performance art, a piece of theatre, or a band-aid on a gaping wound. For Australians this will be the third year of rebates, so the total cost, respectively, is $3b in 2023 , plus $3.5b in 2024, plus $1.8b for a total of $8.3 billion.
There’s no intellectual merit in the rebate, it’s not like it’s an incentive scheme for homeowners to “stay alive” or use more or less electricity. The sole point of the rebate is to hide the failure of the governments energy plan. It’s to bury the market signal which is screaming “bad, bad, bad” so the Labor Government can do more of the same “bad things” that got us into trouble in the first place.
The PM also thinks giving away money reduces inflation:
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the cost of living measure would put downward pressure on inflation.
We wonder why any country ever suffered inflation when the solution is so easy?
$8 billion in Rebates could have made electricity cheaper for 30 years
Unfortunately “rebate” doesn’t reduce real electricity prices or inflation, except in advertising and ABC news. If the government is going to incur a debt on our behalf, it could have used this $8 billion to buy at least four new gas plants and an advanced efficient coal plant, any or all of which would have reduced the price of electricity for 30 years to come (or 60 years in the case of a coal plant).
For reference the cost of the 660MW Hunter Power Project is expected to be around $1b.
China started building 92GW of coal plants last year, which is twice as much coal power as Australia has.
“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the cost of living measure would put downward pressure on inflation.”
So handing out freebies to the plebs is not inflationary, well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
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Jo, what you say is exactly what the Lamestream Media and the Liberal “leadership” should be asking and saying.
But we just get… silence.
This country is being systematically destroyed.
America has TRUMP. Who do we have?
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Most “churnalists” are politically complicit.
ESPECIALLY the tax-payer funded ones.
They take their self-appointed role as “opinion-shapers” very seriously:,
When they want your opinion, they will give it to you, good and hard.
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We have Sir Starmer in the UK.
He is being ‘pragmatic’. He told us so, today.
And our pragmatist is bringing forward the ICE ban, from 2035 to 2030.
Very pragmatic.
And the ‘measure’ to allow makers to spread their mandated sales [which aren’t happening] of EVs up to the 2030 deadline means having to sell more EVS when the public will want the ‘last’ ICE cars.
Like your neighbourhood loan shark – “You can’t pay. No worries. Have more money now. I’ll be round on Friday for your kids – and your kidneys!”
Real pragmatism … he said.
Auto
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I find it amazing that Starmer can get away with his dictatorial edicts.
But then again, there has been a dramatic demographic change in the UK due to the deliberate importation of a demographic from a culture that doesn’t believe in freedom, free speech or democracy.
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Instead of $8b in rebates, Labor could have built gas and coal plants and actually made cheap electricity.
Don’t be silly, these labor knuckleheads don’t want to actually do anything to fix the problem, no, they would rather gain votes from the gullible by spending our money grandstanding , making out they are “lowering the cost of living”.
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The UK government will pay a £7500 subsidy towards a heat pump installation that hardly anybody wants.
For the same price they could replace 5 old inefficient gas boilers for modern high efficiency ones.
And of course as with any government subsidy, it just becomes extra profit to be harvested by the subsidised service provider, the end customer gains little in reality.
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Yes. As soon as a government i.e. taxpayer-funded subsidy is applied to any energy-using appliance, or indeed anything, the price of that thing goes up by about the amount of the subsidy.
We see this in Australia all the time where it’s easier to make money harvesting taxpayer-funded subsidies, especially in anything related to energy, than in doing something useful and productive.
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Jo, the headline contains an obvious mistake. It includes the phrase “Labor could have build…” The past tense of “build” is “built”.
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And the past tense of “Labor” is “Coalition”!
NONE of them have done anything to improve the Australian energy situation because they are sucking on the Net Zero tit with their eyes and ears firmly shut.
The Australian credit card will hit $1,000,000,000,000 = 1 TRILLION $ this year and none of them seem to care, they don’t even mention it, they just spend like drunken sailors after 12 months at sea!
It really is a bad position when there or no fiscal parents in the room!
Who the hell do you vote for???????
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Actually it’s far worse than that.
Taking into account federal, state and local government debt, its over $2 trillion. Last time I checked it was going up at over $6000 per second, it’s probably far worse now. It’s frightening. (See http://australiandebtclock.com.au/ )
I think a lot of the spending relates to:
1) Politicians not caring what they do with taxpayers’ money.
2) The innumeracy of many or most politicians, how many could write one million, one billion or one trillion in numerals or have any idea of the size of these numbers? These huge numbers are meaningless to them.
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Builded would have been acceptable in Middle English, however.
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Jo, get someone to edit your articles or at least use AI to do the final proofread. 😊
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I keep saying, things need to get very, very bad before they can be changed. We’re not close to bad enough yet. Albo will get in and we will have three more years of rapid descent. All the LNP offer is a slightly slower descent. Not useful. Until we address debt, defecit spending, poor immigration policy and spending who’s outcomes we cannot measure we will continue our clockwise spin down the plugole.
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Ahh Bernoulli effect!
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Argentina might be a comparable example. A once-rich country like Australia ruined by decades of socialism.
It is now finally getting back on track due to Javier Milei but Argentinians had to first suffer very badly
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And if we have to descend, it’s better to do it rapidly under a Green Labor regime than take slightly longer under a Liberal regime.
Let’s get it over and done with quickly then rebuild like Argentina. Not a longer drawn-out affair as it will be with Liberals.
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“Without our assistance and without our interventions, electricity would be more expensive.”
NO, NO, NO, It is BECAUSE electricity is more expensive that rebates are offered .
I speak English, I understand a little Italian, I know a few words in German but this language of political double speak is beyond me. The fact that politicians of all persuasions can talk this drivel and expect people to believe them beggars belief.
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I am amazed. Rebatees? Normally I ignore mispelling as a fast but error prone typist myself, but surely one balloon is not needed?
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AI did it.
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Rearrange the balloons and it could be a hidden message from Chairman Xi or his mini me Dokta Fauxi or even El Bo’ himself:
BAT SEER (E)
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And I repeat part of my relevant CO2 post from Tuesday..
In the bizarro Green world no one cares if all the CO2, all the mining, all the money goes to China. It’s Green policy. So all the steel industry, mining, manufacturing and all the carbon credits and carbon cash go to China. And the world’s Green parties and the UN find that a desirable and adequate solution to Climate Change.
Australia’s massive, devastating, invisible and unknown 35% CO2 tax will produce hundreds of billions which will find their way to China while all our ‘biggest polluters’ go out of business, crippling Australia’s independence and employment and Federal incomes, as intended. Just like banning rare earth mining. No one voted for this massive punitive CO2 tax, supported but not mentioned by all political parties.
China wins everything and Australia loses everything and the world is worse off. Like rare earth bans, Green policy and the 35% CO2 ‘tax’ or ‘theft’ is not being mentioned by any party in the Australian election. This inexplicable disastrous massive cash grab is 10% this year and 15% next year as thousands of jobs are already lost and all prices soar. What Canberra has done to electricity prices is being done to all goods and services and food and mining. Punish Australians massively to move Climate Change to China.
It is unbelievable that the “Safeguard Mechanism” 35% CO2 ripoff is not the killer governance issue or an issue at all in the Australian election as everyone tries to placate mad, unthinking Green voters and pretend we can really stop world Climates from changing. All on our own! It’s brutal Monty Python logic. Chop our legs off and beg.
Stop all the CO2 ‘rebates’. They are all theft. Hundreds of billions of dollars and huge and devastating punishment for all Australians. By our own governments. For nothing.
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Very few people have heard of or understand this 35% tax, TdeF. Including well-informed people.
The Liberals should be shouting it from the rooftops.
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They have reached the limit of crushing coal providers and coal based electricity. Now they are going after fuel users, but avoiding private cars. Everything else is going to be taxed at 35%. Everything. Even the MMBW Sewage. And who gets all this money. NOT the government, us.
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Does anyone have the time to chase down this money. Last year was 5%. The act creates or uses a department and the department has a report. Someone must be able to work out how much they have handled (the government does NOT touch the money). And perhaps who gets it all?
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Why do people blame the Labor Party? When has the LNP proved to be any different? Who introduced “net zero”?
Our political system is a carcass and it’s not going to save us from anything. We elect a committee which is heavily influenced by both unions and then more committees in the ‘public service’. Committees inevitably atrophy because they eschew leadership and enterprise. We have a uni-party system now because the committee has absorbed all differences within itself. Maybe the west is re-discovering an unpalatable actuality, in that a king is a necessity.
Even worse, it has inculcated a risk averse mindset in the citizenry, because the likelihood of punitive punishment and the weight of social compulsion has become so oppressive.
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I can’t add anything to Jo’s comments but I know that Aussies have wasted endless billions of dollars for zero climate change since the 1990s and will continue to do so until we completely destroy our economy and environment.
How Aussies can vote for Labor, Greens and Teals and then sleep at night is beyond belief, but we definitely seem to be heading off the cliff after May 3rd.
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Almost every Labor policy associated with renewables ends up as a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
The vast majority are funded by subsidies that are kept “off budget” so that no one can see in one location, or from one federal government agency, how expensive this transition to renewables actually is. Fortunately, subsidies for Australia’s renewable industry were documented in the following report:
https://35b1ca50-ea91-45c2-825d-3e16b7926e46.filesusr.com/ugd/b6987c_4c95f7692ebe490f9b3beaa47e6a758a.pdf
The report’s title is “The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables”, by Dr Alan Moran. Section 1, pages 10-12 show that direct government subsidies total $6.913 billion each year. That was back in 2020!
So who pays the subsidies? Every Australian electricity consumer:
https://www.aemc.gov.au/news-centre/data-portal/price-trends/2021/trends-act-supply-chain-components
https://www.aemc.gov.au/news-centre/data-portal/price-trends/2021/trends-nsw-supply-chain-components
https://www.aemc.gov.au/news-centre/data-portal/price-trends/2021/trends-qld-supply-chain-components
The subsidies differ from state to state, but are captured in the light blue section of the table shown at each of the above links. What does all this mean?
Labor’s plan to achieve 82% renewable electricity by 2030 can only be funded by increasing subsidies. Those increasing subsidies directly result in increasing electricity costs for Australian consumers. Those increased costs create energy poverty for people on fixed incomes, pensions, welfare payments, retirees, and families living on minimum wages.
And who gets the benefits of all these subsidies? Generally, those who are well off. Want solar panels on your roof to reduce your electricity bills? Well, first, you need to own your own home, have a secure job, and have about $10,000 in the bank. Or perhaps you are an investor in renewable energy, like Simon Holmes a’Court. Then these subsidies allow your renewables farm to show a profit, guaranteed by the government! Or you might be a virtue signalling environmentalist, who is looking to promote his environmental altruism by purchasing an EV.
Don’t worry about the sticker price being nearly double of an equivalent ICE vehicle. The government offers you tens of thousands of dollars in subsidies to bring down that cost for you – as long as you own your own house, and can afford to also buy the necessary home charger! So who gets left behind? Just those who rent, live in an apartment block, or live in the country where EVs are just not practical.
All these subsidy schemes are designed to take from the poor, and give to the rich. Why does no one talk about this?
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Peter, you made a hash of culling the excessive Government and WFH grifters but here’s a couple of words that The Libs need to utter before it’s too late.
“We’ve Cancelled all solar/wind subsidies”
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I fully expect to hear Albo-Tross squawk “let them eat cake” with a strong French accent while wearing a large coiffured white wig.
Australia is unlikely to ever recover from this irresponsible period of vote buying
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