Australian Politics
Wishy Wilson is back, madder than ever
He has launched a tirade of Warmist claims with no scientific foundation whatsoever. But he is marijuana-dependent these days so perhaps we should cut him some slack
He is something of an elitist so Green/Left views are to be expected of him, though he is more extreme than most. His past as a Duntroon student and an investment banker certainly confirm his elitist identity
He is also an enemy of Christmas. That is he in the centre below
Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson has criticised Labor for failing to protect The Great Barrier Reef, saying the Albanese government’s policies have Australia “on track to blow through the two degrees warming threshold.”
“Warming oceans caused by the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and still Labor wants more coal, more gas and more Reef destruction,” Mr Whish-Wilson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Try as they might, Labor’s attachment to the “drug dealers' defence,” that if we don’t export it someone else will, is meaningless to the protection of the Reef.,” he said More
Mr Whish-Wilson said a 99 per cent decline in the world's coral reefs will ensue if the threshold is broken, including the world’s largest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef.“The only thing that will save the Great Barrier Reef is an end to fossil fuels. That starts with saying no to new coal and gas. This is the bare minimum required to give the Reef a chance of survival," he said. “After two years in government, Labor refuses to do what is required to protect the future of the Reef. Only the Greens in balance of power will implement a climate trigger and take action to stop the fossil fuel cartel before it destroys our climate and the places we hold dear.”
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Pure unadulterated hate
From a religion of hate
A Sydney imam has described Jews as a 'criminal, barbaric, tyrannical enemy' in an anti-Semitic sermon, claiming Jihad was the 'only solution' to restore Palestine.
Australian Imam Abdul Salam Zoud delivered the sermon to his congregation at Masjid As-Sunnah Mosque in Lakemba, southwest of Sydney, on February 9.
The sermon, which was streamed live on the Mosque's Facebook page, was unearthed and translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute - an American group that monitors Muslim extremists.
Imam Zoud said the Jews had trespassed on land and oppressed the people of Palestine.
He praised Jihad and Hamas, claiming the Prophet Muhammad and the Righteous Caliphs did not conquer the world by peaceful means, negotiations or concessions.
'These people (Jews) only understand the language of force,' Imam Zoud said.
'Do not even dream that [Palestine] can be regained through negotiations. By Allah, Palestine will only be restored through Jihad.'
'Jihad for the sake of Allah is the only solution when it comes to the infidels.'
He said'all the billions that were spent to improve, beautify, and highlight the image of the Jews have all gone in vain'.
He added the goal of Jihad was not to kill people and take over their land but rather to remove obstacles preventing the spread of Islam.
The sermon has outraged MPs and Jewish leaders in Australia, with many claiming the hateful speech should not be tolerated.
Liberal Senator Dave Sharma labelled the sermon 'disgusting' and 'un-Australian', claiming the imam was inciting violence.
'If it is not unlawful it should be,' Senator Sharma told the Daily Telegraph. 'That crosses the line from free speech into inciting violence.'
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies David Ossip said the sermon was 'incredibly dangerous' and 'inconsistent with Australian values'.
'If we are serious about maintaining the communal cohesion and harmony we all treasure, we surely cannot tolerate hate preachers poisoning the minds of their adherents by vilifying other Australians and calling for jihad,' Mr Ossip said.
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Unachievable at any cost
Political blindness in Western Austraia
Two weeks ago, we got a taste of the brave new world of renewable energy. Victoria’s grid collapsed on a hot and windy afternoon. 530,000 homes were left without power, train lines were shut down, schools and businesses had to close their doors, phones couldn’t be used even for emergency calls, and hundreds of sets of traffic lights were out of order.
The same fate awaits Western Australia unless it reverses course on its ideological determination to pursue Net Zero.
In June 2022, the WA state government announced its plan to close all coal-fired power stations (Collie, Muja, and Bluewaters) in the state by 2030 as part of a commitment to an 80 per cent emissions reduction target by that year.
This will result in the removal of two-thirds of the WA network’s current electricity supply.
The justification for this policy was the ‘overwhelming uptake of rooftop solar’, adding that, ‘…an estimated $3.8 billion will be invested in new green power infrastructure in the South West Interconnected System (SWIS), including wind generation and storage, to ensure continued supply stability and affordability. This investment is expected to pay for itself by 2030-31 relative to the status quo of increasing electricity subsidies.’
A detailed analysis conducted for the IPA by Senior Research Fellow Kevin You, former General Manager of Generation at Western Power Mark Chatfield, and this correspondent, demonstrates that this plan is neither feasible nor achievable at any cost.
Our research shows that the cost to replace coal-fired power generation will be far more than the already huge sum of $3.8 billion – it will be far greater than even 10 times that amount.
WA’s vast size means that it is geographically isolated, not only from the rest of the country, but internally. Therefore, it cannot be connected to a national energy grid, as is the case with states on the eastern seaboard. It must – and does – produce and rely on its own energy. Therefore, the huge fluctuations that arise from taking out coal in the main network cannot be addressed by relying on other states.
In the southwest of the state, there has been an historical reliance on coal, but WA also has abundant energy in the form of gas.
Following the discovery of large gas reserves in the mid-1970s on the North West Shelf, the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline (DBP) was constructed. It is one of Western Australia’s most critical pieces of energy infrastructure.
The pipeline was privatised under the Court government in 1998, however, the easement surrounding the pipeline was not privatised. In fact, it was enlarged to accommodate potential future expansions to the gas pipeline’s transmission capacity.
Until now, gas has been able to back up the increasing move to solar and wind. The state’s domestic gas reservation policy, which requires gas exporters to set aside 15 per cent of reserves for domestic use, has been considered a key to avoiding the energy shortages and price rises seen in the east.
However, the warning signs are already there that the WA government’s Net Zero energy policy will not provide the stable, affordable, reliable power its proponents claim.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) in a recent report suggested WA could face electricity blackouts as soon as 2025 unless it fills a forecast shortfall in energy supply.
This report is the first time AEMO has given a forecast that takes into account WA’s commitment to transitioning off coal-fired energy by 2030, which it says would strip an estimated 1,366 MW of power generation out of the system.
Unfortunately, the WA public is not being told of the true costs of the WA government’s 2030 renewable energy feel-good dream. There is the real threat that Western Australians will not be able to keep the lights on or turn on the air conditioning when they need to.
A key finding of our analysis is that by phasing out coal by 2030 and without expansion of the DBP, even if:
wind capacity from today is trebled
battery capacity is increased nine-fold
the state’s solar capacity is doubled
Greater Perth and the Wheatbelt still risk blackouts close to four months in a year.
Our analysis shows further that, theoretically to maintain the network in the absence of coal and gas, there would have to be a massive overbuild of renewables, requiring approximately:
50 batteries, with a total capacity of 5000 MW, (currently one battery is in service)
8,000 MW of solar factories, currently at 180 MW
12,000 MW of wind factory capacity, currently at 1,040 MW
4,134 MW of rooftop domestic solar capacity, currently it is 2,406 MW
Once transmission easements, poles and wires are added in, we calculate the total cost to be – not $3.8 billion – but more than $52 billion, which is equivalent to over 130 per cent of budgeted general WA government spending for the financial year ending 2024.
This can only result in ever-increasing energy bills for ordinary Western Australians. As far as we can tell, no thorough cost-benefit analysis has been done of the government’s plan, especially in relation to battery production and storage.
Consider also the destruction of the environment – and much of the state’s available arable land – by plastering its landscape with solar panels and wind factories.
All in a reckless pursuit of emissions reduction. Let’s not forget that Australia is responsible for just over 1 per cent of the world’s emissions.
Less than one-fifth of that 1 per cent comes from WA, and about 6 per cent of that one-fifth of the 1 per cent comes from WA’s coal-fired power stations.
Therefore, shutting them down would contribute to reducing roughly 0.013 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions.
For $52 billion, the money would be better spent keeping coal-fired power stations open for the foreseeable future and in the meantime expanding the DBP and buying gas, which is the only way to avoid blackouts while sensibly reducing emissions.
If WA wants to avoid what happened in Victoria, its government must abandon its ideological fantasy of Net Zero, which, as our research shows, is unachievable at any cost.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/unachievable-at-any-cost/
*********************************************Envy and the left
We are all familiar with the concept of envy. As we know, this corrosive, malignant state of mind is one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity, but it’s also condemned in Islam, Buddhism, and most secular ethical systems. Writing in 1930, Bertrand Russell identified envy as a major, and largely unacknowledged, cause of unhappiness in Western societies. If anything, its pernicious hold is stronger than ever today and growing. Social media is widely blamed for this, but progressive ideology is also a culprit, and perhaps the most important one. True, the left has always appealed to envy, but as its Utopian ambitions have grown, so too has its demonetisation of the successful.
Let’s start with the government’s ditching of the Stage Three personal income tax cuts. In a classic Robin Hood ploy, it is taking money from all those who earn more than $150,000 (compared to what they would have received under Stage Three) to pay for higher tax relief for those on lower incomes. The latter could have been funded by spending cuts, preserving the reform intention behind stage three.
So why was this option apparently not even considered? Doling out benefits to the needy does not provide, for the envious, the frisson of pleasure that penalising others in the community does. Envy was the leitmotif of Bill Shorten’s leadership. Under Prime Minister Albanese, the appeal is less overt, but still unmistakably there: a dog-whistle rather than a campaign slogan.
Envy’s reach extends well beyond tax. It is hard-wired into identity politics. Consider what kind of world its adherents aim to create. Their goal is not equality in the true sense of the word: a colour-blind society where all enjoy the same rights and freedoms. No, they crave hierarchy and privilege. Power must be stripped from imagined oppressor groups (white males and Jews, to take two favourite targets) and transferred instead to their supposed victims (women, Indigenous people, and Palestinians). Where the traditional left at least paid lip service to the abolition of all privilege, progressives covet it for themselves. Covetousness, as we know, is a close relation of envy.
Nor is climate change ideology free of envy. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, many people mask their envy in virtue. I suspect this was a large part of the psychological appeal of last century’s prohibition movement. I have no doubt that it motivates climate change moralisers today, who insist we give up – for our own good, of course – cheap and reliable power, viable agriculture and industry, and even the type of cars most of us want to drive. For many of them, I suspect, this harsh prospect provides a warm inner glow. Not only can they indulge their worst envious instincts, they can pose as morally superior at the same time.
If you think I am drawing a long bow, consider why renowned economist and climate believer Bjorn Lomborg is so despised by the left. By rejecting the need for emissions austerity, he is denying climate zealots the opportunity to take others’ petrol-powered SUVs away.
Of course, none of us is immune from envy. This vice can afflict conservatives as well as progressives, libertarians as well as socialists, in their personal lives. Equally, no political philosophy is free from morally corrupting influences and ethical blind spots. For conservatism, at least in the eyes of its critics, a lack of compassion toward the less fortunate is highlighted in this regard. For the left envy is the age-old moral hazard, given how easily compassion can morph into the urge to hurt the better off.
Mainstream social democratic parties, to their credit, used to keep this malign instinct within certain limits, confining their ambitions to income redistribution. In the past, the tall poppy syndrome was about pricking the pretensions of high and mighty rather than outright cancellation. Today’s progressive left, like its socialist predecessors, has given envy far freer rein. Indeed, it is an inevitable by-product of progressivism’s basic worldview.
By denying the existence of individual merit or excellence, progressives are suspicious of success of any kind, which is attributed to privilege, luck or the lottery of the free market. By rejecting traditional religion, they blind themselves to the darker realities of human nature, not least their own. And consider the effect of the depressing, zero-sum view of the world progressivism adopts: the belief that everything we value, whether material wealth, cultural riches, and indeed treasured historical memories, must have been stolen or appropriated from some oppressed group.
Rather than giving in to envy, we can respond to the success of others in a constructive way. We can admire them. We can seek to emulate, and possibly even surpass them. This competitive impulse, while decried by some, is a positive social and economic force. It has always been the key to capitalism’s dynamism and social mobility.
This truth was recognised by our greatest Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and John Howard. Their policy settings, which put aspiration (and where merited, compassion for the less fortunate) before envy, yielded enormous economic and social dividends. We became richer and more socially cohesive as a result. I suspect we were happier and more content. Yet this era seems a world away.
If you want to know why socialism, for all its manifest failures, retains its attraction, you don’t need to look beyond its appeal to envy. After all, there is a reason why the major political party of the left in Australia is called the Greens. Progressive ideology, the socialism of the 21st Century, has given this vice new impetus and cover, pulling the impressionable young into its orbit. They may initially have good intentions, but for too many envy’s seductions (and addictive effect) eventually take over. This is a recipe not for happiness and fulfilment, but for anger, emptiness, and demoralisation. We can see every day in the faces of progressive protesters.
Envy can be overcome. People can change for the better. The ancients, in their wisdom, gave us the clue we need. Envy, they believed, is a form of selective blindness (as its Latin word invidia suggests). Those afflicted by it must remove their self-imposed blinkers. Yet for progressives who, whether from hubris or vanity, refuse to see this is no small task.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/envy-and-the-left/ ?
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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