A few weeks ago, I was discussing with a friend who lives in Japan how much electricity costs in Australia. We decided to compare electricity bills.
His last bill cost him 21,902 yen before consumption tax, and it worked out to a rate of 32 cents per kilowatt hour.
I checked our latest bill. We paid 33 cents per kilowatt hour before GST.
Australia is Japan’s biggest supplier of energy, 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity comes from our coal and gas.
How have we allowed a situation to emerge where the Japanese people pay less for electricity than the Australian people do, when we are the ones supplying their energy needs?
The access to cheap energy should be the birthright of every Australian. We have the best energy resources in the world. We are blessed with abundant coal, gas and uranium. Yet we now have this strange rule where we only let other countries use these resources.
It is like having a golden goose but only letting other people collect the eggs.
In the past we have used our energy. And that cheap energy has delivered us some of the highest wages in the world. Cheap energy allows businesses to pay dear wages.
If we stick with dear energy, we are going to get cheap wages.
The easiest and quickest way you can destroy a prosperous, industrial economy is to increase the price of energy. We are well on the way to doing that.
Since we have signed up to net zero, Australia’s real wages have gone back a decade. Australians are poorer now thanks to net zero.
Since we have signed up to net zero, energy prices have gone up another 40 per cent!
Since we have signed up to net zero, we have lost our nickel industry, our plastics industry and our urea industry. Urea is the most important fertiliser to grow food. We now have to import urea from China and the Middle East. We are dependent on them to grow food.
For the first time since the early settlers, Australia can not feed its own people.
Net zero has been a complete and utter failure and people are waking up to the net zero scam. Last week the government released yet another ‘Chicken Little’ doomsday warning about climate change.
It was an interesting political strategy from the government. They seemed to be saying that you need not worry about the $275 cut in power bills you were promised (and that we have not delivered) because you are all going to die from climate change.
The warnings were so over the top and contrived, the report fell flat. Like the animals in that fairytale no one is taking Chicken Little’s warnings seriously anymore.
Former Senator Ron Boswell, recently reminded me that 20 years ago the Australian Government published an Energy White Paper which proudly stated that Australia “enjoys some of the lowest stationary energy prices in the developed world.”
A chart showed that Japanese energy prices were four times higher than Australia’s. Now ours are higher than Japan’s. What a disaster.
The change we need is simple.
We must run Australia’s energy system for the sole and exclusive purpose of benefiting the Australian people.
The primary purpose of Australia’s energy policy should be to deliver the lowest power prices for Australians. Let’s just deliver cheap power again by building everything, coal, gas, nuclear, renewables, the lot.
This is the only way to save what is left of our manufacturing industry, bring down the cost of living and get Australian wages rising again.
