Why is it that women now run the four most evil lobbies in Australia? The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the Minerals Council, the Australian Banking Association, and the Business Council of Australia?
Is it affirmative action? Are women more talented liars? Are they better at warping public interest policy? Is Australia gifted with four of the best of both that just happen to be women?
Or, is it that evil corporations understand that gaming our woke political economy is more easily done by feminising the subject?
My own view is that it is the last. We may all be woke these days but most dudes are still more likely to take it easy on a sheila in a heated debate. So is the media.
That chivalry offers the opportunity for very serious abuse. To wit, cop this lie:
“A tax on mining will put Australia’s economic recovery at risk, and hurt the very people the government is trying to help: households and small business owners,” said Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable.
“The prime minister has said he would only be looking at sensible proposals to address rising electricity prices.
“It is not sensible to slug the very sector that has propped up the economy and the federal budget through recent uncertain times.”
Ms Constable said international coal prices had “nothing to do” with domestic electricity prices.
“What is exacerbating the rising wholesale price of electricity is not the price of coal, nor the lack of supply, but the reduction in availability of baseload generation.”
That’s a gob full of lies. Did the local coal price rise 700% all by itself after the Ukraine War started? Is coal not still used in power generation and not much else? Does coal not set the price in the NEM roughly 40% of the time? Are power prices not the highest in NSW and QLD where tradeable coal power production is predominant?
Come on Tania, is that really the best you can do?
Mind you, the blokes aren’t doing too well, either. Chicken Chalmers has gone from ignoring the issue for six months to this fecal-spraying pirouette:
Australia’s ‘defining challenge’ is to make an unprecedented market intervention to bring down soaring energy prices, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has declared on the eve of a meeting of G20 nations, following the competition watchdog’s finding that the cost of gas will more than double next year.
“The chaos in energy markets is the defining challenge for Australia and for a lot of countries represented here at the G20,” Chalmers said.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the government’s preference is to intervene in the energy market to cap prices and bring down costs for households and manufacturers.
“We are contemplating intervening in our domestic energy market in ways that we wouldn’t have contemplated in earlier years.”
A report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released on Monday found the prices being offered on the spot market between March and August averaged $20 a gigajoule, more than double the average $10 a gigajoule being offered in the six months to February.
These prices have flowed through to long-term gas contracts being offered to manufacturers, whose representatives told this masthead that the prices now being offered had reached as high as $45 a gigajoule.
Chalmers spent much of the year lying right alongside the Minerals Council. But now fixing energy is the defining issue of our time? He just sounds confused:
Treasurer Jim Chalmers says regulatory change and not a tax is the priority when asked about what form the government’s promised intervention in the energy market will take.
But he has reiterated that it was important to leave all options on the table given the complexity of the problem and any remedy the government previously pledged to unveil before Christmas.
“Our first preference is to try and find a regulatory solution here, rather than a tax solution,” Chalmers told ABC RN Breakfast.
“But there’s an important reason to leave all the options on the table and that is (because) there’s a lot of complex interactions here in these markets.
“We’re working really quite hard every day, seven days a week to try and get to a good outcome here. We know the urgency but, equally, you know, you don’t want to rush into something and get it wrong.”
So, where are we? The iMSM is still confused and captured. Domestic reservation and price caps vie daily with export levies and super profits taxes as the preferred solution. State premiers are still at each other’s throats. Albo’s cowards are sending mixed messages all over and have abandoned the country for a new round of Chinese kowtowing.
Gas and coal prices have lifted a bit after China’s new stimulus measures and so have local electricity futures:
If this is the challenge of our time then where the $%#& is the response?
