"Foreign intermittent power swindle factories superpowered at the cost of disempowering the people of New England" was the headline on the front page of the last Federal Members Newsletter from my local member.
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If you can make any sense out of it, please let me know, because I find it the most confusing and jumbled piece of gobbledygook I have seen in a long time.
In the rest of the article on the front page of his newsletter he makes unfounded and unsupported claim after unfounded and unsupported claim about things like loss of property values in the New England because of the roll out of renewables.
He does not say anything about prospective property values in Muswellbrook, the closest town to his proposed nuclear reactor site at the Lidell power station, which is about to become part of his, and our, electorate of New England.
I think it is interesting that he did not have any of these concerns for local farmers when gas and coal companies came a drilling.
Where was he for the farmers of the Liverpool Plains fighting against the plans of Santos and others to extract coal seam gas on prime agricultural land?
Imagine if he had come out back in the day, or even more recently, with lines like this that he published in his newsletter recently:
"Think of the money you're going to lose when the value of your asset is diminished because you are surrounded by an industrial swindle factory band crossed over by transmission lines. This is a real financial hit to you, make no mistake ..."
Substitute "gas pipelines" for "transmission lines" and many in the Liverpool Plains are justified in asking "Why did you not support us?".
But then, and now, it is his friends in the mining industry pushing that gas agenda that are more important.
One gaping hole in his newsletter was that he made no reference to the Liberal and National Parties recent push for nuclear power in Australia. He made no reference to their recent announcements, and he did not reference his past comments that nuclear was too expensive. Funny that!
Anyway, all of that just goes to show that the Nationals can't be relied on to argue for rural residents and industries in any sort of rational or consistent way.
On the nuclear proposals from the LNP, the only thing that is becoming clearer and clearer by the day is that they have absolutely no idea of the costs, timeframes, impacts, emissions implications, social implications, waste management issues associated with their proposal.
The other thing that is becoming clear is that it seems nothing more than a trojan horse to keep the fossil fuel industries churning out carbon emissions for decades more that is needed.
In some sort of Trumpian festival of madness they are proposing the most expensive power generation option and at the same time claiming power prices will come down.
They claim that we are the only one of the top 20 economies to not embrace nuclear power yet ignore the fact that Germany, the third largest economy in the world, and Italy are closing down their nuclear industries.
They claim that nuclear is ramping up yet ignore that fact that projects are being abandoned around the world because of cost and time overruns.
They brush off concerns about nuclear waste with unsupported claims that small nuclear reactors only produce a coke can of waste. They also assert that their nuclear reactors will use the waste facilities that the current government, who inherited the abominable AUKUS deal from the Morrison LNP government, will have to find.
I suspect that this nuclear "policy" is just a side show to an effort to disrupt our efforts to address climate change and to implement realistic emissions targets by, in part, moving to a more renewable powered economy.
The Liberal and National Parties have always been against action to combat climate change and their latest shenanigans just show that nothing has changed.
