- Sky News Host (Steve Price)
James is a supporter of the News Limited Sky News Bush summits. There is the first one held in Broome today, I think there’s one in Mount Gambier tomorrow and sadly, there’s one in Ballarat next Thursday, and I was invited to go to the dinner before it, but I’ll be here filling in for Peter.
Gina Rinehart has penned an op-ed in the news today saying, “The damage net zero is doing is horrendous, and while a lot of it is currently contained to our regions, it’s going to spread to many aspects of Australian life.” She’s 100% correct, isn’t she?
- James Morrow
Well, she’s absolutely right. Gina Rinehart is one of our greatest Australians. Let’s be honest about this — she is also completely correct when it comes to what she has written here about net zero. And the folly of net zero — and she calls it as the propaganda around net zero — because, you know, this is hitting the regions very tough. We’ve done a lot of reporting at the Daily Telegraph about the impacts of these wind farms and other projects and renewable energy zones and transmission lines that have had on rural communities.
But here’s the thing. You know, this power, this unreliable power — this is going to come into the grid, it’s going to make life tough in cities before too long. We only have to look at what happened in Spain recently, and we also know that there’s simply no way that the economics stack up — that you can get to net zero without incurring vast expense.
There is no way power prices will ever come down again if we keep going down this road in what should be a really energy-rich nation. So good on Gina Rinehart for calling it out. But really, people have got to wake up to what’s going on here.
- Sky News Host (Steve Price)
You know, one of the things that Gina made the point about — and I thought it was a really good point — is that, you know, if you go out into regional and rural Australia (and I was in Western Victoria a few weeks ago), I came across about 120 wind turbines stuck next to a road. I couldn’t believe how huge they were. So it comes to folk knowing that it’s going to impact their farms and their properties. People in the cities are still turning on the lights every night, turning on the hot water — no impact at all, except their bills have gone up. But once this stuff is in place and plugged in, the bills will certainly be going up and potentially, we’re going to have brownouts and blackouts. It’s not going to work.
Do you reckon they’re going to wake up completely that this is craziness?
- James Morrow
Yeah, well, I mean I think we’re seeing this encroach further and further into the outer suburbs, closer and closer into the cities on this, because, you know, what you said there, Steve, has already happened. You know, we’ve already seen higher prices go up — something like $1,400 in New South Wales, and I don’t know what they are in other states, but they’re similar. We know South Australia, which has the highest penetration of renewable energy, also has the highest energy bills — go figure. And we also had a situation here in Sydney some months ago, where we were told:
“Hey, look, when you get home, you know, it’s a hot day. If you don’t mind not running that dishwasher or, you know, flicking off that air conditioner, that’d be great.”
And so, you know, we already see this. And the thing is though, because it’s become such a religious, almost article of devotion for people who are true believers in this, you know, it’s very hard to tell people that they’re wrong — that they’ve been sold a pup here on this. So getting people to understand that the thing they felt a real moral commitment to is causing all sorts of dislocations and is actually not doing anything to solve the problem that we’re talking about here. I.e., you know, like, if we stop doing everything about everything electric here, you know, somehow it would change the weather and, hey, suddenly the sun would come out in Sydney instead of three weeks of rain — you know, it’s a folly.
