Thanks to Wind and Solar Energy, Australia’s Manufacturing Sector Has Been Destroyed!

A Chinese virus has taken up where Australia’s suicidal energy policies left off; crushing the entire economy, rather than just energy hungry industries, like manufacturing and mineral processing. Well, in truth, it’s the political reaction to COVID-19 that’s done the damage, rather than the pathogen itself.

Having destroyed the hospitality and tourism sectors overnight, throttled air transport and eliminated the free movement of Australians between states, talk has already turned to what comes next.

With shortages of medical equipment and machinery, one notion that’s taken hold is the idea that Australia could, once again, become a manufacturing powerhouse. The concept is being branded as “self-reliance” or “self-sufficiency”. Ignoring the fact that Australia’s manufacturing sector has been practically destroyed over the last decade, not least due to the fact that Australian businesses pay among the world’s highest power prices, thanks to an obsession with heavily subsidised wind and solar.

As Liberal MP Craig Kelly points out, for there to be any hope of the rebirth of manufacturing in this country, restoring its once reliable and perfectly affordable power supply is an essential prerequisite.

Here’s Craig being interviewed on Sky News by Peta Credlin.

Federal Liberal MP Craig Kelly says Australia cannot wreck its agriculture and aviation industries because of “some overseas international agreements that we’ve got which don’t apply to China whatsoever”.

Mr Kelly criticised Labor’s 45 per cent economy wide emissions reduction target which he argued would dramatically affect the productivity of both aviation and tourism, and agriculture.

Mr Kelly told Sky News host Peta Credlin Australia’s “sovereignty has to come first,” which includes the ability of major industries to be viable.

“Everything we’ve done, everything climate alarmists have done, has given a competitive advantage to China,” he said.

“We have seen a wealth transfer out of this country to the communist party of China”.

Peta Credlin: The member for Hughes, Federal Liberal Craig Kelly’s no stranger to this program. Currently he’s the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on law enforcement and formally he was the chair of the Coalition’s Backbench Environment and Energy Committee. You know him as someone who gets his head across the detail when it comes to the true impact of climate policy on our economy. And I know him as someone who calls a spade a shovel and who isn’t afraid of speaking up on this issue and, critically, Australia’s place in the global debate. Craig Kelly joins me now from Sydney.

Craig Kelly: It’s good to be with you, Peta.

Peta Credlin: Craig, thank you. You are long regarded as a rare voice of common sense on the Backbench. We haven’t heard much about climate change for the past couple of months. Do you think perhaps that a real crisis has put a merely hypothetical crisis into better perspective?

Craig Kelly: You’re right, Peta. It’s put a lot of these alarmists claims into perspective. We used to have Greta telling us that people are dying from climate related incidents, but when you look at the numbers last year, something like extreme weather claimed less than 10,000 lives. We’ve already lost over 100,000 to the Coronavirus.

If you drill down to those numbers, the age group, aged from 15 to 49, you were last year 100 times more likely to die from suicide than you were from a climate related incident or 150 times more lucky to die in a road accident or 150 times more likely to die from HIV/AIDS than you were from extreme weather climate related incidents. And so we’ve been focusing our guns on the wrong target. Just imagine if instead of spending the billions that we have on subsidising solar panels or wind turbines, some of that money had of gone to health research, especially into the potential of a pandemic.

Peta Credlin: I want to move to one of the areas that we know you often talk about energy, parallel to that in terms of targeted areas for emissions reduction, aviation and agriculture and transport are there as well.

I want to stick with aviation because obviously the only way to have fewer emissions from aviation was to have a whole lot less planes flying around. Now of course we’ve got that right now. To what extent is this wasteland of grounded planes our future. For instance, Labor gets back in and says that they will go ahead with the policy it took to the May election last year, which was its massive emissions reductions targets. How much is this current aviation stand off shutdown our future?

Craig Kelly: Firstly Peta, you have to remember how important aviation is to our country. It’s not just Qantas and Virgin and the other airlines, it’s also all those hotels, the ground transportation, all the cafes and restaurants that run off that tourism and the tour boat operators, they all rely on us having a competitive, efficient and low cost domestic aviation industry.

Now, what we saw at the last election, Labor took to that a 45% economy wide emissions reduction target, so it wasn’t just about solar panels or wind turbines, it was economy wide and that includes the transport sector, which aviation is a very big part.

Now so far, the Australia Institute have done some modelling and may estimate if we keep this lockdown going at the current way we are, for six months we’ll see a 38% reduction in emissions from aviation, but that’s less than Labor’s 45% emissions reduction that they wanted economy wide. So this is giving us a little bit of a forerunner of what would have happened to our Australian economy in the tourism and aviation sector if Labor had of got that way and implemented that policy.

Peta Credlin: We also talk about economies and the economic area of agriculture. Now agriculture, I just talked then with John Barilaro about how it is important we use a bit of common sense and we open up more agriculture than we close down, but it’s in the gun too with lowering emissions and given the only real way to cut emissions in agriculture is to grow less, to have less methane-producing animals under the plan of extremists. Where do we go in terms of agriculture?

Craig Kelly: Well, the only way to get the agriculture emissions reduction target is to simply cull the herds. It’s the vast majority of what they call emissions from agriculture simply come from the burps and farts of animals. So unless you reduce the number of animals, you are not going to get those reductions in agriculture emissions down.

Now, this is going to be a big turning point and a wake up for our country. Our prime minister is on exactly the right track when he says we have to look at the sovereignty of our nation and nation’s sovereignty has to come first and we can’t be wrecking our agricultural industry.

We can’t be wrecking our aviation industry because of trying to sign up to some overseas international agreements that we’ve got that don’t apply to China whatsoever. Everything that we have done, everything the climate alarmists have done has given a competitive advantage to China. It’s in a wealth transfer out of this country over to the communist party of China.

Now that cannot continue, Peta. We’ve got to get through this health crisis and then we’ve got to have a complete wake up call and reassessment of a lot of these policies that are harming our nation sovereignty.

Peta Credlin: We’ve had a big talk about manufacturing. We talk about it most nights on this show and the two biggest inputs are the cost of labour and the cost of energy.

Now we’re not going to pay Australians less and we can’t compete with the wages of Asia, so we’ve got to fix the energy price. Please Craig Kelly, give us some hope and that out of this your colleagues in the party room who buck your trend every time you talk about getting energy more reliable and more affordable, are they going to see some sense?

Craig Kelly: Well Peta, every time I turn on the TV or listen to the radio over the last couple of weeks, every politician is talking about we must bring manufacturing back to this country, but you are not going to do that if we have some of the highest electricity prices in the world.

We need to remember, what is the competitive advantage of this nation, and is that black coal-seam that runs down our Eastern seaboard that enables us to generate low cost energy. And if we’ve got people in politics that after this Coronavirus crisis are going to continue to block Australians from using this, continue to enable us to get back to having that low cost energy so we can bring those manufacturing jobs, Peta. I think they’re going to have one hell of a time when they go to the Australian public at the next election.

Peta Credlin: Well, let’s hope Coronavirus is a wake up in more ways than one.

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