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Flat White

Airbus Albo’s carbon shame

4 July 2022

8:00 AM

4 July 2022

8:00 AM

What happened to ‘Mister 43 per cent?’

It was only last week that Labor’s Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen was out shouting at the peasants, insisting they’d have to live with a 43 per cent axe-wound to Australia’s economy in the interest of ‘planet-saving’ reductions to carbon emissions.

This is not a vague desire or thought-bubble, it’s a legislated minimum reduction figure with a nasty bit of legal scaffolding. It’s only fair that Australians ask whether the Prime Minister’s frequent flyer carbon miles are going to be included in the total and if so, will he be put on a diet of bugs and over-priced lettuce leaves to compensate for his environmental crimes?

After all, Labor’s leader has spent almost the entirety of his Prime Ministership in the air, zooming around in a fossil-fuel-spewing private jet so that he can shake hands and cuddle his favourite luvvies in every corner of the globe – something that the Australian public were forced to do via Skype for two years because of lockdown orders. How many families could have enjoyed driving their kids to school for the emissions that Albo wasted? A lot. But this isn’t about the needs of the poor.

Better yet, maybe Chris Bowen can bring Anthony Albanese in front of the new Climate Change Authority for questioning about whether this weekend’s New South Wales floods were a direct result of Labor’s climate policy. That is the line that serious journalists in mainstream publications pulled on the Morrison government every time it got a little hot, rainy, dry, or cold without a hint of scorn from the ‘Trust the Science’ community. To that end, shouldn’t Albanese be leaning against Warragamba Dam, helping to hold up the wall instead of sipping champagne and staring longingly at slices of cake in Paris?

If the press had any guts (or fairness) they would point out that the only things Albanese has done since ascending the throne is book himself on a five-star holiday and sack the tiny veneer of people in Parliament that actually scrutinise policy – independent party advisers. So much for transparency.

Chris Bowen’s recent speech made it quite clear that Labor has no interest in democracy or independent market forces when it comes to the magic whacking stick of Climate Change.

If they have ideas, suggestions or amendments which are complementary to the Government’s [Climate Change] agenda, which are sensible additions to our plan, then I am happy to consider them in good faith.

I say this in a spirit of co-operation. If there is a good idea which improves, not undermines the bill, I’m happy to hear it and work with it.

But we won’t be entertaining amendments which are not consistent with our agenda or our mandate.

And, just as we have been crystal clear that we regard legislation as being best practice –

We have also been clear that the legislation is not required and, if the Parliament doesn’t wish to pass it, we will simply get on with the job, as we have already started to do.’


This is a declaration that Labor intends to pick winners and losers in the Australian business community. They will act as an authoritarian force wielding social licenses and carbon credits as a means to skew the market in favour of ‘green businesses’ to the detriment of hard-working, ordinary Australians. It no longer matters if you have a good product and eager customers. Everything is about to be weighed against the impossible mythical feather of carbon as if it were a poison rather the key component of life.

The World Economic Forum weren’t kidding when they said you would, ‘own nothing and be happy’. With rising interest rates and punitive measures in place to punish competition, only the ‘mates’ of those in power will profit.

As Albanese said in March of 2021, ‘We don’t just return to what was there, but that we use this crisis [Covid] to build back stronger.’

It is a future of black-outs, $30 salads, shivering pensioners, and dole-dependent voters. Inter-generational farms are to be sold off to foreign corporations who can ‘better handle climate needs’ while the people are left trying to hide from an ever-increasingly matrix of surveillance, health passes, and social credits.

Labor’s Climate Change proposal represents terrifying overreach by a government that has given itself licence to use the rhetoric of ‘emergency’ as a mechanism to invade private industry and begin meddling. That is what you get with a leader who has declared his love of socialism.

There is no point in Labor pretending that this is born out of a genuine fear of the apocalypse.

43,000km+ in a private jet isn’t screaming, ‘I’m terrified the world is going to end in a carbon-fuelled apocalypse.’ None of the world’s leaders behave as if they truly believe in Climate Change or the rising waters of the Global Warming tide. Their harbourside mansions and private islands should be enough to bell the cat that something is amiss.

If this isn’t an apocalypse, and if Climate Change isn’t important enough for the Prime Minister to trim-down on his flight log, then why does it justify communism-by-proxy with Labor legislating of Big State interference in every aspect of the Australian economy?

And why is no one picking through Labor’s saviour-complex policies with the tooth-comb of reality?

Labor’s flagship (expensive) policy to push electric vehicles isn’t exactly ‘clean’ or ‘environmental’, given that EVs are behind the mining industry’s push to tear up the ocean floor with a scorched-earth approach that threatens to disfigure the poorly understood ecosystem for centuries.

Where is the environmental risk assessment on this? Where is the acknowledgement that – far from ‘saving the planet’ – this blind push into lucrative renewables is threatening Australia’s food belt, economic security, and energy independence? Where are the Greens flagellating themselves on public roads to protest the ruination of the ocean to service the car manufacturing industry?

With the Liberals licking their wounds and independent parties stripped of manpower, Labor knows that it answers to no one.

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