Peta Credlin first:

On Friday, the federal opposition released modelling claiming that the cost of the Albanese government’s energy policies would be at least $642bn by 2030, or nearly double the maximum estimated cost of acquiring our nuclear submarine fleet, and some five times the government’s own current estimates.

That’s some $25,000 for every single Australian.

The stage is now set for a new chapter in the long-running climate and energy wars that have been turbocharged by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president on a platform of: “drill, baby, drill”, pulling out (again) of the Paris climate accords, and declaring man-made climate change is largely a “hoax”.

Over the life of the Albanese government, hardly a week has passed without Energy Minister Chris Bowen proclaiming that wind and solar provide the cheapest forms of power. And there’s certainly a superficial plausibility to this assertion, given that the sun and the wind do indeed come free.

Yet converting this to electricity requires solar panels and wind turbines, and they’re certainly not free. And getting the electricity to homes and workplaces requires extra transmission lines, and they’re not free either. And as for the storage or the alternative generation to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining; well, that too, is hardly without cost.

The killer question that the government can’t dodge is simple. If renewables are as cheap as they tell us, why are our power bills going up and up the more of Labor’s “free” power we have in the system?

Prior to the 2022 election, the ALP published modelling purporting to show that a grid with 82 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources would, somehow, cut power bills by $275 per household per year, even though – as Bowen declared shortly after the election – this would require the installation of 22,000 solar panels every single day, and 40 large wind turbines every single month for seven whole years; plus the erection of at least 10,000km of new transmission lines; an energy transition that even he admitted would be the biggest transformation since the industrial revolution.

Labor’s modelling claimed that moving to net zero would create more than 600,000 new jobs, even though it would also destroy nearly all the existing high-paid jobs in the coal- and gas-fired power that, in 2022, produced about 80 per cent of our electricity.

And that’s before we factor in the economic suicide of losing all the jobs in the mining of coal and the extraction of gas that, most years, are two of our three biggest exports.

And the billions in budget revenue that comes with those exports – gone as well!

Unsurprisingly, given all this, a steadily increasing proportion of wind and solar power (now about 30 per cent of our total electricity) has so far led to an increase in household power bills of about $1000 a year and coincided with local power prices roughly double those in the United States – which achieved energy self-sufficiency under the previous Trump administration via increased oil extraction and gas fracking.

Eventually, in response to increasing demands to provide an overall cost for the government’s energy transition and based on the CSIRO’s “gen-cost” (or cost of generation only) modelling, Bowen said the total cost to 2030 was just $122bn – even though, before the election, the ALP had separately released material claiming that new transmission lines alone would cost up to $80bn.

Even then, Bowen’s figure still amounted to about an extra $5000 per Australian man, woman and child over just seven years.

This was always implausible – and especially after the Net Zero Australia study, released last year by three universities and including Australia’s former chief scientist, Professor Robin Batterham.

The study concluded that achieving net zero – across all sectors of the economy: transport, agriculture, manufacturing and construction, as well as energy – would cost up to $9 trillion by 2060, and up to $1.5 trillion even by 2030.

Building the up-to-seven 1000-megawatt nuclear power plants, on existing coal plant sites, that the Coalition has said are needed to get to net zero, while also keeping the lights on, won’t be cheap either. And it can’t happen over night.

Yet the United Arab Emirates has just brought to full operation a giant new 5400 megawatt nuclear power plant costing $30bn. Based on an existing Korean design, it took less than 15 years from conception to conclusion. And it is now providing up to a quarter of the Emirates’ total electricity.

The Coalition has promised to provide its nuclear costing well before the election.

Compared to the costs of the 2000 megawatt Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro scheme – originally estimated at $2bn and taking five years, but now blown out to $12bn and a decade-plus – these are likely to be both reasonable and plausible.

What’s now clear is that the next election will be a real contest, based on strong evidence, about a subject that really matters, because almost nothing is more central to the daily life of a modern economy than reliable and affordable electricity.

Low information voters are apparently what got Trump back to the White House. You know, those apparent racists and bigots in flyover country.
These are also the low to middle income people who know what the cost of living is.
One cannot look at these figures and think to themselves that this is dissimilar to the US. Labor are a pack of arseholes who are hellbent on taking you back to horse and buggy, candles and a shit way of life.
At a mindboggling cost. Just horrendous.

Then Piers Akerman gives the Wong Chap and the government she represents a nice kick up the quoit:

The Albanese government has rewarded the actions of terrorist regimes with its recognition of the “permanent sovereignty” of Palestinians to natural resources in the disputed territories.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong hasn’t explained this dramatic reversal of Australia’s longstanding bipartisan support at the UN for a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict.

Not a hostage will be freed, there will be no end to terrorist rockets and nor will an entity called Palestine be created by this capitulation to terror.

In a weasel-worded statement from Wong’s office, a spokeswoman said Australia had voted with an overwhelming majority of UN member states.

Given that the UN is full of tinpot Third World nations ruled by autocratic dictators and, in some cases, extremist Islamist governments, it is not surprising the majority would vote against the only liberal democratic society in the Middle East.

Support of this particular kind for Palestinians, descendants of those who fled Israel when it was attacked by surrounding Arab nations in 1948 and who have been encouraged to stay on welfare for the past seven decades by a uniquely designated UN welfare agency which harboured terrorists in its senior ranks, goes against every principle Australia has previously upheld.

The UN vote, which still has to be rubber-stamped by the General Assembly, might have come from a meeting of inner-urban Young Laborites.

It is difficult to see the vote as anything but appeasing offensive pro-Palestine protesters and Muslim voters in the seats held by Labor ministers Tony Burke (Watson) and Jason Clare (Blaxland).

Clare accused Israel of trying to “bomb its way to peace”. Bombs seemed to have ended WWII and brought peace to Europe and Asia.

The newly-formed Muslim Vote party has said it will target Muslim voters in those seats as well as in Werriwa, currently held by government whip Anne Stanley.

The move to placate Muslims resident in Australia puts us at odds with the incoming Trump administration.

US president-elect Donald Trump has named former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to be his ambassador to Israel. Huckabee rejects the notion of an “occupied” West Bank, referring to the area using the biblical term “Judea and Samaria”.

Prior to the Albanese government, Australia referred to the region as “disputed” territory. Wong chose “occupied” territory, in line with her undergraduate approach to international affairs.

During his last administration, Trump moved the US embassy to Israel’s capital Jerusalem, historically the capital of the nation since King David’s time, about 3000 years ago. Frightened at losing heavily Muslim populated electorates, the Albanese government’s embassy remains in Tel Aviv.

Trump also imposed bans on travellers from 13 countries which had fostered international terrorism following a terrorist attack by a Somalian who drove his car into a crowd of fellow Ohio State students, before slashing others with a knife.

President Joe Biden rescinded the ban in 2021.

Under Albanese, Wong and Burke, some 1300 Gazans have been brought to Australia though security scrutiny has been questioned. More than 3000 Lebanese-Australians took advantage of taxpayer-funded flights to return to Australia as Israel pursued Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

There has been no questioning whether those arriving or returning accept the Judeo-Christian Australian culture, and clearly many who turn out in protest do not subscribe to liberal Western values.

The dissonance was highlighted on Thursday when Melbourne’s Myer store was forced to cancel its annual family-friendly Christmas window unveiling event because of a pro-Palestinian protest planned to disrupt the event. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan said the protest “wouldn’t change a thing in the Middle East”. Neither will the Albanese government’s anti-Israel stance.

Hate filled pricks only in it to seat their tax payer income bloated arsecrack on the plush green and red seats in Parliament and give a hearty up yours to the people they purport to represent.
I’d almost go as far as saying this Muslim Votes party is a terrorist group. Espouse the same shit as Hamas cockroaches.
Piss off.

I tried searching for the Blair piece, to no avail.
However I got this from Farrelly in the search. Get a load of it:

As a child I had a corner bedroom with a big bay window opening onto dark trees. When, as kids do, I worried about a bogeyman coming in to get me, I’d send up a silent prayer: “Just let him be smart”. An intelligent bogeyman, I figured, was one you could reason with. It was the stupid, emotion-crazed bogeyman, inaccessible to logic, you had to fear.

I feel the same now about Malcolm. Already, after only a few weeks, the country feels different. The air itself has a new edge. And that edge has a name. Intelligence.

I know. We’ve had clever prime ministers before. Hawke was a Rhodes scholar. So, even more mysteriously, was Abbott. But neither of them approached us, the country, with their intelligence unholstered.

Indeed, it seemed some protocol required them to keep their IQs unloaded, safety-catch on and locked in some secret dungeon where none would suspect.

Of course, in the intelligence department, Keating was the standout. PJK, as we knew him, had three extraordinary intellectual skills. He could soak up information like a sponge. He had an intense strategic imagination. And he could mix both with the vernacular to emit a spray of one-liners with the perforating lethality of a Gatling gun.

So yes, Keating used his intelligence, as both weapon and wand – but not as bridge. Never, in my experience, has an Australian prime minister used intelligence to connect with the country. Never has the PM conversed with us as if we were functioning adults.

That’s why the Abbott years were so unutterable. Sure, the policies varied from dismal to disastrous. But more than that, during the winking and smirking “ditch the witch” years, when the country seemed to be run by a gang of schoolboy inebriants, most depressing was the shared presumption that public debate is a game of idiots.

Malcolm is different. His intelligence has light in it. I often disagree with him. We don’t see eye-to-eye on tax, I’m suspicious of the TPP, I believe the sale of Darwin’s port to the “private” company of Chinese government billionaire Ye Cheng was unwise and the approval of Adani’s coal mine shocking. There is no moral case for coal.

And yet. And yet. Malcolm speaks to us not as a rabble of blithering chimps wanting their buttons pushed but as grownups, capable of considered argument, reasoned reflection and conscientious decision. For Australia, this is huge.

So here’s my prediction. Malcolm – who like Beyonce is known universally by his first name – will be the longest-serving prime minister since Menzies. Possibly ever.

Malcolm has occupied the middle ground so thoroughly that Bill Shorten – who against Abbott looked almost plausible – is suddenly Mr 15 Per Cent, and shrinking.

This was always on the cards. It’s been rumoured for years, and from inside sources, that, back at the start, Malcolm either courted or was courted by Labor. Malcolm denies it and perhaps it doesn’t matter, except that from the moment he crossed the floor for climate change, he was a shoo-in for the chattering classes.

Before that, throughout his Republican push, people tut-tutted. “He’s no politician,” they grumbled. “He’s arrogant. He’s rich. He lacks timing.” Lately, though, Malcolm’s timing has been impeccable.

To join one party yet please the other is a high-risk strategy – if strategy it is – that in retrospect looks like genius. Starting softly, he fell (42-41) at the first hurdle then, when all seemed lost, hit his stride just when our “plague on both your houses” clamour reached fever pitch.

But this is more than a prediction. It’s a judgment. Malcolm’s political longevity will be a Very Good Thing. Not because he’ll necessarily manage to repurpose the crazier cowboy fringes of the Coalition. But because – far more importantly – the explicitness of Malcolm’s intelligence makes it OK for us to be intelligent too.

Not just OK. Intelligence is almost expected. And expectation, as we know, is the best single predictor of performance.

I’m kind of surprised to care. I never considered politics terribly important in a “comfy bloody country” like ours (to quote Bob Hawke from Keating!), where everyone will eat tomorrow and the parties are virtually indistinguishable. Certainly it never seemed to matter much who was in charge.

But I was wrong. Who knows why, but people take their lead from leaders. The worst effect of the Abbott years was the way intellectual thuggery became normalised. Trickle-down ethics.

So I’m not just talking political smarts or intellectual agility. The lucid intelligence is one that operates on higher principles than crowd-pleasing, rabble-rousing or the routine party hackery of the common-or-garden political mind.

To have an intelligence of this kind leading Australia is a shift of immense significance. Deriving from something that, at risk of sounding naive, you may almost call goodness, it gives Malcolm the potential to be not just a practical leader, in the usual way, but a moral one; a leader of minds.

Pick any of Malcolm’s speeches, interviews, even media releases. His first act, within a week of becoming Prime Minister, was to give $100 million to counteract violence against women and children. Since then he has killed the dopey knighthoods, established a $250,000 prize for scientific innovation, launched a book on Whitlam, dudded Christopher Pyne’s $100,000 degrees and promised to change the ludicrous “publish or perish” funding that has so white-anted academia.

But that’s not all. When Malcolm says “good teachers change lives”; when he reminds the G20 of the “potential for renewable energy, especially solar”; when he warns China “not to fall into a Thucydides trap”, bringing war to the South China Sea; when he promises friendship and support to Indonesia or insists – in contrast with Abbott’s relentless “bomb them” belligerence – that Paris demands a political solution: throughout, you sense the cool and true moral intelligence at the helm.

Relief is what I feel, like the southerly buster after a 40-degree day. It says my inner child was right. The weak and stupid are the ones to fear.

November 25 2015 she wrote this sneering bilge. Never did she hide her contempt for Joe Public. FMD

Given that the UN is full of tinpot Third World nations ruled by autocratic dictators and, in some cases, extremist Islamist governments, it is not surprising the majority would vote against the only liberal democratic society in the Middle East.

From Piers Ackerman’s article.

The UN is way past its use-by date, it is now used to spread tyranny instead of democracy or freedom. It needs to be disbanded and a freedom block established. However, under Democrat administrations even the US tended toward tyranny. Does it really come down to the people deciding they want freedom and voting accordingly?