Motorists queueing to fill up their cars at petrol stations around the country should be consoled that, for all the crippling expense and infuriating inconvenience they are experiencing, at least the view of the sunset from the Umina Beach Surf Club, on the New South Wales Central Coast, remains as lovely as ever and that surfers along Australia’s southern coast can continue to pursue their passion with undiminished tranquillity and joy.
Go on, I hear you say. What do sunsets and surfers have to do with a fuel shortage caused by Donald Trump’s adventures in the Gulf?
Well, as Bill has had to tell Hillary on occasion, allow me to explain. It’s actually simpler and more predictable than you think.
The Iranian regime has been itching for a blue with the United States ever since it stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979. It has sponsored countless terrorist attacks, even in Australia, and loudly extolled its plan to subjugate the West and replace it with, if memory serves me correctly, rooftop gay discos and Middle East-style goat rodeos.
War with Iran was as inevitable a consequence of all that provocation as mysterious suicides are of Bill’s indiscretions.
Whether Trump was wise to start it now is beside the point for us in Australia, an island continent halfway round the world. The point is that the fuel crisis caused by this conflict has been coming for almost 50 years. Australia, rich in resources, has had all that time to become self-sufficient for energy. Our survival depended on it.
Which brings me back to sunsets and surfers.
One of the deciding issues in the 2022 election was an application from two resource companies to search for gas in an ocean area called PEP-11, off the coast of New South Wales between Newcastle and Sydney.
Both major parties went into overdrive to exploit the irrational fear that these applications caused, saying the rigs would spoil the residents’ million-dollar ocean views and, even more hysterically, warning that a spill — from a gas rig — would destroy wildlife and ruin the locals’ morning beach walks.
The most egregious performance was by the Liberal incumbent in Wentworth, Dave Sharma, who stood on the beach at Bondi, Sydney, and promised not to allow exploration rigs to appear on the horizon. In fact, PEP-11 ends at Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and even then the applicants were mostly interested in a section more than 100km north and well over the ocean horizon from Newcastle.
The Liberal Party held three of the eight seats adjacent to PEP-11 going into the 2022 election, including Sharma’s. Their efforts to appear more environmentally unhinged than Labor only drove voters towards the real thing. Labor picked up one of the seats and the Teals nabbed the other two. The way they are going, the Liberals look increasingly unlikely to ever win them back.
When the mining companies’ exploration application was finally and categorically kiboshed under Labor last year, Mark Mann, who organised the Save Our Coast protest movement, invited residents to join his celebration of “the sun setting on gas exploration along the coastline” at the Umina Surf Club.
“The rejection of Petroleum Exploration Permit 11 (PEP-11) by the federal government is a huge win for the community, the ocean and the planet – and a stunning success for the seven-year community campaign against offshore fossil fuel development.
“It’s an all-too-rare win for the community and the environment, so we feel we should take a moment to celebrate.”
Lucky them. If their compatriots in less salubrious inland electorates celebrate anything these days, it’s making it to the front of the bowser queue before the station bumps the price up another 10 cents a litre or the tanks run dry altogether.
Had PEP-11 been tapped, and the federal government had had the initiative and foresight to encourage the construction of a plant to convert gas to liquid fuels (as Qatar has been doing at its massive Pearl and Oryx plants, generating enormous profits, for years), the estimated 5 trillion cubic feet of gas lying dormant under PEP-11 would by now be providing a bulwark against the effects of the aforementioned predictable disruption in the Gulf.
Surfers along the south coast of Australia enjoy a similarly blissful delusion. Six years ago, a loose coalition of them forced Norwegian company Equinor to abandon its application, which had been approved by authorities, to search for oil in the Great Australian Bight, despite the fact that these stoner dropouts had been surfing virtually alongside the oil fields of Bass Strait without incident since the 1960s.
Equinor was the last of five companies that applied to tap the oil in the Bight, the minimum estimate of which is 2.9 billion barrels, which alone could keep Australia going at the current consumption rate for at least five years.
Had Equinor ignored the south coast surfers, and had it also enjoyed robust support from the federal government, that oil would by now be getting pumped ashore, and the price of petrol at the bowser would be delightfully unaffected by the mad mullahs, Trump or whoever else might be to blame for the Gulf standoff.
Instead, the government is doing what it always does in a crisis: blaming big corporations while distracting the punters with taxpayer-funded handouts.
The gnawing conclusion from all this is that Australia just isn’t a serious country any more. Further evidence of our decline in sophistication was provided by the Victorian Liberals this week when they released a video meme about the Commonwealth Games.
Posted on the day that the Games would have started had the Labor government not dropped the ball on them and pulled out, costing $600 million, it features the top members of the Liberal parliamentary team performing sports that used puns to lampoon this isolated example of government profligacy.
Premier Jacinta Allen brushed the video off as “petty politics”. For once she’s right because there are far worse things for the Victorian Opposition to focus on. The state is $159 billion in debt. The annual interest on that alone is ten times what it cost to break the Games contract — a bill that must be paid every year, not just once. Worse, the government was recently accused of funnelling $15 billion to the CFMEU for having provided standover services on infrastructure projects, some of which, we are told, was blown on cocaine and hookers.
Conspicuously absent from the Liberals’ video is Upper House MP Moira Deeming, whose adherence to the principles of Western civilisation — personal responsibility, equality, tradition, free speech and small government — are as welcome in the Liberal Party as a Covid vaccine in a ward for myocarditis sufferers.
Australia is hurtling in the same catastrophic direction as Britain, where energy resources are being even more tightly strangled to appease green voters, and Muslim migrants now openly discuss their plans to subjugate and enslave the natives.
Australia’s destination is blindingly obvious, and, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said yesterday, the government could not care less.
