The LNP can't sell socialism

For the Coalition to win back government we have to stop chasing people that rarely vote for us

McDonald’s has tried many times to sell health food but it has always failed. As the Wall Street Journal put it in 2017: “After losing about 500 million US orders over the past five years ... [McDonald’s] said it was going to embrace its identity as an affordable fast food chain and stop chasing after people who will rarely eat there.”

McDonald’s can’t sell health food and the Liberal and Nationals parties will never be able to sell socialism.

For the Coalition to win back government we have to stop chasing people that rarely vote for us. People that are committed to climate change action will not vote for us. As this election proved once again, climate conscious voters will go for the real deal, or the real teals in this case.

The net zero emissions agenda is for the massive expansion of government and corporate control. To enforce net zero there must be an army of bureaucrats measuring this and taxing that. And, an associated bureaucracy in the corporate and banking world who decide what investments are taboo.

I joined the Liberal and Nationals parties because I believe that we should lower taxes, get rid of red tape and provide freedom to individuals and families to pursue happiness. Net zero emissions does the opposite.

By supporting net zero, we legitimised our opponents by signing up to the radical, green idea that we should totally transform how we make food and energy, within a generation, using technologies that don’t yet exist.

In fairness, we proposed getting to net zero slower, but this just made us Fabian socialists. We agreed with the socialist ideal – we just didn’t support the aggressive tactics of the Bolsheviks to get there.

In any case, the record is clear. We took net zero to the election and we lost. Those saying we should be more “ambitious” on climate change are parroting the old trope that socialism has not failed, it just has not been properly tried yet. And further, how exactly could we be more ambitious? Should we support a carbon tax? Should we ban petrol cars? Or, should we restrict the consumption of red meat?

The net zero agenda has proven to be a complete and utter failure in practical terms. Since the Glasgow conference, coal prices are up threefold, oil prices are up 32 per cent, gas prices are up 90 per cent, wheat prices are up 56 per cent and corn prices are up 41 per cent.

Prices were increasing before the war in Ukraine, but the war has exposed the folly of the West’s net zero obsession. What climate change policies have done is to export the manufacture of high emission goods – such as fertiliser, transport fuels and raw energy – to other nations not obsessed with reducing emissions. This has left the free nations of the world dangerously exposed to the whims of dictatorial regimes.

During the Glasgow conference, Russia and China banned the export of fertilisers. Thanks to many Western countries not developing their gas resources, Russia and China are now the world’s largest producers of ammonia, the feedstock for the most commonly used fertilisers.

This is the principal reason why food prices have gone through the roof and why people are starving around the world. The first green revolution unlocked the carbon content of fossil fuels to help make fertilisers that boosted crop yields. Around half of the world’s food is now grown using fertilisers made from natural gas.

Thanks to fossil fuels, starvation has effectively been eradicated from the world except in cases of political disarray.

The ESG “green” revolution is shutting down the production of gas and other fossil fuels that kept people fed. The consequence is food riots in South America and South-East Asia. The ESG acronym should be re-designated to stand for “Extreme Shortages Guaranteed”. Climate change has not caused people to starve, but climate change policies are doing that right now.

Lucky for us, Australia will not run out of food as we produce a significant surplus. But prices for food and energy will rise and hit the poor hardest.

These price increases will be so large that they will cause a massive political backlash. For all the hype over the high-wealth teal seats, they represent, by definition, just a small percentage of the Australian people.

An inflexible commitment to net zero emissions will not be consistent with democracy because eventually people will not pay the price. That is already happening in Europe (where Boris Johnson wants a “leave pass” from their climate change commitments) and in the US, where the Republicans look likely to sweep the midterm elections, largely from the momentum of raging, ESG-induced inflation.

Ultimately, there will be a desire for solutions that lower energy and food prices. Everywhere that government has got involved in providing green subsidies has just led to higher energy prices as a consequence.

For the Liberal and Nationals parties to get a bigger party room we will have to argue for smaller government.

This article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review on 26 May 2022. Available here:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/coalition-can-t-sell-net-zero-socialism-20220525-p5aoi9