As much as 72% of Australia’s large-scale solar factories and 70% of our wind installations are foreign owned.
That means the majority of taxpayer-funded subsidies – amounting to billions of dollars – provided by the Albanese Labor government goes to other countries instead of being invested here in Australia.
Worse still, the latest report from Net Zero Australia (comprising University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, Princeton University and Nous & Evolved Energy) puts the total cost as high as $9 trillion to meet Australia’s target of Net Zero by 2050.
That’s $9,000,000,000,000 !
Putting that in context, Prime Minister Albanese recently bragged that his government has allocated just $10 billion ($10,000,000,000) in additional defence expenditure.
Is the futile attempt to achieve Net Zero really more important than defending our country when we know for a fact that Communist China is very openly assessing our ability to defend ourselves?
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has just completed research on the rising spending commitments of the Albanese government on programs related to Climate Change and Net Zero in each federal budget over the last decade.
Their Chief Economist Adam Creighton had the following to say in their recent report.
“As federal government spending on programs related to ‘climate change’ and ‘net zero’ has soared – rising 15-fold over a decade, and more than 400% in the last term of parliament alone, it is making Australians poorer.
While both Labor and Coalition governments have supported policies to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the analysis finds:
- Estimated annual funding accelerated under the Albanese Labor government from $1.7 billion in the March 2022 federal budget to just over $9 billion in the most recent budget.
- If climate change spending was consolidated into a single program, it would be one of the 20 most expensive federal programs, at a level currently attributed to ‘air force capabilities’.
- The focus on climate change in federal budgets (based on key term mentions) collapsed after the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, before exploding once again with the election of the Albanese government in 2022. But significantly, it subsided before the 2025 election.
Analysts have typically ignored the level of federal government spending on such programs because spending totals pale in comparison to the multitrillion-dollar cost households and businesses face due to the impact of net zero.
Yet spending on climate change and net zero in the most recent federal budget has reached around $9 billion annually, up from around $600 million a decade earlier – an unbelievable 15-fold increase!
The array of ‘programs’ and ‘funds’ related to climate change and net zero, which are typically piled on top of one another, year after year, has become ridiculous and almost impossible to track. It raises serious questions about how effectively and efficiently public funds are being spent.
Despite instituting net zero as government policy, the Coalition’s final budget in March 2022 mentioned ‘net zero’ only three times, compared to 92 times in Labor’s 2024/25 budget, which also included 18 separate references to Australia’s becoming a ‘renewable energy superpower’.
It’s interesting that mentions of climate change, net zero, and emissions, dropped off significantly in Labor’s most recent budget. The embarrassing talk of Australia becoming a ‘renewable energy superpower’ vanished entirely – almost as if the political obsession with net zero is beginning to wane.
Australia has previously benefited from some of the lowest consumer electricity prices in the world, but it now has some of the highest thanks to Net Zero.
Decades of poor decision-making, based on flawed and misleading advice and ideology, is crushing the most productive sectors of our economy and household budgets.
Yet Canberra is spending $9 billion a year to fund this disastrous Net Zero agenda.”
And that excludes the huge costs associated with the phasing out of fossil fuel exports, mass rollout of electric vehicles, industrial realignment, and costs borne by businesses and households during the transition stage.
How can anyone argue with these facts and observations?
We can assume that Albanese will certainly do so, because he has form.
He was recently asked to respond to another sensible report – this time from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – that warned of the imminent threat posed by Communist China.
He said, “Well, that’s what they do, isn’t it, ASPI? I mean, seriously, they need to have a look at themselves and the way they conduct themselves in debates.”
He hadn’t even read their report – and he won’t read the IPA report either.
That’s how Albanese always responds to issues he’s been forced to publicly defend and which he knows nothing about ……. total denial, obfuscation, and outright lies.
And despite that, people apparently believe he is “nice” – according to post-election polling.
Right now, we don’t need ‘nice’ people running our country – we need competent people who know what they are doing. If they also happen to be nice, that’s a bonus.
There are some tough years ahead of us and we need strong leadership and sensible decision-making that will maintain our prosperity and keep us safe.
The Albanese government’s primary responsibility is to defend Australia and its citizens – not indulge in nonsensical virtue-signalling schemes aimed at ’saving the planet’, which is all Net Zero is about.
This is especially so when no major CO2-emitting country is doing anything of practical value about Net Zero and Australia only emits 1% of global CO2 emissions, so nothing we do will make any tangible difference to global warming.
An interesting reflection of that is happening right now at the G7 meeting in Canada – climate change is not even on the official agenda!
It’s time our government woke up to itself and cancelled Net Zero, pulled out of the ridiculous Paris Agreement, and legalised the civil use of nuclear energy so that we can join the rest of the industrial world on an equal footing.
Thanks to the Institute of Public Affairs, YouTube and Johannes Leak for his cartoon.
