by FRED PAWLE – THE current fuel crisis – and the government’s response – proves that Australia just isn’t a serious country any more.
Motorists queueing to fill their cars should be consoled that, for all the expense and inconvenience they’re experiencing, at least the sunset view from NSW’s Umina Beach Surf Club remains as lovely as ever.
- War with Iran was as inevitable as Bill Clinton’s indiscretions.
- Whether Trump was wise to start it now is beside the point.
- The Albanese Government is doing what it always does in a crisis – blame others.
Surfers along Australia’s southern coast can continue to pursue their passion with undiminished tranquility 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?
EXPLAIN
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 November 4, 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 energy self-sufficient. 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 NSW between Newcastle and Sydney.
Both major Parties went into overdrive to exploit the irrational fear these applications caused, saying the rigs would spoil the residents’ million-dollar views.
Even more hysterically, warning that a spill — from a gas rig — would destroy wildlife and ruin the locals’ morning beach walks.
PROMISED
The most egregious performance was by Liberal incumbent in Wentworth Dave Sharma who stood on Bondi Beach 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 queue before the station bumps the price up another 10 cents or the tanks run dry altogether.
CONVERT
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 five 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.
Equinor 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.
This 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.
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.PC
– Fred Pawle
• Substack
• X
• TikTok
• Instagram
