At least he didn’t fall off the stage this time, but many of us are old enough to remember when we had incredible music from the likes of The Beatles, Deep Purple and The Rolling Stones.

Or climb on board with Cher’s Turn Back Time to the fabulous 50s with Elvis, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry and their contemporaries who set the scene for even greater times to come.

Music aside, before we embraced the concept of all-encompassing “climate change” in recent years, we produced and refined most of our own oil and fuel.

You may recall our energy bills were among the world’s cheapest thanks to an abundance of reliable coal-fired power stations, our steel mills and aluminium smelters could run profitably without multi-billions of dollars in government handed outs.

SMOTHER

We manufactured our own urea to fertilise essential food crops – and we didn’t smother an area the size of Tasmania with Chinese-sourced – and more heavily-subsidised – solar panels and wind turbines which are pushing power prices through the roof.

We also manufactured our own glass, plastics and paper, which are now also dependent on overseas imports along with our dwindling fuel supplies, the latter thanks to the on-going war in the Middle East which governments present and past should have foreseen as a powder keg waiting to erupt.

And we didn’t have rampant anti-semitism or any other huge racial divides creating traffic chaos in capital cities most weekends and culminating in the slaughter of 15 innocent Jewish citizens at Bondi in December last year.

So, sorry Albo, if we can’t turn back the clock by waking up to reality and diverting some of the billions in subsidised green dreams to fast-tracking domestic energy production we are all much worse off.

(Your new deal to secure some refined fuel from Singapore in exchange for our LPG is a tenuous stop-gap measure at best, as Singapore is dependent on crude oil imports mostly from the Middle East.)

Add the irrational ban on reliable nuclear energy now being increasingly adopted by other OECD nations, to that long list of fails.

The obsession which you and your Climate Change & Energy Minister Chris Bowen have with staying on track to the fabled goal of net-zero was also highlighted recently by signing up to the new Euro Free Trade Deal, which ties us to meeting our obligations under the previously mainly aspirational Paris Accord.

This was highlighted by Sky News Australia’s commentator Peta Credlin the same day that Bowen had adamantly denied it during an interview with her colleague, Kieran Gilbert.

“I pointed out that the EU trade deal could well be set up as a back-door way to enforce compliance with UN climate targets,” Ms Credlin said.

“By God, Chris Bowen is slippery, isn’t he? Slippery – and either deliberately lying about what’s in the agreement, or wilfully ignorant of the detail.

“If you look carefully at the DFAT website, the government’s own trade website, you will find this document titled ‘Australia-European Union free trade agreement – benefits for trade, environment and climate’.

“And off the top, it says this, ‘for the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia (and the EU) has made a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change’.”

Google’s AI is in agreement: “The concluded EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement (March 2026) includes legally binding commitments to implement the Paris Agreement on climate change. This makes climate obligations, along with labor rights, enforceable through the trade deal’s dispute settlement mechanism, representing a significant integration of environmental policy into trade law…”

ENFORCEABLE

Further to that Mr Bowen, it is also confirmed on the European Commission’s own website: “Boosting more sustainable trade through strong, enforceable provisions on Trade & Sustainable Development (TSD), including commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement, core labour standards, gender equality and environment.”

 Following eight years of negotiations, peak industry bodies have argued that the deal severely disadvantages Australian red meat, sugar and dairy farmers, with some leaders suggesting they would have been better off without it.

Given the above, I was amazed to have Question Time playing on the TV while I went about other tasks when all this was brewing, and totally expected the Opposition would try to haul Albo and Bowen over the coals for their duplicity.

But no. Apart from Labor MPs’ Dorothy Dixers and the customary back-patting, all I heard over several days from the Conservatives were repetitive questions about how many servos had run out of fuel and how many fuel ships were on their way here.