While the word to get the most attention this was “sycophant”, Malcolm Turnbull spent a lot more time talking about electricity during the first week of Parliament. A survey of his media appearances, speeches and answers in question time over Parliament’s first week back shows he used the word sycophant a mere five times (to be fair, it was loudly, and in the space of roughly a minute).
But because of the government’s focus on Labor’s “ideological” preference for renewable energy he mentioned energy 55 times (if you take out the obvious stuff like “Australian” and “Labor”, it was his most-used word). But the real fixation was with electricity. The Prime Minister raised electricity 34 times over the week. No other common cost of living issues — housing, water, food — cracked 20 mentions. Childcare was a distant second to electricity, rating 14 mentions (which was five fewer than “business”).
Incidentally, while Labor was No. 2, with 61 mentions, Liberal and Coalition collectively passed his lips a mere six times.
Malcolm’s Top 10 words for the week:
65 Australian
61 Labor
55 Australia
55 energy
45 families
44 work
42 Australians
39 expenses
38 jobs
34 electricity
Now we have sold off half of base load providers, it optional whether they provide power when we need it. And the peak electricity prices do wonderful things to their revenue.
Meanwhile we are moving to an entirely new situation where half of the power will come from root tops and an intelligent grid is required to get it to where it is needed. So let’s sell the grid to whoever and then it will be optional whether the grid is functional when required.
What is not to love about free market supply (or not) of electricity?
Before we had renewables and wire dividers in SA we had Ash Wednesday, rolling blackouts and so called load shedding.
It took 7 tornadoes to shut us down, and yet the media continue to allow Truumble to lie about SA power and renewables.
Methinks the laddy doth protest too much – he is so easy to read, even without visuals for body language, because he is most giving to needless verbosity when he knows in (what passes for) his heart that he is spouting bullshit.
And the most used phrase uttered by Turnbull, “Hard working Australian Families.” Wasn’t it?
I wonder if anyone on the LNP side, or anywhere actually, has made the bleeding obvious connection between privatisation of electricity assets and the outrageous increase in the price of electricity.
Michael West certainly did, and showed it repeatedly with the help of supporters. It was systemic, and privatisation was the major factor along with dysfunctional processes and formulas used in the Pricing Tribunal. None of this has anything to do with renewables.
Terry Lane, on ABC afternoons in the 80s, would constantly remind his audience that SA, which was the first to privatise, had the most expensive electricity in the country.
Plus ca bloody change.