In this interview, Saxon Davidson appeared on TNT TV to discuss the IPA’s research on the Nature Positive Plan.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Dean Mackin:
All right. My next guest, what can I say about him? I’ll start off by saying he makes me feel bad, because I live right near a beach and I never go there. This man is terrific because he was the Life Saving Victoria, Australia Beach Sprint gold medalist in 2019. He’s represented Victoria in national surf Life Saving Australia competitions in ’20 and ’22, and he’s also a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. The only thing he’s not got going for him is that he’s a fan of Essendon. What’s going on there? How are you, mate?
Saxon Davidson:
Thank you for having me. I’m very well. Essendon actually won yesterday, so I’m pretty chuffed about that, so that’s not bad. But yeah, I’m very well. Thank you for having me.
Dean Mackin:
I have Jason Akermanis on the programme all the time. I mean, I remember they almost signed him up. Remember they went really close. Back in the day, they almost singed up Aker, but that was interesting. That’s a conversation for another day, mate. Now, let’s get started with what we were here to talk about today, like the staggering cost of the federal government’s proposed environmental protection agency to taxpayers. We can’t afford it. We are broke. We don’t not only have money in the bank, we owe a trillion dollars. Why are we carrying on with all of this nonsense?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, because the federal government have been long slated to rewrite the environment laws within the EPBC Act. Unfortunately, this was all based on a review done by Professor Graeme Samuel back in 2020. However, he never advocated for an environment protection agency in the federal government with approval powers, which is exactly what this government is proposing to do through two trenches of laws.
Now, this EPA, according to recently released IPA analysis, is going to be the sixth most resourced agency in the federal government, costing $1.8 billion. Over a third of which, 694 million, will be in staffing costs alone, over nearly 5,000 staff, which will be regulating our most vital industries. These vital industries are also being more regulated under this government. This government is responsible for the largest expansion in regulatory bureaucrats, over 100,000 regulatory bureaucrats for the first time in Australia’s history. And the vast majority of this growth is seen in our environment and climate change government portfolio, which, of course, this EPA will be under.
Dean Mackin:
I mean, I’ve just got to ask quickly, if you know $694 million on staff, how many years is that over?
Saxon Davidson:
That’s annual. This will be an annual cost to the government. Yes.
Dean Mackin:
A gift that’s going to keep on giving, and, of course, with inflation over time, it won’t be long before that’s another billion dollars on top of the Paris climate agreement. We talk about billions the way we used to talk about millions, and that’s when we used to have money in the bank. And now, we’re just spending… Sorry. No, we’re not spending, we are borrowing billions of dollars for this nonsense. As a country that represents less than a third of 1% of the world population, why are we spending so much when others, who are far bigger polluters, if you will, spend next to nothing?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, you’re exactly right. We produce a minimal amount of CO2 emissions, and yet, the everyday Australian, mainstream Australians, are forced to pay for it through their tax dollars, and for a transition that is failing. Every single headline we hear about the energy transition is that it’s not working, it’s behind schedule, but yet, we continue to funnel dollar after dollar of our hard-earned taxes through to pay for it all.
And the economic advantage for this transition simply isn’t there. We only saw a couple of weeks ago, Twiggy Forrest has stepped back on his green hydrogen commitment. And yet, we are expected to pay for it through our taxes. If the economic advantage isn’t there for one of the richest people in the country, why is it there for everyday Australians who are forced to pay for it through their taxes?
Dean Mackin:
It’s a good question. I’m just trying to get the exact number. I think it was $368 billion we spent on the AUKUS deal, and then subsequently ScoMo scurries off to be part of the military industrial complex of the very cushy job, and it’s reminds me very much of what’s happening here with the climate industry. I mean, so many of these people who advocate for this utter nonsense, spending a lot of money to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. But then again, A, who benefits from all this money that as you suggested is funnelled around the place? And at the end of the day, some of these people seeing themselves in rather cushy jobs on a global level looking after this global climate emergency that we are told we have.
Saxon Davidson:
You’re absolutely right. We see these tax dollars are funnelled in a sort of protectionist way to these very rich individuals, such as Mike Cannon-Brookes, for example, who’s a heavy investor in green renewable projects, and as well as Twiggy Forrest. And it just simply doesn’t benefit the everyday Australians who ultimately are forking over their money to pay for these things. The benefit is just not there for mainstream Australians, mainstream taxpaying Australians who are one of the most income tax burdened in the world.
Dean Mackin:
It’s a very non-organic transition. I mean, when you’ve got a better thing, businesses just move to it. You can’t keep them away. They’re like seagulls after a chip. Yet when it comes to this nonsense, the only time you ever see business drawn in, unless there’s some sort of… And let’s face it, big businesses, multi-billion dollar businesses don’t tend to have sub three-digit IQ individuals running the thing. They don’t tend to have idiots running them. Well, there is Mark Zuckerberg, but anyway, that’s another story. When it comes to these type of things, how do these people get sucked in for this, because it’s very non-organic? They’re given all these incentives, they’re seen to be green, but as soon as those government incentives are taken away, there they are left holding the bag, if you will.
Saxon Davidson:
No, you’re exactly right. This green industry would simply not exist without the various tax subsidies and incentives that exist. And they’re actually replacing our most competitive industries, that being the various mining resources sectors that we have, and agriculture. And they’re bringing in all these regulatory bodies and all this increase into red tape and green tape to stifle investment in our most profitable industries. We are a heavy exporter of things such as iron ore, coal, gas, and various agricultural products, and yet, these green industries that are being propped up with tax incentives and tax subsidies are replacing them.
And we simply don’t have the competitive advantage on a global scale in these industries. China has over 51% of the exporting market for solar panels and wind turbine products. And yet, we’re expected to believe that because we’re subsidising our own base manufacturing and these things through tax incentives, that all of a sudden, we’re going to be able to compete on a global scale. It’s ludicrous. It’s simply not there, and the competitive advantage is not there. We need to be deregulating our agriculture, and we need to be deregulating our mining sectors in order to unleash prosperity for Australians.
Dean Mackin:
Whether it’s Liberal, whether it’s Labour. I mean, if people haven’t woken up to the fact that it seems to be one group pretending to be true, little things argue, yay and nay to distract us. But when it comes to things that do long-term harm, irreversible harm to this particular country. In fact, in a Western nations, it seems to be the same ludicrous madness. So, the spread across the world. Hey, we’ve got these politicians. I’ll give you an example.
Here we go, and the government again said, “Look, first of all, we’re going to sell off our electricity grid.” Probably for a lot less money than they spent on PCR tests and face masks recently. So, there’s that gone. All of a sudden, we’ve gone from having some of the cheapest electricity in the world to paying whatever they want to charge. It’s essential. The fact that we’ve sold something that is essential, that was once government to private enterprise is beyond me. Then, we’ll go on better.
Let’s get people to put solar panels on the roof. Oh, they don’t want to do it. Let’s give them an incentive. Let’s pay a percentage of it. People are putting solar panels on the roof. Let’s give them extra money for the electricity they put back into the grid. It’s great. Everyone does it. Everyone’s saving money, even though they’re paying far more than they ever did on electricity, but as a percentage of the new rate, they’re saving money.
Then, they move up. They start lowering how much they pay you for putting electricity back into the grid. When are we making electricity through the solar panels? During the day. When do we use the most electricity because of industry? Probably during the day. So, here, they’ve got us feeding the electricity back into the grid. They’re paying us a pittance. I heard talked of them charging us for putting money back into the grid as if we’re some sort of nuisance for doing so at the moment.
I mean, talk about they rip us off, they take away our electricity grid, they make us pay a proportion of putting electricity back into the grid, and now, they want to charge us for doing that. I mean, you can’t win. And why are people still voting for the same parties that, as a duo, have been doing it to us coming up on three decades now?
Saxon Davidson:
Yeah, it’s all ridiculous, and it all comes back to us removing base load power out of our electricity grid on purpose. The government is doing this on purpose, and you simply just cannot have electricity bills lowered whilst doing that. We have a plentiful amount of coal. We have a plentiful amount of gas and also uranium. We have plentiful amount of base load power that is ready to come onto the grid that we could use today and now.
But the government just simply don’t want to do that. They want to denigrate our exporting industries, but at the same time, tell us, “Well, we export all this gas and coal, why don’t we use it internally, domestically?” That’s fine, but then you can’t make it impossible to use those same resources as well. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too. And there is a big endorsement for these ludicrous policies. We saw a cabinet shakeup just last week where we saw a cabinet shakeup just last week where there was a big huff and puff about Andrew Giles losing his immigration ministerial role. Now obviously that needed to happen. He wasn’t doing a good job, but we saw an endorsement of our two most economically disastrous ministers staying in there. That being the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, and our energy minister, Chris Bowen. They’ve still got their roles, and they’re still regulating our most vital industries. They’re cancelling jobs, they’re delaying approval times, and these environmental law shakeup is still going to happen under these ministers. It’s an endorsement of an economically disastrous plans that’s going to have a humanitarian disastrous results for everyday Australians.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:10:04]
Dean Mackin:
It absolutely is a whole bunch more to talk about on this subject and others here at TNT right after the break. Everybody on with Saxon Davidson. He is a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and a terrific guy as well, and somebody who makes me want to get along to the beach and points out our lazy I am. He’s a terrific guy. Back after this here at TNT.
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Dean Mackin:
Oh, yes, and welcome back. I mean, some of the relationships between some of these politicians and people, I mean, Tanya, Plibersek, I mean Google Michael Coutts-Trotter and see what you come up with. I mean, wow, you can’t make this stuff up. Just getting back into it. I am with Saxon Davidson, a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and we’re talking about a bunch of things and how nonsensical it is, how much money we’re borrowing that our grandkids will have to pay interest on. Hopefully they can afford the interest on it moving forward with the state of our various economies in the Western world.
But mate, I remember when my son was a young fellow, I was at a markets and I bought him some playing cards and they had The Muppets on them, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with our ministers. We’re shuffling around a bunch of Muppets to take these critical industry roles, and I could almost pick who they’re going to put there because it would typically be, by my definition, the worst person imaginable. And it seems to be the case every time, especially this labour, half of the duopoly, do a bit of a reshuffle.
Saxon Davidson:
Well, a lot of the talks surrounding whenever there’s a ministry shuffling are the winners and losers. And we talk about typically the career path for different politicians that are having their jobs basically shuffled around in different portfolios. But the only real losers with this ministry reshuffling is Australians. Honestly, all the important roles, more or less stayed the same. Home affairs was basically gutted. But as I was saying earlier, the two most economically disastrous ministers, Chris Bowen and Tanya Plibersek, who are responsible for our most vital industries for our prosperity, more or less, have remained the same. There’s no agenda change, there’s no altering of any of their disastrous policies, and there’s no altering of the bills that are currently before Parliament, whether that be the future made in Australia or the EPA that we were talking about earlier.
And these disastrous bills, already disastrous bills have to be negotiated with very radical crossbenchers, whether they be the Greens, whether they be the Teals. The Greens have already said is a non-negotiable starting point that they need to introduce a climate trigger into the EPBC Act. Now, what a climate trigger is, is immediately any project that has over a hundred thousand carbon emission tonnes will be cancelled right off the bat. And this would cost thousands of jobs, would costs billions of dollars in investment, and anything between 25,000 and a hundred thousand tonnes will need to be assessed under this climate trigger by the minister, or when the EPA comes in the CEO Environment Protection Australia.
Now this is going to be vastly disastrous, it will cost over $200 billion in upfront investment straight off the bat. This is not even ongoing costs for any potential future projects that aren’t yet into the pipeline. This has disastrous economic costs for Australians and particularly for our most productive states such as Queensland and Western Australia particularly, and even the Northern Territory, which is vitally needing economically development. Now, this is simply unacceptable. This simply cannot happen. But what the Greens are saying, “This is a non-negotiable starting point,” and with the bills already being disastrous, the fact that this wasn’t shuffled at all when the opportunity was there for the Prime Minister is just baffling to me.
Dean Mackin:
Greens and the Teals, they love to advocate for things that seemingly won’t affect them in their little enclave areas that they live in. They are bigots, they are absolute hypocrites. It’s crazy. And again, another 200 billion, 360 billion for AUKUS, another billion dollars every year for this. Mate, how long, literally, before we are in $2 trillion worth of debt, which will be about 160, $170,000 per Australian. A baby is born, you owe 160, $170,000. Mate, that’s where we’re headed, all to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. And when do we wake up? Some people would argue when the lights don’t turn on, when the life support systems in the hospitals switch off. I would suggest at that point that’ll be the least of our problems because we will have been broke well before then, and will go the way of other countries. I mean other countries that have historically done well and who now find themselves almost as Third World countries such as Venezuela.
Saxon Davidson:
Well, I mean there’s a saying from Victorians and the centre riders that we’ve come from the future. The state of Victoria is the end result if we just continue to go down this path. And 10 years ago, we put a moratorium on onshore gas. And our energy grid, the Victorian section of the energy grid has been unstable for the past five years basically. There’s a very severe gas shortage in Victoria. Victorians already owe a large amount of debt per person before we get onto the federal level as well. So the Victorians, we’ve come from the future and we’re not doing well. The Victorian economy is in tatters. We owe plenty of debt. There’s very little productivity. Businesses are suffering. We’re the most regulated in the country, and a lot of the other states like to laugh at Victoria and the state that it is. And it’s basically become a welfare step for the federal government through GST. But that is the future that holds for everyone else in the country if we simply continue down this path that is before us at the federal level.
Dean Mackin:
I think the smoking gun, the elephant in the room, the thing that absolutely proves that this is an attack on our society, on our economy moving forward. If we are in debt to the globalists, if we are in debt to the rest of the world, they own our country. They literally control us. Anyone knows that. And the simple smoking gun, elephant in the room is this. If we firmly believe that there is a global climate problem, we’re prepared to spend such a disproportionately high amount of money on this problem, and this is it. Why would we possibly sell in record amounts’ coal to other countries around the world? We would simply say, “We’re not doing it. You can’t have it, and you need to move along and make the same changes that we’re about to make.” I think that is the smoking gun.
Saxon Davidson:
You’re absolutely right. But simply put is that the country would almost stop at a standstill if we stop exporting coal and we exporting gas. And even uranium and iron ore and our agricultural products, the Australian way of life would simply be no more. We would simply stop as a nation. Our entire prosperity would disappear. Our system of government would actually disappear without the vital royalty and taxes that are paid through these industries that help fund our schools, our hospitals, and our roads. And if the climate crisis, the global climate crisis as you described, the countries that really need to stop their emissions wouldn’t be Australia, it would be China, it would be Russia, it would be India. This simply put, Australia has nothing to gain by going down this path, but we have everything to lose. It is simply not in our national interest to continue pursuing the policies that are required under this regime.
Dean Mackin:
If we listen to the labour, the green, the teals, I mean, we’re damned if we do, we’re damned if we don’t. If simply went back to old school values, do what we’ve done well doing for decades, I think we wouldn’t have a problem. And I won’t drag you into this argument. I would argue that if we weren’t told we had a problem over the last four years, that other thing, most people wouldn’t have known, “Oh, I had the flu the other day. I’m over it. Let’s get back to work.” Again, mate, we’re told we have a problem. I suggest many of these problems are fictional. They ramp up fear. That’s how they sell. And it’s always about money, immense amounts, billions, sometimes trillions of dollars globally to fix problems that don’t exist. And I think if we really want to find out who’s behind all of this, have a look at whose benefited and where all of this money has ended up. And I think there you have your culprit. There you have the actual smoking gun itself.
Saxon Davidson:
Yes, it’s the investors in green energy that really benefit from all this. And we know this, and we know this through the vast swaths of subsidies that exist through the green lobby groups, all the different environmental NGOs, all the different environmental lawfare firms, which the government funds to put out risk, our jobs in regional Australia and resource projects and in agriculture. We know who benefits from this, and that the government pretends that these sort of strong lobby groups don’t exist is really just a slap to the face and is really condescending to mainstream Australians who are suffering under this regime.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:20:04]
Dean Mackin:
Do you think it would be terrific if everybody, perhaps 60 Minutes, could do a show, not that they’re likely to do it, when they had all those, not just overnight, but certainly week-long, I think it was, or longer electricity outages down in South Australia? And of course, Victoria would’ve been asked to help out in that particular regard. Now, I do believe Victoria is asking New South Wales and other states to help out with their supply of electricity. We’re about to close down another couple of major ones in due course. Of course, they put that off because they do realise that they don’t have the grid, and probably never will, to sustain it. Mate, wouldn’t it be terrific to have people maybe even spend some time down and talking to those who were without electricity for a couple of weeks? Because that is the future of every Australian at some point. Should we not somehow wake up to this madness before it’s implemented?
The other thing that particularly worries me is when they flick on these wind farms and these solar farms. And of course, the wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine. Certainly, when it comes to battery storage technology, 99% of people have no clue how much battery you would need to get us by overnight. It’s undoable, it’s unworkable, and just on a national level it’s unworkable, let alone to imagine that countries around the world, like China, would have batteries that could keep them running overnight when the wind’s not blowing and the solar panels… Mate, so moving forward, do you think we’re going to wake up? Do you think we’re going to wake up to any of this, or will it be too late by the time we do?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, the lucky thing about Australia is that we have so many resources available to us once we do wake up from this sort of daze. Ever since Liddell closed down, IPA analysis has repeatedly found that we cannot close any base load power stations until there was one ready to replace it. But fortunately for us, we have plenty of resources available to us to open up new base load power stations. And unfortunately, due to the amount of green subsidies that exist, we would actually probably have to remove the green subsidies and place them into these new power stations simply to direct where the public funding should be going. This is what Dutton envisioned with his nuclear plan from the old power stations. Simply, it is available to us, and luckily for us, we are able to do this much better than other countries due to the sheer amount of coal, gas, and uranium reserves that exist under the ground and just offshore. It is available to us. We just simply have to wait for a government to realise this and follow suit.
Dean Mackin:
I’ve got a break to get to. Do you have another five minutes on the other side of it to talk about nuclear?
Saxon Davidson:
Of course.
Dean Mackin:
Okay, then Saxon Davidson, he is a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and he’ll be joining us again after this short commercial break.
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Dean Mackin:
And of course, you can send us an email, easy. Dean, D-E-A-N, @tntradio.live if you’d like to do that. Or of course, you can have a chat in the online chat, and we welcome you to do that. Saxon Davidson rejoins me after the break. Right now, he’s a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and we’re talking about our power stations.
I remember sitting there one morning, Saxon, having our breakfast one Sunday morning looking out over the Lake Budgewoi, a couple of chimneys belonging to the Lake Munmorah Power Station, a station that would probably have still been able to create power had it not been closed a few years earlier, apparently unnecessary. And there we saw the two chimneys, the two smokestacks, demolished one after another. And again, just one in a long line. As you said before, we’ve already lost Liddell. I drive past Eraring a couple of days a week, mate. The air is clean, the sky is blue, and they tell us it’s ruining the planet. I’m not buying it.
Saxon Davidson:
Well, I’m not buying it either, but, also, these power stations support high-paying jobs in regional parts of the country, and these jobs are unlikely to ever come back. And if too many of these power stations disappear, a lot of our regional communities will simply just disappear along with them. We, at the IPA, go on a lot of regional tours just to talk with community leaders in the area that are being impacted by these net-zero climate change policies. And the few jobs that replace these disappearing jobs simply are not high-paying and they’re not long-term.
When we were in Chinchilla, we were speaking to someone from the Chamber of Commerce there, and one of the largest solar farms in regional Australia, or in Australia in general, is just south of there in the Southern Downs. And the creation of this solar farm, or factory, as I prefer to call it, was supporting about 500 jobs in the construction phase. Now, this is no small feat for regional areas of the country. However, once it was fully constructed, it was only supporting about 20 low-paid jobs to wipe the solar panels themselves. And these were largely done by backpackers on minimum wage. The jobs are simply not there in the long term, and the jobs that were there for the long term were high-paying, and they will never come back if they continue to be lost.
Dean Mackin:
I especially love when it’s the government that advocates, “We’re going to create jobs,” and especially with their government jobs, which means more money from the taxpayer, more debt, money we don’t have. I mean, the fact that they announced this as if it’s a good thing, and typically, those jobs going to people who have been brought in here over other Australians. Again, another debate I don’t wish to get into at the moment. Mate, these stations, as they close them down, I mean, we’re aware of these small microreactors. They fit on the back of a truck. They can run a whole town. They’re air cooled. They don’t need liquid cooling, mate. Whether it’s microreactors or big nuclear plants, mate, it’s the way of the future. There’s no two ways about it.
Saxon Davidson:
Absolutely. And when the government say that nuclear can’t work in Australia, we know it’s not true. Nuclear has been powering plenty of countries in Europe and elsewhere for decades. 70% of France’s energy is provided by nuclear, and they provide nuclear to other countries across the continent as well. We know it’s simply untrue for the government to say that we have no nuclear capability in Australia, particularly when we have the largest uranium reserves in the world.
Dean Mackin:
Yeah, mate, I couldn’t agree more. When it comes to nuclear, and we’re a safe country, I mean we’re not subject to major earthquakes. Yes, we have flooding, but we certainly got plenty of places you can locate these things. We’ve got a pretty stable sort of socioeconomic situation going. We don’t have terrorists running around for the most part, even though there is a story today that we’re in a heightened state of terror alert. Take that for what you will. But mate, I couldn’t think of a better place to have nuclear than here in Australia. We’ve even, God forbid, not that I want to, but we’ve even got a place right in the middle where we can dump it, far safer than most countries, if we have to dump our own, not other countries’, but our own waste.
Saxon Davidson:
No, you’re absolutely correct. Australia is very stable on a tectonic-
No, you’re absolutely correct. Australia is very stable on a tectonic level, and also, even though we’ve been complaining a lot today about the bureaucracy in our government, it is nowhere near as bad to create a sort of Chernobyl event like we saw with the Soviet Union. And there is almost no better place in Australia than to do it. We have the capacity to do so. We have the locations as outlined by the opposition and Peter Dutton, and we also have the reserves.
We have so much of it. We have so much of it that we could use it here for our own domestic capabilities and also for global trade, for other countries to be able to realise their nuclear potential as well. The economic advantages are just completely there and completely overshadow the lack of competitive advantage we have with green technologies such as hydrogen and solar panels and wind farms.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]
Dean Mackin:
But you think it’s things like Fukushima and, for example, the nuclear meltdown there, the Chernobyl situation? Do you think it’s stories like this and a lot of that… I mean, the one in Fukushima, [inaudible 00:31:06] would argue it was in a coastal place. There’s a fault line there. They’re subsequent to having those type of problems. In Russia, lots of lessons learned. It was due to human error. So moving forward, we’re actually quite safe and the technology is far advanced compared to that which it used to be.
So again, I don’t know what people are afraid of. Certainly those of the hand in the pocket of the public purse, maybe those who have the most to lose, but I think we’re in a good place moving forward. I pray that common sense prevails and that’s where we find ourselves and that those savings, and they would be immense, are passed along to the consumer.
Saxon Davidson:
Absolutely. The only thing stopping nuclear energy being realised is the political will of the government. It’s simply not there. They have an ideological bent against nuclear energy and it is holding them, and it is holding every Australian in the country back from having cheaper, more reliable energy.
Dean Mackin:
I don’t know how long it takes them to actually build one of these things, I would imagine with red tape and bureaucracy and all the rest of it, it would be at least a decade away. But certainly when we look at our existing coal-fired power stations, they’ve got at least another decade in them. Absolutely, without fail. The fact that we’re rolling forward with these wind farms is bad, but these ones that they want to put out at sea, and there have been other countries that have just cut them off said, “We’re not going to do it anymore,” Australia are apparently the last country that intends to do them, what could possibly go wrong with these giant monolithic structures almost as high as Centre Point Tower, I’m led to believe, floating out at sea? What could possibly go wrong?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, it’s going to be a bad thing for birds, I suppose. But alongside that, it destroys our beautiful coastline. No one wants to look at wind farms and the government have realised that. We’ve seen the protests at Port Stevens out near the Hunter Valley where they’ve proposed these mammoth wind farms and no one wants them in the community. And the government should know that they don’t want wind farms on their coastline because farmers don’t want wind farms on their farms and in their neighbourhoods either. The government simply are just trying to bulldoze these communities and have these wind farms or wind factories up in the middle of their areas. It’s just completely immoral and wrong.
Dean Mackin:
It’s funny that you’ve got the Greens and the Teals that advocate for a lot of this stuff. I mean, there’s the Greens sitting in, let’s say, Newtown. They say, “We want more immigration,” but none of the immigrants ever end up in Newtown. We’ve got them wanting all these wind farms out in the middle of back of nowhere, out off the coast. Never places where the Greens seem to live. They like to advocate for things that will affect others, but not them it seems.
Saxon Davidson:
100% but that’s always been the way that they’ve operated and it’s the way that the Teals operate as well. The Teals advocate very much for more or less the same policies the Greens do in regards to renewable energy and the transition. But yet you never see wind farms or solar factories in their electorates. It’s always in the bush. It’s always in regional Australia who are expected to carry the load and to sacrifice their way of life, their output, especially of their farmers and their property, the value of their property, in order for people who are not them and are not like them to realise their ideological goals. This is completely wrong. And it actually goes against the whole idea of representative democracy that these people from complete other way of the country can decide what their way of life will be like. It’s completely wrong.
Dean Mackin:
We could argue about all these policies, but ultimately we could argue about the Greens and the Teals and Labour, even Liberal, if you like, implementing all of these policies. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the Australian public. They keep falling for this en masse. The fact that we continue to vote in governments and people, individuals who do this. How, for example, Tony Abbott’s former seat where everyone wanted this strong Liberal Party leader and in fact voted for him to be Prime minister. We know how that turned out. Thanks Malcolm Turnbull. But for that same seat, to then go and vote in one of these Teals, Zali Steggall, they’re very fickle, the Australian public, that you could go again, the same seat from a Tony Abbott to a Zali Steggall tells you just how easily influenced most people are by the media.
Saxon Davidson:
Well, there is a bit of that, but the dial is shifting on a lot of these issues, particularly in regards to energy because people’s energy bills just keep on going up and up and up. And there is a slow realisation within the public that a lot of this is due to our climate change policies, to our energy policies, and because of our environmental policies. The dial is shifting and that has been reflected in polling in regards to people’s views on Net Zero as a policy. IPA polling has regularly shown that people want energy reliability and energy affordability to be at the forefront of the minds of our elected officials instead of net zero and climate change. So the dial is shifting. It will take a bit of time, but the Australian public is slowly starting to realise that they can’t have an affordable cost of living and have a lot of these net zero policies.
Dean Mackin:
Yeah. Saxon Davidson, I could not agree more. I say the media is a problem, but people like you through the Institute of Public Affairs are fixing it and reversing the damage that has been done. Saxon Davidson, I appreciate your time here today at TNT.
Saxon Davidson:
Thank you.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:36:52]
This transcript with Saxon Davidson talking on TNT TV from 5 August 2024 has been edited for clarity.
