I think the reason LNP love coal is because there’s not a lot of thinking required there. Dig up and export and that’s money. If you go to renewables, there’s a lot more thinking required if there’s money to be made by government.
And it should be made to think. Just because it gets its revenue from taxes isn’t an excuse to get lazy. They should be able to be forward looking in their revenue generating activities. If they focused on ensuring the value addition chains were inland, they’d make Australia competitive in renewables very easily by making exporting of lithium costlier than processing it into finished products here. They’d make iron ore exports more expensive than processing iron ore into finished products. That would make manufacturing profitable here and bring jobs back. But who wants to think that much when they could be evicted from office in three years time? Time too short to implement such radical ideas?
