Ann: Presentation on Full Year 2021 Results, page-33

Terry McCrann's second part of this 'The Weekend Australian' article is about inflation, but here's the initial part.

Unfortunately few politicians (apart from perhaps Angus Taylor, Federal Energy Minister) will take any notice: certainly note Matt Kean, who's become the NSW Treasurer, or the completely woke Victorian Labor Government with hopeless, incompetent Lily D'Ambrosio as Energy Minister:

"Australians are being given a ringside seat at just the mild version of what the life without fossil fuels that the chattering elites wants to impose of them looks like.

That is, rocketing prices to keep the lights on, heating in winter and cooling in summer, driving the car, and of course powering industry and jobs.

And that would be the ‘good news’ outcome; it might cost you a lot more but at least you get power.

The least attractive alternative is ‘brown’ and ‘black’ outs, as we see right now rolling across China.

Now, yes, the immediate ‘supply chain’ issues that are rolling and roiling across Europe, North America and Asia and especially China, might be – and I stress, might be – short-term and self-imposed.

Although that last bit – self-imposed – is hardly all that comforting, because that is precisely what we are planning for our future: to self-impose not using fossil fuels like coal and petrol and gas.

In Britain petrol at stations has been running out because of a shortage of tanker drivers. Who knew you had to keep getting petrol into the tanks at stations or else they’d run dry?

In China, they stopped buying Australian energy coal – the best quality in the world – and have been desperately trying to buy coal somewhere else: anywhere else, at any price. Again, who knew if you chose not to deliver coal to coal-fired stations, they’d stop producing power?

But, as I say, there’s small comfort in that for our future. That’s because we plan going – and

stumbling – into an exact same future.

But unlike what’s happening in Britain and China – and Europe, where they are desperately trying to buy gas, having made themselves so crucially dependent on Russia; with gas, their go-to power source after getting out of coal – we plan it to be a ‘forever future’ for us.

At least Britain can, and is, getting more tanker drivers; at least China can go back to buying our coal (if of course we will supply it to them if we don’t want to use it at home); at least Europe is finding gas on the global market, if at spectacularly high prices.

But for us, when we’ve closed all our coal-fired power stations – and not built any nuclear ones or gas-fired ones – there’ll be no going back when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine and the so-called big batteries have gone flat.

That’s one side of the global energy crisis – and I might just add, this is before the northern hemisphere heads into winter. It is going to be one hell of a “winter of discontent”..."