OPINION: Power and inflation crises work for the new government but for how long?
There’s something about hearing the government of Australia’s biggest state ask its residents to minimise their electricity use during certain hours that evokes a sense of decay. Australia is a place that has felt beyond such things for most of our lifetimes. And yet, here we are, consulting news sites every few hours to see if theMeanwhile, in very much related news, inflation gallops away from our earning capacity, taking lettuce beyond reach, with promises of worse to come.
Had the Fair Work Commission ultimately concluded the government’s recommended increase was significantly too high, perhaps there might have been something to that criticism. Having campaigned on being a champion of real wage increases for the most vulnerable, Albanese would have appeared both ineffectual and economically unsound. As it is, he can claim to have read the economy better than the Coalition, while also prioritising those struggling most.
It’s hard to square this with the Coalition’s traditional narrative that coal is the cheaper, more reliable energy source. Certainly, we’ve suffered from low wind and solar output, too, but there’s a basic infrastructure problem here that makes the problem worse. Put simply, our grid doesn’t get the most out of renewables because it isn’t made for them. You could update it, but you’d need the federal government to implement renewable-energy policies that attracted that sort of investment.
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