In which the Caterist, the Major and His Lordship make Monday reptile emissions day ...

 

Some of the pond's truly hard proud patriots plunge into turf the pond is inclined to avoid, such as Sky News; the pond is more inclined to play hard in an ABC quiz show, with its expert subject the reptile hive mind.

The pond fancies its chances at playing hard in that game because it had wagered a quadrillion doubloons that both the Caterist and the Major would be all for nuking the country to save the planet this Monday ...

The Caterist is well known as an expert climate science denialist who suddenly transformed into a pious, deeply concerned environmentalist, someone also deeply concerned, agitated and upset by emissions, making his own emissions on the matter a revelation down there with his emissions on the movements of flood waters in quarries.

The pond feels no need to indulge in an argument with this climate change enthusiast, this religious zealot. 

His transformation from zealous denialist demagogue to zealous nuke advocate to save the planet is sufficient unto itself ...

Bowen’s response to nuclear plan proves his irrational mind, Australia muddles along, shackled to a 34 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that it cannot possibly meet under a Luddite government fighting a rearguard action against nuclear energy that defies rational explanation.

This sort of reptile ritual is always best begun with a snap of, if not the anti-Christ, then at least one of Satan's helpers,  Chris Bowen holds a press conference in Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Then it was on with the Caterist's deep concern for emissions ...

Sweden’s Energy Minister took to social media last Thursday to voice her displeasure with the Germans. 
German demand for Scandinavian electricity had sent power prices through the roof.
“It is a result of decommissioned nuclear power,” Ebba Busch wrote on X.
“When it’s not windy, we get high electricity prices with this failed electricity system.”
In Norway last week the ruling centre-left Labour Party pledged to cut the interconnector with the EU grid after Germany’s latest wind drought sent Norwegian power prices to record highs. Norway’s Energy Minister Terje Aasland summed it up thus: “It’s an absolutely shit situation.”
The nuclear power debate runs on different lines in Europe and North America. A country can invest in its own reactors or scrounge nuclear power from its neighbours. The only exception to the rule is Norway, which invested heavily in hydro generation until the green­ies put a stop to it in the mid-1980s.
The case for nuclear generation in flat and dry Australia is compelling. The case against it is embarrassingly weak, as we discovered last Friday when Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen set out to discredit Frontier Economics modelling and failed.

The pond bit its tongue and noted that the reptiles thought that the best idea, the most solid and convincing argument, was to show an AV clip of a steaming pile of something ...

The Federal government has criticised Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear ambition. They claimed households with solar panels would be the biggest losers. The opposition is defending its plan, despite Energy Minister Chris Bowen raising multiple concerns.

Mmm, that caption almost passed as a bit of both siderism, but naturally the Caterist would have none of that ...

Accusing Frontier of pushing “dodgy figures” and labelling Peter Dutton’s endorsement of its findings as “a Christmas con job” provided copy for plodding journalists. Yet Bowen could not refute the report’s most damaging finding: the cost of decarbonising the grid under his policy.
Frontier’s headline figure of $594bn is a conservative underestimate. It does not include the cost of cleaning up the grids in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Costs incurred directly by the consumer to install solar panels and batteries are excluded. So is the price of trading in gas appliances for electrical appliances.
Frontier does not attempt to model externalities such as the loss of amenity in regional Australia caused by wind and solar generators and augmented transmission networks. Frontier says if these were included, the total cost of the transition in the energy sector would be well more than $1 trillion.
Bowen was wise to avoid getting trapped into a messy argument about Frontier’s claim that the new transmission lines needed to accommodate variable renewable energy would cost $66bn.
Wise because the Australian Energy Market Operator’s transmission cost estimates are all over the place.
In 2020, AEMO said transmission lines to support the New England Renewable Energy Zone would cost $1.5bn. In the 2024 Integrated System Plan, AEMO has upped that figure to $3.7bn.
The Queensland SuperGrid was supposed to cost $500m. Now they’re telling us it’s $3.3bn. The HumeLink was supposed to set us back $2.4bn. AEMO’s latest guesstimate is $4.9bn.
The integrity of Frontier’s report is hard to question. It has a solid record in climate and energy research stretching back 25 years. It can hardly be accused of skewing its findings to satisfy its client since the research was conducted at the company’s expense.
For its trouble, Frontier can kiss goodbye to any government contracts so long as Labor is in power. It can expect to be shunned by the cashed-up renewable sector.
Frontier’s Danny Price could not have been blind to the reputational risk. He would’ve known that the time-poor, economically illiterate press corp would not read the report before jumping on its imagined failings.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a snap of said Danny, Economist Danny Price

Always standing by to help, the pond thought this might  provide some useful Danny b/g, dressing his emissions in his own best light:

The Caterist can emit nothing but praise for Danny:

Frontier’s motives appear genuinely publicly spirited under the circumstances.
“We have decided to do the work because of the large amount of ill-informed and misleading cost comparisons being publicly made about nuclear power,” Frontier explains in the introduction to its first report.
“We feel Australia deserves better quality analysis and commentary on this important issue.”
If Bowen were sure of his ground, he would test the report’s findings by asking AEMO to replicate its work. AEMO describes its ISP reports as “least-cost modelling”, implying they point the way to the least expensive method of meeting consumer demand for electricity. In practice, however, it self-censors its work to conform with the government’s emissions target and insistence on the use of renewables. By adding nuclear to the mix, Frontier has merely done what AEMO should have done in the first place.
AEMO’s road map is based on shaky assumptions that Frontier has been fearless in challenging.
Chief among these is the prediction that electricity demand will almost double in the next 26 years from 180,000 gigawatt hours to 340,000GWh, the so-called step change scenario. AEMO and its processor NEMMCO have a woeful record of forecasting demand.
Frontier says the step change demand forecast is so far from the historic trend that it looks incredible. It assumes that 98 per cent of new vehicles by 2050 will be fully electric and that green hydrogen technology will mature.
Frontier’s assumption that the nuclear option is $260bn cheaper than the government’s current policy is based on a more modest expectation of a rise in demand to 250,000GWh by 2050.
It also assumes the increasing power demand from AI computing largely will be met behind the meter. Data storage and processing centres will generate their own electricity to reduce outage risk. Should demand exceed expectations, nuclear technology is relatively easy to scale up.

The pond realises that some pedants have quibbled. Over at the Graudian, Peter Hannam was scribbling Energy generators poke holes in Dutton's nuclear plan as questions over costings pile up.

Nicki Hutley was outraged in The Coalition's nuclear costings and their rubbery assumptions take us back to being a climate pariah.

Over at the Nine rags Mike Foley declared Dutton abandons Liberal principles in nuclear energy pitch (soft paywall):

Friday the 13th marked an auspicious day for the Coalition’s free market principles. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton declared his government would spend tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to achieve his nuclear ambitions.
This is a startling goal for the conservative force in Australian politics, which traditionally advocates shrinking the role of government.
Not only does Dutton aim to increase public spending; he would bring to a screeching halt the private investment – $40 billion in the past four years – pouring into renewable energy. And all without any evidence his actions would bring down power bills.
The Dutton plan says renewable energy would not exceed 53 per cent of the grid’s supply – a level set to be reached sometime in 2026 – largely through projects already under way.
Millions fewer Australians to drive electric cars or have rooftop solar under Dutton’s vision
Dutton wants to present a cheaper alternative for the energy grid so he can attack the Albanese government over its failed, ill-advised 2022 election promise to cut household power bills by $275 by next year.
He showed on Friday that he’s willing to ditch the private sector to do it.
As opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said on Saturday: “Our focus is not trying to ensure investors make a buck. Our focus is trying to ensure households save a buck.”
The problem for Dutton is that the CSIRO says nuclear energy in Australia would be at least 50 per cent more expensive than renewable energy.
That’s a key reason why the opposition cannot point to any figures showing its plan would bring down power bills.

You could also read Foley joining with Paul Sakkai for Millions fewer Australians to drive electric cars or have rooftop solar under Dutton's vision.

How to settle these nervous nellies, these quibbling quislings? 

Why, show a snap of the two heroes of the moment, Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien discuss the Coalition’s approach to energy. Picture: John Gass

Thus fortified, the Caterist could summon the energy for a final emission, a climactic spurt ...

Additional reactors can be added in sequence on the large tracts of land vacated by retiring coal-fired generators.
Scaling up renewable energy is a nightmare proposition. The scarcity of suitable land, the fragility of supply chains, the challenge of gaining community consent and the demand for yet more transmission will only increase.
Global interest in nuclear is gaining momentum. At COP29 in Azerbaijan, six more countries joined the pledge to triple the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050, bringing the number of nations on board with the agreement to 31. Microsoft is reopening a mothballed reactor at Three Mile Island. Some of the world’s largest banks, including Bank of America, Barclays and BNP Paribas have agreed to bankroll nuclear.
Six new reactors have gone online this year, three of them in China, where the average build time is five years. Another 65 are under construction.
Meanwhile, Australia muddles along, legally shackled to a 34 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that it cannot possibly meet under a Luddite government fighting a rearguard action against nuclear energy that defies rational explanation.

Indeed, indeed ...

And so to the Major, also in emissions mode, another climate science denialist suddenly given over to saving the planet by nuking the country in Australia’s energy transition plan is a sham, Well past 2050 renewables will require large amounts of gas as a back-up for power generation. So fossil fuels won’t disappear despite the Climate Change and Energy Minister’s plan.

The Major's emissions were strengthened by the opening snap, President-elect Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macronin 2019. France has 70 per cent nuclear-generated electricity. Picture: AFP

The Major was in full cry ...

The world spent $US2 trillion on new renewable energy infrastructure this year yet carbon dioxide emissions rose, fossil fuel use increased and the hollowing out of Europe’s industrial base accelerated.
If that sounds crazy, Australia’s renewable power system builders have effectively admitted we will rely beyond 2050 on potentially being able to burn enough gas to power 15 million homes a day when the weather knocks out renewables. Nuclear power will take a long time to build, but it may be the only carbon-free way to achieve permanent stability in the electricity network.
This is the sham of our energy transition: politicians, journalists and many in the power industry don’t even admit that our renewables future will depend on gas.
Journalists will smash Coalition nuclear costings, as the ABC did on Friday morning ahead of the formal costings release later that day, but the same journalists will remain incurious about the total system cost of Labor’s plan.
Events in Australia, and in the US, in California and Texas, make it clear that severely adverse weather conditions for renewables can’t be offset by batteries alone because of frequency issues in the system.
Renewables-obsessed Germany has shed 8.4 per cent of industrial production during the past 18 months. European output is down 5 per cent and exports are down 3.8 per cent.
China, while experiencing a domestic slowdown, has lifted output 6 per cent and exports 15 per cent between quarter one 2023 and quarter two 2024.
Despite rolling out hundreds of new renewables projects, China increased total emissions of CO2 in the past 12 months by an estimated 0.2 per cent and now accounts for 32 per cent of global emissions. Its power grid remains 80 per cent coal-dependent.
China’s car exports are booming while European car companies are closing factories to relocate to the US and China.
Yet Europe did manage to cut total emissions by 8 per cent last year and is on course for another cut this year.

Well might they cut total emissions because no way the Major was cutting his own, especially as the reptiles decided to insert a snap of Satan's little helper, Australia’s federal Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Well played Jeremy, the reptiles love that finger-pointing snap ...

Naturally that finger-pointing sent the Major into a major emission about greenie activists ...

That may please its Greens activists, but EU politicians are worried about social cohesion and the effects on Europe’s workers of the industrial downturn. In Germany the right wing Alternative for Germany party is polling 18 per cent, behind only the conservative CDU (Christian Democrats). Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party Coalition government collapsed last month and faces a wipe-out at the general election in February.
Everything in the climate action space is now up for grabs as president-elect Donald Trump declares “drill baby, drill”.
Yet even before Trump’s inauguration, UK-based website Carbon Brief expects total US CO2 emissions across all sectors to be up 2 per cent in 2024. The US this year produced record amounts of oil and gas despite President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion green spending under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The US was for the seventh consecutive year the world’s top producer of crude oil, at 13.1 million barrels a day.
It is the world’s number one gas producer at 1.35 trillion cubic metres, more than double that of number two producer Russia at 586 billion cubic metres, and dwarfing Australia’s output of 150 billion cubic metres (seventh in the world). This is Biden’s green energy transition.
Yet Australian politicians, led by Energy Minister Chris Bowen and former Liberal NSW treasurer Matt Kean, now chair of Labor’s Climate Change Authority, still plan to cut all coal-fired power generation here and keep insisting wind and solar are the cheapest forms of power.
Our country has had hints of how a continent-sized grid built on renewables could go wrong – the collapse of the South Australian power system on September 28, 2016, and the failure of renewables to kick in to save the local system in Broken Hill, NSW, in October.
Chris Uhlmann, still at the ABC at the time, received a lot of abuse for writing the facts about electricity grid stability in the wake of the South Australian debacle.
As this column reported on June 30, quoting electrical engineering posts on Climate Etc, the blog of climate scientist Judith Curry, the science of grid stability is about spinning machines that stabilise the alternating current system. These do not always sit well with renewables feed-ins.
Menzies Research Centre senior fellow Nick Cater got a guernsey on Climate Etc on December 5 in a piece by Russ Schussler, former head of system planning for the Georgia Transmission Company. Cater had previously written about the Broken Hill shutdown and the difficulty of synchronising storage batteries with the grid.
Large blackouts in recent years in California and Texas after extreme weather events highlight the same issue but on a much larger scale, pointing to serious problems with the science of electricity distribution. This is nothing to do with denying climate change, as Guardian Australia insists when presented with such reporting.

What's this bizarre talk of extreme weather events and that talk of not denying climate change?

Be proud Major, be defiant, be unrepentant.

For year upon umpteen year, the Major led the climate science denialist charge at the lizard Oz. 

Way back in 2014 in Crikey, Clive celebrated the Major in The Dirty Dozen: Australia's biggest climate foes.

The Major was the first denialist cab off the rank, and Clive began his celebration with a string of links featuring the Major's work.

Sadly many of those links are now dead, but still this Clive tribute survives ...

Just as his reporters repeatedly misrepresent the science of climate change and blacken the names of eminent scientists, so Mitchell’s opinion editors are always willing to turn over their pages to whatever disinformation is being peddled by the likes of Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and Bjorn Lomborg, plus blowhards like Maurice Newman and George Pell. Even the loopy Lord Christopher Monckton gets space.
Otherwise-good journalists at The Australian allow themselves to be sucked into Mitchell’s vortex of paranoia about all things green. At the heart of his relentless campaign of anti-science and debunking of measures to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions is a visceral hatred of environmentalism, especially the Australian Greens, whom he wants to “destroy”.
In 2009 the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the oil and gas lobby group, awarded Mitchell the JN Pierce Award for Media Excellence “for leading the newspaper’s coverage of climate change policy”, which proves that the greenhouse mafia does have a sense of humour. As a sign of his endurance, Mitchell’s is the only name to appear in all three Dirty Dozens.

Now it seems a few storms in the US and A storm in Broken Hill cut out the towns power supply. Picture: 9News ...

... has broken the Major and sent him into a blind panic, and he's gone over to the dark side, convinced we need to nuke the country to save the planet ...

Now even the Australian Energy Market Operator has admitted our electricity transition will have to rely on gas for decades. On November 12, Uhlmann quoted Australian Energy Market Operator CEO Daniel Westerman saying “gas would be essential to ensure the reliability of the eastern grid to 2050 and beyond”.
Given likely gas shortages in Australia without a domestic gas reservation policy, Westerman admitted there may be times when there is too little gas during periods of low solar and wind output to keep gas-fired power stations running.
The politics of this have not yet hit home in Canberra: because of engineering difficulties, Australia may never reach a time when it does not need fossil fuel back-up of renewables.
Adi Paterson, former CEO of ANSTO (the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation), says there is too much politics in power system discussions and not enough engineering expertise.

On the  matter of Adi, the pond is inclined to be lazy and revert to a highly esteemed correspondent's note:

As a ‘leading scientist’ Adi Paterson doesn’t seem to have been mentioned on any scientific papers that I can find. Certainly not in Material Sciences, Physics or Nuclear Energy.
Still it might be that his strength wasn’t so much scientific endeavour but middle management and an ability to schmooze at workshops and conferences.
More of a political animal I would say.  (Source DW)

Then the Major could do a final epic emission:

“The Australian east coast power grid is the single biggest machine in the southern hemisphere. The grid is the precision timing signal for hundreds of industries across the country. This links not just to manufacturing but to things like landing aircraft safely and even to pumping sewage,” Dr Paterson says.
“People who use the grid to do precision manufacturing are starting to get the rattles. In fact, South Australia has lost 4000 precision manufacturing engineering jobs but no one will talk about it. Those jobs have gone to the west coast of the US.
“Data centres also depend on precision timing systems in the grid. All sorts of things are wobbling as the grid becomes less stable.”
This is an inevitable function of using inverters to introduce power from wind and solar into the synchronous grid stabilised by spinning turbines.
Dr Paterson believes neither AEMO nor the CSIRO understand the engineering challenges and are yet to onsider weather events such as east coast blocking lows that could affect wind and sun for up to 10 days at a time.
He points to the latest GenCost report’s admission that the CSIRO had underestimated the life span of nuclear plants and their average operating capacity, but against all logic had found correcting both had no positive effect on the economics of nuclear.
Dr Paterson points out Gencost “does not actually measure the cost of power at the meter but the cost of generation to the fence. One of its fatal flaws is not measuring the cost of the big new grid needed to make renewables work.”
Interestingly, in considering the wider economic effects of renewables, France – 70 per cent-dependent on nuclear power – is not facing the same industrial downturn as Germany.

At this point, the pond was exhausted by all the emissions ...

The pond usually leaves David to IA, but heck, so many emissions, so little time ... and then the pond realised it hadn't done a survey of the lizard Oz front page ...

It turned out that there was a splendid report on the court of King Donald I at the top, what with the USA having at last returned to its English monarchical roots ...

Over on the extreme far right, the pond spotted an egregious error, a serious omission from the pond's coverage of all this day's emissions ...

Lord Downer had apparently become a lizard Oz Monday regular and was offering Voters are furious, but don’t bet on change, The Australian government is now making all the mistakes that the Europeans and the US Democrats have been making, and its only salvation is that it hasn’t been in power very long.

Should the pond indulge, or should the pond save Lord Downer for a late arvo emission?

Oh heck, Lord Downer began in the right spirit, with a snap of King Donald I, Donald Trump arrives to a campaign rally at Albuquerque International Sunport in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was time for that Pythonish after dinner mint moment, and let stragglers drop off if they couldn't take the sight of Lord Downer's handling of the mike stand ...

The year 2024 has been one of elections. More than 60 countries, containing around half of the world’s population, have been to the polls.
The media will tell you it has been a tough time for incumbents. And 2025 also promises to be heavy going for them.
We’re also told support for traditional parties of the centre right and the centre left is sliding. New parties often described as “populist” are increasing their electoral support. There’s an underlying assumption that voters are straying from traditional parties only because they’re being duped by social media, the Russians or other malign forces. How could they otherwise vote for “fascists and racists” such as Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage?
Well, perhaps there’s a simple explanation: the incumbents haven’t done a good job.
Defeated candidates and their supporters are expressing astonishment that they haven’t won. I understand their disappointment, having won and lost elections myself. But election defeat requires a certain modest introspection.

Indeed, indeed, a splendid argument, and no doubt in due course the trains will begin to run on time ...

The reptiles then interrupted His Lordship with a lengthy AV and caption:

US President-elect Donald Trump has been named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" and became the first president since Ronald Reagan to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Trump took the stage during a ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. He was joined on stage by Melania Trump, daughters Ivanka and Tiffany, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and cabinet nominees Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services) and Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary). Trump, previously honoured with the title in 2016, said, “This is an honour, a tremendous honour. I think I like it better this time, actually". Trump's recognition follows Time's 2020 decision to name Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as "Person of the Year" after their victory over Trump. Known for his real estate success, Trump has long tied his political achievements to the stock market, which has reacted positively to his re-election.

It turned out that this was one of a number of snaps of reptile heroes, as Lord Downer kept emitting:

First, it’s largely overlooked by commentators but the pandemic has a long tail. The colossal public spending that accompanied the pandemic lockdowns had to be funded. It was funded by a combination of debt and what is known as quantitative easing.
Pumping all that money into the economy triggered inflation. So central banks had to try to tame that inflation, and that led to higher interest rates. Smart governments saw this problem and quickly cut spending. But some didn’t.

At this point the pond simply had to interrupt to celebrate the way that His Lordship was a most wondrous and adept student of climate science ...

At the same time, governments have been addressing climate change. The energy transformation from fossil fuels to renewables sounds just great. Who could argue with that? Instead of using dirty oil and gas to power our lives and jobs we’ll just use wind and the sun. After all, they’re perfectly clean and they are in exhaustible.
There’s just one problem. Far from being cheap, they’re proving very expensive. The wind doesn’t always blow and at night it’s hard to get any sight of the sun. So there needs to be some backup. So once you include the cost of the backup and the enormous cost associated with the transmission of wind and solar farms to the market, the energy transition turns out to be rather expensive.
The public understandably wants the issue of climate change addressed but doesn’t want it addressed if it is going to mean big increases in energy prices, the flight of industries to countries where energy is cheaper and a collapse in growth. So not only have we seen inflation driven by pandemic spending, we also have seen big increases in energy prices that have had a very real impact on people’s living standards.

Sssh, don't mention the very real impact climate change is having and will have on people's living standards. Instead, let's hear it for Lord Downer's heroes:

 

Now carry on Lord Downer:

In Australia we have endured seven quarters in a row of real per capita GDP decline. Germany has been in recession for the best part of the past two years. For the past two months GDP has turned negative in Britain. Living standards in the EU generally are stagnating. Why should politicians get a prize for that?
The point is, most people have lived in an era when living standards would gradually improve year by year. During the past 50 years there has been a transformative increase in the living standards of people in developed countries and beyond.
But that growth has now stopped and the reason it stopped is because of a lack of investment in profitable enterprises. If the only investment is going to be government investment in what are essentially loss-making industries and activities – and that’s all you have – then you’re not going to see improvements in living standards. It’s a simple as that.
So centre-left and centre-right political parties in developed countries think they should get re-elected in this environment. The public doesn’t agree and that’s hardly surprising.
Add to that the issue of illegal immigration. It isn’t that in Europe, Britain, the US or for that matter our own country people are opposed to immigration per se. What they don’t like is illegal immigration. They know that tens of thousands of people every month are gaming the refugee system to circumvent the normal immigration procedures.
The publics of the developed world are concerned about the stress all this immigration is placing on essential services and housing. But I think they care even more about the impact it’s having on their traditions and way of life.
Governments are telling them they have to change their traditions and their way of life to accommodate the preferences of migrants. Again, I’m not entirely persuaded from experience that telling people to do that is a vote winner.

Ah, at last the pond has the source for that comment about cats not getting on with horses, and the pond deeply regrets cutting the correspondence from the record ... after all, it was merely reflecting Lord Downer's deepest thoughts and his dire repugnance at the thought of eating spaghetti with garlic, or even worse, having to sit down for a serve of fried rice. Think of the three vegies and lamb chop way of life ...

Time to pause then for a snap of more heroes, Argentina's President Javier Milei waves from the stage next to Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The pond had done it, a final emission and Lord Downer's hope that the mutton Dutton might yet become King Peter I, and it would all be over for the pond for the day:

And finally there’s the issue of progressive authoritarianism. Policing the sort of language people use is likely to meet with a fair bit of silent resistance, expressed only when they go to vote. But more than that, those who promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives such as appointing, promoting and helping people on the basis of their innate characteristics, not their effort or energy, will be resented by many. Of course some people are winners because of their innate characteristics, but remember a lot of people are losers. The losers may think it is politically incorrect to complain, but you can rest assured they won’t be voting for people who discriminate against them on the basis of their characteristics, about which they have no control.
So all this explains why it comes as no surprise to me that there has been a seismic shift in the voting behaviour of people in developed countries.
You definitely saw it with the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. You saw it in France, in The Netherlands, in Britain. And expect early in 2025 for the German government to be tossed out, and a new government that directly addresses the issues I’ve outlined to take its place.
What about Australia? Well, the public got rid of the Coalition government just 2½ years ago. It would be remarkable if, after only three years, voters turned on their relatively new government and re-elected the parties they had rejected. But don’t count on it. The Australian government is now making all the mistakes that the Europeans and the US Democrats have been making, and its only salvation is that it hasn’t been in power very long.

Credit where credit is due:

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chairman of British think tank Policy Exchange.

The pond did make a feeble attempt to discover something more about Lord Downer's role at the Policy Exchange, but the "About" section failed to mention him ... nor did His Lordship make it into "the team" ..

There was just this release celebrating the elevation Adelaide's 'leet ...

Oh, he's just the chair of trustees, and all the idle talk of people, place, prosperity and patriotism was enough to send the pond scuttling in search of a closing cartoon ...