The future is another country; conservative politicians have no idea where it is or how to get there. By their definition of themselves and their thinking as conservative, they like things the way they are and how they used to be. Change is unsettling to them unless it’s changing things back to a time they were comfortable with, regressive or otherwise.
There is no clearer example of this than the idea being pushed by Queensland’s current conservative state government. The Liberal National Party (LNP) is pushing hard for federal government backing for a silver bullet solution to the current fuel crisis through a local oil extraction project, the Taroom Trough. The Crisafulli government claims it will help alleviate the fuel shortage brought on by the Iran war and they are promoting Taroom Trough as the next big thing in extracting oil domestically. Yet it is not a new discovery. It has been known about for decades. What is new is the Iran fuel crisis. However, as Kevin Morris, Industry Fellow at Sydney’s University of Technology, writes in The Conversation, there are reasons to be sceptical about its trumpeted benefits of adding to Australia’s domestic fuel supply.
As Morris puts it, “Exploration has just begun and many challenges would need to be overcome. Extracting the oil would require fracking, a controversial technology with clear harms to human health.” There’s also the little matter of what it will produce and the volume, let alone the cost. If it ever gets up and running at commercial levels, it will produce Light Crude which, according to Morris, yields more petrol than diesel and diesel is what we use most of and is in short supply. When you factor in the likely costs of production and distribution, it is unlikely to be the magic solution the LNP are promoting. Nor will it happen quickly, which rather defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Clearly the idea to be free of dependence on imported oil for our transport needs is a no brainer. It’s how we go about ending the dependency that is at issue. Australians have seen the writing on the wall and are turning to EV’s at a rate of knots. But instead of recognising this huge shift, the LNP want to invest large amounts of taxpayer dollars on a big ‘if’. Backing a dying technology and industry when it should be future proofing the state’s inexorable transition to electric vehicles of all kinds, including large semi-trailers – which we’re still heavily dependent on in Queensland – for road transport of goods and supplies.
EV’s are now reaching a critical mass where the technology is going ahead in leaps and bounds, the cost is at or near parity with fuel driven cars and the batteries in electric vehicles are achieving longer distances between charging every year. Given most passenger vehicles are driven in cities, range anxiety is – overwhelmingly – in regard to the long interstate and intrastate drives that Australians enjoy. So this is where taxpayers’ money and logistical and regulatory support should come in. And there have been steps taken, just not by the LNP.
The previous QLD Labor government, albeit with a measure of bi-partisan support from the LNP, set in train the ‘Queensland Electric Superhighway’. A network of 54 fast charging locations, making the uptake of EV’s for those long drives more palatable. Up and down Queensland’s Eastern seaboard, drivers can now plan ahead and know they have places to pull up and re-charge. Labor clearly recognised the need for governments to put the seed capital into important infrastructure ventures when businesses are reluctant to take the first steps. With the delivery of Phase 3, the Electric Superhighway is now complete.
Despite this important phase in the ongoing process of the switch to EV’s large and small, it’s clear already that it’s not enough. Especially if the projections of the rapid uptake of EV’s, now exploding exponentially since the outbreak of the Iran war, prove correct. As an example, in contrast to the LNP’s ‘Back to the Future‘ outlook focusing on old technology and a fading oil industry, the NSW government recently announced a plan costed at $100m in response to the scenes of long queues at EV charging stations during recent holiday travels.
Clearly the current NSW network of electric charging stations simply did not meet its intended purpose. Projections that gave the NSW government a calculation as to how many charging stations it needed to deploy, did not anticipate the massive growth in EV sales and use. So, in response to the surge in demand, another 1,000 electric vehicle chargers will arrive in NSW in the next two years and businesses could find funding to switch to electric trucks, under the NSW state government’s updated EV strategy.
So at least NSW Premier Minns is trying to play catch-up, while QLD Premier Crisafulli doesn’t even recognise the game has changed. Instead of pursuing an old idea, why isn’t the Crisafulli government copying the NSW approach? Clearly we’re going to need charging stations in every Queensland regional town and every service station up and down the state. So how long before the state government recognises that and gets behind it?
This latest fuel crisis should be the final nail in the coffin for fossil fuels. Our reliance on a resource that is surely going to be too expensive to pull out of the ground to remain economically viable, even if you can guarantee supply – must end. Are the LNP even capable of seeing the ‘bleedin’ obvious’? One can only hope this party of allegedly business savvy politicians, are competent to at least read a spreadsheet. Because now is surely the time for the LNP to bank on the future, not go back to the past.