First of all, we need to re-define who or what is an Australian Aboriginal. There are too many part breeds who have usurped the title and in doing so many also seem to have gained a hatred for their non-aboriginal antecedents. Until this ceases, there will always be an "aboriginal problem".
David

What a load of political propaganda! As for the claim that Australia could "power the entire world five times over from the Australian sun", the reality is that we never will be able. Solar struggles to be economic because of its intermittency, and the distribution costs would be prohibitive.

We could grow bananas in the Simpson Desert if only we had the imagination or maybe cost has something to do with it. Grand plans to send desert solar to cities have gone astray in the past such as the Desertec project in north Africa. There's also the problem of low light conditions for example where I live was fogbound July 1st to the 14th.

Four hour lithium batteries will have a storage cost of $150 or more per megawatt hour assuming there's enough lithium then there's subsidies, new transmission lines, solar panel washing and so on. Mr Cannon Brookes will ensure it is other people's money that finances his projects.

Well, at least the author is honest enough to get straight into the nonsense in his first paragraph.

He goes on to quote a multi-billionaire who is going to get even richer on producing unreliable energy - at our expense and to our disadvantage.

Then, he goes to the really wild side: 62% are into multiculturalism and same sex marriage, which apparently makes us 'moral'. Note that a similar percentage of Victorians also like being slaves to Comrade Andrews. All the statistics tell us is that a majority of Australians are servile, and have apparently learned a lot from a Stone Age society that ceased over two centuries ago. And we must do 'more' for their descendants, despite the obvious fact that everything we have done, all the money we have sent, has seen their situation get worse.

And, not surprisingly from this author, we have to rid ourselves of conservatives, presumably including Scott Morrison (who is not conservative), but who is apparently a liar because a Frenchman and known Leftists (e.g failed politician, Malcolm Turnbull) said so. No mention of the politicians who are PROVEN liars.

Peter should try writing for Marvel

Tasweigan, re the batteries;
No one ever asks the question; "After you have used the batteries to
fill in the loss of sun and or wind where & when do you get the power
to recharge them ?".

It turns out that you need to duplicate a couple of times the number
of turbines and solar that generates a full day's demand.

errr, catch 22 big time; What if the next day is cloudy and windless ?
errr, a third cloudy windless day ? Oh that would NEVER happen !
Would it ?

Australia certainly has potential due to its size.

But it would cost a lot of money to set up, including vast water infrastructure.

I know it’s hard to believe but the fact that Australia is a big empty sunny place has been shouted loudly as a wonderful advantage for at least 50 years and has made no difference. There’s only one conclusion. It’s irrelevant. True but irrelevant.

Look at the background of this author. As to be expected, supposed qualifications and expertise in humanities type subjects. Needs thinking firstly more from engineering and then economist point of view. One way of summing up attitudes I have seem is the likes of an arts student with fanciful fantasies tries to claim something like: "It can be done. Therefore we will do it." Someone thinking like an engineer and economist looks further into and considers details. Analysis from them is often more like, "It could be done, but for various reasons will not work well in some respects and the costs and problems implementing it will, or are likely to be excessive."

Peter Bowden should go an join his mate Emperor Mal Turncoat in his New York Penthouse hideaway. How Dare He?? (to paraphrase the Swedish doom goblin) suggest the Liberals dump conservatives.. The Liberals need to dump the wets like Turncoats old club.

I think the liberals are " fecked" and hence the Lib Dems are sit to rise unlike the other attempts like Cori Berardi Conservative Party. Renewable are a elitist pipe dream, only founded by subsidy and of which venture capitalists like Turncoat make margin and Hedge fund bets.

The first two comments are right. This read more like an retrospective Turncoat political note ( like the ones that ruined Abbotts 26 seat majority overnight!!

If you know anyone who is wondering what is wrong with our university sector, just give then this article to read.

Peter Bowden obviously has no idea of practically, must have never got past primary school math, to harbor this rubbish & have the last 30 years living on another planet to generate his ideas. I guess living in academia he is as close to living on another planet as it is possible to get.

He is an business Ethics specialist he tells us, obviously contaminated by too much dreaming & so far from down to earth he wouldn't recognise the place if her came down some time soon.

It is people like him who give senile old goats a bad name.

Is Elon Musk senile given much of his wealth is based on his future vision?

Well, the old adage is "don't argue with an opponent's logic, just attack his philosophy and personal background", seems to sum up the way other posts have been made. Now, Ross Garnaut, who wrote "Super Power- Australia's low carbon opportunity" gave us a more convincing argument to change our thinking. Bankers, investors and business leaders around the world have decided that the world must change to account for climate change. Otherwise, Australia will be in the horse and buggy class in national status and dependency on progress.

The trite comments and thinking of the anti-climate change disciples may come back to bite them in the future

I had to laugh when Peter Bowden claimed that multiculturalism was a factor in economic success. The USA, the richest country on earth, is tearing itself apart with multiculturalism and identity politics. The Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are laughing their heads off. One thing is for sure, Asians as a group are smarter than Caucasians and they are too smart to import the notoriously dysfunctional minority groups that do little except create public service welfare jobs, and expand the legal systems of western countries. More police. More lawyers. More interpreters. More prisons, and prison guards.

Multiculturalism is a handicap, not a blessing, Peter. Every multicultural nation on earth right now is trying to devolve into separate, unicultural nation states, proving that mixing racial and cultural oil and water was never going to work.

I would not be too optimistic about our mineral wealth, either, Peter. Everywhere we dig a hole it is a sacred site and subject to regulation by a plethora of government departments. Look at the Adani Mine fiasco and ask yourself if any overseas investor wants any part of that?

As for moral capital, here we are facing the threat of a new, expansionist Nazi Party in Asia and you can bet that Australia's embrace of homosexual marriage will really encourage our new enemy into realising correctly that we as a nation are weak, effeminate, and stupid.

As for Labor making a better government. They will repeat the US democrat success of using identity politics to divide us and rule us. They will force the whites and Asians to pay ever higher taxes to purchase the votes of the ever expanding public service, and the votes of the dysfunctional minorities who are their new electorate.

You were off with the fairies when you actually had the chutzpah to claim that "first nations" people could tell the people from advanced societies a thing or two about anything. They can not even run their own communities without holding out the begging bowl to the white man while screaming abuse at him.

Let's say that there was a town somewhere in Australia populated entirely with white Anglo-Saxon residents, Peter.

In that town, there were 23 year old grandmothers with grandchildren born with foetal alcohol syndrome. There was rampant sexual abuse of children with kids under five being routinely screened for gonorrhoea. The women in the town alleged widespread sexual abuse committed upon them by the town's male leaders. These women were 34 times more likely to be hospitalised for domestic violence and 15 times more likely to be murdered than the women in surrounding towns.

The entire adult population of that white town was entirely on intergenerational social welfare, and every two weeks when the government cheques rolled in, the whole town went on a three day drinking binge resulting in widespread violence and riots where government supplied houses were burned to the ground.

The town's children suffered from lice and ringworm. The kids would not go to school, and the government had to bribe parents with extra benefits to make their kids go to school. In addition, the government had to provide cars and chauffeurs to take the kids to school and feed the kids, because their parents didn't bother. These kids were five times more likely to be hospitalised for domestic assaults than the kids from surrounding towns.

The only way that jobs could be created for the town's residents was to either make them public servants or by inventing taxpayer subsidised non jobs like picking up trash if they felt like it. When their young men were farmed out to government subsidised jobs outside of their community, most had to be sent back because 75% of them failed drug and alcohol testing.

Then I think that any intelligent and rational person would conclude that the town's population was a bunch of low IQ morons, commonly referred to as white trash.

But woke people like good your self, who think that displaying how non racist you are is more important than accepting self evident reality, will look for any reason to explain away aboriginal dysfunction, except the screamingly obvious one.

We would have a National Service & wouldn't need to import fruit pickers from overseas if young Australians had decent advise from their Whitlam era insipid parents !

I thought that people who believed things like that had names like Bobby Ray and made videos on YouTube about how you could make free power for yourself with special arrangements of magnets. At least it gives me some insight into the value some have for fifty year climate predictions.

Just another pointless Academic !

To get a balanced comment on renewables and their ability to supply Australia's energy needs, please navigate to The New Daily website and read Alan Kohler's article about energy economics. It puts much of the comment on this issue here into perspective: he knows what he is talking about unlike ...

Brian, I went to the Daily web site but while there are a number of
articles there I could not identify the one to which you referred.
Can you please send a link.
Before I even read it I bet he does not explain how and when you
recharge the batteries.

Hi Baz,
Here is the link
https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2021/11/25/carbon-taxes-australia-kohler/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020211125

Of course the coal fired generators would still be happily supplying reliable cheap power, requiring no subsidies, if unreliable renewable wind & solar were not given preferential treatment, with the grid required to take all they produce .

If coal & gas could compete on equal terms our power would be a lot cheaper & more reliable.

Brian, the article is mainly concerned with the co2 tax which while
important in itself is not relevant to the problem of electricity supply.
As far as the tax is concerned I guess you have heard of the Russian Oligarchs.
They made a fortune out of the European investors by selling co2
certificates generated by closing down decrepit Russian factories they
bought for a song from the Soviet government.
I would suggest that our own oligarchs might be on the same gravy train.
However I think the electrical system will collapse before they can
milk it dry.
When that happens, whichever politicians and varying combinations
of them are in power, will simply scrub everything and restart from scratch.
We are already on a predetermined path to economic failure dermined
by the failure of the electrical system.
The current problems with the supply chains are similar to what the
electrical failure will trigger.
My son bought a new car recently, 2 weeks ago, he can sell it for more
than he paid for it this week !

As Taswegian pointed out, Desertec was going to be the powerhouse of Europe, yet that turned into a farce. Thermal storage is a tenth the cost of battery storage, and it isn't cost competitive either. Further, the German example shows that if you want to have even a quarter of your power from renewables you need French nuclear to keep things from failing.

Australia would be better off copying the Chinese by building some coal fired power stations that could have the furnaces swapped over with fourth generation nuclear should they be developed.

My hope is that the renewable lie will be recognised before it does much more harm.

No Fester, I think I am an incorrigible pessimist.
The global warming preachers/Marxists/Geenists or whatever they maybe,
they have convinced all schoolkids and the multitudes that we are in
imminent risk of having our whole civilisation destroyed by global warming.
How ironic, that is just what it will be !
They are all convinced that our only hope is solar panels, wind turbines
and reluctantly batteries.
All backed up by St Greta.
Frankly, I do not think there is any hope of stopping them.
When the collapse occurs I would not be a green as they will then be
their version victims of Green Hunts, rather than Witch Hunts.

Strangely, I also believe the planet might be warming but only
slightly by co2. The sun has driven this cycle for about three cycles
in 3000 years that we know of.
In reality perhaps for millions of years.

Pity I won't be here to say I told you so !

I am more optimistic Bazz. Renewables have been sold on the basis of being cheap, reliable and economic. Yes, the forecasts for renewable energy are all golden, but how will populations respond to intermittent and expensive power? I suspect it will be a much harder sell.

Solar is not going to be cheap when they start making us pay to put energy back into the grid. If that happens we will have no alternative but to disconnect or run whatever appliances we can to minimize our output.
David

Yes David, solar & wind cannot be cheap and the smaller the country
the more expensive it is. It is the duplication of all the solar wind
and batteries that is the killer.
Being a large country, if we connect the grid to the west and increase
the capacity of the grid and establish sites all around Australia we
might get away with only a five times duplication.
This is the problem that Germany had, it is far too small to have only
solar, wind and batteries.
I just hope that the system crashes soon before we have spent the money.

I see that they have blown up another power station, Wallerawang this
time.
I think they do this, rather than mothballing so they cannot be refurbished.
It makes me suspect that they believe their plan will fail.
Isn't that the Davos plan ? "Build Back Better ?"

I have been reading up on Thorium MSR reactors and I must admit that Alan probably is on the right track. The government should be putting money into building a few of them, starting at Morwell, instead of wasting our money on Snowy 2 and and more Tassie interconnectors.
David

The Indians are building a thorium reactor but no sound of it for some time.
Rolls Royce is contracted to build three Modular reactors for delivery
to the UK grid in 2030 so to get on that queue would take a long time.
A friend Keith VK2AXN sk designed the nuclear power station for Jervis Bay,
that the government cancelled. What a blunder that turned out to be !
Time is running out on us I am afraid unless they undertake to build
some coal fired stations soon.
de vk2aab

They certainly need to build something or we are going to have numerous blackouts and load shedding during the hot summer months.
David

China is in the advanced stages of testing a gen 4 reactor, with connection to the grid expected by the end of the year.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinas-HTR-PM-reactor-achieves-first-criticality

Bangladesh is building a gen 3+ Russian built reactor that is expected to generate power more cheaply than coal.

With the renewable farce unfolding there are plenty of nuclear reactor designs being developed. China is even testing Alan's favourite.

Good article and one recalls till a decade ago, if that, anything solar was disappeared by media except an occasional news article with some platitudes about its potential use; background by research from CSIRO etc. on solar cell technology that was world leading (like wifi etc.).

Australian governments, mostly LNP, have avoided innovation, science, education and learning in favour of preserving the place of fossil fuels and carbon emissions, how?

Importing US techniques if climate science denial and avoidance of good policy for the future, withdrawing behind our borders and signing up to the libertarian and nostalgic Anglosphere cult of the US, UK and Australia.

By banking on supposedly centrist conservationist types, falsely blaming immigration, NOM and population growth for environmental degradation and carbon emissions, while ageing electorates being leveraged to maintain the status quo.