They Want To Control How You Live

What does the Glasgow climate conference mean for the future of the West? This is focus of The Australian Way newsletter this fortnight.

Former prime minister and Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs Tony Abbott provided much needed perspective and guidance on the issue in this week’s Australia Heartland with Tony Abbott. As he said green activists don’t want to save the world. They want to control how we live.

You can listen to the episode on your web browser here, or on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

And remember to press subscribe or ‘like’ so that you don’t miss an episode.

In The Discussion this week I explain that it will be working- and middle-class Australians who will pay the price for Net Zero emissions.

And The Must Read this fortnight is by the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, who argues that humiliation is often a necessary component of tyranny, as revealed through what is required of us to comply with the theatre of Covid regulations.

Thank you for your support of the Australian way of life.

This week Tony Abbott and I discussed the hypocrisy of the global elites descending on Glasgow in their private jets and massive motorcades, while leaving the working- and middle-class Australians to pick up the tab on Net Zero emissions target.

We also dug into why the proposed permanent pandemic legislation in Victoria is the biggest peace-time threat to freedom, democracy, and Australian values we have ever seen – and importantly, what we can do about it.

You can listen to the episode on your web browser here, or on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

“I don’t see too many of those who turned up in private jets [to the Glasgow conference] offering to change their lifestyles; it will be the rest of us who will be forced to change.”

Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs
Tony Abbott

That is exactly right.

Whether it is phasing out petrol cars, making it more expensive to eat meat, or making it harder to get a well-paid and stable job in mining or manufacturing, it will be mainstream Australians and the global middle-class more generally who will pay the price.

Recent research by the Institute of Public Affairs, for example, estimated that approximately 653,600 jobs would be put at direct risk by a Net Zero emissions target, and more than half of those potential job losses would occur in the agriculture, mining, and manufacturing sectors.

As a consequence, IPA research also identified that a worker in a typical electoral represented by the Nationals was over three times more likely to lose their jobs under Net Zero than a worker in a typical electorate represented by the Liberals.

This is because those in Nationals electorates are more likely to be in the outer-metropolitan and regional parts of Australia – which depend on primary industry and manufacturing – while those in Liberal electorates are more likely to be in professional services occupations and living in the inner-cities and suburbs.

“…the global elites who descended on Glasgow in the private jets and massive motorcades want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property and travel.”

Joel Kotkin – Spiked

American demographer Joel Kotkin, who I have written to you about in an earlier edition of this newsletter, made a similar observation to Tony’s.

Writing for the British online magazine Spiked earlier this week, Kotkin argued that the global elites who descended on Glasgow in the private jets and massive motorcades ‘want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property and travel.’

Kotkin went on to make an important observation about the deep divisions within Western societies when it comes to issues such as climate change and lockdowns: those who impose these policies are not those who incur the costs.

Kotkin wrote:

With climate, as with many other issues, the upper classes are inflicting their own preferences on working- and middle-class people. As non-profits, oligarchs, and bureaucrats plot out the future, small business owners and the middle class … are not at the table, or even in the room.

A recent report by the United Kingdom Treasury, Net Zero Review Final Report: Analysis exploring the key issues as the UK decarbonises supports Kotkin’s observation.

The IPA’s Executive Director John Roskam wrote about the report in a recent column for the Australian Financial Review. As John noted, it is significant that the UK Treasury acknowledged in public something politicians already know:

Although the highest income households emit around three times as much carbon as the lowest income households, they have incomes that are more than eight times greater the average.

The report went on to note that housing and utilities are the most important sources of emissions for lower income households, making up around half their emissions, compared to around one third for the highest income households.

There are even suggestions in the UK to implement a type of social credit system when it comes to accessing finance where banks would be forced to take into consideration the energy efficiency of homes before they provide loans, according to the UK’s The Telegraph. This would mean higher borrowing costs for those who are buying houses which are considered to have low energy efficiency ratings, the effect of which would be to make housing even less affordable for those on modest incomes.

And as a part of the UK’s move to ban gas boilers, a hydrogen village trial will be implemented to ‘inform’ the government of how they will kick families off gas heating.

In the area of the trial, a government-approved engineer will access privately owned homes to switch them to hydrogen heating, with home-owners ‘unlikely to have control over when this happens’.

As yet policymakers in Australia have refused to debate – or even acknowledge that there is a debate – about who will pay for the ‘transition’ to Net Zero emissions, and what exactly this will mean for the jobs and lives of everyday Australians.

As Tony Abbott said, this isn’t about the environment. It’s about control.

It’s about the government and big business telling mainstream Australians what car to drive, what house to live in, what job they are allowed to have, and what food they can serve their family.

Net Zero will certainly be a transition. It will transition Australia from a free, democratic, and capitalist nation to one based on feudal serfdom.