Xenophobia the new climate denialism on the right

Last weekend, right-wing West Australian MP Andrew Hastie said something interesting in the wake of a motion to reject net zero from his own party branch, which was backed unanimously by the WA Liberal Party.

“We export a lot of our coal and gas to India and China — both their emissions are growing year on year — and yet we deny coal and gas to the Australian people. Meanwhile, we’re buying Chinese made solar and wind,” Hastie told journalists, ignoring the fact that China’s CO2 emissions look like they’ve peaked.

He added “right now, we have a tax on our cars, we’ve got a tax on heavy industry, we’ve got a tax on our farmers and people have a tax — a hidden tax — on their power bills, which is subsidising foreign made renewables. And I’m calling it out…”

Normally, the views of a state branch that rocketed to a mighty seven seats at the WA state election in March, justified by the federal MP of a party that turned in its worst ever state result in WA in the federal election in May, and which now faces not returning to power until the 2030s, would be of no moment.

But the narratives used by the right, both in its parliamentary and its media form, in its campaign to protect its fossil fuel donors, are always worth considering. The Coalition is now staging one of its triannual splits over the laws of physics, led as ever by the Nationals, in a ritual now so long-running and ossified that it feels more like watching kabuki than politics. Pauline Hanson, who has a much better electoral record of exploiting racism than the Liberals have recently, is circling in the hope of picking up some of the climate denialist vote.

And who knows, Hastie might soon become leader and exhibit an Abbott-like capacity to effectively prosecute a negative opposition agenda.

His argument is, inevitably, a conspiracy theory — Labor is selling our cheap fossil fuels to India and China, but forcing Australians to pay a tax to the owners of “foreign made renewables”, in particular China. It’s an accusation of economic treachery — Anthony Albanese lets the Chinese have our coal and gas while forcing Australian households to pay Chinese renewable companies for power. No wonder he spent so long in China recently — he wasn’t walking in the footsteps of Gough, he was handing over huge novelty cheques from ordinary hardworking Aussies to sinister Chinese wind turbine blade manufacturers.

An awful lot of renewables technology is manufactured in China. Most of it, in fact. Australia should know that better than anyone, since we invented much of the standard solar technology now in use and allowed it to move to China during the 2000s. If Hastie doesn’t like Chinese-made solar, he ought to raise that with John Howard, who let it happen.

And presumably Hastie backs the Albanese government’s belated and pointless plan to subsidise solar panel production in Australia, contributing to the global glut of solar power systems that have helped prices down to less than half of what they were in the early part of last decade.

Indeed, Chinese solar panel manufacturers have repeatedly been investigated for dumping solar panels in Australia below cost. If the Chinese sell us panels below the cost of making them, Andrew, that’s a subsidy, all right — but from Chinese companies to us.

But it gets worse, because not merely are renewable systems foreign-manufactured, as Hastie says, some of them are foreign-owned. We know because that organ of public policy, the Institute of Public Affairs, has told us repeatedly, in articles such as “Australia’s $1 Billion Electricity Bill Foreign Owned Wind Farm Windfall” that explain how subsidies flow to “solar and wind farms which [are] foreign owned“.

And you may be confused because, decades ago, before the IPA turned into just another lobbyist outfit for Gina Rinehart and other fossil fuel donors, it was, in its guise as a “think tank” for pure neoliberalism and globalism, critical of restrictions on the free flow of capital such as those imposed under Australia’s foreign investment rules and the Foreign Investment Review Board. It even sacked xenophobes from its ranks.

But now, foreign-owned power generators are a terrible thing — if they’re renewable power. Nary a word about the proportion of Australia’s fossil fuel power generation industry that is owned by foreign companies. Companies like, erm, China’s CLP Group, which owns EnergyAustralia. Or China’s Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, which owns Alinta Energy.

Cripes, better not tell Hastie about them.

Better not tell News Corp, either — The Daily Telegraph warned us two years ago that “Daily Telegraph analysis [sic] shows 70pc of wind and solar projects in NSW foreign-owned”, and sought out Barnaby Joyce to lie that sheep can’t graze under solar panels. Again, not a word about foreign-owned companies selling coal-fired power. 2GB’s right-wing buffoon Ben Fordham read the story, or at least one of his producers read him the story aloud, so he raged about how “75% of wind and solar farms are FOREIGN owned” as well. One wonders how they’ll react when they find out sunshine doesn’t originate in Australia either.

Nor should we forget that under Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy plans — the one still backed by the Nationals — foreign companies would have been given hundreds of billions in subsidies to build nuclear power plants here, using foreign-built components and foreign labour, given we have no local nuclear power construction experience. Even the regulators would have had to be imported. The only thing produced in Australia would have been the nuclear waste.

We can mock the stupidities and inconsistencies of climate denialists, yes, but as Abbott demonstrated, if you just don’t give a damn about the truth, you can convince a substantial proportion of the electorate at least long enough to get you into power. So who knows, a xenophobic climate denialist conspiracy theory might yet do the trick.