For the first time in years, the Opposition doesn't sound like a school girl (well, not all the time). And, suddenly the government has realized they shouldn't go burning $2 billion on a COP31 UN-love-fest while voters can't afford electricity — their political opponents could turn it into a stinging election campaign. Instead, as a consolation prize, they will fly Chris Bowen, the Minister for Weather Fiddling, to Turkey to preside over the COP meeting there and star in the bureaucratic beauty contest.

Giving up on the COP Cabaret will save billions, not just in hotel rooms in Adelaide, but in all the tokenistic daft climate projects the government might have started to impress the UN powerlords. As it is, the PM radically increased our Net Zero target in September — was that to earn favor with the UN to cinch the deal — if it was, the UN won. The fantasy target certainly wasn't done to impress voters, because the Labor Party hid it from them during the election. Who was 'Albo' trying to impress?

Freed from the shackles of the Net Zero straight-jacket, the Opposition's Energy spokesman can finally talk with some conviction about the awful costs, the poverty, the national productivity loss, the decline in standards of living, and the smelters that are closing. In a rare moment of functional governance, the Opposition promises to force the grid manager (the AEMO) to put cheap electricity ahead of weather voodoo. So, lucky Australians can still have hope, that one day our power stations might even be directed to make cheap reliable power rather than change the jet streams over Antarctica.

But the Opposition are camouflaging themselves in the talisman of climate virtue, as if chanting the spells of the Paris Agreement will protect them from the Global Bullies. To ward off the bad spirits, and BlackRock bankers, they still say they're committed to the Paris agreement, while promising to consider building coal plants, which sounds a lot like the Chinese "net-zero plan". Smile and say 'Yes' while doing whatever you were going to do anyway.

Apart from burning the token Parisian incense, its heartening to hear some of the messages we've been saying for years, even if we feel like beating our head on the wall:

Australians desperately need reset on energy for more affordable power

By Dan Tehan, Opposition Spokesman for Energy in The Australian

Australia is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. This is undeniable. We have suffered the steepest declines in living standards of the developed world. Real disposable income has fallen by 8.5 per cent since 2022. More than a million Australians now work multiple jobs simply to get by. Under Labor, poverty has risen from 12.4 per cent (one in eight) to 14.2 per cent (one in seven). That is 3.7 million Australians, including 757,000 children, are living below the poverty line.