Coalition throws more billions at fossil fuels as Albo’s apology tour continues

If Labor’s Anthony Albanese spent much of today apologising for getting some basic numbers wrong yesterday, the fossil fuel industry was hearing all the right numbers from the Coalition: Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce announced a remarkable $1.5 billion handout to the gas industry to establish a new port facility in Darwin.

But wait, I hear Crikey readers cry, isn’t there already a port in Darwin? Like, the one that the NT government sold to a Coalition-connected Chinese firm in 2015 with the blessing of the feds? Ah, yes, but China has, in the manner of how we’ve always been at war with Eastasia — transformed since 2015 from the nation whose orbit we had to get closer to (thank you, Paul Kelly) and about which it was racist to suggest otherwise — to being the Great Satan in the cosmology of the Coalition and News Corp.

So now we’re building another port — especially for all the gas that we’re going to develop in the NT, adding significantly to the world’s CO₂ emissions even if we don’t count them as ours because someone else burns the gas.

That’s why Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce today announced a $1.5 billion port development at Middle Arm in Darwin, being “the infrastructure needed to export more gas, including hydrogen, and critical minerals from Middle Arm”.

(Don’t you love the inclusion of hydrogen? But Joyce gives the game away later in his media release when he said: “Australians must embrace the fact that it is our resources sector that pays for the services and opportunities we all enjoy, and without coal and gas and iron ore, we would be weaker and poorer.” The citizens of Lismore and the victims of the Black Summer bushfires might quibble about being weaker and poorer without them, but you get the picture.)

Joyce says the gift to the fossil fuel industry “has been recognised as a nationally significant project by Infrastructure Australia”. In fact it is on the IA list of nationally significant projects because the NT government nominated it. But it has undergone no assessment of any kind by IA because the project hasn’t even been fully scoped yet to determine what funding is needed, let alone whether there’s a business case for it. Not that that stops the Coalition when it comes to “infrastructure” — none of the car parks needed a business case either.

There’s an electoral case for the spending, however — Labor holds the seat of Solomon by just 3%. We thus have our first truly substantial entry for Crikey’s Porkwatch 2022, and how fitting that it both targets a marginal seat and looks after the Coalition’s fossil fuel donors. The Nationals leader campaign is traditionally called “the wombat trail”; surely it’s time it was renamed the more apt Pork Trail.

At the other end of the country in Tasmania, Albanese was showering not dollars for donors but apologies for journalists anxious to keep reminding him of his mega-gaffe yesterday on the unemployment rate and the Reserve Bank’s interest rates. The Labor leader’s explanation is that he was thinking of the average level of unemployment (Labor, keen to neutralise the ultra-low level of unemployment currently, prefers to compare average unemployment rates during periods of government), but his strategy is also to almost ostentatiously own the mistake. “It was a mistake,” he said, over and over. “I accept it. I own up to it. I’m not blaming anyone else. I’m accepting responsibility. That’s what leaders do.”

Albanese hopes people will contrast that with Morrison’s refusal to ever acknowledge, let alone apologise for, mistakes (who can forget the time Morrison got Australia’s Hong Kong and Taiwan policies completely wrong and refused to admit he had, despite his own office saying he’d misspoken).

Morrison himself was in the seat of Parramatta where the very recently installed Liberal candidate Maria Kovacic is up against the slightly less recently installed former Rudd staffer Andrew Charlton in Sydney’s blockbuster Clash of the Late Arrivals. True to pre-election warnings that Morrison wouldn’t travel anywhere in his home city without the human shield of the slightly more popular (outside Kooyong) Josh Frydenberg, Morrison was joined by the treasurer and overexposed chatterbox and foreign minister Marise Payne to baptise Kovacic’s campaign at a Rheem factory.

Of course, Morrison was really there to refer repeatedly to Albanese’s gaffe, although even the prime minister appeared to flag on that subject before the assembled journalists had. After belting the opposition leader numerous times, he called last question, which turned out to be the forensic “What is your message to Anthony Albanese?”

Morrison actually did a verbal double take at that. Even he couldn’t believe he’d been asked to kick Albanese yet again. “What is my message to Anthony Albanese?” he said, evidently slightly stunned. “Yeah,” said the alleged journalist. “Following yesterday’s blunder.”

Morrison gave it another 250 words, though he was at least moved to conclude with the poetic “It won’t be easy under Albanese”.

If only all days on the campaign trail were as enjoyable for the PM. Although, with the current press gallery, maybe they will be.