The Berejiklian government has rushed to defeat a private member's bill to derail the controversial Narrabri gas project as anti-coal seam gas groups were preparing to target National party seats.

In a rare move, the Coalition suspended the day's parliamentary agenda on Thursday to debate a coal seam gas moratorium bill in a bid to fast-track its demise in the Legislative Assembly.

It comes after the bill, put forward by independent MP Justin Field, passed the NSW upper house on Wednesday night with the support of Labor and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

Governments were generally caught short by COVID-19. Scott Morrison boasts that he saw it earlier, and acted quicker and more decisively, than most – that he relied on medical and scientific advice, forged a “national” response, ignored ideology.

But his government has a split personality on the need to rely on science. It so easily ignores climate science, still swayed by a small rump of Coalition deniers.

In a sense, the experience of the pandemic is a dress rehearsal of what will happen with climate, if governments continue to ignore the science. There had been imprecise warnings of possible pandemics, but these had been ignored. Climate science is far more substantive, peer-assessed and uniform than that relied on to support the COVID responses; the predicted catastrophic weather events have become more frequent and more intense, and over decades.

 

Multinational corporations have captured the national polity and continue to push last-century energy solutions on Australia, in defiance of sound policy and due process. The US fracking industry has collapsed. Yet the Covid Commission forges ahead with coal seam gas plans for Santos at Narrabri. Callum Footereports.

As if a tradie-led recovery wasn’t bizarre enough, the COVID Commission and Liberals and Nationals in NSW are forging ahead with plans to open up Narrabri for coal seam gas fracking.

This is despite:

• warnings only a day ago that the global glut could force natural gas prices into negative;
• the science telling us clearly that for the sake of the planet we need to move on from fossil fuels, especially given that renewable energy can compete on cost with oil, coal and natural gas-fired power plants;
• figures showing that fugitive emissions from natural gas production are driving massive increases in greenhouse gas; and
• the fact that domestic gas users are massively price gouged because the East Coast gas market is controlled by a cartel of three producers, Santos, Origin Energy and Exxon/BHP, who starve the domestic market to force up prices and make super profits  Meanwhile overseas buyers of Australian gas pay far less than the domestic buyers do.

Almost half say that if they hear about a rural industry acting irresponsibly, it negatively affects their opinion of all rural industries.

Foreign-owned capital in Australia is $3.5 trillion.

Community leaders at Blackall are looking back in order to move forward, commissioning Toowoomba consulting firm AEC Group to explore the feasibility of siting a modern wool scouring plant in the town.

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