JoNova

By Jo Nova

Is it any wonder conservative politics is in such a deep hole?

We got another reminder this weekend of how Australia was sold out by our politicians –effectively coerced by large foreign financial forces. When Australia adopted “Net Zero targets” in late 2021 it was against the wishes of the voters.  As I noted at the time the Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Treasurer were disarmingly honest about why they did this.  Well that explains everything: Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero.

The Prime Minister and Treasurer laid it out with an extraordinary admission that “Global Financiers” threatened to jack up our national interest rates by 1.5% which would have sparked a “17% investment collapse” (according to their models) and thus presumably a stock market crash. I’ve talked about this in speeches ever since, but hardly any political commentators seem to recognize the significance.

Foreign banks were setting Australian domestic policy with threats and intimidation. The money changers look, act and smell like the One World Government we didn’t realize we had.

It is also a lesson in the peril of holding large debts.

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has had a few years to polish the story of why he decided we had to have a Net Zero target — we were going to be economically ostracized:

‘Political prostitution on both sides’: Morrison and Joyce’s net zero battle

By Paul Kelly, The Australian, July 12th, 2026

Mr Morrison described the forces that drove his thinking: “I became convinced in early 2021, if not late 2020, that regardless of what we thought, global markets, capital markets, business, had already made up their minds. The world was moving to a new-zero economy. Australia had one of two choices – to be part of that or be ostracized from the global economy.

“In my view that would be disastrous for us. We might not like it but we don’t set the global rules of investment decision-making.”

But lets not forget back in 2021, the raw naked truth: 

The penalty regime would have sparked a 17 per cent investment collapse by the middle of the next decade, cutting 0.9 per cent from gross domestic product and making each Australian more than $650 poorer.

Households would have paid an extra $25bn a year to service home loans, and business and credit card debts.

And thus Scott Morrison saved us from “an extra $25 billion” in interest payments only for us to spend that money on poles, wires, tunnels and chinese solar panels instead — albeit with a lot of help from the Labor Party.

When the big test came, it was a tough test, but he failed. The Prime Minister of Australia was supposed to stand up for the voters:

Scott Morrison had gone to a “climate election” in 2019 with no Net Zero target and astonished the pundits by winning. People forget how shocking the 2019 election result was. Sportsbet was so sure the Labor Party would win with their big climate action plan, they paid out $1.3 million dollars two days before the election was even held.

So Australian voters were offered climate action, but didn’t want it (yet again). Two years later, Scott Morrison set a Net Zero Target anyway, just in time for the Glasgow UN shindig. While Morrison got what he thought he wanted, it doomed the conservative Coalition. They had thrown away one of their best weapons against an absurd Labor Party platform which was trying to change the weather. By pandering to the Woke Energy Gods, they had inadvertantly endorsed them. They could hardly criticise the Labor Party when they wanted the same goal.  Six months later they lost the next election. Perhaps this was the point of coercing the Liberals into setting targets? Sabotage — to neutralize them in the political arena?

Swept away in a bubble?

The irony of Morrisons new admission is that he decided we needed a net zero target in early 2021, which was the exact peak of the renewables market bubble globally (in January 2021).

If Scott Morrison had paid a team of skeptical scientists and engineers to audit the mess  in climate and energy policies  — he would quickly have found out that the weather has always changed, the storms were always bad, the models are horribly wrong, and the random generators were doomed in the current form and hideously expensive. 

The Global Clean Energy Index peaked in January 2021. https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/sustainability/sp-global-clean-energy-transition-index/#overview

In further admissions we see what kind of coercive power the COP meetings have on leaders:

Mr Morrison said: “The thing that threatened the existence of the government more than anything else was the COP26 conference. I had to go to Glasgow. “The government nearly fell that Sunday when the Nats met, and their partyroom voted by just two votes to support the net-zero stance.

To be fair, he now says it was also to get AUKUS up and running as well.

So the coalition nearly fell apart — such was the effect of pushing a lie. Barnaby Joyce screwed good money out of the deal for his constituents, but ultimately this didn’t work out well for The Nationals either:

“I keep asking for more and more,” Mr Joyce said. “I said to the party, ‘If I ask for Morrison’s strides, then I’ll get them’. I think by the end I’d got about $32bn.”

That figure cannot be verified, but the subsequent Mr Frydenberg budget offered immense funding for Nationals’ projects, inland rail, dams, pipelines, upgrades for ports, highways, roads and beef roads, water security, and agricultural and industry development.

Asked how he would describe his political battle with Mr Morrison, Mr Joyce offered a remarkable statement: “It was a huge deal. It was political prostitution on both sides. I think that’s a fair call. One paid for it and the other one gave it up.”

The right choice is always the one closest to the truth. The conservatives picked the wrong side. They didn’t do their homework.