Government gives $3 million to “share clean energy stories”

Cartoon: by Zeg.

Straight from the Australian “Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency,” (Fair dincum, it really exists, you just can’t make this stuff up) presumably with advice from the Goebbels Foundation, we get the latest in touchy feely altruistic claptrap.

Some time ago the government announced that it would be spending $12 million in an advertising campaign to persuade us that a big new tax is in our best interests and that we should grasp it with both hands as an incredibly generous act of benevolence on their part. While this is understood to have convinced Tony Windsor and Rob Oakshott, it seems that this $3 million is to convert others to that view.

It seems that it is going to take more than that to get Barnaby Joyce onside according to his latest missive:

Today the Department of Climate Change will begin taking applications for grants of up to $250,000 so that organisations can “share their stories and demonstrate the opportunities associated with Australia moving to a clean energy future.”

We are almost morphing from political propaganda to straight out political bribery. $250,000 is more than I and one of my staff get paid combined so that someone can write a Labor pop-up book. I bet you Rhys Muldoon will be all over this one.

This “Climate Change Grant Program” will cost $3 million. Coincidentally, that is the same amount that Labor has offered those affected by this Government’s overnight ban on live cattle exports.

While people in the north of Australia are told to get by on the dole, the government is handing out to others cheques of $250,000 so that others can “share stories” for a clean energy future. I bet you there would be quite a few people in the north who would like to “share stories” mainly about a Green-Labor-Independent free future.

Fair dinkum, what is going on here? The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and the Green-Labor-Independent government. This is bizarre. This is more money we are going to be borrowing from overseas for something that would go down very well at a hothouse, talkfest at a community forum in Nimbin.