Frydenberg refuses to repent as Alan Jones tries to exorcise energy blasphemy

A couple of weeks ago, Alan Jones exposed what will hitherto be known as the furtive front lawn declaration. According to Jones, Josh Frydenberg had confessed to him on the front lawn of his Melbourne home that “the global warming stuff was rubbish”.

By his own account, the Sydney shock jock shared this insight because he’d been irritated by the federal energy minister’s frankness about Tony Abbott’s serial wrecking tactics on energy policy and other matters. The upstart. Where was the damn respect?

Apparently one can observe deliberate wrecking tactics with one’s own eyes but one can’t mention them in polite company – at least not without having to field a friendly call from Peta Credlin, or an on-air homily from Jones.

“You told me, and agreed with me, on the front lawn of your house, that the global warming stuff was rubbish,” Jones thundered peevishly on the wireless in mid-April – proving that in the contemporary collective #auspol unhinging, revenge easily trumps dignity.

The energy minister could have responded to Jones with that time-honoured invocation against all self-appointed pub bouncers and hyperventilating serial pests: Get off my lawn, Alan.

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Instead, Frydenberg entered the Sydney studio on Thursday for his appointment with Alan’s accusatory finger. “Look, let me be blunt,” Jones said to his guest, breathing already shallow.

“I’ve known you for some time. My judgment of you is you have sold your soul for the sake of ministerial office.

“You don’t believe in this global warming stuff. You don’t believe we can survive on renewable energy. You know that coal-fired power will be the source of our energy needs for years to come but you’ve swallowed this leftwing Labor party-Greens rhetoric. Why?”

Frydenberg was calm in rebuttal. “Well, Alan, that’s not true. I’ve always rejected reckless responses to climate change but I’ve never rejected the science.

“In fact I’ve been on the record for more than a decade, well before I went into parliament, about the need to tackle climate change.”

The conversation then veered into philosophical territory. “What is climate change?” Jones wondered, out loud, as if the answer might confound mere mortals.

Again, Frydenberg was calm in his thunderous heresy. “It is the fact that man is contributing to the warming of our climate.”

How much was man contributing to warming, Jones wondered. About one degree since 1900, the minister said, an insight prompting a short homily from Jones about the folly of a country like Australia reducing emissions when our emissions contributed only 1.3% of the global total.

Jones then noted as if it was obvious to everyone bar Frydenberg that “carbon dioxide may in fact be good for us”.

Not lingering excessively over how carbon dioxide might be good for us, except that Bjørn Lomborg was somehow involved, the duo then scampered on to energy prices. They were too high.

Why were they high, Jones wondered? Gold-plating of poles and wires, Frydenberg noted, citing Australia’s competition watchdog as the authority.

Given that Frydenberg had once again supplied The Wrong Answer, Jones then sighed loudly, giving his guest an opening.

“We’ve also seen states lock up decades worth of resources when it comes to gas,” the energy minister noted.

Jones suddenly sensed he might have washed up in an episode of let’s turn the tables. “Oh, that’s rubbish,” he exploded.

“Well, it’s not rubbish,” Frydenberg said. “Let me ask you this, Alan. Why in New South Wales, where more than 80% of the power comes from coal, have prices continued to go up? And the reason is because you import more than 95% of your gas. Gas sets the price of electricity.

“So if we are going to be honest with the pastry chef who you like to quote who gets up at two in the morning … well, let’s be honest with him and say we can lower those power bills if you develop more gas here in NSW.”

Just to be clear, if you can’t quite decode Frydenberg’s trolling, Jones campaigns relentlessly against unconventional gas development. So in this telling, the one where a certain Sydney shock jock plays a pivotal role in persuading politicians to curtail gas supply, Jones just might have to wear some of the responsibility for high power prices rather than this being a conspiracy perpetrated exclusively by wild-eyed warmists and windfarms, plotting away in paddocks.

One plus one might just equal two.

In the hermetically sealed universe Jones inhabits, one plus one never equals two, so the host wasn’t having a bar of it. He may have even raised his voice. “That is absolute and utter rubbish. I cannot believe … ”

The answer to all this was easy, Jones insisted. It was keeping the gas at home, rather than exporting it. It was just like his childhood on a dairy farm.

Cue bucolic rural idyll, with young Alan at large among the milkers, absorbing life lessons. “If you’ve listened to the program you’ll know what I’ve said about the farm, where I was brought up on the dairy farm.”

“Yes,” Frydenberg noted politely.

“ … and my dad would say how much milk does your mother want,” Jones continued, “so we would keep the milk that was going to service the family and we’d let the rest go to the factory.

“Why don’t we have a gas reservation policy so that the gas that is currently available to us is used for the benefit of Australians and Australian businesses?”

Rather than laughing, which would have been entirely reasonable, Frydenberg continued with his opportunity to tell the Jones listenership that Alan might just have a teensy-weensy something to do with high power prices.

“Well, the fact is the gas we are currently exporting is unconventional gas, which is the gas you’ve been railing against being developed, Alan,” the minister noted.

Why, Frydenberg wondered to no one in particular, would NSW have to keep pulling in gas from Queensland when there was ample supply under the ground?

Alan thought the answer to this conundrum was to change the subject. Why weren’t we building new coal-fired power plants? Frydenberg thought that would be just tremendous in the event anyone wanted to build one. Anyone? Anywhere? *Crickets*

In the meantime, perhaps we could just get more gas out of the ground? Jones sought asylum back in the dairy. “Stop talking rubbish, Josh, we have buckets of it and we are exporting it, why don’t we keep it for our own domestic use?”

The problem, as Jones saw it, was renewables, and subsidies to renewables. Appalling business. As they were on the topic, Frydenberg thought he might take the opportunity to mention subsidies don’t stop with windfarms. “Can I tell you subsidies have been all round the place, when you look at coal, governments forever have been building coal-fired power plants and you paid for them through your tax bill not your electricity bill.”

Despite the conversation perhaps not panning out entirely as intended, Frydenberg was invited back for another pep talk next Thursday.

Jones thought Frydenberg probably wouldn’t want to come though, not for a decade or so. Au contraire, said the minister. “Of course I’ll be here. It’s a sticky wicket but I love to play on it because we need to explain to the public all the good work we are doing.”