Year Zero approaches with Comrade Tony Number One in waiting?

Tony seems to be struggling with the reality of affordable solar

After a week which saw Opposition Leader Tony Abbott perform more gaffes, backflips and nonsensical quotes than the average Barnum and Bailey circus, your columnist thought it high time to check out The Man’s policy on clean energy. This was a bit more difficult than first expected due to the fact that Big Tony, and his front bench colleagues….er… don’t seem to have a properly functioning clean energy policy to present to the Australian people.

The Hon. Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, after grudgingly admitting that the introduction of a carbon tax didn’t in fact herald a zombie apocalypse as he predicted (but just you wait and see — don’t you worry about that!), has also demonstrated that he knows little about clean energy, particularly solar power.

Mr Abbott, who once referred to himself as “the political lovechild of [former PM John Howard] and [backbencher] Bronwyn Bishop” (no one really knows if he was joking) appears to be outlining a clean energy policy closer to the strategy of former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot than mentor Johnny “Paycheck” Howard.

Now I’m not for a moment implying that Big Tone will turn Canberra into a killing fields nor set up re-education camps across the length and breadth of this wide, brown land. However I do think that the Coalition’s weird clean energy policy has more than a little of Year Zero attached to it.

Here’s how it goes. Assuming he gets the job, Tony and his mates will use the money he saves from the useful parts of the renewable energy policy of the previous Labor administration to create a task force of presumably fit young folk (FYF). The highly-trained force will then sent to all corners of the country to plant trees willy nilly while generally making a nuisance of themselves. Said FYK will obviously march up and down our country’s highways and byways chanting pro-Tony Abbott slogans and waving quotes of Chairman Tony a la the Cultural Revolution (I made that last factoid up for a bit of colour).

All this in place of a well thought through renewable energy policy.

To make matters worse, Mr Abbott has already sounded the death knell of the carbon tax, will punt the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation into touch and get rid of the malfunctioning (though well meaning) Solar Flagships program.

Clean energy under Tony? All sounds a little Orwellian doesn’t it? Like the Ministry of Peace in the book 1984.

Or am I being too harsh readers? Have your say below or over at our Facebook Page.