Labor’s pushing for more Australian-built solar panels ‘totally driven by politics’

This is this philosophical idea, right, which is there are billions to be made and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the greening of Australia, right? So why does it need any taxpayer money to help push it along? But again, and I'm not suggesting there's anything nefarious at all about the company that Cannonbrookes and Turnbull are involved in, but if they need $5, $10, $15, $20 million out of someone to build more solar panels, couldn't they just ask the billionaire or the multimillionaire who owns their company for that money before they ask you and me to pay for it? I think this is what the average person would think. What it displays is a complete lack of self-awareness on the part of the ruling class that extends to taking the airfares and then subsidising rich people to build panels that we know are going to be more expensive than the things we can currently get from overseas, and then not presumably subsidise households to buy them. This looks like it has a lot more to do with politics than it does economics. I think we're going to see more of it. But people will be scratching their heads as to why rich people need money to do a commercial endeavour. I mean, if it doesn't make money, why do it? Yeah. I mean, again, Matt, part of this here is that I get that the best spin on this, right, is that it's a small industry that needs to grow to a bigger industry, and then it will be a flourishing one that will end up... But it's going to make the very people who were there in the early days pretty rich while those things exponentially grow, right? Take any other example of hypercapitalism, and that's what ends up happening. But my issue is, is that these deals should also come with equity. Why doesn't it have a scenario where, right, if you need $10 million off us, then we're going to get 5% of an asset that we might be able to sell later, our shares in it, or when this becomes a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar company, it's a new source of revenue for governments. Or a loan, for example. That would be another way of doing that, and that's often what we did when we were in government. The government is trying to do some of those things. It was not clear why they couldn't issue this particular investment, some kind of, like, concessional loan. Like, I do support government trying to bring back more manufacturing to Australia. I do agree with Graeme, though. This particular decision seems to be totally driven by politics, nothing to do with economics. I mean, they're going to the Hunter Valley and reading the death knell on the coal industry, despite the fact that we're exporting a record amount of coal, there's record demand for coal overseas. It makes no sense. But they obviously want to kill the Australian coal industry, and this is them trying to make the medicine go down easier for people. And then, of course, you've got a glut of solar panels in the world right now. There's a total glut of them all around the world, largely because of the subsidised industry that occurs in China. But there's no serious plan to deal with that. I mean, if we were serious about developing a domestic solar production industry here, why wouldn't we put tariffs or ban, like the Biden administration has done, those solar panel manufacturers who are using slave labour? Why would we at all consider putting solar panels on our roofs that are made from slave labour? And if the government were serious about supporting the Australian solar production industry here, they would do that very minimum thing. The fact they're not, I think this is just actually for the PR. It's not really serious about developing the Australian solar production industry itself. Well, don't forget, of course, we still have taxes on cars that are imported to the country, which was all about protecting cars made in the country, but we don't make cars in the country anymore. So what? But then again, we still compensate for carbon tax that doesn't exist. Oh, OK.