Queensland’s “future beyond coal” was at least four hundred years away unless a nuclear industry is developed in Australia.

We need to get realism back into this debate instead of pandering to the Greens and GetUp!.

LNP leader Deb Frecklington, in her budget reply speech yesterday, declared a future LNP government would force government-owned electricity generators to spend money on unreliable renewable energy.

The last thing our politician-inspired energy crisis needs is politicians mandating more government bias against coal. Mums and dads and industry will only be forced to pay even more for electricity.

The only thing that is certain at the moment is that our electricity is unaffordable and its reliability is uncertain.

Government subsidising of renewables has distorted the energy market and the way to fix this is not through more government distorting of the energy market.

The Conservative Party has long called for an agnostic approach to energy where the most affordable and reliable resources are deployed be they coal or nuclear.

Billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money pumped into renewables has given Australia some of the highest electricity prices on the planet and is forcing important industries to shut-down because of outages.

Our politician-inspired energy crisis has frittered away our nation’s competitive advantage.

The great irony is that Labor-Green and LNP governments happily take billions in tax revenue from Australian coal sent overseas to be burned and yet won’t allow this resource to compete on a level playing field here.

Unless Labor, the Greens and the LNP allow coal to compete on an equal playing field with renewables, Australia’s energy crisis will only get worse.

The rest of the world is burning Australian coal to generate affordable and reliable electricity but we are closing down coal-fired power stations and failing to invest in new ones.

It is madness.