A glimmer of hope in the mad debate about Net Zero came when Nationals Senator for Queensland, Matt Canavan, held his own under intense questioning from David Speers on the ABC’s Insiders program yesterday.

As expected, Speers threw every left-wing climate change talking point in the book at Canavan. Yet Canavan unsurprisingly batted every single one of them away with ease.

When Speers raised the costs of abandoning Net Zero, Canavan reminded him that current estimates from the University of Queensland, the University of Melbourne, and Princeton University all place the cost of enacting Net Zero at around $7–9 trillion—nearly $300,000 per person.

When Speers mentioned the risks identified by the Treasury and the International Energy Agency around dropping Net Zero, Canavan reminded him that these were the same institutions that had predicted acting on Net Zero would lower Australians' electricity bills by $275, remarking, “All those people have been wrong - I don’t know why we would listen to them.”

And when Speers suggested that taxpayer dollars would be required to continue building traditional energy infrastructure such as coal or gas, Canavan reminded him that no energy-producing infrastructure is built in this country without government support. If the government is going to back something, it may as well back something that works.

As Canavan put it, “When you narrow your options in life, it tends to become more costly,” and that’s exactly what’s happening in Australia. The Albanese Labor Government is narrowing our options with Net Zero and forcing Australians down a costly and uncharted path.

Our politicians need to live in reality, and the reality is that when we ran our electricity grid on coal-fired power stations operating at their designed capacity of 80–90%, “we had power prices of half of what we have today,” as Canavan rightly pointed out.

Net Zero has also been destroying Australian jobs. Since starting down the path of Net Zero, Australia has lost over 8,000 jobs in the manufacturing industry and lost its nickel, urea, and plastics manufacturing sectors. As Canavan put it, “Let’s take the anchor off the Australian economy and let the thing go.”

But, while Canavan did a good job defending common-sense policy, unfortunately, the rest of the Coalition don’t all feel the same way. The Coalition started us down the path of Net Zero, and the Nationals are now debating whether they’ll break from the Liberals over this destructive policy. The major parties, while they may have some good individual politicians within them, are not strong enough to defend Australia from Labor, which has only doubled down on the Net Zero nonsense since coming to office in 2022.

It’s great to see voices like Canavan aligned with Family First but it is a shame they continue to be ignored within the Coalition as families are put under increasing pressure because of high energy costs.