Economists in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at coal miners.
The standard critique of Matt Canavan’s "economic revolution" usually follows a predictable script: it’s labeled a "populist mirage," a dangerous retreat into protectionism, or a fiscal suicide note. The critics, usually perched in comfortable inner-city offices, argue that Australia’s path to prosperity lies in the hands of the services sector, a smooth transition to renewables, and the gentle guidance of the "invisible hand"—which, coincidentally, always seems to favor the people writing the op-eds.
They’re missing the point. Not just a little bit. They are fundamentally misreading the mechanics of what makes a nation-state viable in a de-globalizing world.
The "lazy consensus" suggests that any move toward industrial intervention or fossil fuel reliance is a step backward. In reality, the "mirage" isn’t Canavan’s platform; it’s the belief that Australia can maintain a first-world standard of living by selling houses to each other and exporting low-margin services while our energy costs—the literal lifeblood of an economy—skyrocket.
The Productivity Lie
Most Australian economic commentary treats "productivity" as a mystical KPI that goes up when you give people better software. It doesn’t. In a resource-heavy economy, productivity is a function of energy density.
The math is brutal. When you transition from high-density, reliable energy sources to diffuse, intermittent ones, your energy return on investment (EROI) drops.
$$EROI = \frac{\text{Energy Delivered}}{\text{Energy Required to Deliver that Energy}}$$
If $EROI$ shrinks, your society gets poorer. Period. You can mask this for a decade with debt or by inflating property values, but eventually, the physics of the grid catches up with the balance sheet. The critics call Canavan’s focus on coal and heavy industry "regressive." I call it an acknowledgment of thermodynamic reality. You cannot run a high-wage, high-standard-of-living country on vibes and expensive storage.
The Sovereignty Tax You’re Already Paying
Patrick Commins and the orthodox crowd argue that Australians would "pay the price" for a populist pivot. They frame it as a cost-of-living catastrophe.
Newsflash: Australians are already paying the price.
We pay some of the highest energy prices in the world despite sitting on enough coal and gas to power the planet for centuries. We have gutted our manufacturing base to the point where we couldn’t even make a face mask in 2020 without begging a foreign power. That is a "sovereignty tax." It’s an invisible levy on our national security and economic resilience.
The contrarian truth is that "efficiency"—the god of the neoliberal era—is often the enemy of "resilience." A perfectly efficient supply chain is a brittle one. It breaks the moment a ship gets stuck in the Suez or a geopolitical rival decides to turn off the taps. Canavan’s "revolution" isn't about returning to the 1950s; it’s about acknowledging that the 1990s-era dream of a borderless, friction-free global market is dead.
If you aren't building things, you are a vassal state.
Why the "Populist" Label is a Cop-Out
Calling an idea "populist" is the intellectual equivalent of a white flag. It’s what you say when you can’t argue against the underlying grievance.
The grievance in regional Australia is real: the wealth generated in the dirt of the Galilee Basin or the Hunter Valley is being used to subsidize a lifestyle in Sydney and Melbourne that actively seeks to destroy the industries that created the wealth in the first place.
I’ve spent years analyzing capital flows in the energy sector. I’ve seen boards of directors abandon profitable, baseload assets not because the economics failed, but because they were terrified of an ESG rating from a firm in London that couldn't find Rockhampton on a map. That isn't "market forces." That’s institutional cowardice.
When Canavan talks about government intervention to keep coal plants open or to build new dams, the "experts" scream about market distortion. Where were these experts when billions in subsidies were being poured into intermittent renewables that require a total, multi-billion dollar redesign of the national grid?
The market is already distorted beyond recognition. The question isn't whether the government should intervene; it's which side they should intervene on.
The Manufacturing Fallacy
The most common rebuttal to an industrial "revolution" is that Australia "can't compete" on labor costs.
This is the most tired, debunked trope in the book. Modern manufacturing isn't about a thousand people standing on an assembly line with screwdrivers. It’s about high-end automation, robotics, and—most importantly—cheap, reliable power.
Look at the United States. Through the Inflation Reduction Act and a massive pivot toward domestic energy (fracking), they’ve sparked a re-industrialization that the "experts" said was impossible twenty years ago. They didn't do it by being the cheapest; they did it by being the most reliable and energy-abundant.
Australia has a choice. We can be a giant museum with nice beaches and high rent, or we can use our natural endowment to become the low-cost energy capital of the Asia-Pacific. The latter requires a "revolution." It requires telling the NIMBYs in the suburbs that their aesthetic preferences for "clean" energy don't trump the need for a functional economy.
The Dirty Secret of "Green" Jobs
Let’s talk about the "People Also Ask" favorite: "Won't the green transition create more jobs?"
Technically, yes. It takes significantly more people to maintain a sprawling, decentralized network of wind turbines and solar farms than it does to run one concentrated coal or nuclear plant. But that’s a bad thing. That is the definition of a productivity decline.
If you need 10 times the workers to produce the same megawatt-hour, you have made energy more expensive. You haven't "created jobs"; you've created a labor sink that drags down the rest of the economy. A healthy economy wants fewer people involved in energy production so they can be involved in higher-order pursuits like medicine, engineering, or even—god forbid—art.
A Brutal Truth for the Critics
The reason Canavan’s message resonates isn't because people are "duped" by a mirage. It's because they see the cracks in the current system.
They see a country that is:
- Short on housing.
- Short on energy.
- Long on bureaucrats.
- Entirely dependent on one trading partner.
If you think the status quo is sustainable, you are the one living in a mirage.
The "price" the critics warn about—higher debt, international friction, environmental impact—is real. There is no such thing as a free lunch. But the price of inaction is the slow, managed decline of the Australian middle class. It’s the transformation of a lucky country into a branch-office economy where the only way to get ahead is to sit on a piece of dirt and wait for the price to go up.
Stop Asking the Wrong Question
The question isn't "Is Matt Canavan’s plan perfect?" (It isn't. His fiscal projections can be as hand-wavy as a tech startup’s pitch deck).
The real question is: "Does the current economic consensus offer a future where Australia is anything more than a glorified quarry and a retirement village?"
The answer is a resounding no.
The critics are terrified of "populism" because it threatens the comfortable, managed decline they’ve overseen for two decades. They prefer the "mirage" of a service-based utopia because it doesn't require them to get their hands dirty or make hard choices about base-load power.
You want an economic revolution? Start by admitting that a nation that can’t power itself, feed itself, or build its own infrastructure isn't a nation—it’s a target.
If that makes you a populist, then perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about the label and start worrying about the lights staying on.
Stop listening to the people who profit from the status quo. The "economic revolution" isn't a threat to the Australian people; it’s a threat to the people who have spent twenty years selling the country out from under them.
Build the dam. Dig the hole. Burn the coal.
Or get used to the dark.
