Yesterday didn’t want for contrast when it comes to Western Australian billionaires.

Kerry Stokes was launching a new right-wing online newspaper, backed by climate denialist mining heiress Gina Rinehart and mining billionaire Chris Ellison, supported by advertising from Australia’s worst climate criminal and prominent tax dodger Woodside (lead story in the first edition: a hatchet job on the prime minister from a former News Corp editor).

The aim of the bizarrely named The Nightly is, presumably, to achieve the kind of political influence the Seven Network can no longer muster, without losing too many millions of dollars for its fossil fuel backers.

Meanwhile Andrew Forrest was at the National Press Club in Canberra offering some home truths about fossil fuels and their advocates:

Why are we giving the fossil-fuel industry a free ride and forcing energy consumers everywhere to only consume fossil fuels? Simple. The multi-decadal polluting companies have exploited vicious lobbying for approvals so they can crowd out green energy. So they can prevent Australians from having the choice between cheaper green energy which won’t destroy their livelihoods and them, and more expensive fossil fuels, which will. In 2022-23, Australia spent over $11 billion supporting the fossil fuel industry.

Or:

The question for Australians is not if or why to price carbon — it is whether or not we allow the price to be set by Australia, by Australians, to the profit of Australians, or by global markets. It’s going to happen regardless. You can’t deny it.

And of course his shot at the furphy of nuclear power:

Renewable projects can be distributed across a far greater area and bring economic benefit to far more communities … it is often MPs from these very regions who are grasping for talking points who are inadvertently standing in the road of the local economic growth that will benefit the regions most. They push nuclear knowing it will just keep expensive and unreliable fossil fuel going for another 20 years, as opposed to green energy that is delivering jobs, infrastructure investment, and sustainable growth for their constituents.

Nuclear power was merely a delaying tactic, “misinformed, unscientific, uneconomic, plucked-out-of-thin-air, bulldust nuclear policies of politicians — masquerading as leaders”. That’s you, Peter Dutton. That’s you, David Littleproud.

Strangely enough, neither Stokes’ West Australian nor The Nightly covered these remarks, instead preferring to attack Forrest concerning oyster farms.

This is only the latest instance of Forrest teeing off on fossil fuels. He savaged the new Barossa gas field project as one of the most polluting in the world back in 2021. He has derided carbon capture as a failure, and two weeks ago urged politicians not to be “the next idiot waiting for the old lie to be trotted out and say I believe in carbon sequestration. It has only failed for 75 years … It’s a complete falsehood”.

Indeed, Forrest has a particular passion for calling bullshit on all of the fossil fuel industry’s delaying tactics and scams. “The fossil fuel industry’s cosiness with governments will lead to a perpetuation of that great lie, ‘clean coal’, with its next sister great lie, ‘clean hydrogen’,” he said in 2021. 

“If it is not green, i.e. renewable electricity splitting water, then it is not clean. It is a fossil fuel and as a fossil fuel they are going to brush it up as blue or pink or grey, and they are going to try to call it clean hydrogen and it is an outright lie.”

Forrest’s message is effectively an endorsement of everything the most vigorous critics of fossil fuels have been saying for years: coal and gas companies use their political influence to thwart good policy, carbon capture is a scam, nuclear power is unviable and a delaying tactic — all coming from one of Australia’s most successful resources sector billionaires.

It’s awkward not merely for Kerry Stokes’ outlets but for the fossil fuel allies and nuclear power supporters at News Corp as well — and for the Nationals, which are now, under the deeply malignant influence of the Queensland Liberal National Party, no longer devoted primarily to the interests of agriculture but of fossil fuel companies.

Forrest’s critique of the National Party is particularly trenchant. In trying to block renewables projects and championing fossil fuels, the federal Nationals are trying to block regional communities from enjoying the benefits of tens of billions in investment in new projects and new infrastructure. They’re sacrificing their voters to the interests of Santos, Woodside and coal companies.

Politicians masquerading as leaders, indeed.