You greatly underestimate how utterly devoid of morals both of our major parties are, resulting in them being in the pocket of the coal miners and other big corps. They are almost militantly opposed to non-coal, non-LNG investment.

This is a government which earlier this year brought a lump of coal in to parliament as a prop to say that they were 'not afraid of coal' and to attack the opposition for 'attacking the jobs of rural workers at the coal mines'. I'm not even joking: https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...

I'm not one to defend our pollies, but these same "utterly devoid of morals" parties are the same that put in place home solar energy subsidies that have resulted in Australia being the world leader in rooftop solar uptake.

That is unfortunate. I spent a month living in Ryde and I fell absolutely in love with Australia. I agree, as Bill Bryson once said: "It may truly be the greatest place on earth." Hopefully things sort itself out soon.

I think there's a big problem with most voters remembering the Good Times under a Liberal government when we had a massive mining boom and the country was doing well. Now things are slowing down - I suspect the next few decades will be bumpy when China stops buying everything we dig up out of the ground.

Things could have been much better if we'd taxed the hell out of the miners, like Norway's Oil Fund.

We have the Future Fund but it's a joke compared to Norway's sovereign wealth fund.

There was plenty of tax money floating around back then but it was probably spent buying votes and posting budget surpluses so government could pat themselves on the back for being such good economic managers...

I hope so too. It truly is a lovely place and I'm blessed to live here, however our politicians across the board and with very few exceptions leave a lot to be desired. Australian politics is truly awful.

Australia is the world leader in roof top solar PV installations per household.

http://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-is-australia-the-...

And now that the technology is cost competitive, there are many plans afoot: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-29/australia-on-cusp-of-l...

Australia seems like a country where the politicians are excessively out of touch with the population. I'm not sure why it is the case, is it a side effect of their electoral process?

So often I see stories where the PM is saying that Global Warming is a hoax and Coal is the future and every Aussie online is screaming "YOU'RE KILLING THE GREAT BARRIER REEF, AND EVERYTHING ELSE!" and going out of their way to install personal solar or wind power.

Coal/mining too strong here. But yes, it makes sense to me too. There are incredible amounts of flat and unused land out there, baking in the sun.

> Sort of on-topic but I recall once an Australian company called Enviromission that was wanting to build solar updraft towers in the outback

Funny you call it "the outback". Their final proposed site was 20km from my then family home :)

I was disappointed it never went anywhere, and yes, Australians should be adopting solar much, much faster than they are.

Australia is one of the top adopters of PV solar in the world. Granted, we are not yet at the level of Germany (500MW per million head), but we're doing ok at 250 MW per million head of population. Half the number of Germany might sound pretty poor, but it is twice that of the USA (125), Spain (118) and a a lot more than the UK (178).

Last year saw overall production increase by 13% and there are a lot of big projects in the pipeline.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-29/australia-on-cusp-of-l...

I think that you'll find people have been biding their time until the economics looked favourable, which isn't so silly in my opinion.

Australia damn well ought to have more solar PV installed than the UK given that the UK is about 30 degrees further from the equator.

*20 (unless you're comparing Cairns to Wick)

Forgive me, I am an American :)