Democracy has come a gutser in New South Wales. In this very column last year I complained that Australian politics had become a choice between Cornflakes and Rice Bubbles.

Well, now federally, the flakes are in opposition and the other lot are bubbling along nicely, but round here nothing is going well and we’re in a very sorry state.

In NSW politics it’s more a choice between Fruit Loops and Fruitier Loops. We have here a perfect example of what happens when an opportunistic government abandons its ideology and incorporates all the ideas of the other mob.

The Iemma Government acts out a well-entrenched economic rationalist’s ideology with impunity. The poor Liberals can’t find any area of disagreement that doesn’t make them look like green lefties.

There are, of course, a few Liberals who tread a different path, but in NSW today, to be to the right of the Labor Party confines you to such a small space, you’re almost off the planet and thereby unelectable.

The lack of an energy policy is a good example of how much trouble we’re in.

Michael Costa repeatedly says that electricity generation will be passed off to private operators because this is the only way we’ll get another coal-fired power station to meet our ever-increasing energy usage.

Whether or not this is true, it shows that he’s just not with it. His ideas are hopelessly behind the times and he’s squandering the community’s goodwill towards energy conservation and emissions reduction.

Last week, Zhengrong Shi, a Chinese businessman (who once worked at the University of NSW but is now reportedly the richest man in China) urged the government to subsidise the fitting of solar panels on houses. As an incentive, the power companies would offer ‘feed-in tariffs’ to consumers who put their money into energy self-sufficiency by paying them more for what they produce than the going rate for electricity.

It’s obviously a great way to cut carbon emissions, it rewards householders for initiative and would provide far more security for the future than the same amount of money left in some super fund at the mercy of finance buccaneers.

Predictably, a spokesdrone for the NSW Government said they are not considering feed-in tariffs. I won’t waste space on repeating their reasoning, but trust me, it was complete gobbledegook.

These bozoes can’t see that it’s not about the economy, stupid, it’s about burning less fossil fuel. It’s quite simple really; if we keep burning coal, we’ll keep releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa should come as clean as solar energy. Are they doggedly supporting the industries they’re attempting to flog off, even to the detriment of other ways of making electricity?

Don’t they see that the less profitable the coal-fired electricity industry becomes, the better off we all will be?

If they can’t or won’t see this, then they’re all fossil fools the lot of them.