Zoe Booth speaks with Gerard Holland, CEO of the Page Research Centre and a founding member of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Together they explore how foreign funding is shaping Australia’s energy policy, what’s driving the rising cost of living, and why ideological commitments to renewables may be undermining the country’s economic and strategic resilience.

Holland argues that Australia’s transition to green energy has been distorted by international interests, bad economics, and an aversion to politically unpopular technologies like nuclear power. Drawing on original research submitted to a federal Senate inquiry, he makes the case for a return to energy realism—and warns that unless we regain control of our policy decisions, Australia’s prosperity and security may be at risk.

Transcript

Zoe Booth: Thank you so much for joining me today. I came across a tweet of yours and then a piece you’d written for The Daily Telegraph about foreign influence in Australia—specifically, overseas actors influencing our domestic energy policy. Not many people talk about it, or even know it’s happening. Could you explain what’s going on in Australia’s energy market?

Gerard Holland: Absolutely. And thanks for having me on—I’m a big fan of Quillette, so it’s a pleasure to be here. To give you the snapshot: we’ve tracked over $108 million from overseas sources specifically earmarked to influence the Australian public, our politics, and to shift domestic energy policy. That’s only what we were able to uncover; the real figure is likely much higher. These are amounts declared on foreign registers, annual statements, and so on. We really don’t know the full extent.

That money has seeded a network of third-party organisations which, in the 2023–24 period alone, raised about $170 million to spend during that election season. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the Labor and Liberal parties spent combined in the last federal election—they spent about $70 to $75 million each.

These are huge sums, and very few Australians are aware of them. What triggered our investigation was a Senate committee inquiry—currently ongoing—into misinformation and disinformation in Australia’s energy and climate debate. It’s a Greens-led inquiry with a Labor vice chair, largely set up to investigate so-called dark money from the fossil fuel industry.

ZB: Yes, I remember that. I believe the Centre for Independent Studies’ office in Sydney was graffitied during one of those protests related to Atlas?

GH: That’s right. Atlas actually does very little in Australia, but they were accused—along with the IPA and CIS—of being funded by this so-called dark money from fossil fuels. The inquiry set out to prove that, but they’ve come up short. The reality is that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t invest much in domestic lobbying. Their revenue—ninety percent of it—comes from export markets like China. They’re not interested in whether Liddell or Eraring stays open an extra two years.

In contrast, we’ve seen massive flows of money from international green organisations. These funds have supported everything from environmental legal cases to astroturfed grassroots campaigns and junk think tanks. One of the key players is the Sunrise Project, run by John Hepburn—formerly of Greenpeace Australia. They brought in around $70 million last year alone. They were initially seeded by Rockefeller Foundation money back in 2011, and they laid out a strategy for using foreign funds to influence Australian energy policy.

ZB: So that’s the astroturfing aspect—making coal and gas socially unacceptable, even though it feels like a genuine grassroots shift in opinion. But according to recent Pew data, support for things like banning new coal mines and carbon taxes is actually down slightly. Possibly due to the cost of living crisis?

Could you speak to how foreign influence affects the cost of living in Australia?

GH: Eventually, you get mugged by reality. There are basic laws of physics and economics. The more renewable penetration you have in your energy grid, the more expensive your energy becomes. Let me try to keep this simple: the denser and more dispatchable your power source, the cheaper it will be.

Wind and solar are abundant—but only when the wind blows or the sun shines. When they don’t, you need gas, batteries, pumped hydro, or other backup systems to maintain the grid. That complex infrastructure gets baked into your power bill. Around 30–40 percent of your bill is “network cost”—transmission and distribution infrastructure.

A hundred years ago, we built coal-fired power stations in cities to keep generation close to consumption. We’ve since moved those out due to air quality issues, but they were still near industrial centres. Renewable sources, by contrast, require massive transmission buildouts to connect remote solar and wind farms to users. That’s astronomically expensive.

And that’s just one piece. You also need peaking plants, batteries, and backup systems that only operate part-time, which makes them far less efficient and harder to recover costs without subsidies. In short, we’re being mugged by the costs of redundancy and inefficiency.

Power isn’t just one part of the economy—it is the economy. It affects every part of production, from agriculture to AI data centres. If your energy input costs go up, so does the price of everything. We’re now seeing energy costs approach twelve percent of our GDP. Historically, when that number hits ten percent, you either bring costs down or face a contraction. And we are indeed experiencing a per capita recession and decline in living standards.

ZB: The title of one of your research papers is Economic Self-Harm or a Pro-Human Future. How much of what you’ve described is ideological? Are we seeing a deliberate degrowth agenda from activists who see population and economic contraction as a positive?

GH: There are financial motives—renewable developers are making billions. But yes, there’s also an ideological layer. Some of this thinking goes back to Malthus, who believed humans would inevitably outstrip Earth’s resources and face collapse. He was wrong, of course—human ingenuity has repeatedly solved problems and made resources more abundant.

But Malthusian thinking was revived in the 1970s by the Club of Rome, and it influenced some very dark policies: India’s mass sterilisation programme, China’s one-child policy. That thinking still persists today in modern environmental movements. There’s a belief that humans are a blight on the planet, and that degrowth is necessary.

Our approach at Page is different. We want to improve living standards and protect the environment—both can be done. But the dominant eco-alarmist movement is increasingly anti-human. It sees nature as something to be preserved at the expense of human flourishing, rather than something to be stewarded for people. Australia’s current policies are actively hurting citizens in service of that ideology.

ZB: Do we know who is hurting the most from these policies? Which industries or which kinds of people are being hit the hardest?

GH: Overwhelmingly, it’s the poorest who suffer the most. That impact is a little papered over by government subsidies—people get payments to help cover their energy bills. But what most people don’t see is how energy costs are baked into the price of everything.

Whether you’re rich or poor, your power bill might look similar. You’ve got a fridge, a TV, lights. But if you’re on a lower income, that same bill takes up a far greater share of your disposable income. And then there’s the cost of goods and services. When energy costs are high, it increases the cost of your food, your transport, your rent—everything. That hits low-income households hardest.

From an industry perspective, it’s heavy manufacturing and metals processing that have been decimated. Twenty years ago, manufacturing was about ten percent of Australia’s GDP. Now it’s around three percent—lower than Belgium. In fact, our economy is less diversified than some Sub-Saharan African countries.

We’re basically just digging up iron ore and coal now. Sectors like aluminium, nickel, copper—they’ve either shut down due to high energy costs or are surviving only with government handouts. You can’t make steel, cement, plastic, fertiliser, or refine metals without cheap, reliable energy. It’s just not possible.

People get excited about AI, but there is no AI without electricity. Elon Musk talks about batteries and solar, but he’s building gas-fired power stations next to his data centres because he knows they can’t run without constant power. Google and Microsoft are looking at small modular nuclear reactors. The rest of the world is asking, “How do we get more reliable energy?” And we seem obsessed with making ours more expensive and unreliable.

ZB: Let’s move onto the nuclear topic. I believe Australia has around thirty percent of the world’s uranium reserves, yet we have a moratorium on using it for energy production. What are your thoughts on that? And what sort of energy mix would you like to see?

GH: The ban on nuclear is completely nonsensical. It’s one of the safest, most proven technologies in the world. But when people think of nuclear, they imagine Mr Burns from The Simpsons and barrels of glowing green sludge.

In reality, the spent nuclear fuel from a person’s entire lifetime of electricity use could fit in a Coke can. It’s incredibly dense. All the nuclear waste ever produced in the US would fit in one football stadium. Switzerland stores its entire nuclear waste stockpile in a facility the size of a basketball court.

Most of what people think of as “nuclear waste” is low-exposure material—gloves, suits, tools—which decays rapidly. The serious spent fuel is tiny in volume and can be safely stored and even reprocessed in some cases.

So yes, it’s safe, proven, and abundant. We shouldn’t have a ban. From what I understand, the ban was originally a political trade-off made with the Greens to pass other legislation. At the time, it didn’t seem worth the fight because we had cheap coal, and nuclear wasn’t cost-competitive with coal back then.

But now, if you’re serious about net zero, you need nuclear. There is no path to a carbon-neutral grid without it. Renewables alone won’t get you there—especially once you factor in land use, peaking requirements, and the need for firming capacity.

In the short term, if we want to bring down power bills, we should build new coal-fired units on existing brownfield sites with transmission infrastructure already in place. But if you’re planning for the next 100 years—thinking like the people who built the Opera House or the Sydney Harbour Bridge—then nuclear is a no-brainer. It’s low-emissions, high-reliability, domestically secure, and it positions Australia as an energy leader.

ZB: Nuclear has become such a political issue here. It was a big part of the last federal election and definitely influenced how I voted. It still has a bit of a branding problem, especially with older generations, although younger Australians seem more open to it.

Do we know how much of that anti-nuclear sentiment is influenced by foreign actors? What do they have to gain by keeping Australia nuclear-free?

GH: This is where it gets a bit more nefarious. Legitimate environmentalists know how valuable nuclear is. The key is power density. To give you a sense: to power 100,000 homes for an hour, you’d need a tennis ball of uranium, two school buses of coal, or about 3,000 AFL fields worth of solar panels. And if you want that solar power at night, you’d need to double the panel area and add battery storage—about two basketball courts of Tesla megabatteries.

So nuclear is far better for the environment in terms of land use. But if you look at what’s happening to our national parks, farmland, and forests to build out renewables, it’s heartbreaking. That’s what turned people like Michael Shellenberger, who was once a big solar guy. Our local equivalent, Steve Nowakowski from Rainforest Reserves Australia, has done spatial mapping showing just how much habitat is being cleared daily—far more than what’s being replanted by conservation efforts.

So why the resistance to nuclear? Part of it may be financial. If we build nuclear, there’s no need for sprawling solar farms and wind turbines and all that expensive transmission infrastructure. Some people have a financial stake in keeping things as they are.

And yes, foreign influence plays a role too. Take ClimateWorks, for example. They helped design AEMO’s 2022 Integrated System Plan and contributed to the CSIRO’s GENCost report—both of which favour high renewable penetration. ClimateWorks was co-founded by an Indonesian coal baron, whose daughter still sits on their board. Their office is partly based in Indonesia.

In the past decade, Australia’s coal exports have remained flat, while Indonesia’s have tripled—they’ve overtaken us. So it raises serious questions about why someone with that kind of interest is advising Australia on decarbonisation.

ZB: That’s quite a revelation. And this network of influence—how far does it go? Is there more you uncovered in your Senate submission?

GH: Yes. Another group we mentioned is the Smart Energy Council—the peak lobbying body for renewable projects in Australia. They were behind that infamous $600 billion figure for the cost of nuclear energy. Ironically, this claim came out during a Senate inquiry into misinformation.

That figure is not only wrong—it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the energy grid works. They confused megawatts with megawatt hours. So, they misunderstood the difference between capacity—how much electricity you could theoretically produce at a given moment—and generation—how much energy is actually delivered over time.

Let me explain. If you build one gigawatt of solar, you only get about thirty percent of that in usable energy due to its capacity factor—sunlight is intermittent. So, to reliably get a gigawatt’s worth of electricity, you’d need to build three to four times that amount, and that’s before accounting for storage to cover nighttime.

Nuclear, on the other hand, runs at about a 95 percent capacity factor. If you build one gigawatt of nuclear, you get nearly a gigawatt of energy all the time. Same goes for coal, though it’s typically 60–80 percent. So, the Smart Energy Council used the same flawed multiplier for nuclear as they would for solar or wind, which massively inflated their cost estimate. That’s how they got this $600 billion figure—by applying a completely inappropriate model.

It’s not just misleading; it’s dishonest. But it serves a political purpose—to erode public support for nuclear and secure favourable conditions for renewables, where a lot of vested interests lie.

ZB: And this misinformation is then repeated by the media, the Energy Minister, the Prime Minister… even the ABC.

GH: Exactly. And other so-called independent think tanks, like the Australia Institute, are just as involved. They’re constantly pushing misleading claims about gas and nuclear. They were also named in that original 2011 strategy document—part of the same foreign-influenced network. They’ve been running the same playbook for over a decade, just with different technologies in the crosshairs.

Take the issue with gas, for example. Gas has become more central to the grid because we removed coal and replaced it with intermittent renewables. When renewables don’t produce, gas has to step in and set the market price. That’s how the system works.

So, the same people who pushed us into relying on gas are now demonising it—complaining that it’s expensive or unstable. It’s a self-created problem, and then they blame the only technology keeping the lights on.

ZB: It sounds like a mix of ideology, foreign interests, and financial motivations. All working in tandem.

GH: Yes, it’s hard to pin it down to just one motive. Is it a degrowth agenda? Is it opportunism—profit from the renewables boom? Is it foreign actors seeking to destabilise or dominate our markets? Is it China pulling strings? Russia interfering? Probably a combination of all of the above.

What’s clear is this: Australia is no longer in control of its own energy future. And the people we rely on to make decisions in our best interests are often too compromised, too constrained, or too captured to do so.

ZB: How did you come to be interested in all this? And how did the Page Research Centre come to exist?

GH: Page has been around for about twenty years. It was originally set up to provide independent policy advice in support of the National Party—specifically focusing on rural and regional Australia. Our guiding philosophy is that better outcomes for the regions lead to better outcomes for all Australians, because our economy is regionally integrated.

I’ve been running Page for just under two years now. Before that, I worked with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in London, where I helped shape some of the energy-related thinking. I’ve also worked in think tanks and local politics—mostly with the National Party.

ZB: And are you connected to the country personally?

GH: Yes, I grew up on a farm near Young—about 2,500 acres. My dad still runs it. I first really noticed the effects of energy policy back in 2008–09 when the carbon tax came in. Overnight, our family farm went from profitable to struggling—not because of drought or weather, but because of the added input costs.

Later modelling showed the carbon tax’s pass-through costs to producers were between 100–300 percent of the headline rate. That was a wake-up call for me. Energy costs don’t just affect your bill—they affect everything in the economy, from fertiliser and transport to packaging and refrigeration.

What really took me deeper into energy and national security was working in London in 2019–2020. I was with a peer in the House of Lords during the debate over the Telecoms Security Bill—essentially about removing Huawei from UK infrastructure. In those security briefings, it became clear just how strategically dependent we’ve become on China for the renewable transition.

All the rare earths, all the components, and all the interconnectors—China controls them. That realisation made me start digging. How did we allow this to happen? How did we build an entire new energy economy that we don’t control?

From there, I got more involved in energy policy—and the more I uncovered, the more concerned I became.

ZB: So when did your views on renewables begin to change?

GH: At first, I was fairly tech-agnostic. I thought we could have a bit of solar here, a bit of wind there—whatever made the most economic and engineering sense. But over time, I became opposed to renewables—not because the technology itself is bad, but because the economics simply don’t work when you have thirty percent, forty percent, or even seventy percent of your grid running on intermittent sources.

You then need to build a parallel system around it—gas, batteries, pumped hydro—to compensate for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. It’s incredibly inefficient. Even rooftop solar, which sounds benign, is problematic. Everyone’s panels produce electricity at the same time, which drives down its value. Yet homeowners are paid feed-in tariffs far higher than the actual value that electricity brings to the grid.

So what ends up happening? Renters, students, and people living in flats—who don’t have solar—end up cross-subsidising wealthy homeowners who do. It’s a redistribution from the poor to the rich, all in the name of going green. And it has completely distorted the energy market.

Your grid needs to be based on baseload, dispatchable power, with some firming capacity from gas. That’s how you get cheap, reliable energy.

ZB: It’s good to see how passionate you are about this. Are any politicians or parties listening to your research? Are there signs of change? Do you have hope for the next few years, even though it looks like Labor will be in power for a while yet?

GH: That’s a whole other conversation. But if I discipline myself to focus on energy—yes, I think some politicians do get it. In fact, I’d say most of them understand the problem. They’ve had the briefings. They know things aren’t working.

But what’s missing is political licence. They don’t feel there’s enough public support—or not yet—to act on that knowledge.

Australia is a highly urbanised country. Most voters are disconnected from these challenges. They feel the cost-of-living pressure, but they’re not sure what’s driving it. Is it COVID? Inflation? Government mismanagement? Energy policy? It’s complex. People tune out.

And you can’t blame them. Forty years ago, energy policy debates were about whether the state or private sector should run utilities—not whether we should build solar versus nuclear. People didn’t have to think about where we built transmission towers. We trusted engineers and experts to make those calls.

It’s like asking ordinary people to debate which asphalt to use on our roads, or what type of sealant works best. That’s not how a functioning system should work.

ZB: That’s such a good point. Everyone has an opinion now. And honestly, I’ve done a lot of reading for this interview, but I still find the technical aspects overwhelming. There’s just so much to understand. Even among the so-called experts, there seems to be confusion—like with those megawatt versus megawatt-hour mistakes.

GH: Exactly. If even the peak renewable industry body can’t get those basics right, what chance does the average voter have?

And look, there’s a simple fix here: give the experts the freedom to make the best decisions again. At the moment, AEMO and the AER—the market operator and the energy regulator—know full well how to build a reliable system. The problem is, they’ve been given binding constraints by Parliament.

They’ve been told: you must hit a certain percentage of renewables; you must decarbonise by 2030, 2035, or 2050. And so they’re not designing the cheapest or most reliable system—they’re designing the cheapest possible version of a system that meets those political constraints.

It’s back to that old Gulliver’s Travels metaphor—trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it’s economically or socially sensible.

ZB: So you’re saying we’ve created this impossibly complex challenge for the experts, then get frustrated when it doesn’t work?

GH: Exactly. We’ve told them, “You must build a grid that runs mostly on renewables and must be carbon neutral within 25 years.” And now we’re surprised when that system turns out to be expensive, unreliable, and socially divisive.

We need to remove those binding constraints. And that starts with scrapping net zero. It’s not a welfare target. It’s not connected to anyone’s day-to-day reality. It’s a political abstraction.

ZB: That’s the most un-woke use of “lived experience” I’ve ever heard.

GH: [Laughs.] Energy policy is a social justice issue. It really is. If you want to improve the lives of people—whether in Australia or globally—you need to give them access to cheap energy. That changes everything.

There’s no better way to lift people out of poverty than to give them affordable coal, gas, or nuclear—plus the infrastructure to use it. But if you keep them stuck in subsistence, reliant on intermittent electricity and diesel generators, you guarantee underdevelopment.

I was in South Africa earlier this year. Supermarkets there run on huge diesel generators because of rolling blackouts. You can’t fix that with solar panels. You need baseload power. You need reliability. That’s the only way to build a modern economy.

ZB: So in your view, it’s about regaining control, getting real about energy, and being honest about what’s possible?

GH: Yes. I think politicians know what needs to be done. They just need the social licence to act. And that means shifting public opinion—getting people to understand that it’s okay to want cheap, reliable electricity. That doesn’t make you a climate denier or anti-environment. It means you care about people.

ZB: I’ve had Will Shackel on the podcast—the young nuclear advocate. He’s been working hard to change the branding of nuclear in Australia. I think it’s having an impact. Young people do seem more open to it than previous generations. We’ve got a lot to worry about, though. Some are still very concerned about the environment—but I wonder if that concern is waning. I’d love to see the stats on that.

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For people my age, in their late twenties or early thirties, it’s hard to see a path forward. We can’t afford houses. We can’t afford to start families. The cost of living is crushing. So I think a lot of us are more focused on day-to-day survival than big-picture ideology.

GH: That’s exactly it. And I think what you’re describing is where most young people are at right now. What we’re doing at Page—speaking on podcasts like this—is about trying to give people the tools to understand why that pressure exists.

I used to be a greenie myself, so I completely get where you’re coming from. I mean, you mentioned the Environmental Defenders Office—that’s deep in the belly of the beast! You were on the front lines.

ZB: Absolutely. I joined the Young Greens the day I turned eighteen. I did my legal diploma placement at the Environmental Defenders Office in Sydney—doing lawfare, basically. But yeah, you grow up. You start to realise there are real-world consequences and pressures beyond ideological concerns.

GH: And that idealism isn’t bad. In fact, I think it’s a strength. It’s a sign of how secure and wealthy we’ve been as a country that we’ve had the luxury to care so deeply about the environment. But whether it’s the education system or the media, we’ve been poorly informed about how the world actually works.

The famous example is David Attenborough showing a polar bear stranded on an ice floe—and we’re all heartbroken. But then you look at the actual data and see we’ve never had more polar bears. Their populations have recovered precisely because we stopped killing them for meat and sport.

Similarly, we’ve reforested much of Europe. For centuries we cut down forests to burn wood. Then coal came along, and then oil and gas, and then nuclear. Each step gave us cleaner, denser, more efficient energy. And each step allowed us to move away from destroying our environment.

What’s happening now is a sidestep. The renewable industrial complex is actually doing more environmental damage. We’re lowering living standards and still not getting closer to solving the climate problem we all set out to address.

Being an environmentalist is something to be proud of—but that doesn’t mean the people producing hydrocarbons are villains. It might just mean that hydrocarbons have properties we haven’t been able to replace yet.

GH: And here’s something that frustrates me about my generation. I used to play rugby league—and one thing you learn is that training isn’t just about improving your game. You have to think about what the other team is doing. It’s the same in chess: if you only focus on your own pieces and ignore what your opponent is doing, you lose.

And geopolitically, that’s what we’re doing. We’re completely inward-facing. We’re not thinking about what China is doing. And you simply can’t talk about energy, emissions, or trade without talking about China.

They’re our largest export partner. They buy our coal, our iron ore—they fund much of our prosperity. But at the same time, they’re an expansionist authoritarian state that’s actively trying to destabilise the global order. And the US—our main ally—does most of our fighting for us. That’s why our military is so under-resourced. We’ve outsourced defence to them.

We’re not prepared for what’s coming. You can’t talk about emissions without acknowledging that China is the world’s largest emitter. And yet we’re setting ourselves these decarbonisation targets as if we’re operating in a vacuum.

ZB: It’s true. I think Australians are very parochial. We’re an island. We don’t have traditional enemies like European nations do. We take peace and stability for granted.

GH: Exactly. And I think we’re heading for a very difficult decade. We’re not in a position of strength—militarily, economically, industrially, or socially. We’ve never had a weaker military. Our industrial capacity is at an all-time low. Social cohesion is fraying. Patriotism is out of fashion.

And if a conflict arises, we can’t just sit it out. We’re not Switzerland. We’re a key ally of the United States and a key supplier of resources. China knows that. And the US will expect us to show up. But we’ve done nothing to prepare ourselves for that reality.

ZB: That’s a bleak picture. What do you think are the real, possible scenarios when it comes to China?

GH: The Taiwan invasion is the obvious flashpoint. China would ideally want a peaceful reunification—like they attempted with Hong Kong. But I don’t think the US would allow that, not after how things played out in Hong Kong.

And the US–China relationship is much more strained now than it was five years ago. Between COVID, critical mineral embargoes, and increased militarisation, things are deteriorating fast.

But it might not even be Taiwan. China’s also in a tense stand-off with India over the Himalayas. That’s a key region for their Belt and Road Initiative—a corridor they’ve invested billions in. If India blocks that, China gets squeezed between the US in the Pacific and India in the west.

People don’t realise how close we’ve come to serious conflict. There were border clashes between India and China. There was the India–Pakistan skirmish, and Pakistan is essentially a Chinese client state. These are volatile dynamics.

GH: And even if there’s no hot war, there’s economic warfare. There’s cyber warfare. Supply chain disruption. And we’re not ready. Our economy is vulnerable. Our fuel reserves are low. Our logistics are fragile. Even if we’re not facing a shooting war, we’re still exposed. We only have about 28 days of fuel in-country. There’s maybe another week’s worth arriving by sea, mostly from Singapore and Southeast Asia. If that supply chain is disrupted, we face serious consequences—everything from food distribution to emergency services grinds to a halt.

ZB: That’s genuinely alarming. What other major issues do you see coming that people should be paying attention to?

GH: There are three converging crises that are coming at us fast. First is the geostrategic one we’ve just discussed—security, trade, fuel, food. The second is energy. And I know it’s technical and often boring, but the fundamentals matter. Our prosperity has been built on cheap energy. Right now, we’re taxing production and redistributing wealth through the state while running up record levels of debt. That isn’t sustainable.

The third crisis is demographic. We didn’t talk much about migration, but it’s central to the housing crisis. And we’re not having enough children. That’s a major issue for our future labour force, our tax base, and our social services. In the absence of a high birth rate, we’re bringing in large numbers of adult migrants—who immediately place pressure on hospitals, roads, housing, and schools.

There’s also cultural strain. We’re becoming increasingly polarised and atomised. The liberal, democratic institutions we take for granted—rule of law, freedom of speech, pluralism—can unravel quickly if we don’t actively protect them.

ZB: It’s a lot to take in. But I really appreciate how clear and focused you’ve been. It’s a mix of hard truths and, I think, a sense of purpose. You’re doing this because you believe we can turn things around.

GH: Exactly. I’m not here to fearmonger. I want Australians to thrive. But we need to start preparing—intellectually, politically, strategically—for what’s ahead. That means letting go of ideological fixations and focusing on what works. Wanting cheap, reliable power isn’t selfish or regressive. It’s pro-human. It’s responsible.

ZB: Well said. It’s been both blackpilling and hopeful at the same time. Thank you for educating me and our audience—there’s a lot to reflect on.

GH: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate what Quillette is doing. Independent media is vital, and I hope you keep growing. And fingers crossed the recording survived the technical gremlins.

ZB: Yes—we’re recording this during a massive Amazon Web Services outage, so who knows! But before we go, where can people find your work?

GH: You can find our work at page.org.au. Subscribe there for our reports and my monthly newsletter—well, fortnightly when I’m on a roll. I mostly write about energy, migration, and defence.

I’m also on X @GerardHolland, and on Instagram as @thegerardholland—obnoxious, I know, but it’s hard to get your name these days. I’m still involved with ARC, and they’re doing great work out of London. We’ve got another conference coming up in June.

ZB: Thanks so much, Gerard.