Drilling for oil in Australian territory is the equivalent of dropping every last dollar into the dusty arcade claw machine while the entire Labor cabinet cheers go for it!, knowing the whole game is rigged.

When Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen this week said that decisions about whether to drill should be based on the economics and the engineering and if it meets the environmental approvals, then it can happen and should happen, it was as if he had had nothing to do with the economics or the environmental approvals.

Look at the first budget of the Albanese government, which cancelled a swag of grants announced for diesel storage and petroleum drilling and instead decided to fund the Environmental Defenders Office, which then took Beetaloo drilling projects approved by former Resources Minister Keith Pitt to the NT Supreme Court.

A new anti drilling bureaucracy

Last year, they brought in reforms so that businesses need to deliver a net gain for biodiversity, a new bureaucracy in a federal Environmental Protection Agency with the power to issue stop-work orders, and forced abatement of carbon emissions under the guise of a carbon tax masquerading as the Safeguard Mechanism.

Bowen and the rest of the Albanese government, who went on to spend the next four years talking about reducing emissions, know the system has been gamed so much, with everything stacked against any new proponent, only a fool would try.

Bowen blames engineering as the issue. Any drilling must pass those economics and engineering tests, he says. But it wasn't too hard for them to drill in the 1970s in the Bass Strait, one of the world’s most dangerous stretches of water, home to the roaring forties and shipwrecks galore, and its oil production softened Australia’s exposure to the last global petroleum crisis.

Just too difficult in Oz

But, now in 2026, Mr Bowen wants us to believe that drilling is just too difficult in Australia.

Australia’s oceans are apparently scarier than they were 50 years ago. More terrifying than Russian icy seas or the deep swell off the Gulf of Mexico, where some of the deepest oil rigs produce millions of barrels of oil.

In the 1970s, we produced 70% of our own petroleum from local oil and refineries.

Now we rely on imports and there’s no guarantee we'll have fuel past mid-May.

The government measures fuel security by counting empty service stations, even though these aren't the main suppliers for big buyers like farmers or miners.

Zelots making sure we don't drill

It has everything to do with the government, which forced existing wells to be capped, who armed those who oppose petroleum on ideological grounds with taxpayer-funded court cases and who provide minimal transparency in relation to activist groups masquerading as charities.

Zealots staff environmental departments, industry super funds are forced to buy politically correct investments, and geologists find themselves busier with paperwork than getting dirty, forced to deal with both state and federal departments to handle what is a state resource.

Australia’s oil is both attainable and comparable to the best reserves in the world. The biggest impediment is not sub-arctic temperatures or deep oceans, but the government itself. No investor is going to sink billions into the Albanese claw machine for drilling, knowing that they will never win.

One-eyed passion

Bowen insists projects need to stack up environmentally, while disregarding foreign companies dynamiting pristine forests for wind turbines or NSW’s EnergyCo, in its one-eyed passion for building transmission towers spanning thousands of kilometres, no matter how much biodiversity goes under the bulldozer.

The game works for them — they get the prize. If we eased environmental approvals, as we do for transmission lines, sped up payments and granted landowners underground rights, we could produce Australian oil within six months.

Mr Bowen says any development needs to stack up economically but one must ask the question: with crude oil prices surging toward $144 a barrel and domestic fuel security evaporating, how exactly does refusing to develop our own resources make good economic sense?

The game was never meant to be won. It has been rigged to ensure the only people walking away with any plush toy from behind the glass are the ones Mr Bowen has already decided should win.

We have skills, technology and the guts to claim the prize for oil. The only thing we don't have is a government that’s prepared to let us play a fair game.

It’s easier to see the bite in the small towns, on the quieter streets, because when the shop shuts, it doesn't reopen; darkened windows sit as an empty reminder of what used to bring people together between the post office and the IGA.

Another day older and deeper in debt!

Over the coffee machine in one cafe, the owner confides that he thinks his business is done because he can't sell enough lattes and eggs to pay the four-figure power bill; even with the crowd out front, and the line at the till, with good staff and good food, every month he goes deeper into debt.

You see it in statistics from the Australian Securities & Investments Commission which show that 14,722 businesses entered insolvency in the 2025 financial year.

Statistics from the Australian Energy Regulator released this week show that more than 6200 electricity customers were disconnected in the last quarter, with the average account holder owing $2600 at the time of disconnection.

Thousands of businesses are going insolvent, and thousands of people are being disconnected from power.

And they tell us it's betting cheaper

Yet the same bureaucrats tell us power is getting cheaper and assure us renewables will send bills down. Just not before we go out of business.

The smart ones try to get out quickly, listening to their heads rather than their entrepreneurial hearts. They watch their plans fall apart — how they turned a shabby old house into a lively spot for coffee and tea, a place where the lonely or elderly could meet and talk, a bit of sophistication in a town where the only other choice is the pub.

Yet the family resemblance is real. For it was the long 18th century’s great philosophers who advanced one of modernity’s most consequential wagers: that interests would subdue passions. If human beings could be induced to pursue their interests rather than defend dogmas and chase glory, conflict itself might be domesticated — shifted from the battlefield to the bargaining table.

This was, in other words, the intellectual origin of the art of the deal: the belief that, in the end, every actor has a price, and that rational self-interest will draw antagonists toward compromise. Strangely, the 19th and 20th centuries ∼ whose wars grew ever more destructive ∼ did not abandon that conviction but entrenched it, even as the evidence mounted that it obscured more than it revealed.

The intellectual genealogy, too complex to detail here, runs from the early modern rehabilitation of self-interest to Mar-a-Lago on the Gaza shore — but the crucial moment lies in Duc Henri de Rohan’s 1638 distinction between passion, grounded in impulse, and interest, grounded in calculation. His maxim, rendered in English as interest will not lie, eventually became, in JA Gunn’s phrase, the most fashionable political concept in the 17th century.

Passion, irrationality and barbarism

Interests, Rohan maintained, were stable, reasonable and predictable. Passions, by contrast, connoted volatility, irrationality and barbarism. The genius of the moderns was to transform conflicts over values into conflicts over interests — interests that could be divided, negotiated and settled.

What gave this idea its force was the rise of commerce, the domain of calculation par excellence. A powerful chain of reasoning followed: a commercial society would cultivate habits of calculative rationality; those habits would permeate social norms and expectations, and; over time, coolly defined interests would supplant tempestuous passions. The result would not be the disappearance of conflict but its intelligent management: regularised, negotiated and, above all, contained.

Montesquieu coined that proposition’s most celebrated formulation in 1748. The natural effect of commerce, he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling. In this way, the spirit of commerce unites nations.

More ambitiously still, commerce offers a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for, wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners — the mild (doux) habits that sustain contracts between traders and agreements between states.

Science plays a part

In Montesquieu’s thought, this tendency had a providential cast. The 19th and 20th centuries translated it into a secular idiom. It was no longer commerce alone that would inculcate rationality but the expanding authority of science and, even more, of complex technology — domains whose effective operation seemed to require disciplined, instrumentally rational thought. Although rarely stated so baldly, much of the modernisation literature of the 1950s and 1960s implied a simple syllogism: anyone capable of building missiles must reason as the boffins in Langley do — and, sooner or later, will act with similar calculative restraint in both conflict and co-operation.

The consequence was that fanaticism ∼ what David Hume called enthusiasm ∼ would gradually recede. Hume argued that disputes from interest are the most reasonable and the most excusable, precisely because they admit of bargained resolution; those of religion, by contrast, are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest.

But the extinction of enthusiasm did not require religion’s disappearance. It was, said Alexis de Tocqueville, enough that religion evolve toward forms that reinforced the mundane virtues of co-operation, moderation, tolerance and self-mastery. And that, the modernisation theorists believed, was precisely the direction the major faiths would take in technologically savvy societies.

Inflaming not taming

Clifford Geertz cast doubt on that optimism. In Islam Observed (1968), synthesising years of fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, he argued that modernisation ∼ and the spread of education ∼ could inflame rather than tame religious extremism.

Minds trained to prize analytical coherence had, in his experience, recoiled from the tolerant syncretism of Moroccan Sufism and from Indonesia’s gentle blend of Islam, Hinduism and animism, turning instead toward more rigorous, purified and uncompromising forms of faith.

It was therefore no accident that, as Albert Hourani observed in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1983), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani anticipated later currents of Islamic fundamentalism, despite being one of the 19th century’s most influential Muslim advocates of science and technology. If someone asks: why are Muslims in retreat?, wrote al-Afghani, I will answer: when they were truly Muslims, the world bore witness to their excellence. Nor was it accidental that several of the September 11 terrorists were highly trained engineers.

Hasten the apocalypse

Technical mastery did not inevitably advance the spirit of bargaining and moderation. On the contrary, the ability to build missiles could give zealots the means to hasten the apocalypse, dismember the infidels and honour a compact not with other men but with God — a compact that admits neither compromise nor restraint. Utterly irrational ends could be pursued by eminently rational means.

That conjunction ∼ technical sophistication in the service of fanaticism ∼ is the Iranian regime in miniature. That does not mean the regime will never enter into agreements. But, following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, any such agreement is a hudna or temporary armistice at best, a fleeting ceasefire at worst, to be systematically violated whenever possible, and openly repudiated as soon as practicable.

Far from vindicating the Enlightenment’s hopes, those agreements show how readily fanatics can advance their cause by exploiting the West’s illusions, knowing that it lacks the stomach for a prolonged fight. And to make things worse, the agreements' record is a miserably poor one. As John Stuart Mill ∼ whom no one could plausibly accuse of warmongering ∼ warned, the lesson of the centuries is that barbarians cannot be depended on for observing any rules, nor to reciprocate concessions.

Compromises and capitulations

Time and again, the tiny seed the Due de Rohan planted has therefore borne bitter fruit, as striking deals with fanatics becomes, all too often, an excuse for compromises that turn out to be capitulations.

Yet the art of the deal and the confidence that every conflict is merely a high-stakes version of a real estate negotiation, has a magnetic hold on the Western mind — and on few minds is its grip firmer than on that of America’s 47th president. That his negotiators with Iran have been commercial deal-makers, not hardened experts in handling rogue regimes, should therefore come as no surprise.

Yes, as they look down from on high, Voltaire, Hume and Kant may shake their heads in disbelief. But this much is undeniable: Donald J. Trump is the Enlightenment’s bastard son.