While Malcolm Turnbull and Jay Weatherill are to be commended for taking energy security seriously, the differences in their approaches highlight the fact few, if any, of the main players in this debate are on the same page.
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Why is a nationally co-ordinated energy policy, encompassing everything from producing the gas, mining the coal, building the solar arrays, windfarms and other generators, right through to maintaining and co-ordinating Australia-wide distribution networks too much to ask for?
Mr Turnbull's carpeting of senior executives from Santos, Origin, ExxonMobil, Shell and others in Canberra on Wednesday demonised the gas suppliers as the authors of many of our current misfortunes.
He played the populist card by effectively accusing them and the states of preferring to export a vital energy resource to Asia rather than supplying the needs of the Australian energy market.
This was blatantly disingenuous given less than 15 years ago then Prime Minister, John Howard, was trumpeting a $25 billion deal under which a consortium headed by Woodside Energy committed to supplying gas from the north-west shelf to China for 25 years as a national triumph.
"This is the single biggest export deal this country's ever picked up and this is going to nourish our export income for a quarter of a century," he told ABC's Lateline. "It offers the hope of more (such deals) to come." And come they did.
Under the contract Woodside and its partners, BHP Billiton Petroleum, BP, Chevron, Shell and Japan Australia LNG, committed to supplying three million tonnes of LNG a year to China from 2005 to 2030.
Meanwhile South Australian Premier, Jay Weatherill's, $550 million "stand alone" plan to secure his state's energy supply also appears to have been tarred with the populist brush. It involves casting off the shackles of the national energy network.
While the revelation Federal Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, may invoke the law to derail the plan won't do Weatherill's government any harm in the polls, it is hard to see how a massive, state-owned, gas-fired, electricity generator could have prevented the outages that struck SA in 2016.
If Mr Weatherill is to be believed, the worst one, which cost businesses $367 million last September, was entirely the fault of the weather.
"Those images of transmission lines bent over showed just how powerful the wind was," he said. Another blackout in December was also linked to damaged powerlines.
It is now almost two years since then Industry and Science Minister, Ian MacFarlane, released his department's Energy White Paper which he promised would "deliver competitively priced and reliable energy supplies by promoting competition in energy markets, increasing energy productivity and facilitating investment in energy resources development".
With Mr MacFarlane, who left politics at the last election, now a fading memory that promise appears to have followed him into oblivion.
