The most obvious was the decision of the government to go ahead with a plan to force the closure of several large, but old, coal-fired power stations in the eastern states due to their high carbon dioxide emission levels.

Less obvious was news the Australian economy was no longer being driven by a resources boom, and might even be in danger of slipping into a recession.

The third factor was a belated realisation that the government’s dream about solar, wind and gas replacing coal as an essential base-load fuel to power the country’s economy is just that – a dream.

The net result is that coal has been handed a reprieve from government attacks because it has realised coal is a commodity Australia cannot live without, either domestically or as a key export-income earner.

Of the events observed by The Hog over the past week, the most interesting, and also the most confusing, was the abandonment of the so-called “contracts-of-closure” with the operators of coal-fired power stations such as Hazelwood, Loy Yang and Yallourn in Victoria.

Under the original proposal, which some people saw as bizarre from the day it surfaced, the Australian government said it would pay the owners a few billion dollars to close the stations as part of a scheme to lower the country’s carbon emissions.

The first problem to emerge with the contracts-of-closure scheme was that the power station owners wanted a lot more than the government was prepared to pay. It turns out that even with a high-price on carbon emissions those stations remained profitable.

Today, the profitability is even greater thanks to the lowering of the starting tax on carbon from $23 a tonne to $15/t. That means the incentive to sell at a price the government can afford has shrunk even further.

A second problem, not widely discussed yet, is that had the scheme proceeded there would be a chronic shortage of electricity-generating capacity along the entire eastern seaboard of the country because the coal-fired power stations represent the backbone of the system.

Some readers will, at this point, say something like “we all knew that”, as did The Hog. However, just because people in the mining and power industries understand the situation does not mean that many politicians understand how business works.

The official excuse from Resources Minister Martin Ferguson that the price demanded by the coal-fired power stations was too high, might contain a grain of truth. It also underlines the absolute naivety of the government’s position and its failure to grasp the economics of electricity production.

What the government has left itself with is an unholy mess of a failure to achieve a primary political goal (the closure of high-polluting brown coal burning power stations) while persisting with grants totalling $5.5 billion to help the owners deal with the carbon tax.

Meanwhile, there are those two economic factors ticking away in the background – the declining health of the Australian economy (which also means the Australian government’s budget), and the east coast gas shortage.

No-one in government will yet admit the size of the problem it has created, firstly by attacking the mining industry through new taxes and then discovering to its horror that the mining “golden goose” has gone home leaving a ballooning deficit and a country travelling the European road to financial crisis.

Nor will it admit that trying to kill coal without putting in place an alternative source of reliable and cost-efficient energy, such as gas, was as equally daft.

In theory, the gas might have been available if coal-seam explorers had been allowed to drill in New South Wales. They weren’t, by the same loonies who dreamt up the contracts-of-closure nonsense.

The end result is a dog’s breakfast of a failed power station closure policy, continued cash hand-outs to the operators to pay a tax that no-one wants, a faltering economy as mining investment plans dry up, and insufficient gas to replace whatever coal-fired power stations do eventually go off line.

Meanwhile, in the background is an even cuter problem. What if the opposition wins government next year? Answer: a whole new set of policies – which must be making forward planning in all sections of the energy industry absolutely impossible.