But now to Alan Jones, whose appearance on Q&A last week helped boost the program's audience by around 140,000 and showed the radio host in scintillating form on matters like politicians perks:

ALAN JONES: How much taxpayers' money does it cost to keep these people going? I mean, I'm looking at figures here which are just staggering. One speaker, for example, went to Ethiopia and Switzerland in April, one month, for $114,000. I mean, this is the price of a house for many people in remote areas of Australia. — ABC, Q&A, 20th July, 2015

Jones was dominant, charming and persuasive, with facts and figures tripping off the tongue.

But sometimes you wondered if they could all be right.

And this one on the exhorbitant cost of wind power really blew us away.

ALAN JONES: 80 per cent of Australian energy comes from coal, coal-fired power, and it's about $79 a kilowatt hour. Wind power is about $1,502 a kilowatt hour. That is unaffordable. If you take that power and feed it into the grid, then every person watching this program has electricity bills going through the roof. — ABC, Q&A, 20th July, 2015

So wind power costs 19 times as much as coal?

You'd have to be mad to support it.

But is that true? Well, no, as a fact check by academic website The Conversation soon made clear:

Alan Jones has told The Conversation by email he acknowledges this comment was made in error and is not correct ... — The Conversation, 23rd July, 2015

Jones's figure of $1502 was exactly ten times too high. He'd also used kilowatts when it should have been megawatts-which is out by a factor of 1,000.

But, graciously, he admitted his error in an email to Melbourne University energy expert Dylan McConnell.

I think you have rightly highlighted a ridiculous mistake that I made... why I said kilowatt-hours and not megawatt-hours and where the 1502 comes from, I have absolutely no idea. — The Conversation, 23rd July, 2015

Well, we do.

That figure of $1502 is is the work of Cut and Paste in The Australian, way back in June 2011.

When the paper misquoted a Productivity Commission report from the previous month.

And, thanks to a stray decimal point, multiplied the cost of wind power tenfold ... knocking it up from $150 per megawatt hour to $1502...and doing the same to rooftop solar which it blew up from $400 to $4004.

While keeping the price of coal the same at $79.

Nice work.

[Media Watch note: While The Australian's Cut and Paste column of 15 June 2011 inflated the figures for wind power and rooftop solar listed in the Productivity Commission by a factor of 10, it also misquoted the report by converting megawatt hours (MWh) to milliwatt hours (mWh). A megawatt hour is 10⁹ times larger (or a billion times larger) than a milliwatt hour.]

Read the statement from The Australian about the Cut & Paste mistake.

And since then the mistake's been popping up everywhere.

Six weeks later Paul Sheehan unaccountably repeated the mistake in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

And despite a rapid correction in the Fairfax papers the error then found a new life.

With Robert Borsak of the Shooters and Fishers Party- using the figures in a speech to the NSW Parliament.

And the conservatives at Menzies House repeating them in a blog in June 2012.

Which ... like Borsak, added the error of kilowatt hours.

Inflated the cost of wind power by ten.

Did the same with solar.

And concluded:

You don't need to be Einstein to work out that the high cost of Wind and Solar is the reason the public are being screwed with high electricity prices. — Menzies House, 20th June, 2015

Well all things being relative, Einstein would absolutely not have made that mistake.

And it makes you wonder where Alan Jones gets his other figures from.