The Opposition’s climate change brain explosion
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Yesterday was a perfect encapsulation of Malcolm Turnbull’s problems on climate change. He’s up against a highly-skilled political opponent at the top of his game and who is gunning for him, in the Prime Minister. And his own support in the party is being undermined by a clutch of self-serving conservatives who are politically tone-deaf. Robert Hill’s appointment to head the Carbon Trust is a particularly Ruddian masterstroke, different from anything John Howard did even when he was at the height of his political wizardry in 2001-04. It continues Rudd’s eager but selective embrace of bipartisanship, but is directed at the wholly partisan goal of increasing pressure on the Coalition by demonstrating one of its own — and one of Turnbull’s predecessors in the Environment portfolio, yet — is in the Labor tent on the issue. Not that Hill will have much to do. The Carbon Trust is the Government’s surreal response to the complaint that under an ETS your average punter could reduce their emissions all they liked and it would only reduce the cost of the permits big polluters will buy to continue pumping out more and more carbon. Under the Trust, you’ll be able to donate to a fund that will buy and retire permits. The catch is that the biggest polluters are getting nearly all their permits for free and the price of the remainder won’t be affected by anything the Carbon Trust does because polluters can buy permits on the international market. Having spent good money buying a solar unit or increasing your energy efficiency, would you then go and waste money buying permits that won’t affect the carbon price anyway? That’s almost as addled an idea as what Wilson Tuckey must have been thinking when he decided to email all his colleagues yesterday afternoon attacking the “arrogance and inexperience of our Leader”. Tuckey’s complaint — although he didn’t voice it in the email, but separately — is that Turnbull is moving beyond the position agreed in the joint party room that there would be no vote on the Government’s ETS until 2010. “Our leader is again out there shifting the goal posts, well beyond the decision taken in the partyroom,” Tuckey told the ABC. This echoes Ron Boswell’s complaint yesterday. “The Coalition joint partyroom decided that the legislation would be opposed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate,” Boswell, presumably drawing himself up to his full height, declared. “Any decision to change that policy must be taken by the joint partyroom to have authority.” What a couple of hypocrites. It’s barely a month since Wilson Tuckey, in defiance of the partyroom decision not to oppose the Government’s alcopops excise increase, insisted on a vote in the House of Representatives on the relevant bill and crossed the floor. And it’s little more than a week since Ron Boswell defied the joint partyroom to insist that the Nationals did not yet support a 20% Renewable Energy Target, which the Coalition has backed if and when the Government ends its crass stunt of linking it to the CPRS bill. Clearly the will of the partyroom is only sacrosanct for Boswell and Tuckey when they agree with it. Boswell and the Nationals don’t really matter. They’re not going to vote for anything. Tuckey, the mad uncle of Parliament, doesn’t matter much either. But — as some Coalition respondents to Tuckey immediately pointed out — it creates the impression of disunity, which Penny Wong is eager to foster. “The Coalition is in disarray,” she declared this morning, before going on to make the inevitable point that it was all about Malcolm Turnbull. It’d be blatant political point-scoring except that we know the Opposition is always just a brain explosion away from another stupidity on climate change. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Tony Abbott — allegedly now all better after eighteen months of being a tiresome loudmouth — decided, without prompting, to declare on a blog that he wanted a carbon tax rather than an ETS. If the issue isn’t dealt with in August, those sorts of things — the dumb emails, the interventions from shadow ministers like Abbott who can’t manage to stay interested in their own portfolios, the blathering of the Nationals — will continue, keeping the focus on the Opposition rather than on the Government, which has been a huge problem for the Coalition since November 2007. It’s not entirely about a double dissolution trigger. The Government will get one from its electoral reform bill, if Michael Ronaldson continues to insist on opposing reforms like a $1000 threshold for reporting donations and a ban on foreign donations. That bill has been knocked back once this year already and will come back between now and the end of the year. But the Government wouldn’t be able to go to an election before early next year anyway, and by then it’s getting close to full term. However, Turnbull will be aware that climate change is an open wound for the Coalition. It’s not particularly serious, but it will continue to bleed until some form of ETS is passed. Those who want to wait until February or March for a vote must think a strange and entirely unprecedented attack of discipline will overcome Coalition MPs between now and then. Maybe Tuckey’s email will disabuse them of that idea. Turnbull is right to try to get the issue resolved one way or the other as quickly as possible. |
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24 Comments
The politics of carbon emissions,
a pox on both houses
Its supposed to be about parts per million
in the air, not in the bank accounts of polluters.
I was wondering what was wrong with Abbott recently. Now we know - he had a painfully aural oral. So painful, in fact, that he left everyone but himself feeling exhausted.
What funny maladies these pollies have.
Me thinks senility is Mad Dog Tuckeys’ problem. He can only get worse.
Had they not been such pompous gits during the Howard era you’d feel half sorry for them. I think they’re in such dire straits they should have called off their overseas study tours this break for a Terrigal-type conference to thrash out where the party and its policies is headed. On board the debt truck for say Versace on the Gold Coast Malcolm could have announced all the savings on overseas travel and on the way back who amongst the dead wood and light weights was going to choose Party over their jobs. Big team win! Not to mention the happy snaps of them all on boot camp with Malcolm and Brendan in their budgie smugglers, Julie surfside in a Lady Di white, high-leg submarine swim, Bronnie and Wilson hiking in the hinterland. The Coalition needs to reinvent itself before it slides of the political radar.
Now’s the time to stop playing politics and call this turkey for what it is….. the KRudd being ‘decisive’ and ‘honouring’ his election promises as he shoves a spud up the exhaust of the nation. Wilson Tuckey is correct.
The enemy of my enemy is probably still an enemy, viz the CPRS/ETS and Ironbar. If only they could all disappear into a deep sequestration. Krudd is proposing the worst possible non-solution to a real problem, the Coaltion can’t find its collective arse no matter how many hands are feeling for it and the world continues to ignore reality. Thankk god I’m an atheist and will be dead by 2050.
The Carbon Trust is a silly answer to an equally silly non-problem. The whole point of cap-and-trade is to reduce net national emissions by whatever amount is decided at least cost. Voluntary action to undertake especially high costs isn’t needed. All people need to do is respond to the carbon price - and that won’t need a great deal of high minded thought. The place for political statements is in politics. Instead of (frankly) wasting their (and everyone else’s, thanks to the now-lapsed solar rebate and the yet-to-pass RET Solar Credit) money on small solar panels, people who want Australia to do more should focus on arguing for a tighter emissions cap. Voluntary action is a sideshow.
If people do want to take buy and retire emissions permits, whether through the Carbon Trust or a private syndicate, it wouldn’t be nearly as pointless as Bernard argues. I would have thought people would want to buy and retire a permit so as to reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere, not for the purpose of raising the carbon price to punish “big polluters”. And the former is almost exactly what they would achieve. Domestic permits will be limited in number after the first year. International units (once we link with the EU ETS and other markets) will represent real capped emissions. Even CDM offsets, for all their additionality problems, represent real and positive activity and can’t be ginned up out of nothing in limitless supply. I strongly expect that with more ETSs overseas, improvements at Copenhagen and after to the CDM, and rapidly growing demand for international units as more countries institute caps, purchase and retirement of Australian units will make a
small but real global difference - at least as much as anything that concerned individuals
do today.
Further to Joe Hockey’s comments, Wilson Tuckey is like the lecherous uncle who gooses the bride and then berates the groom as a worthless wuss. He then vomits on the bride’s mother and announces he can out-drink any man there before collapsing in a stupor in the middle of the dance floor.
He gets invited to the Christmas dinner only if everyone is absolutely sure he will be too drunk to make it. If he does turn up the dinner is immediately cancelled, using an unconvincing pretext, and moved to a secret venue.
That’s the kind of uncle you had in mind, isn’t it Joe?
WELL SAID David Sanderson!! Joe Hockey’s put the real colours of the Australian Liberal Party on show with his “Wilson is our witless embarrasment”. If old iron bar is really the revered uncle of the Coalition they’d retire him with dignity.
This idea is even more of a “pay to polluter’s” paradise than that other tax grab. Not only does the taxpayer subsidize your activity the bigger you are , it also ensures that eventually only the big polluters will be left as they will be the only ones able to afford the purchase of an ever dimisnishing supply of licences at ever increasing prices. Good way of driving all of your smaller competitors out of the market. The pollution will still continue but it will be in the hands of the arch polluters and we the long suffering customer public by that stage will be paying for it in the cost of energy because the oil and coal heavies arent about it give it up. Okay!
When governments join forces with big business to create market monopolies it is called fascism. Got me!
Richard, get people on mass to vote in the Greens for one term and put in a tax on polluters pollution. The dirty polluters will want to reduce costs( to get their bonus) and hopefully go to solar thermal,wind and gas or geo thermal. You know the greens would not jump in bed with them.
Psychoanalytically speaking, Wilson Tuckey is the Australian equivalent of The Suicide Bomber. I reckon he succeeded. Now we’re looking for the arms and legs and brains splattered all over the Caucus room of the Liberal party. Anyone present at the next one under Chatham House rules?
Wilson Tuckey for PM?
He’s the only polly from the main parties talking sense.
Crikey (especially Bernard Keane) , the ABC and Fairfax have been talking drivel on this subject for almost 2 years.
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/malcolm-most-of-us-think-youre-wrong-on-climate/
Why don’t you loony left dunderheads explain to the sheeple that an ETS means electricity bills coming monthly instead of quarterly and doubling in size as well. Just so we can have an army of bureaucrats wasting any tax collected and leaving loopholes in it for multinationals to continue business as usual anyway. Lets introduce a change to the laws on treason, called “economic treason” so that criminals like David Sanderson can be locked up for suggesting or backing something that is guaranteed to bankrupt our economy and bring about the next GFC.
PS, check out my posting following Mark Árbib’s child abuse article on The Punch and i wonder why the onlineopinion.com.au web site is down today.
“Wilson Tuckey for PM?”
That would make ‘Joh for PM’ positively sane by comparison. JamesK may have lost his iconic apostrophe but he has lost none of his buffoonish qualities.
Not even Tuckey himself would support such a ludicrous proposition.
And Geoffrey, locking me up may give you some perverted satisfaction but it is most unlikely. It appears that you were never a Democrat but a raving fascist all along.
Just somebody from the militant middle classes David, who has had a gutful of corrupt politics on both sides of the fence and don’t come the fascist rubbish either. Every third force in politics that has ever surfaced in Australia got the extremist label thrown at them by the established parties who often went on to copy their policies anyway. Thanks to left wing politics, we are a nation with state sponsored child abuse, hardly anything to be proud of.
I am not talking about “third forces”, Geoffrey, I’m talking about you. Anyone who rants about ‘treason’ because of what people think and urges that they be thrown in jail can reasonably be described as a fascist. Or a raving loon. I think you are a bit of both.
Ditto David, Geoffrey Ross … , your burble….”Thanks to left wing politics, we are a nation with state sponsored child abuse”….is the rant of someone whose not quite using all the grey matter inside the cranium, or has lost the plot completely. What the hell are you going on about? The connection between climate change and child abuse is frankly stupdity.
Dear David S/1, do us all a favour. Go to “thepunch.com.au” bottom of the page to article on child abuse by arbib, see if you can pick which posting is mine? Then check out “onlineoppinion.com.au” article and postings on family law, “when not to negotiate”. Maybe then you could come back here and let me know what you really think me and my evil alter ego. Mwuhahaha!
Geoffrey you are even more in fantasy land, than I ever imagined.
david1, surely you can do better than that, simple name calling? i am organising a class action lawsuit for the reverse stolen generations, those children reported to DOCS who were left behind to be neglected and abused by their deadbeat single mothers, despite other family members being available to care for them, or in other words those children deliberately abused by labour party policy, now that does have a nice ring to it dont you think.
A class action lawsuit? You’re a weary old fantasist Geoffrey. The whole concept is a total nonsense in this context and will amount to absolutely nothing except hot air.
The Coalition have no idea about anything to do with the environment as they are the arch rapers and pillagers and enablers of the total sellout of the Australian ecosystem. The ALP is no different, so what we have is an oligarchy of powerful vested interest and a combined duopoly of power between industry and rightwing unions in Australia.
Neither have any conscience and neither have a clue when it comes to tackling CO2 levels. They simply look afetr their own inertests and the rest of us be hanged.
The motivation for cappinig CO2 should not just be the possibility of climate change but the simple fact that cleaning the air will be beneficial to everyone and everyone knows that big corporations, aided and abetted by a corrupt union movement of rightwing semi-fascists are destroying the earth.
The Nazis were both soicialists and fascists simoultaneously and the result of that combination, spurred on by finance capital and manufacturers set the world onto a precipice of madness and murder. So no matter what these people put their minds to the result will always be a compromised corruption of the original intention.
More than ever Asutralia and the world needs decent and responsible leaders. Judging from the shenanigans that pass as talks like the G8 we are a long long way from getting anything near that. The future looks bleak indeed.
Hey, just about all of our politicians on BOTH sides are liars and charlatans! There is a plethora of evidence out there to confirm that carbon dioxide is not a primary driver of what is a naturally driven cyclical ‘climate’ variability. Therefore, because the ETS specifically targets carbon dioxide, which is really a trace player relative to water vapor, it will have no measurable impact on the climate cycle - it is simply unnecessary!! So why don’t you all stop this petty sqabbling and move on tackling the real pollutants and means to accommodate the natural global climate variations. Think ‘time’ and consider the following (in the absence of the industrial revolution) - what caused the warming that enabled the Romans to settle and grow crops in Greenland (it must have been significantly warmer than now!) and what caused the cooling; what caused the cooling of the Dalton Minimum and the age of the black plague in Europe and what caused the following warming. Why did the recognised post-ice age warmings not ‘run away’ and get hotter and hotter; why is there a warm-cool cycle over recorded history and earlier in the absence of huge variations in carbon dioxide? Simple really and carbon dioxide is not required - would that big bright thing in the daytime sky have anything to do with it?