Essential: Flight to the Liberals narrows the gap
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A surge in the major parties’ primary vote has stripped the Greens of their strong support and dramatically narrowed the gap between the parties in today’s Essential Report. Breaking weeks of relative stability on the primary vote, the Coalition has increased 3% to 42% and Labor has increased 1% to 41%, to reduce the 2PP gap to 52-48%, the narrowest it has been since Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd. The Greens have slumped to 10%, their lowest level of support since May. The transfer of much of the Green vote to the Liberals will be of real concern to Labor as it heads into the last fortnight of the campaign. The rise in Coalition support has been accompanied by a softening of Julia Gillard’s approval rating, giving her a net approval rating of 45-40%, down from 8 points last week, and an improvement in Tony Abbott’s net approval rating to 40-45%, down from -10 points last week. Gillard now has her narrowest lead yet over Abbott as preferred Prime Minister, just 12 points, down from 18 last week and a massive 25 points in late July. Essential asked whether voters’ opinion of Julia Gillard had changed during the election campaign. The results reflect Labor’s dismal campaign so far, with 42% of voters saying it had gone down, including 22% who said it had gone down a lot. Nor has the Liberal campaign engaged voters, who were evenly split on the same question about Tony Abbott’s campaign, with 27% saying their opinion had improved and the same number saying it had worsened. Labor is still adrift of the Coalition on perceptions of economic competence, with the Liberals leading by 6%, the same gap as at the start of the campaign, although both parties have strengthened in the eyes of voters. The Opposition also has the upper hand on immigration, where it leads 43-25% on perceptions of best party at handling it, and also has a handy lead on “being a stable and reliable Government (38-30% over Labor). But Labor has strong leads on “looking after the needs of low income earners and pensioners” (42-23%), ensuring a quality education (42-27%), health (38-29%) and, oddly, environmental and climate change issues, where Labor has a 12 point lead. As to which party has a “vision for Australia’s future”, voters are decidedly unenthused. 36% of voters think Labor is better at the vision thing, 33% think the Liberals. Nearly the same, 31%, can’t decide. |
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102 Comments
Thanks Bernard,
Interesting that the Green’s are leaking votes to the Liberals. Should make the rest of the campaign very interesting.
The leaks, Rudd, Latham and other distractions are drowning out Bob Brown
Polls can say as they please but logically thinking a person who values “green” ideals would never vote for the party of environmental exploitation (coalalition).
As Hugh McKay said on the weekend, why do people bother to waste so much time over these stupid frigging polls?
It’s just 1500 people and their views on any day.
Do grow up all and get over it. And there is not a snowballs chance in hell that greens are actually going to liberals.
But here is a tip;
IF the coalition do win the election, climate change will first cease to be crap, and then the way to deal with it will be by installing nuclear power stations in electorates that don’t elect coalition representatives.
And I suspect after the so-called launch by the lieberals yesterday with not a thing to say on anything other than torturing a few refugees they certainly won’t.
The lieberals a stable government? WE just had 12 years of the Howard and Costello soap opera followed by the Nelson/Turnbull soap, by the Grech affair and the stabbing of Turnbull for the idiot Abbott.
Why would anyone assume that Green votes are leaking to the Liberals? All this poll shows is just how stupid polls are.
To be accurate the same group of people would need to be asked the same questions for every poll, and it would need to be a large group, not a few hundred. That would give at best a vague idea of voting intentions because you just can’t guarantee that those questioned respond honestly. But pollsters don’t do that. They ask a supposedly random sample of a few hundred people some loaded questions, and then for the next poll they ask a totally different sample a different set of questions. And the media carry on ad finitum about the very shonky results, accepting them without question and coming up with ridiculous claims like ‘Green votes are leaking to the Liberals’. As if!
It’s hard to say who are the most stupid, the pollsters for conducting flawed polls or the media for believeing the results.
4 posters here and 3 of them agree that it is illogical to assume that green voters would ever go over to the coalition.
Is that giving you a message bernard? As it stands your interpretation of the numbers although qualitatively correct defies logic.
That is the good thing about the Greens and it is why the democrats failed. Greens poillies have a clearly defined agenda, and that agenda is at odds with the rape and pillage of the environment as practised by the <coalition.
Game on.
Bernard, what leads you to assume that there has been a “flight” from the Greens to the libs and Nationals?
Sure the bald percentages indicate a three percent decrease in the Green vote, a 2% increase in the Liberal vote and a 1% increase in the Nationals vote but there is nothing there really to tell us how the dynamics of this occurred.
A far, far more likely scenario, in fact, would be that some people who had intended voting Green as a protest vote over the environment and asylum seekers have decided to vote Labor instead because of the perception that the “heartland” is in trouble, at the same time that there has been a movement of more conservative Labor voters to the Liberal or National parties because of the flim-flam of the last couple of weeks.
Let’s face it. The Australian political spectrum these days pretty much divides into The Greens on the centre left, Labor in the centre, and coalition on the centre right. Jumps from one end of the spectrum to the other are far less likely to occur than more gradual changes of position by those around the internal boundaries.
Such an explanation accounts equally as well for the vote shifts reported in the Essential poll, and has the additional virtue of fitting our understanding of normal human political behaviour much better than notions of “Green Flight to the Liberals” and the like , though I realise it offers far less potential for sensational speculation!
Are the Liberals actually gaining Greens votes en masse, or are potential Greens voters shoring up Labor’s ailing primary vote as we get closer to the real poll? And can we tell?
I can’t for the life of me understand why labor doesn’t tell these stupid reporter’s who are for-ever asking “are you and Keven friend’s now?”to piss-off quietly and don’t come back.This election run-up is a joke. Laurie Oaks said he felt sorry for Channel Nine that Mark Latham would give them a bad name, stuff Julia in other words, a disgrace, shame on laurie(the big tart)and Ch9
Leaving aside the simple fact that irrespective of how seemingly flawed and unscientific the pollsters seem to be, for the most part they are usually stunningly accurate. Agree entirely on the principal that Green to Lib is either an idiotic proposition or the proposition of an idiot but I’d be happy to have $10 with anybody that for reasons I have no comprehension of the pollsters will have got it right come 21 Aug to within a one or two percent margin, wierd isn’t it!!
For what it’s worth, it’s been my perception that the Greens, although a bona fide political party of the left still attract large amounts of the seriously pissed-off who shout and scream they are going to vote Green.
But who, when the contest is as close as this one appears to be, and if the media have got it right, end up voting for the party they’ve always voted for.
I can’t see how this would translate into people switching to Liberal? most strange.
Perhaps I know nothing when I say this whole tragedy has down-graded itself into a mere farce.
It doesn’t Venise. The Essentials poll itself provides no evidence of this. The results provide no information at all about who those polled are transferring their allegiances to and from, and those polled are different in each poll, making it impossible to identify such changes.
THe “Flight to the Libs” stuff is simply Bernard’s highly speculative flight of fancy. The suggestion doesn’t seem to come from the pollsters at all.
Honestly Bernard, don’t you have anything to do but report breathlessly on yet another unrepresenative poll? This kind of obsession with the short term is one of the major reasons the country is in strife!
Abbott not so long ago was seen by just about everyone as unelectable for all the obvious reasons. Nothing has changed, so why would anybody even consider voting for him and his cronies? Let’s hope the largely apathetic and confused electorate wakes up in time! Good luck OZ!
Maybe Greens voters have begun to realize that the only way Labor will raise serious climate reforms is by a change in leadership at the top of the party. And the only way that will happen is if Labor spends the next term in opposition.
@CMAGREE - ironically given the total absense of states’persons’, the shocking and embarrassing nature of the media, the obsession by the trash mags on ear lobes and budgie smugglers over the absense of policy, I’d suggest is an indication that the country is most definately not in strife. If there were ANY real issues (the Libs were actually saying they would re-introduce work choices, the Labor party was borrowing $102M per day), it would be a lot more interesting than it is.
No recession
No compassion
No action on climate change
No Difference
hence ………have you seen the size of Gillard’s arse/Abbott’s ears et al et al et al
You have to remember that the Greens were thought to be attracting some Liberal voters previously (there was a blog post about it a while ago). I didn’t necessarily agree (thinking that most of the surge recorded by the Greens was made up of disgruntled Labor supporters) but maybe there is some truth to this. It would explain an increase in the Coalition vote at the expense of the Greens if this vote swapping was temporary. The Green vote usually decreases as the election gets closer.
Are these supposed trends real? Are they factoring in the margins of measurement error? If not, the changing numbers they are agonising over could be just random noise.
Interesting point -
Todays Galaxy and Newspoll polls, which were both conducted over the weekend, show that the Greens and Others are steady on 13% and 7% respectively. A possible reason for the difference is that the the Essential poll was conducted from the 3rd to the 8th of August (not just the weekend). Any ideas on this?
Karl Bitar the Labor Campaign Director has just sent me an email wanting donations for Labor’s TV ads.
Bugger that, how did he get the email addresses
Imagine the horror of waking on the morning after the election to find that your worst nightmare has actually materialised. Sure the sun has come up as usual, you head down to get the Sunday papers, as usual and say g’day to the guy who runs the store, as usual. But the most awful realisation hits you…..your party of choice has lost the election and you can’t fathom how or why the rest of the county has allowed their ignorant stupidity to elect such a bunch of morons to the top job. As the days turn into weeks and months, you see that bit by bit the very fabric of society is altered in ways which lead to a mixture of dispair at best for some, but tragic loss of life at worst for others. With the passing of a year the economy is in tatters and although it still looks good compared to the rest of the world, you know in your heart and in your head that this is not a worthy comparison and that the man who has so far ‘acted’ as treasurer, a most financially illiterate moron, falsely pretends that he is the saviour of the nation and that he stands for real reform, whilst being incabable of laying down a 12 month budget forecast without having to adjust it every two months, suggests that his economic credentials are world class. At the two and half year mark, you see the highest ranking morons being manipulated into factional coup’s by faceless-behind-the-scenes morons (ones you can’t actually vote out, because they are installed and entrenched and paid by organisations which portray an image of “social necessity for working Australians” but which are actually just breeding grounds for faceless power broking morons (reading this AWU??)) and then finally the media wakes up to the fact that the incumbent government are just a bunch of morons who are actually not that good at running the country.
Then imagine how silly it is to hear the rusted-on supporters of the morons trying to blame the media for the woes of their incompetent party.
Imagine how happy you would be if after three years of a totally incompentent government you finally realised that there are more people who share your view than not, and that the media have finally allowed some scrutiny of the faceless morons pretending to run the country in the lead up to the election.
@ FARMERJOE So you think they’re morons - or something? Thanks for sharing. You’ll be doing yourself a mischief if they get back, I presume.
FARMER JOE: I knew the Liberals were bad. But this bad?
Perhaps I had better vote Labor after all?
The mind boggles at the thought of Greens fleeing to the Libs. Who are these people? Are they right-wing environmentalists who have decided that locking up boat people is more important than climate change. Maybe they’re rusted on Greens who have made the switch because they are so impressed with Tony Abbott’s commitment to the environment, you know the Green Corps and “direct action.” If anyone out there understands please let me know …
@ Farmer Joe - I think rather than the ‘rusted on morons’ you speak of, a majority of those who are planning on voting Labor (me included) are far from happy with the AWU, Julia Gillard or the Labor Party in general. What ‘we’ are happy about is a voting intention for a party that is a country mile (intended) better that your ‘bunch of morons’.
Labor might currently be completely crap but the Libs and the 4th Reich (sorry National Party) are for any reasonable citizen not TOTALLY focussed on themselves and their wallets, a considerably worse option.
@Farmerjoe - hack or troll, I can’t decide. I’ll just pretend you’re a Greens voter
Your point is not so relevant here. Discuss my rather good point in the posts above now that you’ve vented.
@ Tom
Making references to the Nazi’s is completely inappropriate. You should be ashamed of yourself.
VENISE: I’ll remember to post a follow up in three years time.
In the meantime, I am working on a kind of “alternate universe” story about what might have happened if a financially illiterate moron, had been in control of the budget from ‘96 to ‘07 leading up to when the GFC hit. Not up to the chapter about “Post-GFC capacity for financial stimulus”, but it should be a good laugh to see how our protagonist (the moron) explains that “its not his fault the treasury is skint….blame it on the fluctuations to commodity prices and their impact over the forward estimates through the budget cycle…”
@Farmerjoe - remember to include Tony Abbott’s penis in your story. Also, see above post.
[No insults thanks - Mod]
@Powerisnotstrength (or an indication of being very bright)
Where to start ……… re-nationalise Telstra- no, very bad idea. The unions take over schools - even worse idea. Appointing directors to the big 4 - no, I’d have a ‘super profits tax’ on them (watch this space when CBA reports). Advisory boards are for people who can’t or won’t make their minds up either because they are lazy and can’t be bothered to do the background work or have not been given the published results of ‘a focus group’ advising which option might attract more voters.
All that said, I’m not a Liberal, I’m not a conservative, I don’t think the market is a ‘holy’ institution that cannot be questioned or regulated. I’m not rusted on, I’d very much like to have enough belief in an alternative to vote for but who is there? The Conservatives who I really don’t like, The Greens who are well meaning but a bit beardy and mad, Fielding who’s just about the most disgusting cretin I ever met, The S-x Party, yeah but I’ve reached the stage in life when the last time I thought about doing twice was just before doing it once.
So my answer is I’ll vote for the party that gets the best score against my criteria which is currently 5 out of 10 for Labor, 3 out of 10 for Liberal, 4 out of 10 for The Greens etc etc.
I’ll never vote for de-regulation and blatant Darwinism if I live to be 150, it’s just not the way I think.
Before I go (and as you called me a moron), what would it take for you to consider voting for anyone other than the wing nut handing out the free sweeties to only his special friends? Have you ever had a social conscience?
SINGING SAMSON
We have digressed from the topic of Polls, I realise. My apologies> Just trying to come to terms with TOM’s post about the Lib/Nationals voters being self-centred and wondering if that same logic would apply to Julia G and her plan to undercut pensioners on the basis that they “dont vote labor”… What say you, Tom?
On your question of Polls, I think there is nothing in the recent results that is outside the acceptable margins of error. Even the fluctuations in % for the Green vote could be represented by a mixture of young first time voters and/or disgruntled traditional lib or labor voters who may have recently decided that the Greens dont actually occupy the “middle ground” between labor and coalition, and have hence drifted back to a major party preference. I think the past week has actually seen a tad more focus on some of the Greens’ extremist policies, and rightly so.
DSB writes:
DSB , the answer is far simpler. There aren’t any people fleeing the Greens to the Libs. The poll shows no such “flight”. There is no other evidence for such a “flight”. This is all simply Bernard getting it wrong. The fact that 3% of people moved away from the Greens and a couple of percent of people moved to the Libs from Labour means nothing at all when it comes to such things. They aren’t the same people.
Well Labour has lost my vote. This is not because I think the liberals are fit to govern, they are not, but the only power that a voter has is to punish an incumbent government by voting against it. Sometimes this results in the opposition winning power and the b******s then think they have a bloody mandate. This is not the case, governments lose elections, oppositions do not win them.
In 2007 Kevin Rudd did not win, rather John Winston Eyebrows lost big time and the reasons he lost were that the mean spirited exploitation of racism that that previously worked so well for him had not only ceased working for him started to work against him. Racists are not necessarily evil and when they come to realize that they are being exploited by cynics appealing to their worst tendencies they may get angry.
One of the reasons I voted for Labour last time round was their promise to do something about climate change which I naively took to be sincere. But when Kevin Rudd introduced an ETS that was extremly wishy washy in the first place and then was bluffed into retreat by Tony Abbott’s bloody minded opposition I became very angry with Mr Rudd for either dishonesty or despicable weak mindedness or both. The correct response to Tony Abbott’s refusal to contemplate senate passage of the ETS would have been to use this as a double dissolution trigger and to make a concerted effort to convince the electorate that action was necessary, but he wimped out. If there is any justification for the axing of Rudd and his replacement by Gillard it is this failure.
Another disappointment was Steven Conroy’s Internet nobbling madness. I do not trust people who find it so important to censor the internet on the grounds that it is necessary to prevent kiddie porn. We all know that concern with moralizing is the way those who want to introduce mechanisms that can be used to censor political speech sell the idea to the naive. Ever day I visit certain left wing and libertarian web sites that are highly critical of the US, the UK and the Australian governments and I have no doubt that these governments would block if they had the tools available. What is the betting that wikileaks and Craig Murray’s blog would avoid being caught by Senator Conroy’s filter?
Then there is the Gillard government’s agreement with the Abbott opposition that people smuggling is indeed wicked and must be stopped. The truth is that people smugglers are useful scapegoats to conceal the fact that Australia is not willing to comply with the obligations it accepted when it signed the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. This convention says that people fleeing persecution have the right to arrive at the borders of a signatory nation and claim asylum in any number at all. There is no right of the signatory country to vet genuine refugees for compatibility or to limit the numbers accepted to what the signatory country is willing to accept. That is there is no such thing as a “queue” defined in the convention. There is no specification that travel must not be by boat, indeed it was that Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany arriving on boats were sent back to be gassed that caused the flood of shame and guilt that led to the convention being adopted. In 1951 most migration was by boat as air travel was in its infancy. One may ask why refugees come to Australia by overloaded and un-seaworthy boats when air travel is so much cheaper, faster and safer. The answer is that to come by air they require passports and visas and Australia is not going to give visas to those it knows or suspects are going to claim refugee status. People smugglers are providing a service necessary to force Australia to fulfill its obligations under the refugee convention. Of course using overloaded and unseaworthy boats should be criminal, but transporting refugees safely by boat should not be forbidden. No people smuggler is going to limit numbers to what a boat can carry and use boats of any value if he knows that the boat will be confiscated and burned when it reaches Australia, it is Australia that is largely to blame for the dangers of arrival by boat.
When the choice is between a party pretending to concern about the environment but unwilling to risk action ans one openly determined to do nothing, at least the latter deserves credit for being honest. When both particles are disguising their intention to weasel out of Australia’s obligation to refugees there is no reason for voting for one rather than the other.
It took the Howard government 10 years to give voters enough reasons to vote against it but The Rudd Gillard government has managed to do the same in my case at least in a a mere two and a half.
Of course I will be sorry to see Maxine McHugh lose Bennelong, she has been a good local member, but one votes against parties not individuals.
In my previous post I left out one of the things that I intended to include was my disgust at the Government’s releasing document on its discussion with ISPs of its wish list for retention of internet data with most of them redacted to prevent premature, unnecessary and disruptive discussion of the issue. as someone said, beyond satire.
TOM - “Have you ever had a social conscience?”
I, like other classical liberals or Whigs, and together with many of the conservatives and even some of the fat status-quo defenders that I sometimes settle for by way of harm minimization, not only have a lot more social conscience than will ever be recognized by those crusaders who want to fix the whole world and fix it now, but I also give those crusaders credit for meaning well, which is more than they will ever give me.
In fact we differ in less ways than you think. We want the same things, we just disagree on what means are effective for achieving it. The crusader is like someone playing a game of chess and seeing one step ahead. Or like a person trying to tune an electric guitar with a floating bridge, being constantly bemused at the way correcting one string keeps throwing all the other strings out of tune.
Like many on the left you refer to “blatant Darwinism” because it calls to mind an image of fierce beasts tearing each other apart with tooth and claw. It’s unfortunate that few who use the term have ever read Darwin. To prosper in the Darwinian sense, it is not enough for a creature to survive, it must also impress a mate enough to be considered a worthy co-creator of the next generation. In nature the means of doing so is just as likely to be social, nurturing, or aesthetically inspiring, as it is to be ferocious or misanthropic. As in nature, so in human society.
“what would it take for you to consider voting for anyone other than the wing nut handing out the free sweeties to only his special friends?”
A bit of competence, or failing that, temperance. Another Keating or Hawke is probably too much to ask, but I would settle for a Labor government that uses the expert advice it commissions instead of picking just one piece out of context as a weapon for starting a class war. Maybe even a set of ministers with the maturity to know that they don’t know everything. Not this mob. Another Labor mob, yes, but not this mob.
One more point about your “Darwinism” analogy: when applied to human society, it’s not helpless individuals that are expected to be abandoned; it’s unsuccessful industries, companies, products, practices, institutions, and policies, that should give way to more successful ways. That’s the other big misunderstanding about liberalism.
Obviously someone hasn,t tuned an electric guitar floating bridge or otherwise. What calling any group or anyone a moron achieves is beyond me but it certainly doesn,t do much for accuser.
If and its just speculation by the article , the greens are going elsewhere with their voting intentions it would defy belief that the liberals would benefit. No one who believes in the environment or the effects of climate change would vote for the coalition. It would be like Santamaria voting for the communists.
The shock of people decrying that people who might think about voting “Greens” could *horror* ever consider voting Liberal is astounding. “NO!” they cry, surely these votes went off to a magical “elsewhere” and the Liberal vote is only coming from… uhhh… ahhh…
Sorry, I’ve just done a Tony Abbott.
The fact is, that during this election there are many people with a conscience who do not want to vote for Tony Abbott but equally do not want to vote for Ms Gillard. With no other “real” alternative, they park their vote with the only third choice - GREEN. Greens have become the protest party, taking the place of the old Democrats (who were a Liberal off-shoot anyway).
Now, all that’s happening is that as we near election day, some of those are re-considering. Some no doubt are moving toward Labor, deciding that perhaps Julia ain’t too bad after all - but it is clear that others are also deciding that maybe Mr. Abbott isn’t the bad scary person he’s been made out to be either.
GEOMAC, it’s a term reserved for those who will never ever change their vote no matter what. There are just as many morons on the right as on the left, and I regard morons of both sides with a special kind of envy that’s hard to describe.
Sorry John64. Yes, I can understand that some Libs are sufficiently pee’d off with Abbot et al to look elsewhere, and some might even flirt with the Greens given the party’s massive rightward shift in recent times, but the numbers are infinitesimal. The vast majority of those who have “gone Green” are disaffected Labor supporters.
Look, I’m a Greens voter myself, and I’d be more than happy to see our vote swelled by people who regard Abbott as a disaster waiting to happen (as he obviously is) , but once people have made that not insubstantial leap from Lib to Green they tend to stay stuck. There is NO polling data that really suggests that there are enough such people “changing back” out there to amount to a feather, let alone a flight, back from The Greens to Mr “Climate Change is Crap”!
I should make it clear that by “the party’s massive rightward shift in recent times” I mean the Liberal Party’s rightward shift. The Green’s true centre left position seems to be one of the great constants (perhaps the only one!) of Australian politics in recent times. They reached this point at about the time Howard started heavily trading on xenophobia to win an election that he had no right to get home in, and won my vote as a result, because of the mealy mouthed response from Beazely at the time. Sadly, from my perspective, not a lot has changed since, though I’m sure Gillard will play this sort of egregious stuff far less avidly, and with far, far less damage to Australia’s international reputation and trading position, than Abbott if she gets home in the current election.
@Rod, then how would you explain the poll shift? The essential report had Coalition on 39, Labor on 40, Greens on 3, Family First on 3 and Other on 5 in their “last week” poll. “This week”, Other and Family First remained constant. Lib/Nat increased by 3 points to 42, Labor increased by 1 point to 41 and Greens dropped 3 points to 10.
If it’s not Greens moving 2 to Liberal / 1 to Labor, then what else do you propose is happening? Those “Greens” went somewhere… To Family First maybe?? The Liberal vote didn’t rise out of nowhere.
Rounding errors are more than ample to explain such discrepancies, John64. Remember that “39.49” gets treated as 39, while “39.5” gets treated as 40, etc etc. You inevitably find that this throws up discrepancies like this. In fact, if you add up the Essentials Poll figures you will find that the 1st preference vote adds up to 101% for just this reason. Then you also have to take into account variations in the “Don’t know” count, which aren’t provided to us in the published account.
You would have to look at the raw numbers , not the rounded percentages, before you could decide whether there were any really “missing”.
But you are also missing the point that this is not a poll of the same people recorded over time. It is a poll which consists of two independent samples . In other words, different people! It simply can’t be used to make the sort of claims about “drift” which Bernard made for it.
Hi Tom. This one’s for you.
At 6.24pm you said you were disillunsioned/disappointed with all the parties and that you’d vote for whoever met most of your “criteria”. You don’t say what they are, but Labor scores 5/10 and the “well-meaning but beardy and mad” Greens get 4.
OK. I agree the Greens are well-meaning (but I don’t think even Tony Abbott went into politics to actively harm people). Beardy? You mean like Barry Jones? Because he was cool. And I don’t think the Greens are mad; in fact, they are the rationalists in this debate.
Because you don’t say what your criteria are, I’m going to guess the most important one. Do you agree that the earth is warming at a dangerous rate and that this is due to human activity? If you do, you should vote for the only party with policies (or even the intention of developing policies) to address the most dangerous threat to human wellbeing in centuries.
The alternative is to vote for a major party and pretend to look surprised when they don’t act to mitigate carbon emissions. We have a democratic system; it’s about time people who agree with the science (this should be everybody) used it, instead of whinging about how crap the major parties are.
I’d really be interested to hear from people who accept the science but don’t plan to vote Green. Can you explain why, or is it just to punish the Greens for not voting for Kevin’s excellent trading scheme?
Oops, me again. Forgot to tick the “notify me” box.
ROD HAGEN:
JEREMY YAPP:
With all due respect, can the Greens “really” be described as Centre Left? I would have thought a quick perusal of their website and the rather extremist views on state ownership of land, banning of live stock trading, reinstatement of death duties, and winding back of progressive consumption taxes would be seen as a long way from centre left?
I think there is a very good reason that labor is distancing itself from the Greens on most policy issues during this campaign, notwithstanding the preference deals which labor needs if it is to stumble over the line.
Wow, JEREMY. You get all that just from TOM saying, “5 out of 10 for Labor, 3 out of 10 for Liberal, 4 out of 10 for The Greens”? And based only on that, you expect Tom to justify himself to you, as to why his first vote is not for the Greens?
And who knows why Greens support is now showing at only 10 per cent in the polls? I doubt if it’s just rounding error, ROD HAGEN. Poll experts correct me if I’m wrong, but as actual elections approach people tend to get over their novelty protest-vote feelings and face up to the fact that these special-agenda parties are not capable of governing.
The Greens also have the distinction of probably being the only environmentalist party in the western world which voted against having a price on carbon. Because it wasn’t perfect.
I would not be surprised if a lot of Greens supporters became disillusioned after watching Q&A on 26 July when Christine Milne - one of the more rational people in the Greens party - failed abysmally to justify why they had blocked it. The star of the show was Penny Wong: smart, committed, can-do, and pragmatic enough to know the difference between something that’s perfect and something that’s a good start. Compared to Wong, it was hard to see what Milne added to the environmental movement. The Greens just seem to be out of touch with reality.
Rod Hagen’s: “The Green’s true centre left position seems to be one of the great constants” is laughable drivel.
That is patently and demonstrably false.
They are 10% of the vote in our centre left democracy.
Their policies are widely criticised in our liberal left biased media as being extreme in some areas.
Their Senate candidate in NSW is a communist.
I could continue but it is not necessary.
Farmer joe
Imagine how happy I will be if after years of totally incompentent governments I finally realise that there are more people who share my view, and that regardless of which right wing party wins government the greens will at last hold the bastards accountable.
Also given the anticipated moderate and thoughtful use of the impending balance of power being held by the greens, morons who fear them will begin to realise that they were simply being lied to by their favourite media organisation and then decide that they are worth voting for.
For the Greens the only way is up, I am absolutely certain that this information that brings a smile to my lips as I type will make your day, have a good one joe.
There you go, that’s been the main growth area of Greens support in recent years: “hold the bastards accountable”. The Greens have simply inherited the legacy of the Democrats since their demise. But while the Democrats used balance of power to keep government honest and to moderate the use of power, the Greens (and the new Democrats) are the opposite. They want government to have more power than any other party, and of course they will somehow make sure all that power is used only for the environment and the public.
For example not only do the Greens want the NBN; they want to keep the entire $40+ billion project in public hands forever, never sell it off to private investors. They are living in a dream world, they cannot even count zeros.
Meanwhile only one party is even open to the possibility of realistic, low-emission power supply. Hey TWOBOB, show us your clever trick, say “coalition”. Hey TWOBOB, say “nuclear”.
Powerisnotstrength writes
There is indeed a tendency for incipient protest voters to shift back as the actual election approaches, but it is a tendency to move back to the government of the day, not the opposition. In this case it is highly probable that Labor will receive some significant flow of this kind on election day from those who currently identify as protest voters and who are nominating both The Greens and the coalition at present .
If you have a look at Possum Comitatus’s piece today in the Crikey “Pollytics” block compariung this election with Howard in 2004 you will see what I mean.
You have made my day James McDonald
I can say it but who can hear so I will type it for you
coalition coalition coalition coalition coalition
And your so wrong the difference between the Democrats keeping the bastards honesty and the Greens is that the Greens stand for something.
And as to nuclear? Your welcome to have one based in YOUR backyard> But do you realise just how long the toxic waste lasts? Can you count the zeros?
The greens are going to win the election and your futile bile posted here just makes me even happier.
Hey James can you say “The Greens will have the balance of power!!!
LOL, no really I am laughing out loud, really. Thanks James I do enjoy a good laugh at the expense of others!!!1!!.
So
As I understand the election process (being a newish immigrant from Europe) what happens is:
1) Brown paper bags full of dollars are feverishly handed out to any group perceived as swinging/donkey voters (apart from Mary MacKillop who, though eligible for canonisation, is unable to vote);
2) Zombie leaders from the past are brought back from the dead to assassinate rivals;
3) Any issue such as the fantastic numbers of civil servants now resident (and feverishly writing regulations) in Australia is strenuously avoided, along with the poisonous word “federalism”;
4) Talking of overpopulation, it seems to me Brisbane went through a near critical water shortage last summer, must be time to import another 30 million residents. (what happens when THEY grow old, I presume we will then need another 100 million to support THEM- I’m a little confused here);
5) No-one has the slightest intention of following up on anything they say as the focus group/steering committees creating the promises which our future leaders parrot have not in fact had any time to consider the ramifications or potential cost;
The process only lacks Coco the clown (or does it)?
Well spruiked Spruiker
THE SPRUIKER: I second TWOBOB’S comment.
Further, I would also say that if Coco votes, then he too is part of the system.
Your point 4) should have been set in Melbourne. Waterless for fifteen years Melbourne is currently undergoing its biggest population growth since the Welcome Stranger nugget was found during the gold rushes.
And we still don’t have any water.
@ Jeremy Yapp
In order:
“Do you agree that the earth is warming at a dangerous rate and that this is due to human activity?”
Problem in the question is defining ‘dangerous’. I have no problem accepting the premise that the world is warming and that human activity is a significant contributory factor. I’m less certain of the rate being ‘dangerous’ and lean more to the ‘it can be sorted out’ theory over ‘it’s apocalyptic and my children will die an early terrible death hysteria’. I believe I’m pretty mainstream in my thinking so seek your guidance as to who I should vote for with this being the case?
“The alternative is to vote for a major party and pretend to look surprised when they don’t act to mitigate carbon emissions. We have a democratic system; it’s about time people who agree with the science (this should be everybody) used it, instead of whinging about how crap the major parties are”.
I sincerely believe that KRudd’s motives for the CPRS and ETS fiascos were far more about him wanting to establish ‘a place in history’ for himself over the actual issue. Given the numbers (and I except Aus per capita numbers are terrible) attributable by country suggest that should Australia become a zero carbon emitter it would mean a reduction of less than .5 of 1% of total world wide emissions and just about nobody else is doing anything, what’s the point? On the Greens cataclysmic countdown clock, zero emissions from Australia might mean we all die on Wednesday night instead of Friday morning, big deal.
“I’d really be interested to hear from people who accept the science but don’t plan to vote Green. Can you explain why, or is it just to punish the Greens for not voting for Kevin’s excellent trading scheme”?
I won’t be voting for the Greens because if everybody did Australia would turn into a hippy commune at the end of the world and would still fry with the rest of the mankind when they do nothing. Greens naïve single issue, single answer politics reminds me of Mark Latham’s ‘hug your neighbour to re-invent community’ idiocy. I have no problem with the principal but the world has moved on and there are way to many Conservatives now who prefer to hug piles of cash, big houses and flash cars.
As @powerisnotstrength (and he’s a conservative) points out Penny Wong’s ‘let’s do something as opposed to nothing’ philosophy was shot down by the Liberals and the Greens FFS!
@powerisnotstrength - Are you sure you’re a Liberal? You seem to be making a great deal more sense than a wooly ‘welded on moron’ might expect.
TWOBOB:
I too am having a laugh. You sound like an educated kind of guy. A true free-thinker with your own moral sense of what is right and wrong with the world.
So answer me this: Why do you need a government to encroach on your everyday decision making? Why do you need a government to make laws to tell you what to think and what to do about the environment. Why do think the Greens idea of State run farms will be more sustainably managed than those run by third of fourth generation farmers?
VENISE: if the water situation is that bad in Melbourne, what efforts to you go to ensure you manage the resources sustainably or are you also waiting for a government to be voted in on a mandate to dictate to you and all of us how to act and behave to save the planet.
I have lived off rain water (with no public provided water supply) for the majority of my life - have you? I have also been required to pay a Murry River Levy every year despite living more than 800kms away from the river - have you?
Labor/Greens - it is all the same left wing idealogy “If only the people would vote for a government to tell us what to do”. “If only our behaviours were legislated to stop global warming?”. “If only the government would buy my old clunker-CO2-spewing-car off me so that I can do my bit for the environment”. Messiah - tell us what to do!!
TOM - And you sound less and less like a “rusted on moron” with every post, such that I take back my jibe and apologise for it. Your post here seemed to indicate you would vote for Labor no matter what, which sounded to me like an abdication of thought.
As for me, I never said I was either a “Liberal” or a “conservative”. I said here what I am. On this occasion I will be voting for the Coalition for the sake of harm minimization, not because they are my ideological soulmates.
FARMERJOE:
Though I think you might be being a little harsh on the subject of water in Melbourne (I live in a caravan and use rainwater) I sympathize with your having to pay a levy as a result of living a mere 800km from the Murray. Of course, this is a natural result of inequitable taxation (read levy, charge, fee, rate and every other English word for tax dredged up by Australia’s bureaucracy) that results from the inevitable mismanagement between state & federal governments. On the point of civil servants I mentioned earlier, the UK has approx 530K for 62 million people. Aus has 200K in Queensland alone!
As am immigrant I’ve been through the process to a greater degree than anyone born here, and I can assure you it makes you both angry and frustrated. Who the hell would have 8 driving licenses, 8 sets of criminal law etc etc for 21 million people.
I logged in to a Federal web site the other day (looking for some piece on industrial relations law) to be treated to several pages of “how to avoid scalding yourself while filling a hot water bottle” (I kid you not). It is to support these fine people that you are paying the levy.
Excuse the rant, but I have more reason than most to feel angry about the pathetic attempts of our so called politicians to offer bags of cash while avoiding the elephant in the room - what value does the Australian tax payer get for his dollar? There’s the issue.
THESPRUIKER - Brilliant summary here. We hope you enjoy your new citizenship of both a state and a nation, just remember both sides of parliament are going to try and take one of those citizenships away from you sometime in the next few years.
Just one thing you got wrong: “The process only lacks Coco the clown” — have you not seen Bob Brown yet? This is the man who proposed to console the survivors of the 2004 Beslan massacre in Russia by sending 400 toy koalas with the embroidered names of the victims, at a time when other countries were offering all-expenses-paid holidays, a new school, things like that.
SPRUIKER
While you are surfing the net, perhaps you can find out why Victorians are not required to pay a Murray River Levy?
On federalism, presumably your UK equivalent to our States is the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments and their varying degrees of control/jusridiction. Our federation too has evolved from individual proclamation. Having experienced first hand how the federal government can systematically forsake entire rural regions (that will also be the 7% who unfortunately will miss out on the NBN coverage and will have their local hospitals closed under the new health plan), whilst squandering billions of dollars on failed policy implementation. There is still a very good argument for why total control over government funding should not be entrusted to Canberra.
Farmer joe
QWhy do you need a government to encroach on your everyday decision making?
A, Individual decisions made for all the right reasons are not always going to be the best for a community or a nation. So we elect governments who through law making can manipulate individual behaviour so that we as a community benefit. Did you not know this?
QWhy do you need a government to make laws to tell you what to think and what to do about the environment
A, Because of the neolithic attitude of cut it down, kill it and dig it up that is so prevalent among coalition supporters.
QWhy do think the Greens idea of State run farms will be more sustainably managed than those run by third of fourth generation farmers?
A Because if their issue is to sustainably manage primarily as opposed to profiteer we would see less clearing of water charge zones, less salinity, less soil acidification, less overstocking, less erosion, and the appearance of the triple bottom line of social, environmental and financial importance as opposed to the profiteering that has been the mantra of third of fourth generation farmers.
And less winging for handouts too.
Having looked at the Greens policy (on the advice of previous posters) I’ve surmised that their love of central planning is a deal-breaker in regards to my vote.
Holding to Lord Acton’s observations on power (the concentration & abuse of it), with a refined explanation from Hayek’s Road To Serfdom, I cannot in good conscience vote for this party.
Brown admits that ‘Steady State Economics’ is central to the Greens’ worldview, here is one frightening snippet of what that means:
“Scientists would calculate sustainable levels of resource consumption, economists would establish systems to meet those levels.”
One trembles to think what kind of power is necessary for a government agency to undertake this goal, perhaps they could call it the ‘Committee of Public Consumption’, has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Source: Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, The Economist.
Twobob said -
“Q Why do you need a government to encroach on your everyday decision making?
A, Individual decisions made for all the right reasons are not always going to be the best for a community or a nation. So we elect governments who through law making can manipulate individual behaviour so that we as a community benefit. Did you not know this?”
If an individual decision does not directly harm another person, let alone not being illegal, then what good reason has a government to restrict this?
Who decides what is “community benefit”; how is that decision objective?
“A, Because of the neolithic attitude of cut it down, kill it and dig it up that is so prevalent among coalition supporters. “
If the neolithic revolution had not of happened, humankind would not have progressed beyond hunter-gathering cave dwelling lifestyles. Aside from the loaded language you used to attack (negatively) this ‘attitude’, do you have any logical criticisms to make?
To suggest that humans no longer need to transform the natural environment into resources for our select purpose, suggests that economic scarcity has been eliminated, which is false.
FARNERJOE it’s funny you should mention the Welsh Assembly. I was working next door to the new WA building the day it was opened - at a cost of only 67 million pounds - 1.5 times the GDP of Wales at the time - a cozy little number, but then, we have to look after our politicians.
Curiously, one of the issues that did come about was that, following this, Wales declared that the new assembly would pay for all medical prescriptions - yes 100%. There followed a wild stampede over the Severn bridge by a goodly percentage of the population of the South West of England every weekend (who have to pay for prescriptions) to take advantage of this windfall…… oops!
On the topic of hospitals, about 25% of the people who visit Brisbane caravan parks do so to get outpatient treatment for cancer and other chronic illnesses, being unable to get treatment in country areas. In 3 years I’ve seen one person die next to me and one person lying dead in the park when I got home from work.
I agree you need some degree of regional control, what’s the point of passing regulations concerning crocodiles in Hobart. However, the duplication of law in areas such as transport, company law etc is long overdue for reform. Australia may still be a federation of states but it no longer takes weeks to get from Sydney to Melbourne on horseback.
SPRUIKER:
All good points.
Very sad to hear of those patients’ suffering.
TWOBOB: “the profiteering that has been the mantra of third of fourth generation farmers”
Tell me, what was the motive of the first and second generation farmers - to make a loss?
POWERISNOTSTRENGTH
To cut it down, kill it and dig it up off course.
Since I so kindly answered your question can you answer mine.
First and second generation farmers have been accused of poisoning and slaughtering Aboriginals and stealing (squatting) land. There is also records of them blowing up water holes with dynamite so that they could kill the fish, turtles, yabbies ect that made up a fair portion of the Aboriginal diet.
Did they do this for profit? I would love to know. ps I am aboriginal!
FIREFLYING
If an individual decision does not directly harm another person, let alone not being illegal, then what good reason has a government to restrict this?
I expect to stop fools from further harming our nation. As an example I would cite the introduction of cane toads. This did not directly harm any individual and was not illegal at the time. A plethora of such examples exist and it is sad that you could not work this out for yourself. This inability to reason answers seems to be a trait of coalition supporters so feel free to pose as many questions to me as you like but as a warning I expect that you will be as pleased with my answers as was farmer joe.
TWOBOB:
My father developed and introduced farming techniques using hybrid cereal crops, hardier than traditional wheat/barley, to hold down sandier soils through the growing season. These techniques have been consistently used as just one example of sustainable land use. The Greens plan to ban such genetically modified foods - this will ensure that the sandier soils merely drift next door, or perhaps all the way to your place (how ironic). This is an example of how a central government decision is not always in the best interest of land managers. Further, if farmers are expected to to not profit from their labours, I would expect that you too will be happy to hand over 100% of what you earn to a central government to decide where it is spent?
Have you done anything of note that might be considered good for the environment? If so, please do share.
I will also add, that you ought to be proud of Australia’s farmers. Far from being reliant on handouts, they are the most efficient and the least government-assisted of all major western countries. And remember, our grain/livestock exports help to keep the cost of your many imported goods/products at affordable prices. Although perhaps in your ideal Green world no-one will have to worry about balance of trade or world food stocks ‘cause that will all be taken care of by the really big government.
THESPRUIKER: “However, the duplication of law in areas such as transport, company law etc is long overdue for reform.”
It’s not just duplication, it’s supposed to be competition. Check out the reasons for UK federalizing - it exported all its best ideas to Australia in the 1890s when they were politically impossible back home. All new institutions do stupid things, that doesn’t invalidate the whole model. During the time before Australian federation broke down, interstate competition produced innovations in education, transport, criminal justice, to name a few, which compared favourably with anything back home in the rainy Old Country.
Without federation there would be no more trams in Australia; all public-school students would be educated under a single monolithic curriculum (a huge magnet for political interests seeking to reshape the next generation); all maximum security prisons would be run for the purpose of breaking the spirit; the Northern Territory Intervention would have been applied to all Aboriginal lands in the whole country; Tasmania’s 25-year jail terms for being gay might or might not have applied to the entire country (leaving gay people nowhere to run); p0rnography would still be prohibited nationwide (increasing the black market in child p0rn); a single government that has it in for any minority would have almost total power over them …
It’s true that Australian federation is in an appalling condition now, because the states have almost no influence on their own revenue. This is a fairly recent development. So the same geniuses who broke it now say, “Look, it’s broken, let’s abolish it.” Brilliant.
POWERISNOTSTRENGTH - I’m obviously a great supporter of federalisation. Notwithstanding that, the necessity of state government or equivalent regional bodies is of course a real question. The most fractious issues between states are likely to be those of sharing revenue ( some states being more fortunate in terms of mineral assets) and water. It’s not an easy way forward, but there are a lot of obvious duplications that can be removed without harming any concept of competition. - I don’t think stealing a bicycle should be the subject of 8 lengthy legal tomes.
As for Tasmania’s 25 year jail terms, I seem to remember some time in the late 90’s where all the gays turned up at their local police stations demanding to be arrested. Red faces all around. As someone satirically commented at the time - “it gives the Bass Straight a whole new meaning!”.
Farmer joe
Woe there joe ,Your father did not use genetically modify plants at all. He used hybrids - mate there is a big difference you should google it!
The NSW DPI recommended low/no till farming to stop erosion in sandy soils (I know I was part of it). Did the farmers take the advice of the scientists who showed that this slowed erosion and further slowed the depletion of soil carbon? NO they did not. Years later when it was shown that low/no till agg resulted in a harvest because the fields retained more water THEN the farmers took it up!
I dont mind farmers profiting from there endeavours so dont get me wrong. I was just answering your question as to why a state run farm would be more sustainable as per YOUR question.
Have you done anything of note that might be considered good for the environment? If so, please do share.
I ride an old 250 cc motorbike, I have limited the no of children I have to 2, I retain a thick sward of grass in my paddocks to build soil carbon and to reduce weed encroachment, I have fenced off stock from water access except at specific points, I have planted native plant corridors through my property, I have installed solar systems and am a active member of landcare.
I ought to be proud of Aussie farmers? Given their massacre of my people and the desecration of our land I am certainly not.
And in my ideal green world we would be imposing limits on population as the primary driver to sustainability.
Ps joe
Last year 4 dust storms did drop a shitload of soil on my place. How ironic is that!
And the Greens had nothing to do with it either!!
Oh the irony burns!!!
TWOBOB: Those accusations are all correct (though not all white settlers were guilty). Profit was not always the motive for those acts. The Aboriginal peoples are owed a lot of compensation, preferably in the way of grants to develop long term business enterprises, settlements, self-sufficiency - your own way, not by income quarantining and phantom houses from Canberra. Real support for autonomous development. The Greens will never do that, they see Aboriginals as noble savages. Queensland Labor will not even let Aboriginals farm the far north (strictly speaking they may farm some of it, as long as they don’t build a single dam - good luck with that.) Providing only non-arable areas for reservations is not adequate by way of land rights, even though those desert areas are precious to the people who come from there. Farmers - either black or white - operate their farms for profit or subsistence, whatever else they might do which is not part of the core business of farming, such as make war on folks.
Those development grants - there’s no electoral support for anything adequate, only more of the same, and always with those strings attached. The best hope for Aboriginal peoples to get some respect is by extracting maximum royalties for uranium mining and nuclear waste - with contractual clauses to guarantee massive compensation if any radiation ever leaks (it won’t). Or if not money, political reform. Bargain for a new autonomous Territory in the centre, and a guaranteed place in the federal Senate. Seriously, when we become desperate to cut carbon (either for genuine reasons or to satisfy international politics) we will suddenly need those desert lands again, we’ll need them desperately, and I hope you use that leverage as hard as you can.
TWOBOB:
My family did not murder anyone (or turtles for that matter) that I know of. Any chance you can avoid the use of gross generalisations about farmers and I will afford you the same courtesy.
You have supported my point, though. Individuals taking “direct action” will always be more effective en masse than any government decree, no matter how big and central the government is.
Ps. Twobob: Maybe if we spent more money educating people as to what they can do to help the environment, rather than promising to legislate the problem away sometime in the future, we would actually see some real change in behaviours.
@powerisnotstrength - I’m sorry for suggesting you were a Liberal or Conservative, can’t for the life of me imagine where I got that from:
“I, like other classical liberals or Whigs, and together with many of the conservatives and even some of the fat status-quo defenders that I sometimes settle for by way of harm minimization…..”.
I question your return to what you describe as “harm minimisation”, what harm is it you speak of and to whom would it be done? (I deliberately ask ‘who’ instead of ‘what’ in fear you might be suggesting the economy)?
Please don’t as I’ll have to get cross with you again which given your missive to TWOBOB on Aboriginal peoples would be a shame.
Funny thing joe
I cant find a family that did murder, poison or starve out the indigenous people before claiming their farm!
Who would of thunk it eh?
Ps. Twobob: Maybe if we spent more money educating people …
What an excellent idea, I am so glad that you see the benefit of money collected by government as a tax and then distributed for the good of the masses. That is of course a socialist idea and I personally welcome you into the fold comrade joe.
Touche!
Actually, it was the Robinsons. They live just down the road, I can give you their number if you are after retribution (watch out for ol’ lady Robinson, rumour has it she knows Karate).
The original tribe around our parts used to use a message stick to relay information along the length of the coast to arrange meetings and such. Do you suppose you and I could be having this conversation online if it weren’t for progress? I am not an advocate for anything that happened 200 years ago, but nor can I change it. I have worked alongside many of the original inhabitants of our State on issues ranging from financial managment to farming education. Thankfully not all of them treated me like a murderer.
I am not against government, nor the importance of collective revenue. We just dont have to go to the extreme for each of us to make a difference.
Good to hear your point of view though, Comrade. So we are agreed? Direct Action it is. I reckon that slogan has legs, don’t you?
TOM,
Excluding economic harms, the most dangerous I see is the uniform school curriculum. This will end two centuries of intercolonial/interstate rivalry and competition for the best results. A rivalry which has produced some silly outcomes - creationism in science classes, communist history teaching, and everything in between - but also produced the highest literacy rate in the English-speaking world. (We also had some of the best universities in the world until Dawkins and Hawke destroyed them in the 1980s and turned them into corrupt export businesses.)
Government education departments are natural magnets for social engineers seeking to remodel the political mind of the future. To concentrate the curriculum of two thirds of the nation’s children in one government agency is very disturbing.
Then there’s population and the NBN. Leaving aside the economic cost, the NBN will effectively freeze in place the current population distribution by making it prohibitively expensive to set up new urban centres outside the main existing ones. We need more dispersion of population, not to set the current distribution in concrete. What’s wrong with the original plan, an arterial fibre network which would leave private enterprise to build the capillaries and connect to people’s homes?
Shall I go on?
THESPRUIKER: “I don’t think stealing a bicycle should be the subject of 8 lengthy legal tomes.”
Do you think there should be more than one bank? More than one brand of car, book distribution network, internet service provider, more than one type of school? Have you ever sought a second opinion from a doctor?
Many socialists often cite the Nordic countries as examples of good government. And so they should - the Nordic countries are great showcases of socialism at its best. But how many Australians realize that the Nordic countries formed a non-coercive confederation in 1952, sharing a lot of resources and dividing up some research and admin work, and comparing social outcomes of various policies? It’s impossible to say how much that has contributed to the outstanding development of member countries since that time.
“I expect to stop fools from further harming our nation. As an example I would cite the introduction of cane toads. This did not directly harm any individual and was not illegal at the time. A plethora of such examples exist and it is sad that you could not work this out for yourself.”
Ah, I must apologise as I have not made my position clear enough for you, seeing as you’ve made incorrect assumptions in your response.
I’ll restate the narrative just to get things back on track.
I originally quoted your response to another poster’s question, “Why do you need a government to encroach on your everyday decision making?”
Obviously this question does not pertain to matters of national security and macroeconomic (as well the environment) stability, but to matters of social freedom & personal liberty, hence “everyday decision making”.
As such, your analogy does not contradict the harm principle.
By the way I ain’t a Coalition supporter (not that you’d care to acknowledge), I have an eye out for the LDP.
Shame you ignored the other valid points I raised in my post, TWOBOB.
FIREFLYING - Not everyone knows what you mean by the “harm principle”, made famous by J S Mill.
I still read Mill, and I think the harm principle is very important, but I’ve come to realize that democracy and human nature will always give rise to legislative quick fixes, knee-jerks, crusades, public looting of private property, demonization of some minority or other, and guns in your face if you don’t play along. Believe in Rousseau’s social contract or not, there will always be a majority of voters who do. Which is why I’ve begun to take such an interest in federalism. If the states make most laws and you’ve always got another state to run to, then you’ve always got some choice. As Hobbes said, a limited choice or a hard choice is much better than no choice at all.
I think the debate has moved on a bit since I was last online (I’m nine hours behind you guys) but here goes anyhow:
Tom, thanks for your considered response to my question. I really am interested in why someone who accepts the fact of dangerous climate change would vote for a party committed to doing f*ck-all about it, but I guess I’ll have to keep searching for that person!
If you think a 3 or 4C rise in global average temperatures this century won’t be catastrophic (mainly for poor people in poor countries, but for lots of other people too) then there are lots of books and websites you can check out that might persuade you differently. Let me know if you want me to post some links.
We seem to be in agreement that KRudd’s squalid wedging of the Coalition over climate change was an act of breathtaking cynicism. What an appalling missed chance. He and his party should be ashamed.
One last thing: the science is pointing to the need for global emissions cuts of about 50% (on 1990 levels) by 2050. Realisitically this will mean developed countries will need to cut by about 80% by 2050, which is the target the UK has mandated in law. If Australia were to follow suit, this would lead to cuts of 80% of about 2% (Australia’s contribution to global emissions) which is more than 3 times what you said it was in your post.
That said, thanks for your serious answers to my serious questions. I’m beginning to think that a vote for a party committed to doing nothing about climate change is equivalent to climate-change denial. Is there anyone reading this thread who accepts the science but disagrees? I’m really interested to learn why.
Cheers,
Jeremy
PS: I have gone off topic but my comment has everything to do with elections, and the one coming up in VIC in November.
Ah, I am being moderated again. What words of triteness set off the trip-wire this time?
Does anyone else here just have their entire comment, their name, their opinions simply removed?
FARMERJOE: I wrote a long reply to you, but it was quite simply removed by the moderator.
If you wish we city folk to be proud of our farmers, perhaps the farmers shouldn’t have turned the Murray Darling Basin into a saline stream. Perhaps we could be even prouder if the farmers weren’t such great supporters of the Nazi Party aka the National Party.
Thanks to the ‘advanced environmentally friendly’, farming practices of our rural cousins, the residents of Melbourne and Sydney are regularly covered with bright red dust. Meaning the soil of the Mallee which is paper thin anyway, has never had farmers on it who believe in deep rooted grasses, to contain the soil. Rather than just leaving the stuff lying there to be whipped up in the nearest wind.
I answered your question about my knowledge of water. The gods of Crikey deemed my answer to be not printable.
I include a tiny part of my reply. “”Back in sunny Melbourne. We, many years ago, had thought of installing a rain-water tank, so that we would have enough water to ride out one of Melbourne’s periodic droughts. This, in no way, was a plan to become self-sufficient in water-thus denying the Council’s revenue from water rights.
This application for our very own rain-water tank was met with the same degree of enthusiasm-at Council and at State level-as the Greeks felt in 480 BC when they heard that the Persian King, Xerxes, was moving his armies into the Pass at Thermopylae.
Not only were our plans rejected, we were threatened with heavy fines if we continued to persist.
I spent a large part of my childhood growing up in the bush-as it was then. The only water we had came from the heavens. Using water wisely was drummed into me at an early age.
I enlarged my thesis by bucketing Premier John Brumby for not encouraging the Victorian electorate to have those life-saving things called rain-water tanks. Rather, he has dumped on the electorate a desalination plant, already old-fashioned, a rabid user of energy, which is probably the reason it is being constructed so close to the Yallorn coal field, and is hideously expensive behemoth.
Why, we voters have asked ourselves, why did he have to impose this on us? Because the little man fancies himself as being technologically au fait is the answer.
John Brumby’s great achievements have been to reduce the federal government to a state of jabbering nerve-ends.
You mention your late father as being one of the first pioneers of growing correct crops for affected areas, and for thinking like an environmentalist. And I agree that he must have been a forward thinker in this direction. But, hello??!! He was one man in one hundred thousand farmers who were raping the land for all it was worth.
So, I cannot agree with you that farmers are people to be proud of. ost especially because they A) Destroy the land B) Wipe out all the animals and flora indigenous to Oz, and C) The minute a drought hits the land they run screaming to the government to get a bonus for misusing the land in the first place.
I have left a large gap here moderator, so that instead of just obliterating my comments and failing to acknowledge that I wrote something, I can at least produce the evidence that I had the courtesy to answer FARMERJOE’S question.
VENISE, they also (D) feed you.
@VENISE
Thanks for your views. Not really sure what your point is, though. If its to trash farmers in general and you beleive that food producers are the real enemy of the environment, then why dont you just stop eating. That would produce an outcome that I am sure would please lots of people, myself included.
Farmers from our parts dont get to use any of the Murray River water. We contribute to its upkeep by way of a MR levy every year, but dont actually see any of the water. Come to think of it neither does anyone else once the river passes into Victoria. It was Victoria that refused to sign the previous federal governments attempt to nationalise the Murry-Darling system, so I guess you Vics feel that it really is ‘your’ river after all, and to H#ll with everyone else?
Raping the land for all it is worth? Can I ask what the natural banks of the Yarra River would have looked like prior to the three trillion tonnes of concrete that now adorn its banks? I am betting that 99% of Australias rural areas are closer to their natural state than not. You cant say that about our ever expanding cities, surely. At least concrete stops the dirt from drifting, right?
@FARMERJOE: My original intention was to be polite enough to answer one of your questions from near the beginning of this post.
“”I am betting that 99% of Australias rural areas are closer to their natural state than not. You cant say that about our ever expanding cities, surely.”“
This is good news indeed. No rivers whose waterline is way below that of years gone by? No leached old top-soils being rammed full of chemicals to continue farming it? No salinity resulting from giant dams? No FARMERS outraged by stations further up river taking all of the water, thus denuding them of a lively hood? No introduced animal species ruining the landscape? No rabbits? No cane toads? No Asian water-buffalo? No Asian carp clogging up what’s left of a river’s remaining water level? No giant irrigation stations such as Cubbie Station getting water at bargain rates?
No blackberries? No Scotch thistles? No Patterson’s curse? No indigenous animals facing extinction? No dead red river gums in foetid water? No cutting down huge swathes of old native forests in order to chip them then send it all off to Japan to be turned into lavatory paper? No native animals being burned alive in order to prevent them from living in forests which have been there for millions of years?
No applications from farmers seeking permission to wipe out those pesky swans who have come to like some of a farmer’s crop? No bush land near major cities filled with rotting old cars, TV sets, bikes?
Still got all those lovely old trees where livestock could get some shade in our brutal summers? Still got all the wonderful bird life that was wiped out by introduced chemicals?
Truly you are a sagacious witness, wise beyond your years.
Trouble is I don’t think you are the most reliable witness I’ve ever encountered.
PS I am no lover of big cities.
Venise, loaded language and emotional appeals aren’t going to slide with a realist such as Farmerjoe (or so I imagine). If you earnestly wish to persuade him, you’re going to have to start using some logic.
Using the aforementioned invalid methods of arguementation, you might be able to get away with it around city folk, but when you try it on people who actually live in the country, they can smell that bullsh!t a mile away. Hence, Greens support is practically non-existent in the country.
“Persuade him”? Of what, to shoot himself? What is the purpose of the above?
VENISE:
I’d be guessing that our place resembles its native state a tad more than your local shopping mall. Actually we do still have huge areas of native scrub and lots of trees and kangaroos and emus and goannas and lots of snakes and lizards. How many natives live along your street?
I am betting the first thing you would do if you found a tiger snake in your backyard is (a) kill it or (b) phone the RSPCA to remove it. We don’t, we recognise that it lives where it belongs and leave it alone.
Ps. Please stop dumping your rusty old cars and TV sets in our scrub!
FARMERJOE: If you really are a farmer I would be astonished. Heavens, anyone who has ever lived on the land (I told you my parents had a farm, as did my late husband) knows that where there’s one tiger snake, there’s always another.
You ask me “How many natives live along your street?”
Native what Joe?