Greg Hunt is an adult sent on a youth’s errand.
It’s easy to think the opposite. With that boyish appearance, high voice and youthful enthusiasm, the Environment Minister can seem like the work experience kid mistaken for the boss. But Hunt is a seasoned political grown-up: a person who understands that you can’t be too wedded to your ideals if you’re going to make your mark in politics. People throw his master’s thesis on climate change at him as though politicians — or any vaguely intelligent individual — should for a lifetime adhere to the views they held in their early 20s. That’s unfair, and misses the point that Hunt has only done what most politicians who have any chance of actually wielding power have done, which is allow one’s positions to be dictated by political expedience. Moreover, in any event Hunt no longer relies on the ivory towers of academe for his knowledge about climate change, in preference for the greater rigour of Wikipedia.
Take Prime Minister Tony Abbott, for example. Abbott may or may not believe in anthropogenic climate change, but the point is he doesn’t care either way; his positions — and at various times he has held every possible position on climate change and what to do about it except, oddly, the one he ended up adopting as policy — have been dictated by political expediency.
Similarly with former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who insisted climate change was the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time and then offered a feeble scheme to address it, watered it down even further under pressure from lobbyists and then walked away from it entirely. For Rudd, climate change was purely a weapon with which to attack the Coalition, first under John Howard and then Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. It worked so well that he broke the Liberals in two. The Liberals promptly turned to Abbott, who repaid the favour in spades to Rudd and then Julia Gillard. Abbott’s ridiculous scare campaign on the carbon price was no more politically amoral than Kevin Rudd’s politicisation of the issue.
So Hunt, by virtue of political expediency, now has to stand at media conferences and advocate climate change measures for which he ought to need several Botox injections in order to maintain a straight face. This week he insisted that his “Direct Action” policy could start straight away, without legislation, an entirely accurate statement insofar as the winner-picking part goes: Direct Action is in essence a giant industry handouts program that can be allocated under existing appropriations without drama.
More problematic is the baseline emissions component, under which — notionally — businesses could be fined for exceeding their baseline emissions — so long as it doesn’t inhibit business growth. Exactly how this dilemma will be resolved is a matter for a White Paper in coming months. You can bet any baseline emissions scheme will be carefully structured to ensure no one but the most egregious polluter risks being fined, but either way, it will need legislation.
“Our youth are entitled to wonder whether … they should take some direct action of their own. Action to shut down the loaders and ports that export coal.”
Direct Action will have little impact on emissions, and certainly far far less than that required to meet Australia’s minimalist bipartisan 5% reduction target, which is why Treasury costs the program much higher than the Coalition will budget for it. Moreover, Hunt’s programs have already been nibbled away at in the Coalition savings program, and will undoubtedly face heavy going in the Expenditure Review Committee between now and the next budget. Hunt’s colleagues know Direct Action is a figleaf for climate inaction, and at several billion dollars it’s a hideously expensive one to maintain.
Hunt’s best hope is that, in the absence of a carbon price, the Australian economy continues to grow below trend and we fail to address the gouging of government-owned electricity companies, whose ongoing price hikes have played a useful role in curbing electricity demand in recent years. In that context, gold-plating and over-engineering have been a longer-lasting, more effective carbon price than the real thing.
In the longer term, however, the planet will continue to warm and our summers will become more extreme. Australia’s world-beating carbon addiction will go on, the first-mover opportunities for investment in renewables will continue to be squandered and the cost of ending Australia’s carbon addiction — which will have to happen at some point in coming decades — will continue, as Treasury has explained, to grow with every delay. Most of all, Australia’s capacity to drive international agreements to stave off very dangerous levels of climate change — levels that will inflict colossal economic damage on Australia by the end of the century — will be undermined.
Climate inaction is thus a direct wealth transfer from our children and their children and subsequent generations to ourselves, in the higher costs of adaptation and reducing the emissions intensity of the Australian economy. It’s a cost we have consciously selected through politicians like Kevin Rudd — who at least had the good grace to admit his mistake — Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt. Business-as-usual politicians convinced their own personal and partisan political ends are more important than the giant rip-off they’re perpetrating on subsequent generations.
What did you do when we could still have stopped it, our grandkids might ask about climate change, to which we can only answer “we took the easy, the expedient, way out. We put mediocrities and clowns like Hunt in charge. We placed the almost negligible cost of abatement action ahead of the massive costs you’re now paying for through higher taxes, more expensive insurance, lower economic growth.”
Sorry, kids, but we squibbed it. Squibbed it when it wasn’t even a hard choice to make for anyone with a basic grasp of maths.
In a world governed by Rudds and Abbotts and Hunts, in which a functional carbon pricing scheme will actually be removed and replaced with a nonsensical scheme even the creators of which know is a joke, our youth are entitled to wonder whether, in the absence of genuine political action, they should take some direct action of their own. Action to shut down the loaders and ports that export coal. Action to shut down coal-fired power plants. Actions to shut down the electricity-greedy industries we prop up, like aluminium smelting. Such action will be expensive, and damaging, and inequitable, and dangerous, but in the absence of real policies from political adults, it’s better than a status quo that will punish our youth as future taxpayers and citizens.
Better than what we adults have been able to manage.
73 thoughts on “Climate policy: when adults squib it, youth should take direct action”
Warren Joffe
October 27, 2013 at 5:24 pm@ Andrew Dolt
Just to help you with your thinking a little more. Try and consider why you would think a 19 year old Arts student (say) would exhibit more, or less, reliable understanding and judgment on scientific experts’ assertions and reasoning than those whose expertise is in theology, apologetics, Islamic Studies or whatever religious expertise has been inflicted on them?
When those several levels above the average Crikey blogger-with-attitude (and strong opinions) like Court of Appeal judges can have their approach to a case and their reasoning overthrown by a superior court (in our case the High Court) would it not be advisable to teach the young how to think before encouraging them to organise in support of whatever opinions happen to engage their minds at a tender age?
Even the admirable spirit of generosity which is often a large part of the cause of young people supporting causes which may well cost them, their parents, siblings or children real money does not make it compulsory to applaud anything more than their altruistic spirits.
Hamis Hill
October 31, 2013 at 7:00 pmWarren’s fears concerning young people following BK’s urgings, and taking environmental action on global warming into their own hands, can only be justified if one accepts that the young have been hopelessly and deliberately “infantilised”, as part of the conservative political tactic of “dumbing down” the populace by the their media accomplices, as warned of, all those years ago, by Jana Wendt, and so the young are thus insufficiently wise to take responsible action, even if they did take action at all.
Though perhaps Warren has other, less ugly, arguments in mind to justify his position.
Such as it is good for the young to be given a cotton-wool education, devoid of any political contention, lest their youthful proclivity for natural justice lead them to casting their future away on lost causes?
Although we haven’t read those arguments yet have we, Warren?
At what age do the young stop being silly-billy babies?
When they wake up at age twenty five to a lifetime of job insecurity and crippling HECs debt, a debt taken on before the age of adult consent?
Now there’s a good argument to rescind HECS debt, they were too infantilised to be responsible for the terms of the loan contract.
Good one, Warren, those generations will applaud you for reliving them of the responsibility for their education debts.
Hint, hint.
Warren Joffe
October 31, 2013 at 7:18 pm@ Hamis Hill
I agree that young people are probably being encouraged to be over credentialled with useless degrees unless they are in the top 15 or 20 per cent of students and prospects of learning how to be useful enough to other people to earn a good wage, salary or fees which will disappoint them all the more for starting late.
As for the rest I was simply, I think, just responding to the idea that BK’s completely loopy last par was worth treating as the subject of a thread. I mean
“our youth are entitled to wonder whether, in the absence of genuine political action, they should take some direct action of their own. Action to shut down the loaders and ports that export coal. Action to shut down coal-fired power plants. Actions to shut down the electricity-greedy industries we prop up, like aluminium smelting. Such action will be expensive, and damaging, and inequitable, and dangerous, but in the absence of real policies from political adults, it’s better than a status quo that will punish our youth as future taxpayers and citizens.”
BK obviously isn’t one of the handful in a million of Australians with authority to be so positive about anything to do with AGW or climate warming from whatever cause but for him to switch his brain off so completely as to imply that there is a case for Australia doing useless things and spending money that could be better spent in other ways for the benefit of future generations, Maldive Islanders and whoever is just ludicrous.