The first Q&A for the year features Kevin Rudd and an audience of yoof in Old Parliament House (no doubt screened according to approved Abetz principles to include quotas of Young Libs, LaRoucheites, etc).
I won’t be liveblogging it, because of the delay caused by the lack of daylight saving in Queensland. But here’s an open thread should you wish to comment.
No doubt there will also be a lively discussion on Twitter at #qanda. [And just a reminder that LP is on Twitter, and the new new Facebook, for that matter. If you are too, we'd love you to join us elsewhere in the social media-verse!]
Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spoke in the House of Representatives today, in debate on the reintroduced CPRS bills. Bernard Keane has a full wrap at The Stump. From Keane’s coverage, it appears that Turnbull devoted most of his time to demolishing Tony Abbott’s plan:
Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.
Abbott on tv today:
What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing, is that if they get it done commercially, it’s gonna go up in price, and their own power bills as they switch the iron on are gonna go up every year, I mean…
I guess that’s ‘retail politics’, Abbott style. Patriarchy and a deceptive scare campaign all neatly wrapped up in one package.
The Winter Olympics in Vancouver could be affected by a shortage of the most essential winter sports ingredient as a result of the warmest January on record.
However, the sea lions of the Galapagos Islands aren’t complaining. They’ve extended their range to northern Peru for the first time.
Today’s Neilsen poll, published in the Fairfax press, contains some interesting findings about public opinion on the CPRS and on the climate change policies of the major parties.
Just under two months ago, I noted that shifts in public opinion about the reality of anthropogenic global warming appeared to be strongly related to partisan cues, in particular the overt expression of denialist opinion by Coalition politicians. More recently, in a comment at Andrew Norton’s blog, I noted that support for the CPRS was declining in recent months even though the level of sceptical public opinion, as measured by Morgan Polls, had plateaud.
Today’s Neilsen Poll finds that support for the CPRS gas declined from 66 per cent in November to 56 per cent last week. Significantly, it also finds that support for the CPRS has declined as sharply amongst Labor voters (from 79 to 68 per cent) as it has amongst Coalition voters (52 per cent to 42 per cent). Further, whilst 45 per cent of voters prefer the Coalition’s new climate action fund whilst only 39 per cent prefer the CPRS, 43 per cent of voters prefer Labor’s broad approach to climate change compared with just 30 per cent who prefer the Coalition’s broad approach. So what are we to make of it all?
Continue reading ‘Global warming opinion and the role of partisan cues II’
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Max Rheese, who seems to aspire to the title of “Man of a Thousand Front Groups”, has a column in today’s Australian attacking the Victorian Government for not accepting the Parliamentary Environment and Natural Resources Committee recommendation of a prescribed burning target of 385,000 hectares per annum on public land.
I have previously explained what is wrong with this Big Dumb Number approach to bushfire hazard management. I have also previous linked to a submission on this matter by the Victorian National Parks Association and a scientific report by Chris Taylor on the Black Saturday fires. There is nothing in Rheese’s piece which hasn’t already been addressed in these sources and I simply recommend a re-reading.
However one thing does deserve additional comment. Rheese implies, and the OO has previously reported, that the 385,000 ha/annum figure was recommended by “departmental officers” from the Department of Environment and Sustainability. No such figure was recommended by the DSE in its submission to the relevant ENR inquiry, and when I discussed this matter with DSE officers when in Melbourne last July, they explained that the ENR Committee had come up with this figure itself on the basis of a “rudimentary interpretation” of data provided by DSE. This issue is also addressed by the VNPA.
It’s official; Men at Work ripped off Kookaburra in the flute hook of Down Under. ABC story here. You can read the actual judgement here.
I’m completely unsurprised with the judge’s findings. But, to me, it shows that copyright, as is currently constituted, has become a monster that serves few except for a small number of very large multinational corporations, and has-been musicians and their inheritors.
Continue reading ‘Kookaburras sitting on an old gum tree, interfering with creativity’
… The text can be accessed here [link to pdf].
Overland editor Jeff Sparrow has a great piece in Crikey today, reflecting on the significance of Christopher Monckton’s tour of Australia. If you’re not signed up, I’d strongly urge you to take out a trial subscription to read the whole thing.
Sparrow examines how the ground for a populist upsurge of climate change denialism among “the old, the white and the angry” was well prepared by the Howard era culture wars. Continue reading ‘The cultural politics and sociology of anti-science in Tony Abbott’s Australia’
Peter Hartcher on Barnaby Joyce’s address to the Press Club:
”Because we represent the alternative government in Australia, that does not mean that we are omnipotent and that our views permeate to become the views of everyone else. We have to provide an outcome that represents the aspirations of the Australian people.”
In other words, we’re doing it because we have to pander to the electorate’s views, even if we think they’ve been gulled by a giant fraud.
And he made plain that he thinks this is exactly what it is.
Christopher Monckton:
Speaking to The Age before his speech to the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday, Lord Monckton said he had noted that Mr Abbott was very engaged by climate issues.
Lord Monckton said he told Mr Abbott his $3.2 billion policy to reduce carbon emissions by 5 per cent was unnecessary because carbon affected the atmosphere only one-seventh of what the United Nations said it did.
But Lord Monckton added that Mr Abbott’s policies to encourage tree planting and to help industry save energy would help address ”genuine” environmental problems.
”It is indeed better to have a policy which nods to the issue of climate change for those who still believe, and there are some diehards who still believe, that fixes some of the genuine environment issues that are a lot cheaper than the enormous amounts diverted to this ridiculous climate thing,” Lord Monckton said.
Later Monckton told the National Press Club that human-emitted carbon emissions were not warming the planet, that increased sun activity accounted for recent higher temperatures, and that the draft negotiating text at December UN climate talks had proposed setting up a world government.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to be the long-term replacement for the F-18 Hornets that make up the majority of Australia’s air combat capability. It’s been pretty controversial; aside from doubts as to whether it’s really as capable as claimed, there’s been a lot of doubt as to whether it will be available for anything like the cost, and on the schedule, that’s been claimed. The schedule is particularly important, given that the Hornets are starting to wear out; if the Joint Strike Fighter isn’t available on time Australia might be in the awkward position of having to ground the Hornets, and either buy (or borrow) an inferior “transition fighter”, or be left without air combat capability for a period.
So it’s not surprising John Faulkner welcomed the news of some rather blunt actions from the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates – sacking the US Air Force general in charge of the government side of the program, and withholding $614 million in payments to the plane’s maker, Lockheed Martin, as an incentive for them to get their backside in gear.
While this might be seen as a worry for Australia, I’d be very surprised if the planes aren’t ultimately delivered in time, even if they aren’t on budget, and they’re good enough to do what we want them to do. The US armed forces are depending on the Joint Strike Fighter working even more than we are. And they have massive obsolesence problems with their Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter fleets. If the F-35 is delayed too much, they won’t have any planes to fly.
So the US government is going to move heaven and earth to ensure that the JSF is ready in time. And if it’s ready for them, it should be ready for us.
Shock! Horror! Political journosphere shocked by the ALP playing politics!
Ben Eltham has a wrap up of the week in politics at New Matilda. It’s certainly fair to say that it certainly didn’t go all the Coalition’s way. What surprises me about the commentary we’ve seen in the lead up to and after the resumption of Parliament is some sort of default assumption that Tony Abbott would release his climate change policy, and happily elope with the voters, and that’s the last we’d hear of politics in an election year. Dennis Shanahan is, as always, indicative:
There’s some sort of bizarre alternate reality here, where the Opposition is constantly at the centre of events, and any sort of response which doesn’t play to the ‘media narrative’ from the Government is somehow electoral poison.
It’s just nuts. I suspect, in part, it derives from a belief that if the Liberals could unite behind one leader, all would be plain sailing from there on in. In fact, as one week of Barnaby-isms demonstrates, even without leadership speculation, they’re still shambolic. I think there’s still some sort of weird assumption that the Liberals are the natural party of government, and that the electorate are finally waking up to the mistake made in 2007; hence Labor is represented as being panic stricken after a single poll where their two party preferred vote is 52-48. (John Howard’s first term government, by contrast, spent a large part of the time behind in the polls.)
So we also get a bizarre perception that Labor is some sort of immovable object, locked in behind last year’s politics, and unable to shape the political landscape. This is reinforced by constant generalisation on the basis of anecdote – “voters are concerned by debt and deficit”, “Rudd is untrustworthy”, “climate change skepticism is on the increase”, very little of which has much support in any relevant polling. And the descent of Rudd’s own approval rating from its stellar heights is seen as an avatar of doom, without any particular attempt to correlate it with the party vote.
All very odd.
Like I said early in the week, watch the political narrative change.