Just a quick plug for an event being held under the auspices of the Centre for Policy Development on Wednesday 26th November at the Customs House in Sydney:
Ahead of the release of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper in December, the need for optimism and constructive discussion about climate change is stronger than ever.
The Centre for Policy Development brings you a Common Ground discussion on climate change with the topic ‘Australia should lead, not follow’.
Join keynote speakers Bob Carr (former Premier, NSW), Pru Goward (NSW Shadow Minister for Climate Change) and a diverse panel of voices: Fiona Wain (Environment Business Australia), Steve Hatfield-Dodds (former CSIRO, now Department of Climate Change), Andrew Bartlett (former Democrats) and Imam Afroz Ali (from the ‘Australian Religious Response to Climate Change’ initiative).
The Common Ground series is designed to move away from stereotyped clashes, and explore areas of common ground which can be articulated to a common purpose. Personally, I’ve got zero time for Bob Carr, but some of the other speakers sound interesting, and I hope that the discussion will be productive. And there are drinks afterwards! You can register via the link above, and I’d be fascinated to hear from any Sydney folks who go along.
Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.
Bartlett? Carr?
All they have to contribute to the debate is boring piffle. Don’t go I say.
Huggy.
I think that’s very unfair (and unkind) to Andrew Bartlett – who in my experience is a thoughtful and interesting speaker with a lot to contribute substantively.
Believe it or not, I’ve occasionally listened to Parliamentary broadcasts. There’s a lot of ritualistic combat, but particularly in the Senate you did come across some thoughtful contributions to public debate. A disproportionate number of them came from Senator Bartlett.
That’s on top of his excellent blogging.
“The Common Ground series is designed to move away from stereotyped clashes, and explore areas of common ground”
Mark, does this mean the common ground will come from the discussion or that they are starting on common ground? I ask because I would imagine that at least 5 of the speakers will all agree on the issue.
I really don’t know, Marlin. You’d have to ask the organisers! I’m not familiar with all the speakers.
Marlin, I am assuming there will be common ground that climate change is a serious issue. There may well be differing views about what should be done about it, particularly when it comes to how far out in front of the rest of the world Australia should be. In broad terms, I’m very much of the ‘way out in front’ view, but I suspect some others may not be. And in any case, there is still plenty of discussion to be had about just what ways we could or should be out in front.
Being out in front of the rest of the world on an ETS might not be such a good idea (although there’s already others out there ahead of us at present), but there’s plenty of other things we can do regardless of the rest of the world when it comes to structural change in areas of agriculture, energy and transportation.
I shan’t preempt the whole thing, but have done some more thoughts on this topic and the notion of leadership on getting change on climate change at this post.
(and thank u to Mark and Robert for your kind remarks – even though my last electoral result doesn’t provide a very positive indication of the vote winning potential of thoughtfulness. Although I suspect next week’s Howard years might show a bigger reason why I am demonstrating my alleged thoughtfulness in different forums these days)
I’m looking forward to the event. I’ve got a couple of posts in the pipeline that I’ll get out once real world issues get back under control
No worries, Andrew.
If any of the CPD folks are reading, I think it would be a great idea to organise something like this outside Sydney. I’d be happy to lend a hand if there was a desire to do so in Brissie.
Thanks for the plug Mark! We hear ya on the Brisbane event & will do our best to get something happening there in ‘09.
On the whole ‘Common Ground’ concept, we figured that Sydney had a surfeit of public lectures and ‘debates’ and wanted to try something a bit different – bringing together people who would normally be expected to disagree with each other, or who represent conflicting interest groups, and asking them to speak on something they have in common. The first event had Sharan Burrow and Tony Steven (then head of small-business lobby COSBOA) on paid maternity leave, and the second had Janet Albrechtsen and Lee Rhiannon (NSW greens MLC) both arguing for political donations to be banned.
Progressive organisations have a tendency to stick with the usual suspects when running public events & we wanted to try to get away from that.
With the white paper coming up soon we thought we’d make this one a ‘bumper edition’, bringing together as many different voices as possible. In some ways climate change is the ultimate common ground issue – if political parties continue to use it as an opportunity for political point-scoring, if vested interests can’t pitch in to work towards our longer-term common interests, then we’re not going to get the change we need at the speed we need it.
Of course as Andrew pointed out there’s always limits to the common ground (how much ‘in front’ should Australia be? How fast should we accelerate to get there?), which are usually acknowledged and discussed at these events. But the attempt to map out the common territory is I think quite useful – and it certainly makes for a refreshing change from a standard forum format.
Thanks, Miriam, that would be great.