The political theatre over the CPRS continues, with Malcolm Turnbull receiving “approval to negotiate” with the government over their proposed amendments. If you care, you can read them here. In a nutshell, pay everyone even remotely affected by the CPRS even more compensation, let the farmers off the hook permanently, and buy more permits overseas. Penny Wong, in something that will undoubtedly come as a great shock to you all, continues to play a dead bat on the Coalition’s proposals.
Michelle Grattan seems to think that the Coalition is destined to block the legislation when it finally comes up for a vote, setting up the possibility of a double dissolution:
With the enormous schisms in the Coalition over this plan, if it cannot be passed through the Senate now, the chances of the Opposition agreeing to it early next year look like being the proverbial snowflake’s in hell. Of course there is always the double dissolution route, but that’s another story.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it hardly seems inevitable. Couldn’t the Coalition simply agree to disagree on the issue? Something along the lines of “catch and release” as routinely played by American congresscritters, where they play to their particular constituencies and vote against the party line where their vote doesn’t alter the outcome, but fall into line if it actually matters? The Senators with a sense of political self-preservation vote for the CPRS. The Nationals, Wilson Tuckey, and whomever else chooses to rant and rave for hours about the perfidy of the CPRS, playing to their scientifically illiterate constituency. The CPRS passes. Malcolm and the Coalition leadership look weak, sure, but it gets the issue off the agenda, meaning that they can fight the upcoming election on issues where they’re not on a hiding to nothing.
Global warming (if it exists, I take it as an article of faith it does but your mileage might differ) is too important to play politics with. And yet both sides are playing politics.
Bad enough the Coalition is doing it, unforgivable that the government in a rare position of strength is doing the same.
The ALP needs to admit it’s made mistakes and go back to the drawing board.
The true Irony is that the Victorians may announce a Damascene conversion to gas fired generation that will make the entire CPRS redundant -if one or more of the other States follow this road.
Huggy
From the planet’s POV the best outcome would be a rejection, an electoral crushing of the know-nothings and a revamped scheme that has Green support.
For Rudd the best outcome would be one that keeps the coalition split. That means negotiating a scheme so piss-poor that most of the Libs vote for it (& hence it passes – no DD) but the Tuckeys of this world continue to keep them unelectable.
Turnbull’s best bet is to pretend to negotiate with the govt but have the deal fall through, so the party line will be to vote the CPRS down. But then quietly encourage a wet Lib senator or two to cross the floor and avoid the DD; having his left split from the party line is far less damaging than having his right split from it because his right is a mongrel with real teeth and is also much further from the median voter’s position.
Indeed, DD.
That’s pretty much my position DD …
What matters is whether the Turnbull has the 6 or 7 Liberals in the Senate required to pass the scheme. I haven’t looked at the numbers but my guess is he probably would. If he doesn’t, then the Greens would suddenly have some bargaining power, although such an outcome would make a double dissolution election more likely, and Turnbull losing the leadership more likely too.
DD, sounds about right from each POV, except that the Greens will oppose the CPRS (after the Gov’t flatly rejects their amendments). So 1-2 wet Lib Senators won’t be enough.
Why doesn’t Turnbull just make it a conscience vote for his party? It wouldn’t be that hard for him to get 6 or 7 of his senators to vote for it and it no longer becomes a leadership issue for him.
‘Why doesn’t Turnbull just make it a conscience vote for his party?’
Because most of them don’t have a conscience?
Of course the other thing Rudd could do would be simply to refuse the amendments, have them vote it down, and then come back from Copenhagen with new, tougher proposals and a the associated “oh my god it really is that bad” then introduce that instead.
That cues a new round of angst for the other side.. It never ends …
While the world burns……
Yeah, but it’s not the end of the world. Oh wait…
I would be shocked if Truffles or any of the other droogs in the libs were prepared to go to double dissolution with this.
They’ve seen the bloody polling – not just for them, but on this issue, they know they’ll get torched alive if it happens. They would be mad (politically speaking) to make any moves in that direction at all for fear Rudd calls the bluff (which I doubt he would anyway, will take the ‘high road’ should such an unlikely option presents itself).
Copenhagen is shaping up as a total hype session, nothing substantial will come from it. Obama is rapidly becoming just another war president, the US denialists are in full cry, the Greens are blathering about solar panels, rent seekers abound and the lawyers are preparing to tort the whole thing. Really the Libretards are just the whole world in a tiny glass case – its like watching a maggot farm.
Should we be worried ?
You bet.
Huggy
It would be great if Rudd would grow some balls and tell the liberals to pass a strong carbon emission scheme, or he’d go to a double dissolution and pass a stronger one negotiated with the greens.
It aint going to happen though.
It won’t happen because if there was a double dissolution Rudd would lose seats. Pure and simple.
the Greens are blathering about solar panels
That’s a bit unfair – they’ve released their own amendments to the CPRS, which bring it into line with Garnaut’s (not good enough but not truly awful) recommendations. They’re the only ones actually trying to write good policy instead of playing silly games.
Huggybunny, there does seem to be a lot going on.
The media here are just not reporting it.
For example:
- in Bangkok last week there were several international meetings about it
– http://unfccc.int/2860.php
- in Bonn, in August, negotiating texts were discussed
– http://unfccc.int/meetings/intersessional/bonn_09_2/items/4913.php
- etc, plenty more
Plus a few bilateral discussions, like the one Senator Wong was on last week & the recent climate change talks between India, the USA and Europe.
Plus, don’t forget the song:
- http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/10/01/watch-beds-are-burning-celebrity-climate-change-song/
I doubt Rudd would lose seats in a DD. He’d gain in both houses. It’s just that he would probably gain more in a half-senate than in a DD, because some seats the ALP would win from the Liberals/Fielding would instead go to the Greens and so he would have to listen harder to people he’d prefer to ignore.
We really do not have time for all this posturing and game playing.
Exemptions for the coal industry! What does that mean ?
I would tax the shit out of them until they fix the problem – end of the story.
(A spell in some detention centre would also help to motivate the management).
The onus should be on the CO2 emitters to demonstrate that they can fix the CO2 emissions or we will shut them down -right now.
Ges what would happen if we did? The famous “market” would immediately provide an alternative reduced CO2 emissions alternative.
Virtually all the big CO2 emitters have serious CO2 emission reduction schemes in the locker, they are simply waiting for the brain dead lawyers and accountants in the governments to hand out big fat cheques before they will get off their corporate arses and implement them.
This CPRS is all a total con, a scam that wants to shift the cost of avoiding the destruction of the planet onto the backs of ordinary citizens. The libretards are just a bit more blatant about their support of this corporate theft.
Huggy
well said Huggy. This current policy is so bloody bad, get rid of it. It will do stuff all for the climate, wreck the economy for the small player & put huge commissions in the hands of bankers, brokers & traders. Everyone is playing politics with it, surely we have the intelligence to be able to say no to flawed policy that is only pretending to do something about the enviroment. Lets move onto some decent policy.
I agree still@downfall. While a properly structured ETS could be made to serve the cause of lower emissions across jurisdictions more efficiently and effectively than any other single measure, it now seems plain that in this context, it won’t and can’t play that sort of role. What we have now is just smoke and mirrors.
The tough part is that without an ETS it will require a comprehensive set of essentially adhoc measures spanning the jurisdictions of several state governments and 500 local ones to do what is roughly needed. I see no appetite to do that anywhere, still less coherence.
Some of the things we’d want to do are simply ultra vires. The Feds can’t simply shut down aluminium smelters or coal plants. The states can but then they’d all have to act together and probably have to compensate them into the bargain. They could try using pollution regs but again, you’d need a coherent system across the states. And how would you account for genuine offsets? How would you set uniform industry and enterprise energy efficiency and emissions benchmarks?
What do you do about agriculture and residential and private transport?
Fran, wrt to agriculture, the Wentworth Group recently released it’s blueprint on Optimising Carbon in the Australian Landscape, which is definitely worth a read (I’ve only had time to skim).
myriad,
I cheated & went straight to the conclusion; I know not a good practise, I’ll read it when time permitts.
Heh, S@D – I cheated too, but I do want to read the detail. I was mainly pleased to see such a credible and serious contribution to the whole soil/forestry carbon debate, as my gut tells me it could be of real significance, but stil seems to hover on the fringes of debate.
Not a bad report, apart from the misused ‘complimentary’ on page 17 …
In any event, it makes a couple of points pretty clear
1. A price on carbon is foundational — at least $20 per tonne but this would be part of a broader regulatory framework
2. A pirce of $45 per tonne would be better as more land would be viable for this
Personally, I think the 25% target is too modest and we should be aiming for something a lot more ambitious. I’d like to see a carbon price closer to $100 per tonne i.e. around the CC&S viability price point.
Supplying water is a key consideration and for mine, nuclear power, with its ability to do flash desal is obviously the ticket, but if nuclear is out then I really think we need to be looking at perhaps solar thermal desal (as in North Africa) with energy as an ancillary. If we built this and possibly some hydraulic wave capacity near the sources of the Darling …
They make no mention of algae which can be done on marginal or even industrial land with subpotable water and that could sequester a lot faster than trees or grasslands on a per unit of land basis. I’d raise the algae, dry it in air and either co-fire it or do biomass plants with it where these can replace coal or else press it into ingots, wrap it in some recycled polymer and dump it in 1 km of seawater where it should stay stable indefinitely.
Thanks for the link, myriad. I heard about this this morning and I was about to check it out. Someone here posted a link a few weeks back to a site on “holistic grasslands management” and I’ve followed it up a little. Unfortunately there is sparse information on the web, and Tony Burke, Minister for Agriculture, said on Q & A recently that the government rejects soil carbon capture because it cannot be measured accurately. That seems to be the sticking point for this movement.
It’s a bit surprising that the Wentworth Group has picked up the ball on this. I thought they were a wacky bunch with associations to the far right of the Liberal Party, but they might just have contributed something useful to the environmental cause. Maybe they express the fusion of right, left and green politics that Guy Rundle is looking for.
Myriad, there is only one problem with that Wentworth report.
A 2C rise in average temperature will possibly see the entire Australian flora burn out of control. All that investment will go up in a single season of CO2 generation. The bush fires in Victoria and Queensland are harbingers of this. A few days of drying Westerly winds and the eucalypti are ready to burn.
The sequestration program should be totally implemented, don’t get me wrong, but we need the whole program, CO2 reduction at source and massive bio sequestration.
Huggy
The other point of course is that having agricultural offsets in must cut both ways. Agriculture as a whole must bear the carbon cost, whatver that is. No exemptions is a key. If that means that some operations are not economically viable, then so be it.
Huggy,
we’re in complete agreement about the criticalness of the 2C rise threshold.
While as a Green, I obviously disagree with the WG’s position of supporting the current Rudd target of 25% reduction on 1990 levels by 2020, I put that aside in reading this report, because essentially its an argument about a suite of techniques that can deliver us significant cuts to GHG in the same period.
While there’s no doubt about the risks surrounding increased bushfire hazard, given the inter-relatedness of a range of our largest environmental problems that can be simultaneously addressed through both vegetation and soil carbon, I think it must be seriously considered. After all, the risk of extreme fire events is only going to get worse and worse if we don’t use such means to reduce our GHG; the need to restore our degraded landscapes is also pretty dire, and the threats to our freshwater systems are getting harder to overstate by the day.
The positive flipside is the chance to create a range of economically viable and truly sustainable industries and incentives for existing practices.
What can I say, I can’t resist the possibility of a credible win-win, while fully agreeing that risk assessment can’t be abandoned.
Here’s the beginning of the report.
The equivalent of all the carbon pollution emitted from fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution? Wow, that does sound profound!
Ps – meant to say, my comments here are my personal views. For those who haven’t seen a couple of my comments floating about, as of 2 weeks ago I’m now working in Sen. Christine Milne’s office for 12 months, focussed on Tas campaigns and constituents.
Remembering of course that this is a ‘hidey hole’. It’s a one time offer. That harvested carbon is out there fluxing between the various sinks forever in human terms since we aren’t going to be about to watch silicate rock weathering eventually recapture it all.
We get a 40- or 50-year window, depending on the sink and then as that starts to yield up its reserves we have to have another sink to slurp it up plus one more for whatever new we want sequestered. As is known, some trees in rainforests can be 1500 years old but eventually, even they will become emitters.
So having parried the inital threat, our next move would be to find cost-effective ways of stabilising the sequestered carbon so that it doesn’t flux. Ideally, it would go back into the earth or the deep sea where it can go back to being in its ‘fossil’ state, so that we can actually begin to be carbon-negative, at least until we get back to around 280ppmv or less.
Heavy irony alert.
From the report cited at #22 above.
” ….great environmental challenges confronting Australia: repairing degraded landscapes, restoring river corridors, and conserving
Australia’s biodiversity.”
We were doing precisely all of those things at our property on the Murray, albeit in a very minor way according to our resources.
We had planted about 15,000 native trees local [1-2000 surviving] to the region thus diminishing [albeit in a very minor way] salt flows into the lagoon/Murray, removing noxious weeds and ‘outgrowing’ them, encouraging biodiversity eg several species of birds have recolonised the previously nearly totally degraded land, now considerably rehabilitated, captured a fair tonnage of carbon in the maturing trees and so on.
But we can’t do that anymore.
The lagoon is empty so there went our water source to grow the native seedlings and to nurse some of them through their first summer. Of course that is a symptom, among other things, of climate change.
And we wouldn’t be able to avail ourselves of any rehab/reveg programme in the future cos there ain’t no water here.
Sorta goes round in circles doesn’t it?
Ironic.
If that is the right word.
myriad # 28 “I can’t resist the possibility of a credible win-win”
I know that it’s hard for many others to believe, but there is a very real possibility of a win-win. Once in the soil carbon has incredible production benifits. Practices that encourage increased carbon are the same for better land management practices. Better ground cover, conservation tillage, rotational grazing etc.
This proposed ETS policy loads up the production system with a greater burden. If you got to find an extra $50 000 to $100 000 per annum, the result on land management practices is to run the country harder & in the same time less carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere.
Both the ACF and the Climate Institute have estimated the financial impact of the Liberal’s amendments. The ACF estimates there will be $11.2 billion in additional compensation to polluters over the first five years of trading, bringing the total amount of assistance in 2012–13 — 2016–17 to $27.6 billion.
The amendments not only have a negative fiscal impact, but because they increase the amount of shielding to various industries, the coverage of the price signal gets distorted. Mitigation becomes more costly, and this would be likely to reduce GNP.
The Liberals are simply the voice of the owners of the most rampant CO2 polluters. These owners want us to pay them a huge fortune to do something that will save millions of lives and that they are capable of doing without our money.
What they are doing is simply extortion; a criminal offence, last time I looked.
The polluters will not implement their CO2 reduction plans until either we pay them a huge ransom (that’s the CPRS) or indict them for crimes against humanity.
Personally I prefer the latter course, much lower cost and very effective.
Huggy
Something that has received very little publicity, I haven’t seen it mentioned in the media at all [tho' I may easily have missed it] apart from my original source which mentioned it but gave no analysis or comment, is the open and active collusion between Malcolm and the Business Council of Australia over the amendments.
Apparently Malcolm asked the BCA recently to write amendments to the CPRS so that Mal and his COALition mates could adopt such as COALition policy and could then present such in parliament and the BCA would praise their own amendments outside parliament.
Sock puppet style.
Source:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2009/2602653.htm
Hug Bunny’s idea “”We really do not have time for all this posturing and game playing.
Exemptions for the coal industry! What does that mean ?
I would tax the shit out of them until they fix the problem – end of the story.
(A spell in some detention centre would also help to motivate the management).”"
Has great appeal .
problem in this is that the Rudd CPRS was pretty weak and Turnbull wants to neuter it completely Why bother we ask. The industry bleating the willingness of government to throw our money at them is worrying. let energy costs rise throw the money at us. I would be following a line close to hugbunny (and who doesn’t want to hug a bunny?) I think we are being taken for a ride by the big polluters. I was disappointed to hear Heather Rideout a flunky for the business lobby claiming on the ABC the greens wanted to take us back to prehistoric days. Shows she hassn’t read or spoken to Christine Milne who is the most believable and erudite on carbon reduction.
From the post:
The problem with Barnaby Joyce and Ron Boswell is that their anti AGW nuttery means they aren’t being listened to on the real problems the CPRS has for the farm sector. In Australia the sector is too big to leave out, about 16% of emissions, but there is no good way of getting them in. Eventually they will have to be brought into the system, but unless calculations are done at the farm level there is no reward and no incentive for the individual farmer to change practice.
Even if they are left out there will be an increase in farm input costs as the cost of carbon externalities is priced into the economy. This may be a fairly small percentage of turnover but it really has to be measured against profit. Farm produce is priced according to an international market where in many sectors our major competitors will not be paying these imposts in the foreseeable future. Increased costs can’t be automatically passed on.
The healthy dollar doesn’t help.
Brian # 40 at the end of the comment outlined one thing Robert got wrong in the initial posting ” let the farmers off the hook permanently.”
The Australian Farm Institute in the conference paper,Conference Report: Climate 21 March 2009 (386 KB), compared three different modelling that has been undertaken about ETS/ CPRS & agriculture. Under this current policy, its going to be bad to be left out, disastrous to be in where only emissions are calculated & extremely complicated to be calculating both sides of the equation.
I’ll go back to where I began on this posting. This current policy is so bloody bad, get rid of it. It will do stuff all for the climate, wreck the economy for the small player & put huge commissions in the hands of bankers, brokers & traders. Everyone is playing politics with it, surely we have the intelligence to be able to say no to flawed policy that is only pretending to do something about the environment. Lets move onto some decent policy.
- note new gravatar and slight tweak to handle -
just musing out loud – given it is very hard to do the calculations both ways at the moment, I wonder about the (heretical) idea of
a) excluding farmers from the cprs
b) accounting their carbon stores as credits
and
c) linking the use of that money to sustainable land practice / water conservation etc in some way
IOW give them what they want – credit where it’s due but not be part of the complex accounting of the CPRS, but limit / target where & how that credit can be spent
dunno, might end up just as complex and rortable.. too early
Myriad74, Australia is funding research very poorly. If we go along with your musings, such funds need to be targeted at Soil Scientists, agricultural scientists & extention officers. This approach has worked very sucessfully in the past, until left to out to dry in the last 20 years.
“Scientifically Illiterate” Defined, I suppose, as anyone who disagrees with Mr. Merkel. Including a great many actual scientists, and almost all economists, along with the aforementioned retarded rednecks so despised by this blog.
No Myriad@74
You can’t leave them out of any bona fide ETS as agriculture and its cousin, forestry are much more often than not, net emitters. And certainly, to allow them carbon credits while ignoring the fossil inputs and incidental emissions would be the definition of a rort. You would be subsidising increased CO2 levels.
You’d also distort land usage.
Nope … let everyone in business pay one way or another for their emissions and be rewarded one way or another for their offsets.
In a playful moment, I imagined all households being issued with stored value carbon credit cards. Everyone would have to buy their initial household emissions credits — perhaps online. The first 100 kilos per household member per year would be at $20 per tonne and from that moment on there would be a sliding scale peaking at $100 per tonne when you reached 2 tonnes each. At 5 tonnes each new kg would escalate at 1% more than the last one. You could of course anticipate this by buying carbon credits on eBay at whatever the going rate was. So business would be charged nothing, and consumers everything.
When you paid your electricity bill or your petrol or bought stuff at the supermarket, you’d have to run your card over the swipe and if you were short, you’d have the relevant charge added. The total amount of carbon credits in the economy each year would be derived from the cap and from any produced by anyone engaging in properly audited sequestering activities.
Low income households would be assisted in kind by being supplied with whatever goods they needed to stay under the cap — budgeting advise, smart cut-off devices, passive solar water heaters, insulation, water tanks, a concessional public transport card etc and of course expanded income assistance.
In a market like that, you might think that producing goods with low net CO2e would be a selling point aside from price.
Fran, in principle I’d like to see the price of carbon paid at the consumer end. In June we had a look at the issue of carbon labelling and it just doesn’t seem practical.
The problem we have with food is that it isn’t an optional consumer category. The security specialist/now political columnist Gwynne Dyer after talking to the world’s top climate and security people early in 2008 found that food production problems would be where the rubber hits the road in a big way. Basically if you can’t grow it money won’t buy it. (The ABC article might well have also stressed the devastation of Mexico’s grain growing capacity and the possibility of 100 million from Northern China heading for greener pastures in Siberia.)
So we would be smart if we looked after our farmers until they can be brought into the system in a sensible way, which can only happen when the likes of Brazil, the USA, the EU, not to mention China come on board. Of which there is no sign as yet.
Brian … thanks for the link … I missed this first time round and it does raise some issues about the quality of the data in real time. Assuming one could resolve these and have them put onto a label that would be readable at point of purchase –perhaps with a 3Gwifi app/hand held in store at shelf device …
I personally would like CO2e cost; broader fooprint information like water cost, air and water contaminants; PETA-rating; compliance with reasonable labour standards; OH&S ratings; plus the usual nutrient information etc
Actually that’s misleading. Nutritious food isn’t optional, but you will be hard-pressed to persuade me that most of the stuff in the food aisles qualifies as ‘non-optional’. Exactly how optional is confectionery? Or confectionery marketed as breakfast ceral or muesli bars? Is McDonalds even food, in a proper sense? I haven’t been into a KFC, Pizza Hut or similar since 1982 … so these are obviously highly optional. Staple raw or near raw foods? Sure thing. Some processed or preserved food? Arguable. The lot? No way. Were it up to me, we’d tax food according to food value. Low quality food would get high taxes and high quality food would get near zero taxes. Carbon cost would sit on that structure. But I digress …
I disagree with mollycoddling our farmers. They are using our environment just as are our miners and our foresters and woodchippers. If they are essentially embezzling the commons so as to ship low quality goods to us or others, then they can stop as far as I am concerned. On the other hand if they are managing the resource sustainably then they need no looking after. Well done them.
Fran, I’m concerned about junk food too. What farmers need is a fair go rather than mollycoddling. It’s not possible to say that “if they are managing the resource sustainably then they need no looking after.”
Originally I thought we might need a special post to spell out the issues. I’ll see what I can do. Mick Keogh’s analysis is basic and the Wentworth report does seem to open some possibilities.
“Exactly how optional is confectionery?”
Not optional at all. It is an absolutely vital part of life, thank you Fran.
I’ll give you my Flake bar when you take it from my cold, dead hand.
Paulus
If I wait long enough your cold dead hand will surrender it.
I agree that the Wentworth document raised some interesting ideas, but its patrimony shines through in its flaws
And for the record, to foreclose confusion:
What I meant to convey here was that if the system settings were right, which is to say that an appropriate value was placed on the value of the ecosystems which the farmers were using through price signals and regulation and support for best practice through various expert bodies, then that would be mollycoddle-free. That would constitute ‘a fair go’.
It is self-evident that since most low quality food is imported, and imported food has carbon miles in it, that this in itself would support local producers, especially those that were doing the right thing.
Fran # 52, I am more comfortable with your clarification than back @47. You used the term system settings. I have long held the belief that marketing systems in this country have no connection between the producer & the consumer. The focus is almost totally dominated by providing food as cheap as possible. There is no inbuilt mechanism for an environmental or more correctly a sustainability cost to food production. Farmers themselves do not want to be mollycoddled. But what is wrong if the science can prove it, for a win-win in regards to terrestrial carbon.
I do hope that your expert bodies to determine best practise would include the people, who live, work, observe & have connection to the land.
Plainly. the aim of an expert body is to reconcile best practice (the intersection of the best applied science in the relevant fields in the practical context) with the support of those for whome the advice and guidance is intended
Unless of course they live in electorates that are rusted-on liberal/national (in other words almost all rural areas), in which case they would be excluded from this process due to being ignorant of science.
If I wait long enough your cold dead hand will surrender it.
But the flake will be melted and much of its flaky goodness gone….
Myriad@55 …
That’s perfectly OK. With the aid of a wallpaper scraper, I can bury it in my compost heap and return all of its remaining ‘goodness’ to the soil.
Just leave Violet Crumble Bars and Mars bars alone, okay? And Polly Waffles.
(you can tell my parents bought me showbags at the Royal Easter Show when I was a kid.)
Yes Paul, I recall the visits to the show and the whole showbag gig … hot days, the smell of elephant dung, being hit in the face by people carrying bags, and when it all got too tiring … then being carried on my father’s shoulders through the milling throngs to the car parked what seemed miles away across Driver Avenue …
And yes, the Hoadley’s VC bag was my favourite, along with the one that had the Phantom comics in it …
Just leave Violet Crumble Bars and Mars bars alone, okay? And Polly Waffles.
it’s ok Paul, they have so many artificial ingredients they will never die.
True, myriad, though I have to admit Violet Crumble Bars that have been on the shelf too long can go a bit icky. Something weird happens to the molecules of the honeycomb.
Fran, I missed out on the elephants, but they did have some very odd sheep with two heads and six legs.
Also saome pygmies from Darkest Africa. (But, when I grew up I read Heart of Darkness which changed my idealisation of the Africa of the Sydney Show and Where No Vultures Fly starring Tyrone Power, utterly).
The Liberal Party is a party of government. It’s not a strike-a-pose party or a missionary movement. The onus is on it (as it was on Labor when they were in Opposition) to demonstrate what they would do if they get back into government. The Government is in a position of strength because they have convinced the journosphere that the Opposition’s actions deserve more focus than their own; and the journosphere is in a position of weakness because they have accepted this.
The next election is a year away. The three big issues of that election, it would appear at this distance, are in no particular order: climate change, the economy, refugees. On all of those issues, the Liberal Party needs a message that is clear, strong and appealing. On none of those issues does it have this; I doubt that it will do so before the election.
On climate change, there are those who would love the Liberal message to be: climate change is all bullshit, the Liberal Party will do bugger-all on this issue and for those who believe it is one. By and large, such people tend to be people who have safe seats (Wilson Tuckey, Bronwyn Bishop) or who are largely insulated from the popular vote in the Senate (almost any pinhead therein).
There are others who believe the Liberal Party should do something, but they aren’t clear about what it is or how to differentiate it from Labor’s offering. From the inside, those people feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place. From the outside, these people look weak and prevaricating, politically doomed like the Democrats after Kernot. They know that something must be done, and that the climate-change-is-bullshit approach is not that something.
Turnbull is probably in the latter camp. People in that position accept that they have enemies within the Liberal Party but they cannot believe that said enemies are more than willing, but actively happy to embrace a position that will see the Liberals reduced to about about fifty representatives in a Parliament of 224, and for them to stay that way “until the wheel inevitably turns”. Turnbull can’t get the deniers to see that their position will lose votes, will make it impossible for the Liberals to win the 2010 election, and that Liberals holding marginal seats won’t and can’t win. He can’t believe that they just don’t care, because – well, they just don’t.
When the Liberals lost at the state level in the ’90s, they thought that the voters had made a mistake and that they could get away with keeping their head down and breathing while the mistake righted itself. People in that sort of delusion can’t be convinced, only beaten and beaten until the poverty of their ideas exhausts itself. This is the stage the Liberal Party had to get to: the denialism was starting to piss me off, frankly.
Robert’s wrong on the catch-and-release thing because the United States is not a parliamentary democracy. Under Bush II, Republican congresspeople were strong-armed into voting with the President, and those who didn’t toe the line were abandoned in terms of fundraising and in fending off primary challengers.
There are a couple of other issues as I said, and it may be different if the Liberal positions on those was strong and united, but they’re not. For a party of government, this kind of mixed message is just not on. The Democrats had mixed messages and look what happened to them. It was better for Labor to have united behind Mark Latham in 2004 so that they could stay together when it counted the next time, rather than have one or two courageous Labor souls emboldened by defiance. Only journalists care about getting stuff “off the agenda” – real people want to know what you’re going to do. With a mixed message you’ve got nothing to offer, and if you’ve got nothing to offer people won’t vote for you.
At 3:20 yesterday afternon in Australia’s parliament, Opposition Spokes-somethinf- or-other-on-climate-change announced, almost unnoticed, a radical new policy for Australia:
Wow! Finally the power down message people are cutting through …
Andrew E @62, agree with your summary.
As it stands, Turnbull can’t get his party aligned despite a lot of trying, and the vast majority of people (from economists to joe average) now think the ETS is a pile of crap.
One option as you say, is to try and amend it then vote it down if Rudd/Wong won’t include the amendments. Further support for the major emitters will win him votes from the Business Council and the power companies, but they are hardly a majority of the electorate. Looks like a poor strategy.
Another option is to tear the basic framework of the ETS to bits, along the lines that many have already indicated. Turnbull could suggest that it is so fatally flawed that it needs a redesign, from the ground up.
Couldn’t he then allow a conscience vote on the ETS as it stands, recognising that it is not coalition policy that they are voting on?
Why would the coalition look weak if they are voting in random fashion on a dog’s breakfast, having already stated that it needs a total overhaul?
If it gets through, then Turnbull can always have the option to say “told you it needed fixing” when the flaws become obvious to everyone. Rudd/Wong by contrast would look stubborn and pigheaded, for not listening.
Elise, your question answers itself.
Tim @65, I guess you are right.
If it were that bad, then it should be a cut and dried response, hey?
Who would want a dog’s breakfast – a dog perhaps?
However, even the control-freak rodent allowed a conscience vote, at least once, didn’t he? I don’t recall him being caned for allowing his party to vote in a random fashion on the topic.
In the Australian, Lenore Taylor writes that “The resurgent Australian dollar and strong commodity markets have slashed by more than $10 billion the expected revenue from the emissions trading scheme over the next decade… instead of the $11bn surplus estimated by independent forecasters by 2020, the ETS could run at a loss in many of those years and require top-up funding from the budget.”
How can that be? I thought the ETS was revenue-neutral by construction, with assistance (to households and to industry) exactly equal to revenue from the sale of permits.