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!]

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.

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.

However, the sea lions of the Galapagos Islands aren’t complaining. They’ve extended their range to northern Peru for the first time.

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?

Firstly, whether one thinks climate change is a serious problem requiring a real solution is a separate question from whether one thinks the CPRS is a desirable policy to address it. It should not come as a surprise, then, to find public opinion on the CPRS turning sour even as public opinion on the science of climate change seems to be reaching an apparent point of equilibrium.

Media coverage of the CPRS debate (with some honourable exceptions) usually overlooks the fact that opposition to the scheme is not confined to denialists. As well as being a member of the Greens and a reader of Ken Davidson’s Dissent magazine, I am also a member of the National Tertiary Education Union and the SEARCH Foundation, both of which think the CPRS is a crock. This is also the view of a large part of the grassroots environmental movement in Australia.

Secondly, those commentators who have said the Neilsen poll results indicate public confusion about the specifics of the major parties’ climate change policies, and also reflect the failure of the Rudd government to effectively sell the CPRS to the public, are probably right.

However, the difficulties the Rudd Government now finds itself in on the CPRS are, in an important sense, the inevitable consequence of its decision to support a climate change policy which could reassure the top end of town and potentially gain bipartisan support from the Liberals, and to spurn the Greens and the demands of much of the environmental movement. The CPRS, as it stands, is bereft of support from any of the campaigning constituencies which are able to go to the mattresses and appeal to popular opinion on an issue, and which have done so in the past in support of good Labor environmental policies. The welfare lobby groups which are doing their comradely duty by calling on the Greens to support Labor’s policy in the Senate can’t match the campaigning abilities of the grassroots environmental groups, and the Business Council of Australia and Australian Industry Group (which support the CPRS) don’t operate by going to the mattresses. The government itself can’t campaign for the CPRS with any real conviction because the policy is so obviously inadequate to deal with the problem, and is therefore uninspiring to those ALP members who might be willing to go to the mattresses for a good cause. On the other hand there is no doubting the willingness of the denialists to go to the mattresses against any policy whatsoever on climate change, however inadequate, and the Coalition has spurned bipartisanship and is on the mattresses with the denialists in more ways than one.

THE Rudd government has an unhealthy obsession with Tony Abbott’s obsessions. As parliament prepares to resume on Tuesday for the first sitting in an election year, some Labor ministers are spending so much time reinforcing adverse stereotypes of the new Liberal leader they run the double risk of appearing to be in a panic and of actually validating his policies and leadership.

KEVIN Rudd’s emissions trading scheme is dead but he can’t let it go. Politically he should shift ground to alternative action on climate change, blame Tony Abbott for the failure of a scheme previously favoured by Liberal leaders, and use the global failure to agree on a concerted plan as a reprieve before the election.

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.

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.

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.

Having worked on free software for years, and having read a fair bit of the work of Lawrence Lessig, it seems to me that the primary purpose of copyright law should be to encourage the creation of new work. To encourage that work, the law afford them a limited right to gain the profits from its performance or distribution, while protecting certain forms of reproduction of the work, or works derived from it. Those certain forms have little connection with the actual level of “innovation” involved – the author of a join-the-dots Mills and Boon novel has their words protected; Picasso and Braque never sued the innumerable artists who used cubist techniques. In a more directly relevant context, nor did Phuture have the right to sue every half-arsed house music act who abused a Roland TB-303. But, be that as it may, we have evolved a system where melodies and chord progressions, as well as the actual recorded sound, are guarded by the sledgehammer of the law for inordinate periods of time.

As currently constituted, copyright law grossly inhibits creativity by, effectively, locking up forever some forms of borrowing, the same borrowing from the past that creative artists have being making use of since the second cave artist had a look at what the first was up to and tried their own take on it.

So how is this to be remedied?

Shortening copyright terms to something approaching their original length – perhaps 20 years or so – is one solution. But, beyond that is the question of the right to create derivative works. At the moment, as I understand it, copyright owners have the unfettered right to prevent others from creating derivative works of the thing they hold copyright for.

I’d suggest that they don’t need or deserve that right. As long as they get paid, I don’t see why the rights holders of Kookaburra should be able to prevent Men at Work from using parts of the melody. I don’t see why the Beatles should be able to restrict moviemakers setting their plots in the 1960s from using Beatles tracks to create a historically realistic soundscape. And if Westfield wants to turn Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi into an advertisement for their shopping centers, well, good luck to them. Or, in the filmic domain, if somebody wants to commercially release a Trek slash fiction film, or, for that matter, a filmed version of Catcher in the Rye, I don’t see why the original rights holders should be able to stop them.

NOTE: I wrote this in rather a hurry, and it doesn’t make the point clearly that Larrikin aren’t seeking to stop the distribution of Down Under. But, as I understand it, they have that right, and as such would have been in a position to suppress the distribution of Down Under (at least the version with the borrowed flute hook) from the beginning if they’d so chosen.

Elsewhere: Lauredhel argues that the judge got it wrong. Skepticlawyer has an interesting take, arguing that this kind of decision causes a loss of general respect for IP law more generally – with the consequence that somewhere down the track citizen disgust might led to its wholesale revocation, even the useful bits.

Update: Warren Fahey, original owner of Larrikin Music, has popped up in comments and reconfirmed what others on the thread have pointed out: he sold Larrikin Music long before this case began, and it is now owned by by Music Sales, a multinational publishing giant.

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.

Once upon a time, the Liberal Party, an organisation temperamentally suited, after all, to hierarchy, accorded an almost royal deference to Big Science. Menzies presided over an Australia that wondered at atom splittings and Sputnik launchings, and not in the sceptical sense of that word but with genuine awe, with the mysteries expounded by clipboard-carrying oracles understood as evidencing the remarkable advances of the modern age.

Under Howard, however, the party embraced a populist anti-elitism, in which the instincts of ordinary folk always trumped the hoity-toity pronouncements of over-educated know-it-alls. Throughout the culture wars, the high falutin’ elitists in their inner-city apartments, those whining postmodernists confounding the common sense of you and me and the bloke next door, were a perennial punching bag for the Liberals and their mouthpieces.

The climate debate thus arrived with an oppositional script already well-prepared: on the one hand, the fancy-dancing, silver-tongued scientists and ideologues, with their incomprehensible graphs and statistical charts; on the other, the hard-working traditional Australians forced to feel bad about SUVs and air travel by self-righteous scolds.

Slapping down some scientific poindexter became, then, a reflexive defence of values associated with the ’50s, even as it manifested an attitude to the research establishment that Menzies would have found incomprehensible.

He’s also spot on in honing in on the fact that rational argument is incapable of shifting the views of denialists (much as the apparatus of knowledge has to be mimicked with graphs and charts); a mindset driven by affect, emotion and ressentiment, a perceived assault on a way of living and anti-rationalism is by definition immune to persuasion. After all, the frame of ‘the people v. the elites’ rules out the canons of evidence based debate by definition – if you can do that, then you’re one of the dreaded over-educated, latte-sipping tribe.

It is necessary to continue to argue within the rationalist, scientific paradigm, but it’s also vital to recognise that we are talking about two very distinct and opposed modes of being in the world and that the twain will rarely meet. The disjunction between magical thinking and scientific reasoning reinscribes itself because those who are trained in the latter are very often unaware that it is a rare and highly learned skill. The very practice of learning to think rationally naturalises it; and disguises the fact that it is an artifice constructed by human endeavour rather than ‘human nature’. This, then, circles around to the recreation of a feeling of social distance from those who don’t live in the worldview of science.

And that’s what causes a lot of the communicative failures that occur again and again, when incommensurable discourses clash. In fact, respect for science is grounded in status distinctions, as well as concomitant knowledge differentiation, and the erosion of the acceptance of authority pervasive throughout the lifeworld of late modernity erodes the naturalisation of such distinctions, and allows them to be politicised as a cultural war between elites and the folk(s). When you’re at war, dialogue has died.

At the more mundane level of electoral politics, though, all is not lost, because the two opposed constellations of forces are both small minorities within the populace as a whole. (Those who claim to speak “for the people” are also an elite social formation, of sorts.)

Sparrow, again:

Abbott thus faces a ticklish dilemma. On the one hand, the deniers bring a passion that an Opposition sorely needs. On the other hand, the climate sceptics teeter on the verge of overt hostility to the very establishment that the Liberal Party needs to win over. Populists, after all, despise and mistrust not only greenies and EU commissars but Big Media and Big Business.

The Liberal Party, well, not so much.

John Howard managed — most of the time — to present himself simultaneously as a populist and a man of the establishment. Perhaps Abbott can do the same. But it doesn’t seem likely, at least partly because the rhetorical tenor of the sceptics has grown so shrill.

NB: Related post.

”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.

In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.

So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.

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.

That might sound like a spectacular defeat, but leading LNP figures had been claiming on Monday night that McLindon would fail to get a seconder. McLindon had already been booted off a parliamentary committee by Leader John-Paul Langbroek, leaving him about 8 grand a year poorer. LNP Whip and former Nationals leader Mike Horan, who pronounced the episode closed yesterday, had done all in his power to ensure that no one would vote with the excitable backbencher.

The context for McLindon’s apparently quixotic move is two-fold.

Since late last year, when her leadership was looking decidedly shaky, Anna Bligh’s grip on the reins of state has firmed up. Union moves, particularly from the ETU, have reinforced caucus solidarity. Although the LNP is ahead in the polls, concern has grown in Opposition ranks that their lead has more to do with Bligh’s unpopular asset sales than their own efforts. That’s well founded, with the LNP and its predecessors falling at the hurdle before through sloppy policy work, not least from The Borg. So Labor, and in particular Treasurer Andrew Fraser, has been having some mischievous fun turning the focus back on the LNP, with the suggestion that McLindon was a stalking horse for Clayfield MP Tim Nicholls.

The problems the LNP has go back to its election loss, and beyond, to its whole rationale. Springborg’s continued leadership role, despite its electoral implausibility, reflects both a recognition that the party can’t win over urban voters with a leader so identified with the Nats, and also the determination of the Nats to maintain their grip on party room power. Here, Mike Horan’s role is crucial as an enforcer for the old guard. So, too, is the response of the Party President Bruce McIvor, and his dark insinuations of disendorsements to come. That’s straight out of the old school Nats playbook.

So, it’s intriguing that high profile former National and Burnett MP Rob Messenger seconded McLindon’s motion. Messenger was promptly sacked as Deputy Whip, and it’s now being reported that 2 former Liberal MPs voted for the spill, and that ex Liberal leader Bruce Flegg’s proxy vote was cast for it. All this signals that there are real attempts to transcend the stasis in which the LNP is frozen, and that old factional alignments are blurring. You wouldn’t lose a bet that more than 3 other MPs share Messenger and McLindon’s view. This show has a while to run yet, with two years before the next election.

Today I thought I’d take some time to unpick those rubbery carbon reduction figures.

Let’s take a closer look at page 22 of the Coalition policy document, which contains a table outlining the emissions reductions a Coalition government would buy from polluters, which I’ve reproduced below:

Coalition carbon emissions reduction figures. Source: "Rewarding a Greener Australia", p.22

As you can see, the bulk of the emissions reductions are slated to come from so-called “biochar” technologies in the agricultural sector, which, as I reported for New Matilda last year, are highly speculative and relatively untested at any large-scale level.

The other  interesting thing this table tells us is what the shadow price for carbon abatement under the Coalition plan is likely to be. While the price the Coalition is planning to pay polluters is not spelt out in the document, it is possible to use these figures to calculate an overall average carbon price, which I’ve done in the table below:

As I pointed out yesterday, the Coalition’s own figures suggest that not only will the actual funds disbursed by ERF be less than the $2.55 billion budgeted, they will also result in a shadow carbon price of only $12.50 a tonne – far less than the $23 a tonne that the Treasury’s CPRS modelling says is consistent with a 5% national carbon reduction target.

There are plenty of smart people on this blog so I welcome comments if you think I’ve stuffed up the methodology. But I think we can agree that the price signal is weak, and that therefore so will the incentive for decarbonisation.

So while Abbott and Latham have some similarities in their early polling performance, Abbott was literally miles behind where Latham was at a comparable time.

No one believes in it.

They’ve come to this pass because of the momentum of the twin drives to dethrone Malcolm Turnbull and the internal politics of climate change denialism in the Coalition and among the so-called ‘Liberal base’.

Abbott’s ‘direct action’ is supposed to provide a point of contrast between bike-riding muscular Tony (and don’t for a minute think all these photos and all the tv vision of him in togs and exercising is coincidental) and that blancmange of a bureaucrat, KRudd. But the Coalition is stuck with the windy rhetoric that none of them actually care for – either because they don’t believe climate change is real, or because they know it is, and this is an epic fail.

That’s another reason why the contradictions in this thing won’t easily be papered over, and selling it will be very difficult.

You can’t straddle both sides of a barbed-wire fence.

The first stage of selling the Coalition’s climate change policy hasn’t gone well. Barnaby Joyce was positively incoherent on Lateline, and wanted to talk about anything but the policy itself. Significantly, perhaps, when asked about his new role, his response was something along the lines of “I’m not exactly fascinated”. Really. Maybe for both him and his boss, being an oppositionalist ‘retail politician’ and mouthing off about anything and everything is a more comfortable space than having to defend a policy position.

That certainly appeared to be the case for Tony Abbott on the 7.30 Report tonight.

His inability to justify the lie about the cost of the CPRS to taxpayers aside, Abbott found out that it’s very hard to straddle the denialist constituency *and* maintain the fiction that he wants to do something to abate carbon emissions. And it’s not going to get any easier for him.

What might have appeared over summer to the Abbotariat to be a tactical master stroke is now meeting political reality. And on the first day that Kevin Rudd found a way of concisely explaining the ETS.*

*Even, if, unfortunately, it doesn’t really punish polluters as much as it should.*