Tag Archive for 'greens'

Open Tasmanian election thread II

Published
by
Kim
2 days, 1 hour ago
in Polls and State/Territory Elections
. 23 Comments

With election day tomorrow, it’s time for another open thread about the Tasmanian election. This thread provides an opportunity for commenters to discuss the campaign and results, share links, make predictions, and so forth!

Please note LP’s statement on electoral comment.

Update: Live chat at The Poll Bludger starting now (2pm AEST).

Update: Latest Newspoll results – Labor 35, Liberals 36.5, Greens 25.5. More detail at The Poll Bludger.

Previous discussion: here.

Update [by Mark] William Bowe is live blogging the election count at The Poll Bludger.

Update [by Mark] On both results and the federal implications.

Rudd government to negotiate with Greens on CPRS?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics, Elections, Energy, Markets and Politics
. 128 Comments

The Australian Greens have written to the Prime Minister suggesting Ross Garnaut’s interim proposal on carbon trading as a mode of breaking the deadlock on the CPRS legislation.

Details are here.

On SBS news tonight, Kevin Rudd stated he was open to negotiations with all parties represented in the Parliament. The current ETS bills obviously have no chance of passage via Liberal votes since Malcolm Turnbull lost the leadership. It’s intriguing to contemplate Labor reaching an accommodation with The Greens. In many ways, Labor doesn’t need a double dissolution, as it would increase the prospects of non-major party Senate candidate. The current CPRS has also now lost its utility as a political wedge against the Liberals, and in an election year, there may be some value in Labor being able to demonstrate something has actually been done on climate change.

The sticking point, of course, would still be Senators Xenophon and Fielding.

D-Day for the Liberals? (And the government’s CPRS giveaway)

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Disasters, Howardia, Media, Policy and Politics
. 99 Comments

The Coalition are continuing their marathon climate change/leadership party room meeting after question time today. Clearly, agreement couldn’t be reached within the scheduled four hours. That’s significant in itself.

In developments so far, Andrew Robb has jumped ship, reports Bernard Keane at The Stump.

The government has made its offer on the Coalition amendments. Peter Martin has the text of Rudd’s press release. Writing in New Matilda, Ben Eltham characterises the deal thus:

Billions more taxpayer dollars will be sacrificed on the altar of making the emissions trading scheme palatable for big polluters.

It’s impossible to see this ‘bipartisan’ deal as anything other than a huge transfer from the household sector to the polluters, and one which, at least in the short term, will do nothing much to reduce emissions. The argument in favour is that it should be supported to lock in business and parts of the Coalition, in the hope that it can be improved over time. The argument against ‘pass now, improve later’ is put by Senator Christine Milne at GreensBlog.

In today’s Crikey, Bernard Keane described the CPRS as the worst ever policy process this country has seen. It’s a textbook example, as well, of how politics can completely derail the ostensible intent of a piece of legislation, except insofar as it continues to provide the government with a talking point or two on the actual issue (and that’s not much of an exception!)… So all eyes in the commentariat will now doubt be on the implications for the Liberal leadership. Ludicrous outcomes such as a Kevin Andrews ascension are probably outside the realms of likelihood, but then who knows with this mob?

The issue has certainly crystallised almost all the ructions within the Liberals and between the Nats and moderate Liberals. Continued resentment of defeat, the counter-productive relationship with the media, the tendency to tear down any leader who won’t play the right wing game in all its purity and nuttiness, self-delusion about electoral politics. It’s all there. And none of it is remotely rational in a political sense, or any other.

More to come later…

UPDATE [Ben Eltham]: Sky News is reporting that Wilson Tuckey has moved a leadership spill motion …

Update [Mark]: Tuckey’s leadership spill suggestion failed. Perhaps he shouldn’t rely on The Australian for an assessment of numbers within the Liberal party room.

Update [Mark]: The farce continues, as Coalition members get angsty over whether the meeting should adjourn for a dinner break.

Update [Mark]: I suspect what’s going on now is they’re trying to work out what spin to put on an outcome which is completely chaotic, because both sides disagree as to what happened. If Turnbull, as leader, says that the meeting has decided to accept the deal, it seems to me that all they can do if they don’t agree is to take up Kevin Andrews’ kind offer and make him leader. Or Andrew Robb. Or Tony Abbott or someone. But all the blather about legitimacy surely is just hot air, unless they’re prepared to actually dispense with Turnbull.

Update: Turnbull is giving a press conference, pointing to his strong leadership, and claiming that he’s saved jobs. The Twitter buzz might be as good as place as any to follow what’s going on.

Update: SBS makes about as much sense as anyone could out of the result of the meeting.

Update: What Turnbull should do now.

Rundle on the recent history of the left

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Activism, Culture, Economics, History, International, Media, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 38 Comments

As a sequel to my post on The Australian’s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Continue reading ‘Rundle on the recent history of the left’

Rundle: Greens should drop watermelon party

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Activism, Australiana, Culture, Environment, Politics and Sociology
. 153 Comments

In today’s Crikey, Guy Rundle segues from the latest round of “Nats should leave the Coalition” talk (refracted, this time, if The Australian is to be believed, predictably through the Malcolm Turnbull leadership prism) to a consideration of the impact of environmental crisis on rural voters.

It’s always been the case that rural or farmers’ parties have had a chance of survival in modern Western polities precisely because there are cultural differences which are much more deep seated than often grasped between rural and urban dwellers. In many ways, to live rurally is still to partake in the legacies of a culture which literally goes back to a time immemorial – one closely tied to the rhythms of time, nature and the fruits of the land. There’s a different time sense, and a different set of values, based not just on a different core factor of production, but on a culture where nature is not so distinct.

For us, in the cities, and in Australia that’s most of us, we really do live in a quite distinct world where things like our food supply are far more abstract and thus far less prominent concerns (that is, they’re naturalised in a different sense of the term – backgrounded, rendered relatively invisible and subject to a routinisation which doesn’t prompt reflection).

Hence the sort of validity – though sometimes the motives are suspect – of identification claims made by farmers with Indigenous custodianship (and the very closeness of some cultural motifs leads to an unreasonable and exaggerated fear of the Other).

Rundle’s argument is that the Nats can get serious by taking their constituents’ interweaving with the environment seriously. But he also suggests that the Greens’ ties to a heap of social stands aren’t necessary, nor necessarily fruitful for them. I’m not sure if Rundle knows that there are some Greens in Queensland who certainly don’t perceive themselves as on the left. I myself have never been convinced that there’s a logical link between ecological and left wing politics, speaking as an advocate of left wing politics.

Continue reading ‘Rundle: Greens should drop watermelon party’

Where now for the CPRS?

Published
by
tigtog
7 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Environment and Government
. 74 Comments

So, the Greens aren’t too sad that the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) was blocked in the Senate – indeed they were a key component of that blocking. From the GreensMPs website:

“The collapse of the Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme provides Australia with a great opportunity to move ahead with ambitious action on the climate crisis,” Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“The CPRS would have locked in failure on the climate crisis with its inexcusably weak emissions target and its $16 billion handout to polluters. Three in four Australians support the Greens’ decision to reject the bill if the Government refused to toughen it up.

“The collapse of the CPRS opens the door to a suite of other measures that can be implemented immediately, before an amended CPRS returns to the Parliament, in order to begin reducing Australia’s emissions without delay.”

The Greens are probably mostly correct that the proposed measures were too timid, but was their strategy of blocking this bill in hopes of getting a more effective one the right strategic choice? Xenophon agrees with them that the targets were too low, with extra opprobrium for what he considers unnecessarily expensive plans.

Family First’s Fielding voted with the Greens to block because he still isn’t convinced that human activity is causing global warming at all. (Question for the Senator: is it possible for humans to ameliorate the effects of phenomena they don’t actually cause? e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes? Yes? Why not do something in this situation then?) The Senate Nationals seem to be of the same mind.

So now the Government have to turn to the Senate Liberals to get this bill through, and those Senators appear to favour waiting to see what the rest of the world has to say in Copenhagen (at the U.N. Climate Change Conference) rather than have Australia show any initiative in implementing our own effective scheme.

So there’s two camps of people standing on separate principles arguing that the CPRS was wrong wrongitty wrong either because it gutlessly didn’t do enough to make a difference or was recklessly diverting scarce resources into a non-existent problem, while various pragmatists are mourning a lost opportunity to at least take a first step in cutting emissions. What can we expect regarding emissions targets now?

Opposing the CPRS?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 year, 1 month ago
in Climate change, Economics, Policy and Politics
. 95 Comments

This is kind of old news, but Andrew Bartlett linked to a piece by climate activist Anna Rose about the People’s Climate Action Summit a couple of weeks ago. Bartlett noted, with interest, Rose’s take on the summit’s extreme distaste for the CPRS as currently proposed:

In the third session on campaign strategy the debates of the past day and a half start to crystallise into debates over wording. One of the big issues is of course around the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – it’s just so bad that there is a broad consensus that as a grassroots movement, we should do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t pass. This is interesting. It is the same anti-CPRS position of the Coalition – although, of course, for different reasons. The big elephant in the room for me, then, is…what next? If we don’t get a CPRS, what can we expect in its place both from the Government and the Opposition?

As discussed earlier, the CPRS requires either the support of the conservatives or the entire cross-bench, so it might well be possible for the Greens or Xenophon to be persuaded to do just that. But is it wise? Andrew thinks it’s premature:

Continue reading ‘Opposing the CPRS?’

The Canadian election: Déjà vu all over again

Published
by
Phil
1 year, 5 months ago
in Elections, Federal Elections, Foreign Elections and Politics
. 20 Comments

Liberals 76 (26%), Conservatives 143 (38%), NDP 37 (18%), BQ 50 (10%), Greens 0 (7%), Other 2 (1%)

The Canadian election is all over and the result is yet another minority government for the Conservatives. The turnout was low and it looks like Canadians went with the devil they knew given the current economic climate.

The Liberals failed to make a dent, the NDP improved but to no effect. As is usual the Greens failed to garner much support on a percentage basis let alone win a seat and Bloc Quebecois did it’s usual thing in winning the majority of seats in Quebec.

Yes the Conservatives increased their representation and would like to claim some kind of mandate but a minority is a minority no matter how you spin it, so, Canadians will probably be back here again in a couple of years with the Conservatives vainly looking for a majority, quite possibly with a new leader – there is no question there will be a new Liberal leader; the academic Stéphane Dion failed to impress.

I suppose the good news is that any potential excesses of Conservative rule will be tempered by a wall of notionally progressive voices in the opposition benches; working together seems to be the political meme de jour right now anyway.

By the way, I was really interested in these hypotheses mentioned at the Poll Bludger because the Canadian election was mentioned.

Hypothesis one, from Peter Brent at Mumble: “Canada’s one-term government going for re-election (after only 18 months), amidst world economic turmoil, should provide some clue as to how Rudd & co might fare at the next election.”

Hypothesis two, from Adam in Canberra at this place: “It’s curious that the financial crisis seems to be working in favour of the incumbents in NZ (on the basis of one Morgan poll) and (I think so far) Australia, but against the incumbents in the US and Canada. That would suggest that conservatives are being blamed, not incumbents.”

Based on this one result it looks like the economic climate may favour the status quo, as long as they are seen to be doing something, so as Peter Brent mentioned, maybe this does hold a clue to the future for the Rudd government; now that it’s finally found a media narrative to run with.

The Canadian Election: Lost in translation

Published
by
Phil
1 year, 5 months ago
in Elections, Foreign Elections, International and Politics
. 3 Comments

The Canadian Election has finally reached its final weekend (Tuesday vote) with all the usual campaign he said/she said stops along the way to polling day and strangely featuring an episode of duelling plagiarists, one which drew our very own former PM John Howard into the campaign.

As expected the early Conservative lead in the polls has narrowed, to the point where the Liberals may be in a position to pull off a surprise win; or it’s gonna be a Groundhog Day minority Govt all over again.

As it currently stands the Conservatives sit in the lead just outside of the MoE on 32, Liberals 27, NDP 19, Greens 12 and Bloc Quebecois 8.

Continue reading ‘The Canadian Election: Lost in translation’

Coalition voters wanted, apply within

Published
by
Phil
1 year, 5 months ago
in Film, TV, Video etc and Media
. 23 Comments

Eric Abetz is at it again.

Senior Liberal Eric Abetz believes the ABC TV political talk show Q&A has failed in its attempt to provide a representative cross-section of the community because the audience was overwhelmingly made up of Labor and Greens voters.

Rather than seeing conspiracy everywhere, has Abetz considered the possibility that Coalition leaning voters have not applied to join the Q&A audience in the same numbers as Greens and Labor voters?

So, the important question for Abetz to ask of the ABC is how many self-identified Coalition voters have applied to participate as a Q&A audience member?

I’m sure the sign up form database would provide him with the answers he’s looking for, though I suspect he may not like what it reveals.

Or is it that Abetz prefers to take a free kick at alleged bias and lack of balance at the ABC rather than a deeper look at what may be a statistical or political (cultural) anomaly?

By the way, I presume he’s been happy with the panel representation to date.