Tag Archive for 'Greg Hunt'

Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two

The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…

Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday - that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’

Liberal media lunacy III

While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.

Continue reading ‘Liberal media lunacy III’