Zeg strikes again

Conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG has just offered his take (visual and otherwise) on leadership speculation in the Liberal party and the job losses at Qantas.







Federal Green Paper 'too late' to save Great Barrier Reef

LOL. We have been hearing about the impending doom of the Barrier Reef for decades -- since long before the global warming scare. The reef has been there through many climate changes in the past and it will still be there when all of the current crop of doomsters are dead. The scares are nothing more than childish attention-seeking behaviour. I get tired of reiterating it but the reef already thrives through a very large temperature range and it in fact flourishes most where the climate is warmest. Expect zero honesty from an attention-seeking Greenie. Corals even thrive after A DIRECT ATOMIC HIT, in fact

THE Federal Government is being warned its Green Paper on emissions trading will not do enough to save the Great Barrier Reef from destruction. Leading environmentalists said Australia and other industrialised countries needed to slash emissions by 2020 if the tourism icon was to survive beyond the middle of the century.

The warning came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was urged to extend compensation for the emissions trading scheme to self-funded retirees. Everald Compton of National Seniors Australia said self-funded retirees needed extra help after their incomes were slashed by the dive in global sharemarkets.

The Government's Green Paper released last week repeated dire predictions about "mid-century destruction" of the Barrier Reef, which is estimated to generate about $1 billion a year. But Erwin Jackson of the Climate Institute said the Government's emissions trading proposal did nothing to ensure the future of the reef. "We don't know if this paper will help save the Barrier Reef," he said. "Countries like Australia need to reduce emissions by at least 25 per cent by 2020." Tony Mohr of the Australian Conservation Foundation described the Green Paper as "slim pickings" for the protection of the reef.

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Inconvenient truths for Kevvy's climate dreams

Behind the hype of the Garnaut Report and the Rudd Government's carbon emissions green paper lie some very inconvenient facts. First: a carbon system applied as now proposed will barely make a dent in the growth of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2020; it will not deliver a cut in emissions below today's levels, let alone below 2000 levels. Rudd is caught here by the Howard interest rate trap: it was not what the former prime minister said about interest rates under a Coalition government that mattered, it was what the voters thought he said, and when the rates rose again and again they punished him.

In Rudd's case, he has led the voters to believe he is going to deliver relief from global warming or, at the very least, a world-leading Australian example of how this can be achieved - and he can't. He can't, first, because no matter what is done here, the key impact of human-sourced greenhouse gases on the environment will be delivered elsewhere. Second, because delivering a massive cut in Australian domestic emissions through very high energy prices will make a slaughterhouse of the local manufacturing sector and deliver more than a million direct jobs, and perhaps as many indirect ones, to the block.

Nor can Rudd escape the political cost of undermining manufacturing by relying on the ongoing minerals and energy boom, heavily based on Chinese and other Asian demand for our resources, to be the key prop of the economy. As the eminent American economist, Jeffrey Sachs, at present visiting Australia, points out, countries over-reliant on exporting natural resources rarely show much economic growth.

The most inconvenient fact of all is to be found elsewhere: in China, where the direction of the global concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere during the next few decades is already being decided. China is matched by only the US in the size of its emissions. The growth of US emissions has slowed this decade, but the growth of Chinese emissions has been, and is going to continue to be, enormous. In this country, activists obsess over each new coal mine or coal-fired power station as if it signals the end of our world, but the Chinese are duplicating our entire coal-fired power capacity every four or five months. China added 88,300MW of new coal-fired generation in 2007. Australia's total grid-connected power capacity is 48,200MW, of which 28,500MW is coal fired.

The Chinese, to quote a paper delivered to the Asia Clean Energy Conference in Manila in June by Jianxiong Mao of Tsinghua University, Beijing, intend to build another 500,000MW between 2010 and 2020 while closing 4000 of their small, very inefficient coal plants. This program includes developing 120,000MW of renewable energy - four times what the Rudd Government's mandatory clean energy target aims to achieve - but 60 per cent of the new capacity will be coal-fired generation, their gases alone each year adding more than Australia's emissions from all sources to the atmosphere.

The Chinese have on order 200 coal-powered units as big as the dozen largest in use in NSW and 16 units bigger than the 750MW plant, Australia's largest, just commissioned in Queensland. This represents some $700 billion worth of equipment orders and barely half of what will be needed to meet Chinese 2020 capacity targets.

Because global warming is above all else a global issue, where the total of greenhouse gases in the planetary atmosphere decides what happens, even a suicidal decision in Australia to scrap all coal burners in the interests of showing the world a lead - cutting emissions by 180 million tonnes a year - would have no impact in the face of what the Chinese alone have already decided to do. Moreover, the Chinese, contrary to myth, are not doing nothing about emissions: they are engaged in a massive modernisation program that will improve their carbon intensity, but it will nonetheless add huge amounts of gases to the atmosphere.

Which leads to the question: what is Australia trying to achieve? When Sachs tried very politely on ABC Television this month to make the point that effective action requires first deciding on your target, then working out how to reach it most efficiently, he was, to quote a subsequent ABC Radio news report, "dismissed" by federal Government sources.

There is a raft of things Australia can, and should, do to deal better with its own greenhouse gas emission levels. An effective, regulation-driven approach to end-use efficiency is one. This month McKinsey & Company have released a study showing how the world can halve energy demand by spending about $US170 billion ($175 billion) a year....

It is necessary to adjust (and increase) the taxation system to fund these initiatives, which require large-scale community support as well as private investment, but this should be done in a straightforward and transparent fashion, not by inventing one of the world's most convoluted regulatory systems and myriad ways to avert its worst impacts by providing "get out of jail" cards to special interests while buying off voter rage through exempting petrol.

If there is one thing that is crystal clear after a week of the Garnaut Report, his "town hall meetings" and the green paper, it is that the Rudd Government is already knee-deep in a swamp of its own making on carbon policy, and deaf to advice to stop wading.

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Rudd being nice to the conservatives

He needs their co-operation in the Senate

Former [conservative] deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has been appointed Australia's first resident ambassador to the Vatican. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the appointment today while farewelling Pope Benedict XVI at Sydney airport. Traditionally, Australia's ambassador to Ireland has held responsibility for the Vatican.

Mr Rudd said today the government intends to recommend to the Governor General that Mr Fischer be appointed to the position. "The Australian Government will for the first time appoint a resident Ambassador to the Holy See,'' Mr Rudd said in a statement. "The appointment will mark a significant deepening of Australia's relations with the Vatican. It will allow Australia to expand dialogue with the Vatican in areas including human rights, political and religious freedom, food security, arms control, refugees and anti-people trafficking. "It will also provide an avenue for us to learn from each other's perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals and climate change.''

Mr Rudd said the appointment of a resident Ambassador also underpinned by Australia's commitment to inter-faith dialogue. "The Holy See has expressed support for Australia's efforts, within Australia and in the region, to facilitate greater understanding between people of different faiths,'' he said. "This will be the first time since 1973, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam established diplomatic relations with the Vatican, that Australia has appointed a resident Ambassador.''

The current ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See is Anne Plunkett. Mr Fischer will take up his appointment in early 2009.

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Another snoring government "watchdog"

ASIC told Firepower 'could be a scam'. But bureaucrats get paid anyhow. Why worry?

AUSTRALIA'S securities watchdog was warned that the fuel technology company Firepower "may in fact be a scam" more than six months before it became a public issue, but allegedly chose not to investigate. Fairfax reported the allegation is raised in tonight's ABC TV program Four Corners, in which the former chief executive of Firepower also criticises the Australian Trade Commission, or Austrade, for its part in promoting and supporting the company.

John Finnin, who was a former senior trade official before joining Firepower, said almost $100 million was raised from investors, but when he had worked for the company he could only account for about $30 million "at best". Firepower investors included AFL footballers, diplomats, doctors, accountants, media figures and small speculators. Many bought the shares on the promise of a stunning sharemarket listing in London.

However, Mr Finnin said many of Firepower's alleged multi-million-dollar deals were never concluded, including a huge contract with Russian railways that was repeatedly presented to shareholders as a certainty. "We're talking about contracts across dozens of countries that we claimed to have: Pakistan, Romania, Germany, Russia. We were claiming to have contracts which we didn't have," Mr Finnin said. "They made further claims that they had supplied the Australian and New Zealand military (with products), which of course was incorrect."

Mr Finnin said the support Firepower had received from Austrade gave it a layer of credibility it should never have been afforded. "They were able to say they were being supported by the Australian government, which in essence they were," he said.

Four Corners reports that an accountant whose client was offered shares in Firepower made a complaint to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in May 2006 alleging it could be a scam. The commission said it was "taking no further action at this time".

The complaint was made at the height of investment euphoria in Firepower and at a time when the company was on its way to being the biggest sporting sponsor in the country. Its sponsorship portfolio included the Western Force Super 14 team, and would soon include the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league team and the Sydney Kings basketball team.

In January last year, after questions were first raised about Firepower, ASIC began investigating the company. That investigation continues, although no charges have been laid.

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