Warmist guru calls for only 10 percent cut in greenhouse gases

These guys just make up numbers as they go along

AUSTRALIA'S climate change guru has softened his stand on greenhouse gases, saying we are a 'special case'. In a boost to business, government climate adviser Ross Garnaut has said Australia should try to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent by 2020, with immigration ruling out any greater reduction. And if the global community fails to act, that figure should drop back to five per cent.

In a major report released today, Professor Garnaut says high immigration growth makes Australia a special case and its emissions should be reduced by less than any other developed country. Australia's high level of immigration, he says, meant it cannot realistically cut emissions as much as other wealthy nations. And Prof Garnaut believes Australia should soften its target to a five per cent cut, based on 2000 levels, if an international climate pact is not forged.

The 10 per cent target will be a disappointment to the environmental lobby, which wants a cut of up to 40 per cent. But it will allay the concerns of business that emissions trading, due to start in 2010, would cost profits and jobs. The 2020 target will be a crucial factor in determining how much households and businesses will pay under emissions trading. The federal government has yet to set a 2020 target.

Prof Garnaut also recommended emissions trading start in 2010 with a fixed carbon price of $20 a tonne, indexed for inflation plus four per cent each year. The latest instalment of his advice to federal and state governments on what should be done about climate change doesn't make happy reading. He is pessimistic about the ability of the world to tackle climate change, and says there is "just a chance" that dangerous global warming can be avoided. The problem of climate change was "diabolical", "intractable" and "daunting", and the world was rapidly running out of time.

Other developed nations should do more than Australia to cut emissions, Prof Garnaut says. Canada should slash its emissions by a third, Japan by 27 per cent, the European Union by 14 per cent, and the US by 12 per cent. Australia had the "least stringent 2020 reductions targets of any of the developed countries/regions modelled". "Australia's population, because of the country's long-standing and large immigration program, has been and will be growing much faster than populations in other countries," Professor Garnaut said. "The allocation formula ... accommodates Australia's rapid population growth."

Prof Garnaut has recommended Australia adopt a more ambitious 80 per cent emissions reduction target by 2050. The government has committed to a 60 per cent target by then. He also thinks the world should move towards a per-capita system of emissions reductions, which would have a major impact on Australia because it has one of the world's highest rates of per-capita emissions. But the "per-capita" system would not kick in until 2050 under the Garnaut plan.

The report also includes some modelling on the costs of climate change. Prof Garnaut found not acting on climate change would cost Australia dearly, slashing eight per cent from gross national product by the end of this century. Wages would drop by 12 per cent. But taking action on climate change would have a "manageable" cost. Growth would be cut initially by 0.8 per cent, settling to 0.1 per cent in subsequent years. By 2060, taking action on climate change would have a net positive affect on the economy. Prof Garnaut's final report is due at the end of this month.

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Romanticizing Aborigines

No one at all seems to dare tell people that some Aboriginal traditions are about as ancient as Pilates, and even less useful. Take the "indigenous afternoon tea" that Melbourne's Bayside Council put on for Reconciliation Week. Asked by a ratepayer what was so Aboriginal about the tea, Bayside's chief executive indignantly replied: "Indigenous food was provided and included chicken and mushroom pies, kangaroo and burgundy pies, emu and vegetable pies." Pardon? Oven-baked pies? Made with chicken? And vegetables? And flavoured with burgundy? This is as Aboriginal as Gordon Ramsay.

This is "indigenous" only to someone determined to imagine traditional Aboriginal society as an inner-urban Eden of people in deep communion with Nature, yet still supplied with the essential luxuries of cooked dinners, fine wine and hot-and-cold running sustainability experts.

And there's no shortage of people much like that. Take Melbourne University lecturer Wayne Atkinson, a Yorta Yorta "elder" on the grounds that his Mauritian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman. Writes Atkinson: "One can reconstruct a rather idyllic picture of Yorta Yorta lifestyle. It is clear that the people did not want for anything in terms of food and security and their lifestyles fit nicely into the picture of affluence . . ."

How sweet. But it's a dream as tenuously linked to the harsh reality of tribal life as is Atkinson's own genealogy. Yet who dares challenge such dubious recreations of Aboriginality, even when they reinvent paralysing taboos and stereotypes?

Just this week, Dr Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, damned HarperCollins for planning to publish an Australian edition of the Daring Book for Girls with a chapter explaining how to play the didgeridoo. Rose, billed as "a member of the western Victorian Gundjitamara Nation", said this betrayed a "mammoth ignorance" by encouraging girls to play an instrument that Aborigines had banned to women, knowing it would make them infertile. "I wouldn't let my daughter touch one," he said. "I reckon it's the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades."

Oh, really? This university-educated academic with his pale skin and European looks seriously thinks his daughter would be rendered barren by touching a hollow piece of wood? Or is he saying any backward taboo should be maintained, even if its only purpose is to limit women's freedoms? But the real joke is that Aborigines far, far darker than Rose - and from parts of Australia that actually have didgeridoos - don't believe in the tradition he's defending.

Ethnomusicologist Linda Barwick, of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has studied this very question on field trips in the Northern Territory, and writes: "In discussions with women in the Belyuen community near Darwin in 1995 I was told that there was no prohibition on women playing . . . "In a discussion with men from Groote Eylandt, Numbulwar and Gunbalanya it was agreed that there was no explicit Dreaming Law that women should not play Didgeridoo . . ." Didgfest Australia, an Aboriginal-backed festival of the didgeridoo, agrees, declaring: "It is not taboo for Aboriginal women to play the didge in most parts of Australia . . ."

But HarperCollins quickly caved into Rose and said the chapter would be removed. Who dares question an Aboriginal tradition? Or, rather, which inner-urban, book-publishing intellectual even wants to?

The fact is a certain class of sensitive white dreamers - not tribal blacks - actually wants to believe in this natural tribal paradise with its hot pies and cool magic. Think, for instance, of all the whites who queued two years ago to be "purified" by the "sacred fire" lit illegally in our Botanic Gardens by activist Robbie Thorpe.

Thorpe, who has British ancestry as well as Aboriginal, also claimed be an "Aboriginal elder" -- but of which tribe? In 1991, he mounted a forest protest as an elder of the Barbuwooloong clan of central Gippsland. In 2000, he was protesting at Goolengook as an elder of the Krauatungalung clan. And five years ago he was "saving" the Strzelecki forest as an elder of western Victoria's "Gurnai Nation" clans. Now he'd lit a sacred fire in Melbourne that Graham Atkinson, co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group, thought was just a joke by a trouble-making blow-in.

But could you tell that to the white callers who rang 774 ABC in ecstatic tears to tell of being "smoked". Heavens no. Age columnist Tracee Hutchison instead wrote mystically of undergoing this "ancient and gentle healing ritual", and how "humbled" she'd been to be told "I've got some kind of blackfella spirit inside me".

You see how fiercely such whites want to reinvent the Noble Eco-Savage. It's a yearning we've seen since at least 1991, of course, when then prime minister Bob Hawke banned a new mine at Kakadu's Coronation Hill. Aboriginal activists, backed by green groups, had convinced him that if the hill were disturbed, an angry Bula spirit would sicken the land -- or at least kill Hawke's green vote. Never mind that no one had ever linked Bula with the site until the 1970s, or that uranium had been mined there for almost 20 years without Bula giving anyone as much as a headache.

More critically, never mind that the Jawoyn leader, Andy Andrews, begged Hawke to ignore the Bula scare and sent a petition from 92 Jawoyn people asking that the mine and its royalties be allowed to go ahead. Forget it. The white politicians and journalists decided that real Aborigines - the ones they'd listen to, anyway - had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.

Same story with the infamous bridge to Hindmarsh Island, blocked by claims by green-backed Aboriginal activists who claimed it would disturb "secret women's business" and make locals infertile. Again, never mind that many Christian Aboriginal women said this "secret women's business" was not just absurd but clearly untrue. White politicians and journalists once more decided that real Aborigines had to be green pagans, not black rationalists.

And the big joke? Despite this reinvention of black traditions, from "welcomes to country" to smoking ceremonies, most Aborigines aren't remotely as superstitious and traditional as the white dreamers behind this push like to imagine. The 2006 census, for instance, found barely 1 per cent of Aborigines followed traditional Aboriginal religions. Most were just boringly, conventionally Christian.

Even more bizarrely, the 2001 Census revealed that a quarter of the believers in Aboriginal faiths weren't even Aboriginal. Whites just really, really want to believe in black gods and black superstitions in ways that few Aborigines seem themselves inclined.

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Farmers criticise luxury car tax plan

The South Australian Farmers Federation (SAFF) says the Federal Government's proposed luxury car tax would impose an unnecessary burden on farmers.

The Opposition and Family First Senator Steve Fielding yesterday defeated the Government's plan to legislate for its tax on vehicles costing more than $57,000. The Government says it will reintroduce the measure when Parliament next sits on September 15 and, in the meantime, the budget measure will remain in place.

SAFF president Peter White says most of the vehicles suitable for farmers fall within the tax bracket. He says farmers already have enough to deal with. "The other issue is, I mean if you look at it, we pay GST and tax on the fuel, we pay stamp duty on the vehicle, we pay GST on the vehicle and then they want to add another tax on top of that again," he said. "How many bites of the cherry do they want?"

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New CJ sounds very politically correct

ROBERT French has paid special tribute to the role of indigenous people in Australia's history at his swearing-in today as the 12th chief justice of the High Court at a special ceremonial sitting in Canberra. Justice French said it was a great honour to serve in what Kevin Rudd described - at the time of his appointment - as the "most important constitutional office in the land".

The West Australian, who is renowned for his expertise in constitutional law, administrative law and native title, made special reference to the importance of reconciliation with indigenous people. "Recognition of their presence is no mere platitude," he said. "The history of Australia's indigenous people dwarfs, in its temporal sweep, the history that gave rise to the Constitution under which this court was created. "Our awareness and recognition of that history is becoming, if it has not already become, part of our national identity."

Justice French gave special thanks to his predecessor, Murray Gleeson, whom he said gave him "a bottle of very good whiskey in order to tide me over the difficult moments".

His first case tomorrow will involve an exploration of family trusts before he tackles the issue of sleeping judges on Wednesday.

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