Australian Politics
Massive changes to plastic shopping bags in Australia with NSW set to BAN lightweight bags in days, while Woolworths has stopped selling its 15c reusable bags
And what good will this do? The claim is that it will keep plastic out of the oceans. It won't -- for the excellent reason that plastic bags used in Australia don't go there anyway. Most plastic in the oceans comes from Asia. Such waste in Australia is normally disposed of properly. All those garbage trucks running around our suburbs are actually doing something
If you really wanted to stop plastic going into the oceans, you would put a barrage across the mouth of the Yangtse. That would stop about a third of the plastic that presently goes into the Pacific
Australian consumers face a plastic bag revolution in just days with major changes coming into effect in NSW and Western Australia in the coming weeks.
NSW will ban lightweight plastic bags from June 1, while Woolworths supermarket will stop selling its 15c reusable plastic bags across all stores in WA from July.
The supermarket giant will only be offering its paper, green fabric and Bag for Good alternatives when a statewide ban on plastic bags comes into effect from July.
'Over the next month, we'll be gradually phasing out plastic shopping bags from our stores and online orders across WA, as we move to support the WA Government's upcoming plastic bag ban,' Woolworths state general manager Karl Weber said.
'This change will see more than 30 million plastic bags removed from circulation in WA every year — which is a big win for the health of our oceans and waterways.
'While our paper bags will continue to be available, the most sustainable bag you can use is the reusable one you bring from home.'
More than 80 per cent of shoppers are bringing their own bags into the supermarkets - meaning the latest change will have an impact on a small number of customers.
'The vast majority of our customers already bring their own reusable bags to shop, which is the very best outcome for the environment, and we encourage customers to keep up the great work,' Mr Weber said.
'We know the change brought about by this new WA legislation may be an adjustment for some customers and we thank them in advance for their support as we all work together to grow greener.'
Customers will be reminded of the looming change by in-store advertisements.
Environment minister Reece Whitby said the state was leading the way on banning single-use plastics across Australia.
'Western Australia has a strong track record on reducing single-use plastics in the environment, and was named the top jurisdiction in the country two years in a row by WWF Australia, for the work that is being done,' he said.
'The WA community has shown overwhelming support for this — and I would like to thank everyone, including Woolworths, who have embraced these important changes.'
The paper bag will cost 20c and will be able to carry up to 6kgs of groceries.
Woolworths was the first supermarket to ditch single-use plastic bags in 2018. The reusable plastic bag was introduced for 15 cents and was sold as a cheaper alternative to its 99c fabric bags.
Plastic items will be banned in two stages across Western Australia.
The first stage includes banning thick plastic bags, plates, bowls, cups, cutlery, stirrers, straws, takeaway polystyrene food containers and helium balloon releases.
The second stage will ban thin plastic produce bags, cotton buds with plastic shafts, polystyrene packaging, microbeads, oxo‑degradable plastics, takeaway coffee cups and lids, and polystyrene cups.
This change will come into effect by the end of 2022.
Businesses disregarding the ban risk heavy fines of up to $5,000.
Meanwhile, the NSW Environment Protection Authority outlined more detail on other products facing the state's upcoming ban.
Items in the firing line include single-use plastic cutlery, straws, stirrers, plates, bowls, chopsticks and sporks.
Other products being phased out are cotton buds and expanded polystyrene (EPS) food service items.
Plastic microbeads found in rinse-off personal care products - used for exfoliating and scrubbing - will also face a ban.
The supply of all these materials will be phased out by November 1 2022.
The NSW parliament passed the 'ground-breaking' legislation in November last year which will gradually halt the supply of problematic single-use plastic items.
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Do Leftists rely on ill-informed women to gain power?
On extremely rare occasions, news stories about political focus groups reveal something interesting.
Last Friday, Newscorp reported on a group of swinging voters who will (apparently) decide the Prime Minister’s fate. The group was mainly comprised of women because most male voters said they had already made up their minds.
What did these crucial women voters – who we are told time and time again have a near-mystical understanding of what is best for Australia – have to say?
Did they fume about the Liberal Party’s supposed ‘woman problem’ and demand to smash the patriarchy?
No.
They compared Scott Morrison to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, finding the latter quite the hottie in his T-shirt and battle fatigues. That is what they ‘want our Prime Minister to be’ on the campaign trail – not shaking hands with people in a suit.
Did they give detailed rundowns on how Morrison has performed and follow up with a careful analysis of his failings?
No.
He ‘knows his finances and stuff’ but ‘comes across as obnoxious’ so they ‘don’t really listen to anything to do with [him]’ – according to the focus group.
Did they rage about ScoMo’s views on climate change, transgender rights, or any of the things that supposedly damn him forever? Did they show an interest in the economy, or security, or long-term nation-building goals?
No.
Even when prompted about their main policy issue, they could not identify anything in particular. They wanted to get rid of Morrison, but didn’t ‘know the best way to go about that … don’t know enough about it’.
Did they show even the most basic knowledge about or interest in the democratic process?
No.
They ‘don’t follow it closely’ but also definitely don’t want someone ‘arrogant’.
Thank goodness these women have vague ‘feelings’ about Prime Ministerial dress codes. Their position on fashion policy will see their votes used judiciously for the common good of the nation.
There is nothing astounding about their quotes. Political scholars have repeatedly found that women – although often more partisan than men and quicker to take up ‘causes’ – are less likely than men to show interest in macro-level political issues and more likely to preference narrow topics that they believe directly affect them (think sexual harassment or paid period leave).
What is new to the political field is this demographic being elevated to holy status in Australia by so-called ‘progressives’ in both major parties.
They want us to believe that women will guide us into a Utopian future – well, a future that involves getting politicians elected without requiring policy detail.
The same ‘progressives’ who are quickest to jump on a platform about how ‘women need to be heard more in politics’ are silent about how little average women know. Female political ignorance suits ‘progressives’, so long as those women stick to criticising anybody who ‘progressives’ disagree with.
‘Progressives’ go dewy-eyed about equality while encouraging women to stay focused on soft, highly gendered issues. By refusing to call any of this out, the same ‘progressives’ who wax lyrical about girl power are complicit in women remaining wilfully ignorant on significant political issues.
Ignorance makes people far easier to control, but is pandering to it for short-term gain really going to take our country in the right direction?
And why do many women choose to remain ignorant in a society where they have so much opportunity to be otherwise?
For years, this was blamed on useful scapegoats like gendered socialisation. Anybody who still invokes such excuses is trying to skirt the far more likely prospect that there are fundamental differences between how women and men think, and one of those seems to be that – even after decades of feminism – women still prefer babies, husbands, and domesticity. Women are not turned off politics because of misogyny in Parliament House. They never switched on to politics because they simply do not have a burning interest in the big picture.
For all their protests otherwise, ‘progressives’ want the status quo to remain because they need women to have feelings about small targets, rather than thinking deeply about difficult problems. They rely on this for their pathway to power.
If ‘progressives’ admitted that they can only get ahead by manipulating women’s ongoing obliviousness, this would undo years of carefully constructed narratives about the wisdom of women. It would also raise some uncomfortable questions about things like quota systems.
Suddenly, questions might start to come up about whether, when women do engage with politics, it is because they are truly interested in the broad issues that do affect everybody, or because they think their own small issues should concern everybody and damn the rest. Unfortunately, when you consider what is happening in Australia today, it looks a great deal like the latter.
‘Progressives’ validating ignorance and encouraging women to turn a blind eye to anything but the low-hanging fruit of gendered politics is going to end badly in the long term. However, I will not hold my breath on anyone having the guts to stand up against it. Such a step would be too much like real progress. And that might not go over very well in focus groups.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/progressives-prefer-to-keep-their-women-ignorant/
***************************************************Energy security fears spark oil and gas supply pledge
Australia’s biggest energy companies say they will ignore calls not to open up new oil and gas fields, describing a “frightening” scarcity of new developments as Russia’s Ukraine invasion sparks the worst global energy security crisis since the 1970s oil embargo.
While the International Energy Agency warned last year that no new oil or gas fields or coal mines should be opened up if the world is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Australia’s largest producers say it is vital to develop new sources of supply, with Santos concerned it has already missed opportunities.
“We are watching an energy crisis play out in Europe right now, but we have on our doorstop a prime example of what happens if the energy transition is focused only on stopping new oil and gas projects,” Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher will tell the APPEA industry conference on Wednesday.
“We’ve had a decade of moratoriums, shutdowns and lockouts in resource-rich states and territories. And, as I have said for a number of years, the resulting scarcity of new developments today is frightening, with forecasts of tight supply over coming years.”
LNG has shot to all-time highs this year, while oil has surged 40 per cent after supplies were effectively shut off from Russia, sparking a battle across Europe and Asia to secure replacement volumes.
Woodside Petroleum said a crunch on supplies around the world had elevated energy security into a major issue for both the industry and consumers.
READ MORE:Ditch the ideology on energy policy: Santos chief|Open up new oil and gas fields: APPEA
“I think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really has catalysed the energy security conversation in a way that it’s not been done since the 1970s with the Arab oil embargo,” Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill said.
“Nations and political leaders first and foremost think about their home patch before thinking about their role in the global world. And the short-term implication is that there are challenges on reliability and challenges on affordability.”
The scramble for supplies has reignited a debate over energy security and emboldened producers to agitate for opening up new oil and gas fields, despite rising pressure from investors to set more ambitious climate change goals.
A push by activists to exclude fossil fuels was misguided and would simply push supply to rival nations with less stringent pollution goals, said the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the industry body that counts Woodside, Shell, Santos, BP and BHP among its members.
“The focus of our opponents on stopping fossil fuel projects has had no effect on consumer demand, and no effect on emissions reduction. What it has done is to push fossil fuel developments to places such as the Middle East and Russia,” APPEA chairman Ian Davies said.
“This has created a supply crunch and has raised prices, hurting people and economies around the globe.”
Chevron, which operates the giant Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects in Western Australia, tipped ongoing price and supply volatility.
“There are going to be disruptive forces that move the markets around and energy supply around. Given these types of challenges, we can help to solve the types of problems that we‘re seeing, but there will still be some bumpiness as we make the twists and turns,” Chevron Australia director of operations Kory Judd said.
ExxonMobil Australia said the industry was used to geopolitical ructions and the best way for it to respond was by ensuring sufficient supply in the market.
“We’re putting a lot of focus now on Russia but in the past it could have been Venezuela, it could have been Iran, it could have been Libya. So there are always geopolitical events affecting overall supply and demand dynamics. In many instances we see those reflected in price and supply issues,” ExxonMobil Australia chairman Dylan Pugh said. “It goes back to some of those fundamental principles about continuing to bring on investments and making sure that you have a market that’s not so fragile.”
Chevron also took a swipe at iron ore producer Fortescue Metals after its chairman Andrew Forrest attacked the oil and gas industry for relying on carbon capture schemes to cut emissions.
Dr Forrest slammed carbon capture as unreliable and questioned whether a mass rollout of the technology was going to solve the industry’s pollution problems.
Chevron said its $2.5bn Gorgon carbon capture and storage project under WA’s Barrow Island, which is still only operating at half capacity, was storing the equivalent of Fortescue’s annual pollution each year.
“We’ve injected 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide since 2019 and 2.1 million tonnes last year, and that’s about equivalent to the emissions a company like FMG emits in a year,” Mr Judd told the conference.
“I read all of the negativity around it but I see it happening reliably every day.”
Santos, which is developing several major carbon capture projects, was also set to criticise negativity around the technology.
“The new focus on stopping oil and gas projects in environmentally responsible jurisdictions such as Australia is centred around discrediting a proven technology for low-cost, large-scale emissions reduction – carbon capture and storage,” Mr Gallagher is expected to tell the conference on Wednesday.
“Yet CCS has been done before. We are doing it now in 27 commercial projects around the world. And it works.”
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Cost benefit analysis of Australia's Covid response shows low benefit and big costs
Australia’s Covid policy response has been driven entirely by primal fear and hysteria, with reason playing no role. Until today, no Australian state or federal governments have commissioned a CBA.
In mid-2020, Professor Gigi Foster of the University of New South Wales, had prepared on her own CBA for Victoria. Last year, she decided to update it and broaden it to cover the whole of Australia. I have assisted her over the past 8-9 months on this project. She has published a PDF of the Executive Summary of the CBA.
Its highlights are:
The government has lied about the magnitude of the Covid pandemic, which is 50-500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu. Once we consider the fact that Covid kills mainly the elderly, its effective lethality is even less.
Lockdowns have prevented a maximum of around 10,000 Covid deaths during 2020-21 in Australia, not the 40,000 lives Mr Morrison claims to have saved.
There were at least 7,940 additional non-Covid deaths from lockdowns in the first two years of the pandemic (in fact, there were more: ABS data shows over 3,000 excess cancer deaths just in 2021 of people so terrorised by the lockdowns and hysteria in 2020 that they did not get their cancer identified and treated in time).
Every policy-driven harm that reduces our lifespan or earning power, every harm to our children, and every harm through reduced capacity of the government to buy wellbeing is added up in the CBA. Gigi Foster estimates that the harms from lockdowns exceed any benefits by at least thirty-six times.
This CBA’s estimate is not an outlier. It is consistent with innumerable CBAs that have by now been published across the world which show similar (or even greater) orders of magnitude of harm from lockdowns.
While the full CBA will perhaps be published later in a book form, its Executive Summary is sufficient to destroy the innumerable falsehoods we have been told over the past two years.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/lockdowns-did-more-harm-than-good/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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