Australian Politics
The Greens’ push to ban new coal and gas projects would do nothing to lower global emissions – and could potentially increase them – as Australia’s trading partners would source lower-quality resources from other countries, according to Anthony Albanese.
Refreshing realism from a Leftist. And a good riposte to that loathsome Trotskyite Bandt
Ahead of a parliamentary stoush on the government’s climate change bill next week, the Prime Minister said the Greens had no detail on how to reach their 75 per cent by 2030 emissions reduction target and “the idea that you just shut things down” was not the way to build consensus on taking action on the issue.
Mr Albanese said Labor’s position would remain that new coal and gas projects could proceed if they stacked up financially and passed environmental approvals, with the future of the industry to be dependent on international demand.
“Policies that would just result in a replacement of Australian resources with resources that are less clean from other countries would lead to an increase in global emissions, not a decrease,” Mr Albanese told The Australian. “The Greens’ position is aimed at politics rather than what’s necessary, which is a recognition that Australia needs to do its part but doing its part is ensuring that the global emissions decrease.
“That’s why in our Powering Australia Plan, very explicitly, our policy says that Australian businesses that are competing against foreign businesses shouldn’t have a more onerous duty than they do because that just leads to replacement.
“That doesn’t achieve a reduction in emissions – that just produces less economic activity in Australia.”
Australia’s thermal coal is generally more efficient and less polluting than coal produced by other major exporters such as Indonesia, according to the Minerals Council of Australia.
Labor needs the support of the Greens to pass the climate change bill through parliament and enshrine its target to lower emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 in law. On Wednesday, Greens leader Adam Bandt said his partyroom had met and was ready to begin formal negotiations with Labor.
The party is concerned with the “adequacy” of the 43 per cent target, the lack of teeth to enforce the emissions reductions and the refusal of the government to ban new coal and gas developments.
Mr Bandt has also issued concerns the bill will lock in 43 per cent as a ceiling and not a floor – a claim rejected by the government – and is pushing for a “ratchet mechanism” which would allow the government to increase the target without new legislation.
Mr Bandt said the Greens were concerned “that the government’s desire to open new coal and gas mines will make the climate crisis worse”.
“Europe is burning and Australia’s environment is collapsing, but the government wants to open new coal and gas mines. You don’t put the fire out while pouring petrol on it,” Mr Bandt said.
“As well as the weak target that means more fires and floods, the Greens are concerned that the bill as drafted is a barrier to government lifting the weak 43 per cent targets, isn’t ‘Dutton-proof’ against a future government that wants to lower the targets, doesn’t require government to actually do anything to cut pollution and allows more coal and gas.”
Speaking to The Australian, Mr Albanese said his government’s climate change package had been backed by business and environmental groups and was “an opportunity to end the climate wars”.
“Our position is that is a floor not a ceiling,” Mr Albanese said. “But you need to take business and communities with you on the journey.
“The idea that you just shut things down is not a way to bring more support. It’s a way in which you’ll have more division. And the division has not served Australia’s interests and has not served the interests of the Australian environment.
“What we need to do is to have the implementation of a serious plan, which we have. And some of the rhetoric that is there, that’s been there from some of the critics, is just a further recipe for ongoing argument.
“If people have sensible amendments, we’ll look at it. But we are not going to look at a figure. We’re going to have the figure that we have a mandate for.
“People do want action on climate change, but they also want to know that it’s achievable. And our plan is.”
Mr Albanese said the Greens had a 2030 emissions target “but they don’t have a plan to do it”.
“You can come up with whatever figure like if you if you just pluck out a figure and don’t have a plan to get there,” he said. “What we did was develop a plan including transmission, including an electric vehicles plan, including community batteries, including a use of the safeguard mechanism. All of the elements of our Powering Australia Plan … will reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.”
Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is not responsible for the carbon emissions from overseas power generators using our exported coal and gas. Economists and energy analysts expect international demand for coal and gas to gradually decline over the coming decades.
Australia’s major customers – including Japan, India, South Korea and China – all have net-zero commitments.
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New mum is OUTRAGED after being called a 'birthing parent' instead of a mother by the Australian government
A Gold Coast mother has called out the Australian government after being referred to as a 'birthing parent' rather than a 'mother' on a healthcare form.
Sall Grover says she was shocked by the 'alienating' form that has been introduced in some hospitals as part of a trial to upload new baby details to Medicare.
Ms Grover pointed out the form asked for the 'birthing parent's full name' in one box and 'birthing parent's signature' in another instead of mother - and shared an image of it on Twitter.
'Attention women in Australia: On the form to put our newborn baby on our Medicare card, we are referred to as 'birthing parent,' Grover wrote.
'Enough is enough. This absolute bull--- is exclusionary, alienating and derogatory towards every woman who wants to be and is called "mother."
'I know enough what is happening at the moment with women's rights, and the erosion of our language and spaces, so I know where it's coming from,' she said.
During an interview with the Today Show on Thursday morning, she said the new consent forms were simply to please fringe activists and lobbyists.
'The fact that it was on this government form saying 'birthing parent', shocked me.'
Today Show host Karl Stefanovic said he 'couldn't believe' the form had been changed in the first place and described it as 'bureaucracy gone crazy'.
'Motherhood is about so much more than that, it is every other day from then, you have your first few days of excitement, being part of that and then you see "birthing parent", are you reducing the role of me getting her here,' Ms Grover replied.
She called on the people offended by the term 'mother' to 'get help'. 'If the word "mother" bothers you so much, I mean motherhood is going to be quite a shock. Get help, go and deal with it if the word "mother" bothers', she said.
Today Host Ally Langdon said as a mother, she found the term 'birthing parent' dehumanising. 'I feel divided about it if I'm perfectly honest. As someone who does identify as a mother, I see that and it's sort of-putting to see birthing parent,' she said. 'It's dehumanising to me.
'But I understand when the surrogate and, you know, it's not one bill fits all.'
The new mother re-appeared on the Today Show later on in the morning, after news broke the new forms had been dumped.
'Since that interview went to air, Bill Shorten who is a regular on the show, has been in contact to confirm these forms have been dumped,' Karl said. 'Replaced with new ones that use the word "mother" not "birthing parent".'
Ms Grover said it was 'amazing news'. 'I was actually just talking to my own mum about it and I was saying it's awesome, fantastic. No complaint,' she told the hosts. 'It doesn't take a genius to work out that it should have been "mother" all along.'
While the new mum received an outpouring of support from Aussies, some pointed out that the word 'mother' alienates other groups such as same-sex couples, adopted parents and surrogates.
'One form that uses inclusive language is not erasing/stealing your rights/whatever other nonsense you're suggesting. 'Why is it ok to alienate other groups to keep you happy?' 'It removes ambiguity for situations with: lesbian couples, surrogate pregnancy, non-cis parents, adopted parents, and so many more situations.
'By using 'birthing parent', it neatly and simply clarifies specifically which person they need the signature from.'
However others agreed that the words 'birthing parent' had no place on the form. 'Disgraceful. Becoming a mother was the most special time of my entire existence. It re-defined everything I thought I knew about myself,' one wrote.
Anyone coming across this on forms should cross out the offending words & put MOTHER in block capitals,' another agreed.
'If there is space, write on the form, saying that their description is offensive to women. This has come about because a tiny minority have banged on about being offensive.'
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Australian socialism has arrived
It has taken roughly sixty years for Australians to succumb to the socialist yoke, but now, the evidence is all around. Only governments with a socialist mindset could contemplate $25 million for an indigenous flagpole or, countenance citizens waiting three months for a passport. Or establish a costly in-house public servant Harmony Council, a Rainbow Connection team and, a dedicated LGBTIQ unit, let alone sanction a school curriculum which indoctrinates students to believe their nation and its institutions are illegitimate.
And only meddling central planners could impose the rigidities and distortions which have led to Australia’s soaring energy prices and unreliable supplies. As the crisis unfolds, socialism’s fatal conceit demands market failure is responsible. The architects are never to blame.
The application of the yoke was gentle at first with infinite promises of prosperity, greater equality, and accountable government. But, despite promises, per capita economic growth over the past decade has slipped to its slowest pace in 60 years. And, rather than deliver equality, a recent Productivity Commission report found the wealth of the top 20 per cent of Australians has grown 68 per cent in the past 15 years compared to six per cent for the bottom 20 per cent.
Australia’s public service has been a major beneficiary. A decade ago, it represented 15 percent of the labour force. Today it directly employs over two million people or, 17 percent of all jobs. Public sector wage growth has outstripped the private sector 2.5 times, and, on average, government employees enjoy a shorter work week and greater workplace flexibility than the private sector which pays for it.
It’s hardly surprising. When both sides of politics are dedicated to passing more and more restrictive laws and regulations, many with criminal sanctions, extra public servants are hired to administer them. And so, power from the private sector is subtly transferred to a growing army of self-serving, unaccountable, politically active, bureaucrats who have quickly exerted their authority. This reality was graphically on display when Victoria’s ideologically driven police fired rubber bullets, at peaceful demonstrators protesting the world’s longest lockdown. This contempt for liberty saw a pregnant mother at home with her infant children, forcefully handcuffed for posting a politically unwelcome message on her Facebook page. These and countless other abuses of power, sent a clear message that government is free to do anything it pleases, while the people may act only by permission.
As appalling as the Victorian government’s actions were, so too was the silence of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the political class in general, big business and big media. It was left to the outside world to express amazement and disgust.
Aside from losses of freedom, Australia’s clumsy lockdowns have left massive government debts, lost childhood education, a surge in mental illness and, an increase in serious cancer cases due to delayed diagnoses. These are accepted as unintended consequences. After all, governments along with their health ‘experts’ and media allies, have too much political capital invested in mandates to ever admit fault. Best to ignore once-mocked Sweden which refused to impose lockdowns and, has one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe and, fewer ongoing health and economic issues.
Winston Churchill was right. ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who only knows what hurts, is a safer guide than any vigorous direction of a specialised character.’
Despite Churchill’s warning, today’s political class is in the hands of experts. It hides behind them when convenient and defers to them on measures to control the behaviour of the ‘plain man’. Facial recognition is already in service. There is an app to measure personal emissions and, central banks are considering digital currencies which can monitor everything we do. A Chinese-style social credit system seems just around the corner. Under this new socialist order, there is close collaboration between big government and big business. Profits now give way to environmental, social and governance criteria. Directors are accountable to different standards and must reflect gender ‘diversity’. Wealth generation increasingly depends on government patronage and central bank largesse. Careers are influenced by sexuality and race, who you know and how ‘PC’ you are. Today’s fastest growing job title is, ‘Chief Human Resources Officer’.
These measures impede innovation, entrepreneurship, and social mobility. Inevitably it’s the poor, trapped in learned victimhood and despair, who suffer most.
But who will publicly champion our freedoms and heritage? When even the word ‘mother’ can cause offence and, being politically incorrect is career limiting and socially ostracising, it’s understandable that intellectual cowardice is everywhere. And advocates certainly won’t be found within big government or big business and least of all, given their ideological predispositions, within our schools, universities, or the media.
So, while Karl Marx’s deception, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, has been exposed, the enemies of individual liberty, equality, and free market capitalism, continue to hold ideological sway. It’s a sorry tale. These authoritarian elites maintain power through a ‘divide and rule’ strategy, rendering ‘national interest’ a meaningless term. Their assault on the legitimacy of our values and institutions also attracts the attention of unfriendly foreign parties eager to exploit divisions and sensing opportunities should a small nation, rich in natural resources, suffer societal collapse.
Australian governments ignore these threats. They concentrate on racism and pronouns and subsidise the world’s fastest per capita renewable energy roll-out. It may keep climate change critics at bay, but it is a futile gesture with serious economic and social consequences.
Clearly, neo-tribalism and superstition have overtaken national security. As Ayn Rand foretold, we are free to stumble blindly down any road we please, but not free to avoid the abyss we refuse to see. That abyss is rapidly approaching.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/rainbows-and-rubber-bullets
******************************************Net-zero folly in Australia
Visiting the NSW Hawkesbury-Nepean floodplain, Prime Minister Albanese recently declared that his government had altered Australia’s position on climate change ‘from day one’. Relying on that non-existent entity which politicians employ like some pagan goddess, he claimed ‘the science‘ tells us that unless we take action globally ‘on climate change, then these events, extreme weather events, would be more often and more intense’.
Meanwhile, it is clear that China, Russia and India have absolutely no intention of closing down the development of their economies to achieve net-zero emissions. In addition, it is likely that after the next presidential election, the US will again abandon the Paris diktat. Nor, to avoid the retribution of their voters, will the leading European powers actually observe its terms.
The fact is no other nation is going to commit suicide on the basis of a discredited theory and the folly of net zero. This will increase the pressure on Australia’s elites to abandon their betrayal of the people, especially of the young.
But if they eventually do abandon this folly, they will still have done enormous damage. If they don’t, it will surely be time for Australians to take back their country, by all legal and democratic means possible.
In the meantime, let us return to the Prime Minister’s comments.
Since crucial parts of climate science are clearly unsettled, citing ‘the science’ as his authority for what may be termed ‘the Albanese theory of extreme climate events’ is hardly justified.
Even the UN’s IPCC does not dare do this. This is because scientific observations, over a century, show that most types of extreme weather events across the world either do not show any significantly worsening or are less common or less severe.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Meteorology warns that we may be about to experience a La Niña event three years in a row, something rare but not unprecedented.
Indeed, flooding on the Hawkesbury-Nepean plain has been known from the early days of British settlement and apparently before by the indigenous people.
There are records of floods, several larger than the most recent, in the years 1801, 1806, 1809, 1852, 1893, 1916, 1927, 1934, 1955 and 1974. And this is not an exhaustive list.
Much of this occurred, incidentally, well before a world in which motor cars and electricity were even available, much less the norm.
The reason so many people have been so badly affected by recent flooding is not global warming. It is first, the decision by the Hawke government, curiously followed by both sides since, to block what is absolutely necessary for the future of Australia, serious dam-building programmes such as prescribed in the Bradfield, Beale and Bridge Plans. Second, it is in allowing developers to build and sell urban housing on floodplains. Consistent with calls for integrity, politicians should be accountable in appropriate cases, personally and not merely under the civil law, just as businesses are for parallel offences.
And as Senator Canavan says, what journalists should be asking Mr Albanese is when will his policy, for which we are already paying and will pay so much more for far less reliable electricity, result in no floods and no droughts? This sort of interrogation should be addressed to those members of the elites who are so curiously dedicated to what Alan Jones and Terry McCrann long ago described as ‘signing a national suicide note’.
In the meantime, was anyone delighted to hear that the Treasury is again pouring more money down the drain on modelling the effect of climate change on the economy, restarting ‘work’ sensibly abandoned for almost a decade? As the great Anglo-American mathematician, Professor George Box, once famously warned, ‘All models are wrong but some are useful.’
Dr. Steven E Koonin, a pioneer in computer modelling, is a leader in science policy in the US, serving as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration. In his magisterial exposé of warmist extremism, Unsettled (2021), he points out that while computer modelling is central to climate science, uncertainties in modelling make it impossible today to provide reliable quantitative statements about the relative risks and consequences and benefits of rising greenhouse gases to the Earth system as a whole, let alone to specific regions of the planet.
The problem is that the climate is so chaotic it is impossible to simulate it in a model. One ‘stunning’ problem, he says, is that later generations of models are actually more uncertain than the earlier ones. The proof of their inadequacy, he says, is in their failure to reproduce retrospectively the warming observed from 1910 to 1940.
Dr Koonin reveals something appalling, indeed deceitful, in IPCC Reports. Although the models can disagree wildly with each other, what we are presented with is an averaging of those models. This completely undermines the predictions the politicians and media present as accurate to a fraction of a degree. The conclusion must be that the projections of future climate and weather events, which are thrown at us daily, are demonstrably unfit for purpose.
So, thank you, Treasurer Chalmers, for wasting even more of our money.
And thank you too, Warringah MP Zali Steggall, for explaining your most curious objection to nuclear power. This is that it cannot be turned on quickly when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow. Now that uranium expert Tony Gray has demonstrated from UK experience that nuclear power is in fact significantly cheaper than ‘renewables’, and anyway emits no CO2, why would anyone rational fill in with ‘renewables’?
When will our elites in politics, big business and the mainstream media admit that there is no advantage and every disadvantage in Australia adhering to the net-zero folly?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/net-zero-folly/
************************************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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