Australian Politics
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Australia 1.47°C warmer than it was when national records began in 1910, State of the Climate Report reveals
Let's try a little logic here. If the Australian temperature is .37 of a degree above the global temperature of 1.1 degree then a significant part of the Australian warming is NOT due to global influences. That being so, how do we know that ANY of it is due to global influences? Both the global and Australian temperatures could be random fluctuations and probably are. Fluctuations are common in the long-term global record. Temperatures over the last 100 years or so are just a recent uptick from the Little Ice Age
Australia is 1.47°C hotter today than it was just over 100 years ago, putting it ahead of the global trend of 1.1°C of warming, the biennial State of the Climate report released on Wednesday reveals.
The report, from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, revealed Australia as a whole is 1.47°C warmer than it was when national records began in 1910, although there is a margin of error of 0.24°C.
Most of that increase in warming has taken place since 1950, and every decade since the 1950s has been warmer than the one preceding it, the report stated.
Australia’s warming trend was seen across all months of the year, in both day time and night time temperatures, with a marked increase in the number of extremely hot days.
In 2019 – Australia’s hottest year – there were 41 extremely warm days, which the report said were “about triple the highest number in any year prior to 2000”.
While the temperature trend for the country has been uniform, with regards to rainfall the results are more mixed
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Rising energy bills may derail green transition, cautions Origin Energy
Rising household energy bills this decade could spark a backlash against the move to renewables, Origin Energy said, while warning the exit of coal power plants may need to be delayed to safeguard the power grid.
Treasury has warned of a 56 per cent jump in power prices in the next two years, while Labor will intervene in Australia’s domestic gas market before Christmas to calm soaring prices.
The industry needs to invest $76bn by 2030 to achieve the energy transition under Labor’s Powering Australia policy, but Origin argues companies face a challenge meeting that goal while also keeping a lid on high energy costs.
“Delivering the energy transition, given the scale of investment required, will undoubtedly create upwards pressure on energy bills,” Origin chief executive Frank Calabria told a CEDA forum on Tuesday.
“I fear rising energy prices could erode community support for the transition – a task that can only be delivered with co-ordination and commitment across governments, the private sector, market operators, regulators and communities.”
Origin, juggling a $18.4bn takeover bid from Brookfield and EIG, said the industry must be upfront with consumers over the cost of the move to green energy.
“We must be honest about the likely impact on bills over the short- to-medium-term to reduce bill shock,” Mr Calabria said.
“We must consider what levers are available to ease cost inputs right across energy bills, while implementing additional support for those in our community least able to pay.”
Gas consumers also face a big financial hit, with tariffs expected to increase by 20 per cent this year and in 2023-24 due to an ongoing supply crunch on the nation’s east coast and near-record LNG prices filtering through to the local market following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Origin raised concerns over a planned intervention in gas markets by the Albanese government, warning it was worried about the “unintended consequences” of a price cap being introduced.
“We want to be a good international player. We want to make sure supply is available. And I think we don‘t want to have unintended consequences,” Mr Calabria told reporters on Tuesday.
It also weighed in on the vexed issue of coal plant retirements noting coal closure time frames had accelerated this year with some 17GW of supply expected to exit the market by 2035.
Origin itself brought forward the closure of the nation’s largest coal power station, NSW’s Eraring, by up to seven years to August 2025 to meet green goals and focus on clean energy generation. A decision on whether to keep the plant open would be made several years in advance, according to the Origin chief, suggesting a mid to late 2023 deadline.
Mr Calabria said the scale of coal exits out through 2035 may require a reversal of some retirements should not enough replacement supplies be in place.
Consideration “must be given to the cumulative impact of these closures on the market alongside the prospect of delays to new infrastructure coming online,” Mr Calabria said.
“There may be a requirement to delay the exit of some of these coal units, and only for as long as needed, to maintain the security and reliability of the national electricity market.
“These policies will need to be flexible, with consideration given to commercial factors like compensation for costs incurred in running uneconomic plants, as well as the need to retain coal plant workers, secure coal supply contracts, and many other related matters,” Mr Calabria said.
Origin said it was worried about the nation failing to achieve its renewable supply targets against a backdrop of having to triple capacity by 2030.
“We must execute projects with greater urgency,” Mr Calabria told the forum. “I’d argue that we’re still not moving with enough urgency to build the replacement infrastructure needed within the next seven years to manage coal closures and achieve the nation’s objective of 82 per cent renewables by 2030.
“As each day passes, not only does the urgency and complexity of the challenge increase, so too does the cost.
“We need to deliver utility scale renewables faster than we’ve ever done before. The national electricity market currently has 3 gigawatts of renewable capacity slated to come online. This is good, but we’ll need much more – an expected 28GW by 2030.”
Brookfield has pledged an extra $20bn of spending on renewables should it prevail with its joint bid for Origin. Mr Calabria said the company would be able to fund its way through the transition if it remained as a public company, but said the Canadian’s cash injection may speed up the process.
“What I feel Brookfield has been clear about is that feel they have an opportunity to accelerate it even faster. So I don’t feel constrained but they’ve presented an opportunity which is obviously material.”
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Insane moment charming Muslim driver leans out of the window and lashes another car with a chain - as road rage victims reveal 'we thought we were going to die'
The victim of a road rage attack thought she was going to die when another driver leant out of his window and started striking their car with a chain.
Kirsty, 27, and her partner Lawrence were almost run off the road on Thursday by an aggressive Toyota Corolla Seca driver as they drove from Roxborough Park to Somerton in Melbourne's north.
The bizarre and terrifying ordeal lasted more than 15 minutes with the man tailgating, brake-testing and swerving towards the couple's car to try and get them off the road.
'Don't f****** come here,' the man in the early 1990s Corolla shouted out his open car window at the couple who were on their way to a gym.
He then lashed the chain at Kirsty's car, with the clanging sound being heard on the video filmed by Lawrence.
Kirsty can be heard asking her partner, 'Is he serious? Is he serious right now?'
She told 9News: 'He started actually swinging a chain at my car and damaged my passenger side.
'He was yelling at me, threatening to kill me and my partner.'
Lawrence said the man in the Toyota 'was driving so erratically that he ended up on the other side of the road and was continuing to pursue us'.
In part of the clip Kirsty is heard telling Lawrence that she does not want to pull in.
'I'd rather go in the gym and f****** get them to f*** him up,' she said.
As both cars pulled into the Somerton gym car park, CCTV captured the Corolla closing in on Kirsty.
When they parked, Lawrence immediately ran into the gym's reception area and summoned help from other customers and the owner who went outside with him.
Gym owner Maythan Sheriffi said he was shocked. 'The guy literally had a chain in his hand and it looked like... a long chain. 'He threatened us with the chain,' he said.
Kirsty has been so traumatised by her horrific ordeal she has had difficulty sleeping and was forced to take time off work to recover from the stress.
'I've just been terrified that it happened so locally, close to where I live and close to where I work,' she said.
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Labor has an election mandate to boost wages but multi-employer bargaining is a stretch
A new and curious argument crept into the industrial relations debate recently
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke both sought to justify their push to introduce multi-employer bargaining by the end of the year on the grounds they have an election mandate.
"The fact is that the government that I lead was elected with a mandate to increase people's wages," Albanese told parliament. "We went to an election and can't have been clearer. We can't have been clearer either in a speech I gave to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Sydney during the election campaign."
Workplace legislation change
The federal government makes concessions to its contentious industrial relations legislation in a bid to pass the workplace bill before Christmas.
Burke cited the same speech, when Radio National's Patricia Karvelas reasonably asked, "You didn't take multi-employer bargaining to the election, did you?"
"Hang on," the minister protested. "The Prime Minister squarely put bargaining on the table and said that to get wages — it was at a speech at an Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry meeting in Sydney during the election campaign — and he said we need to get wages moving."
So, the references during the campaign to "increasing wages" and "bargaining" apparently amount to a mandate for the legislation Labor is now trying to push through parliament in a matter of weeks. Legislation which would allow unions to negotiate deals across multiple employers.
Not everyone agrees Labor has a mandate
Business groups certainly don't think Australians voted for this. Nor do the independent MPs and crossbench senators demanding more time to properly scrutinise a complex reform.
There may be strong arguments for multi-employer bargaining, particularly to help workers in low-paid sectors like childcare. Few deny they deserve a better deal. But the argument that Labor has an election mandate to apply such a change in any sector, let alone economy-wide, deserves some scrutiny.
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Gay marriage has given our society little to celebrate
This week marked the fifth anniversary of Australia supporting same-sex marriage in a postal vote. Now we are being reassured by same-sex marriage advocates that “society has not fallen apart”.
Think again. If the punitive coercion suffered by people who did not support gay marriage during the period preceding the vote didn’t convince you that this was not just about marriage, but about the gradual imposition of a radical agenda on the whole of society, then look what has happened since.
If the dissolution of society as we know it was an exaggeration, a furious expression of frustrated Christians angry at seeing the social verities of the past falling away, people might start looking at their local school and see what sorts of things are being taught to their children. The notion that our sexual identity is fluid and not fixed is now accepted in most government schools, and challenging that view is impossible.
It has already been raised as a problem if a religious anti-discrimination bill is ever passed, and activists are now fixated on making it harder to challenge the trans agenda even in private and systemic Catholic schools. In Canada, despite assurances and a preamble to the law, Catholic schools are having a very difficult time teaching Catholic precepts on marriage and sexuality, and in the US many individuals and groups are being punished for what amounts to thought crime, prompting a conservative backlash.
The real problem with the Marriage Equality fight was the fight itself. It was never a civilised discussion in a civilised environment. It was bare-knuckle and nasty from the Yes side, from daubing vile slogans on church walls to ridiculing and denouncing people on social media. I know, I went through it. And it goes on.
It has spread beyond marriage, to the trans agenda. I recently wrote a column about a woman who started an app for women and girls called Giggle. This woman was threatened with a human rights action over the very nature of the people for whom her app was intended, women, by a transsexual person who thought they should not be discriminated against because they identified as a woman. These are the two great mantras of the new society” “Discrimination” and “Identity”. It will only get worse.
Go back to the case of Israel Folau. Freedom of expression was not available to Folau who as a believing Mormon did not support same-sex marriage. Not only did he lose his job as Australia’s star rugby player but other players who supported him and did not support SSM were told not to say anything. Meanwhile, those who supported the Yes vote were allowed to speak out. Rugby Australia undermined their freedom of expression about conscientiously held views, becoming, in effect, the arbiters of their conscience.
An even graver case was Archbishop Julian Porteous who, as a preliminary salvo to the same-sex marriage vote, was dragged before the Human Rights board in Tasmania for disseminating a booklet outlining Catholic teaching on marriage to Catholic students. The complainant was not protesting about the church’s ban on remarriage after divorce or any of the teachings about marriage and fertility tied to the vows which married Catholics must make. No, this was an opener in the battle for same-sex marriage. The agenda of the Equality movement was not about equality at all: it was about trying to muzzle the view that the family, based on a generative relationship, is the bedrock of society which has been common to all societies of all religious persuasions since time immemorial.
Meanwhile, the trans agenda has inserted itself into the centre of right think. Who says society as we know it hasn’t declined?
Consequently, the number of cases of well-meaning ordinary people being denounced on social media, or to the human rights apparatuses and even pushed out of positions for stating quite ordinary views on marriage, the family and sexual identity is increasing, and freedom of expression – and particularly of religious expression – is being undermined.
Andrew Thorburn is an ordinary man who happened to be at a church nine years before when his minister expressed moral views not in line with the Equality mantra. Thorburn is chair of the City on a Hill church, which Essendon football club pronounced has views in “direct contradiction to our values as a club”. So, a football club, assuming a prior moral authority to the church, forced his resignation as the club’s CEO.
Not surprisingly, it was this case that has awakened the general public to the danger that now awaits anyone. Not only could someone dig up a sermon a pastor gave nine years before and still hold you to account, but how long before, Torquemada-like, you are taken to the inquisitors of the board of the company for which you work, or the school where you teach, or any governing body?
It is well known that in most echelons of the public service various topics of conversation, especially those dealing with sex and family issues, are off the table. The endorsement of Thorburn’s removal by the AFL and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews highlights the frightening seriousness of this. It has made a mockery of the idea that we have equality of expression, and the real fault line is freedom of religion.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
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My son Joe at ANU
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