Australian Politics
Monday, November 28, 2022
The Nationals will oppose a voice to parliament
Well, that's it. Referenda in Australia never succeed if there is significant opposition to them. With the National party opposed, the referendum will be lost. Good riddance to racism. Many National Party members will have seen Aborigines close up so will have no illusions about their high levels of dysfunction. It's the last thing any reasonable person would want privileged
After a partyroom meeting in Canberra on Monday morning, the junior Coalition party has decided to oppose the proposal in a referendum. The issue is expected to be discussed in the joint Coalition partyroom on Tuesday.
Nationals Leader David Littleproud said the party had consulted with architects of the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart Pat Anderson and Professor Megan Davis.
CLP Senator for the NT Jacinta Price said the Party would not support a “failed model”.
She slammed Minister for Indigenous Australians for going to Indigenous communities “dripping in Gucci” and telling First Nations’ people “what they need”.
“We have to stop dividing this nation on the lines of race,” she said. “We will not be supporting a failed model.”
“It’s not racist to disagree with a proposal … that lacks detail and divides us on the lines of race,” Senator Price said. “I hope the Voice is not successful.”
Mr Littleproud said the Liberal Party’s position was a “matter for the Liberal Party”. “We are two separate parties. We have different values, different principles, different constituencies,” he said.
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Chicken Little propaganda dressed up as science
The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report. The climate has warmed by 1.5C and there is barely a single benefit – it is all disaster.
It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all? The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in the recent decades.
Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.
But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.
A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef. It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the past six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985.
This proves that all the hype about the coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously untroubled by the contradictory evidence. They ignored it.
And they also ignore the fact that corals grow about 15 per cent faster for every degree temperature rise, and that almost all the corals on the reef also live in much warmer water near the equator. We should expect better coral, and it should extend further south. That is not too bad, is it?
Why doesn’t the report mention that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere improves the water utilisation efficiency of dryland plants, which occupy most of Australia, and that this has caused plants to thrive? According to NASA satellites, there is a “greening” of Australia of at least 10 per cent. Overall, the world has seen the area of green leaves expand by the equivalent of twice the area of the United States in just 35 years.
In a changing climate, there will be winners and losers, and it might be that the net effect is a major problem. But if the report writers will not even mention the good bits, how can we have any confidence in its findings?
The latest report should ring alarm bells – but not just about climate. Is this an excellent tool of propaganda, or is it a scientific statement?
We should all worry about whether groupthink has taken hold of the BOM and CSIRO.
We should worry when the BOM says it has recently adjusted all the temperature records reducing the temperatures a century ago by up to a degree. Can we have any confidence they did this with a good scientific reason?
And we should worry about the BOM’s claims that the fire seasons are now much worse than in 1950. Why is all the information on huge bushfires before 1950 ignored – like the devastating 1851 Victorian bushfire and the 1939 fires? It is not like there is no data before 1950.
Did they ignore that data for a good reason? Is this similar to the US fire statistics, which are often reported by authorities as having a major increase in fire acreage burnt since the early 60s, but fail to mention that there was almost 10 times more acreage burnt in the “dust-bowl” period in the 1930s?
In the next decades, Australian governments plan to spend hundreds of billions attempting to prevent climate change. Before we do that, maybe we could spend a few million doing an audit of BOM and CSIRO reports.
Maybe we would find that adapting to a changing climate is by far the best way to proceed. We might even find that some of what we have been told is wrong.
Why will the conservative parties not commit to an audit? Who would argue against a bit of checking of the science, when the Great Barrier Reef statistics prove scientists got something badly wrong?
And the latest report is a sure sign that the BOM and CSIRO are drifting into political advocacy rather than science, observation, and objective prediction.
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Victorian Liberals have become a spectacular example of why pandering to global warming alarmists and woke causes doesn’t work
Andrew Bolt
THE Liberals must finally realise that cringing and pandering doesn’t work. Their humiliating loss in Victoria is their third beating this year for being cowards.
Is federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton watching?
Victoria is the most spectacular example of the new Liberal disease of following the polls, not their principles, but also just the latest.
In March, South Australia’s Liberal government was also flogged despite going green. It banned fracking – a safe form of gas extraction – in the state’s southeast. It offered rewards to the rich for buying electric cars. It promised emissions targets even tougher than federal Labor’s.
Yet it still lost. Yes, global warming was just one issue in that election, but it goes to the heart of the Liberal problem.
The Liberals are scared. Scared of criticism, particularly from the media left. Scared of opening their mouths to fight for their principles.
In May, it was the same pathetic story. The Morrison government also lost, despite going green and signing up to the absurd net zero emissions by 2050 target long touted by Labor.
In the end, it still got smashed. Labor beat it with a lie – to cut power bills by $275 by going even greener – and half a dozen Liberal seats fell to teal independents pushing the climate scare.
Incredibly, in a post-mortem at a Liberal party room meeting in July, party strategists and pollsters told the survivors the lesson was to go even greener.
As if. The Liberals tried exactly that in Victoria and are now destroyed.
Under Matthew Guy, they went so green that they promised to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, although even the Albanese government promises just 43 per cent.
They even preferenced the Greens above Labor, and didn’t stop there in stealing the left’s clothes. They also endorsed a “treaty” with people identifying as Aboriginal, selling out the fundamental Liberal principle of putting individuals above the collective.
But all this me-tooism just made them look weak, second hand and unprincipled, and, of course, it all failed.
Victoria’s Labor government on Saturday lost 6 per cent of its primary vote, but none of it went to the Liberals. The Liberals didn’t pick up a seat, on the count so far, and in Hawthorn a teal independent nearly beat one of the party’s’ most rah-rah warmists, former MP and favourite John Pesutto, who’d promised energy policies so green Victoria would see “probably the most important transition we are going to make in human history”.
Once again, the pandering failed. Yet I still hear Liberals demanding even more of that futile same, claiming so many voters believe in the climate crisis so religiously it’s suicide to resist.
It suits a certain kind of modern Liberal MP – careerist, lazy, a little stupid, without convictions – to believe that. Who wants the bother of thinking for themselves? Who wants to be booed on an ABC panel?
And let’s be frank, the Liberals no longer attract many people with the smarts to argue well. But what has go-with-flow surrender got the Liberals except failure?
If they cower, and now argue for what the left has said for years, they look like fakes.
If they now agree there’s a “climate crisis” that will cook their children, all they’ve done is tell voters that the Greens and Labor were right all along.
No, the Liberals must realise global warming – like Labor’s racist plans for an Aboriginal-only parliament – is a battle they can’t keep dodging.
They can never be greener than Labor, the Greens and the teals. And unless they tackle the lies of those climate catastrophists, they can never properly tackle their disastrous fake fixes.
We saw that in Victoria.
The Liberals were so scared of looking like “deniers” that they didn’t dare criticise Premier Daniel Andrews’s main election promise – for a new government-owned State Electricity Commission to run the state completely on green power in just over a decade.
Guy didn’t dare say this was bonkers: the technology wasn’t there, prices would explode and the difference to the climate would be zero.
Yet there’s an audience for the truth, even if not where Liberals usually look for validation.
On Saturday, the Liberals won huge swings in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s north and west, home to strugglers who must pay for the mad climate plans of the rich.
I know, opposing today’s great Labor causes – global warming and racially dividing Australia – will take years. It’s hard and painful work.
But the Liberals will never win an argument they still don’t even dare to put.
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Climate Council report finds Queensland bears highest cost of climate disasters in Australia
To attribute weather events to global warming is just assertion. Even the IPCC says you cannot validly do that
A Climate Council report released today has examined the financial, social and economic costs of climate change-driven weather events.
It found Queensland has lost a total of about $30 billion from extreme weather disasters since 1970 — about three times that of Victoria.
The economic cost to Queensland from the floods in February and March alone was $7.7 billion, with an estimated $5.56 billion in insured losses across south-east Queensland and coastal NSW.
Brisbane suffered about $1.38 billion in insured losses from this year's floods, more than any other local government area in Australia.
It comes in the wake of the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology's biennial State of the Climate report, which found changes to weather and climate extremes are happening at an increased pace across the country.
And more extreme weather is likely to come this summer.
The BOM's official summer outlook suggests eastern Australia will see above-average rainfall with more flooding expected.
Professor Lesley Hughes, a co-author of the report and a professor of biology at Macquarie University, said with the amount of rain falling in some areas, there's not enough time between disasters for communities to recover.
"We've got a situation where the catchments in many parts of eastern Australia are already saturated, so they can't really absorb more water."
Emergency services stretched to the limit
The emotional toll of seeing your home flood multiple times in one year is hard to fathom, but the people working to coordinate, sandbag, rescue and help clean up these disasters are also feeling the strain.
Former Queensland Fire and Emergency Services commissioner Lee Johnson said disaster-management and emergency service systems are under a great deal of pressure and "have been for some time".
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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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