Australian Politics

Jimbo’s circular economy

Judith Sloan

I was reading about the Productivity Commission’s most recently commissioned inquiry into the circular economy, ordered by Jimbo, our esteemed Treasurer. What the hell is the circular economy, I wondered?

Like all fine scholars, I went directly to Wikipedia and found this out. ‘Circular economy is an economic system that targets zero waste and pollution throughout materials lifecycles, from environment extraction to industrial transformation, and final consumers, applying to all involved ecosystems. Upon its lifetime end, materials return to either an industrial process or, in the case of a treated organic residual, safely back to the environment as in a natural regenerating cycle.’

It went on a bit longer, bringing in the terms: micro, meso, macro and something called a ‘sustainability nested concept’. I wasn’t really any the wiser apart from getting the drift that the circular economy is about being frugal and recycling stuff as much as possible.

My Nan and Pa knew a thing or two about the circular economy, although they wouldn’t have called it that. Having left school early and worked in a variety of jobs, they ended up as publicans on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria. Running a hotel was seen as a safe bet in life.

It was a demanding job, nonetheless. The six-o’clock swill meant that the front bar closed relatively early, but there was still the Ladies Lounge and the dining room to attend to. Providing accommodation was also part of the deal.

My grandparents eventually retired to a seaside town and went about their circular economy lifestyle. They had a big veggie patch, fruit trees and chooks. Nan collected buttons, wrapping and brown paper and string for reuse. She always had a collection of socks in the darning basket to be mended. Lights would be turned off on leaving a room.

They would collect wood from the adjoining fields, and during mushroom season, they would be out gathering as many fungi as they could find. Pa had a fishing net and would encourage locals and visitors to drag it out from the shore in a semi-circle, often capturing a weird assortment of seafood. Nan was a dab hand at scaling, gutting and filleting the fish.

They would do a big shop once a fortnight in Geelong. There were 44-gallon drums in the kitchen containing flour, sugar and rolled oats. Nan was a very economic cook; Pa was an expert at washing up – no dishwasher for them. They were really living the sustainability nested concept but didn’t realise it. In fact, they just thought they were saving money or not spending money unnecessarily.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Jimbo has in mind. For him, the circular economy is about more government regulation, bossing people around – telling them what they can and can’t do. Initiatives taken to promote the circular economy will inevitably impose more costs on producers who then pass them onto consumers. We will hear new terms such as ‘stewardship’ and building a ‘regenerative and restorative economy’. Above all, we will need to eliminate the current linear system because linear systems are bad.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad news here, but the business called Circonomy has been placed in liquidation, notwithstanding that Officeworks had been a foundation investor. This company emerged from an outfit called the World’s Biggest Garage Sale. It turns out you can’t really make money from other people’s trash notwithstanding the virtues of the circular economy.

Presumably, it was a mere drop in the (financial) ocean for Officeworks. And the spokesperson waxed lyrically when talking of the demise of Circonomy. Evidently, Officeworks remains ‘committed to continuing to play an important role in the circular economy, finding opportunities to transform what may be seen as waste into valuable resources.

One Queensland politician also chimed in, declaring the CEO of Circonomy has ‘shown us all how to be part of the circular economy where nothing is wasted and where we can all lead more sustainable lives. The impact she has made could not be measured’. Well, yes and no. The red ink in the financial statements rather measures the dollar impact.

I also recently enjoyed – OK, a strong word – a radio interview of some professor from RMIT in Melbourne, moaning on about the mountains of unusable and/or unwanted used clothing. According to this genius, we need a national solution to this problem, and we need to have national means of collecting this stuff and making further use of it. Of course, there would be a need for government funding and regulation – the typical solutions of the left’s compassionistas.

I am obviously missing something here: I thought that’s what decentralised opportunity shops do – receiving and reselling used clothing (and other goods) – and, in doing so, make money for the causes they represent. How would the good woman professor’s national scheme cut across what looks like a perfectly functional arrangement?

Of course, the rubbish recycling scam is a well-established part of the circular economy. We must all have a separate recycling bin; in some places in the country, residents are required to have more than one recycling bin. Most people dutifully sort their rubbish ignorant of the fact that, apart from aluminium cans, there is basically no market for recycled items.

It would make more sense to have one bin and for all the rubbish to be dumped in well-managed landfills. One thing we are not short of is available land. These days, these landfills with their membrane linings also generate electricity through the release of methane that can be fed back to the grid. That really does sound circular to me. Alternatively, we could burn the rubbish in giant incinerators like the Nordic countries do and generate electricity as well.

Don’t get me on to the ridiculous container deposit schemes. Consumers are hit with 10 cents per bottle/can, or whatever, on purchases but can drive the car with a collection of used bottles and cans in the boot to receive the cash back from government depots. The machinery does have an unfortunate habit of breaking down, but the lure of receiving that $2.20 is enough for some punters.

The Productivity Commission has evaluated these schemes and given them the firm thumbs down. They basically work to substitute recycling for receiving the deposit back. No net effect on littering or recycling is the impact, although the container deposit schemes are costly to run. Not that politically motivated state governments could care – it’s all about the political vibe and being seen to be doing something to promote the circular economy.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/jimbos-circular-economy/

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It will take more than hot air to fix Labor’s renewables woes

The wheels are falling off Mr Bowen’s energy policy as the Albanese government heads downhill like an out-of-control billy cart. Mr Bowen’s energy policy can be summed up as ‘not Mr Dutton’s policy’. That’s the extent of the substance to it, as each day brings more bad news for the 82 per cent renewables charade. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is turning to nuclear to meet future demand.

Rather than remove the prohibition on nuclear to enable market testing, the Albanese government will publicly fund a government-dominated inquiry to discredit the opposition’s nuclear energy plan. The aim is to ‘clear the decks’ for an election next year, rather than to deliver cheaper, cleaner energy for Australian households.

The Albanese government has gone on a crusade against nuclear. How Mr Bowen will produce costings for Mr Dutton’s plan when he is yet to provide costings for his own plan is anybody’s guess. This government is clearly afraid of nuclear and will do anything to put it down rather than face facts.

Microsoft is on the way to securing the Three Mile Island reactor to power a data centre. The reactor was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history in 1979. Midnight Oil sang about it with the scaremongering lines, ‘And when the stuff gets in, you cannot get it out.’ Microsoft plans to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1, not Unit 2 which suffered the meltdown.

Both Google and Amazon plan to use nuclear energy to power their data centres, too. Artificial intelligence and data centres are driving up energy use and the trend is only likely to continue. How wind, solar, and batteries will be enough for Australia’s future needs is not clear from Mr Bowen’s policy.

In Australia, two major green hydrogen plans have recently fallen through.

Further, two major investors in the unpopular Illawarra Wind Zone have pulled the pin on deploying offshore wind turbines. The move comes amid community concerns over the size of the zone and the proximity to the coast. The smaller zone was part of a political compromise that apparently didn’t sit well with investors.

In the US, the Department of Energy has announced US$900 million to support small nuclear reactors. President Biden’s administration:

‘…believes nuclear power is critical in the fight against climate change because it generates electricity virtually free from emissions, and that US nuclear power capacity must triple to meet emissions goals.’

This is a blow to Mr Bowen who has mocked nuclear energy on a daily basis for some time.

The biggest problem with Mr Bowen’s energy policy is that the evidence doesn’t support his assurances. For example, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) stated last week that the:

‘…cost of wholesale electricity rose during winter as periods of depressed renewable energy generation coincided with soaring demand for power in bitterly cold weather, data.’

Further, and although wholesale electricity costs were less compared to the previous quarter, the year-on-year costs were much higher. According to the AER:

‘Year-on-year prices were significantly higher across all regions, with Tasmania up 290 per cent, Victoria up 114 per cent and South Australia up 76 per cent.’

The $275 saving is long down amid such lofty numbers.

Unsuitable weather conditions for renewables generation in July and early August coinciding with increased demand was at the heart of the problem. Talk of batteries and pumped hydro (Snowy 2.0 is way behind its timeline and several times over its budget) are fantasy at this stage, with the reliance being placed on extending coal-fired power stations and increasing the amount of electricity generated by gas-fired stations.

Gas, too, is expected to remain at elevated prices for several years.

Yet the problem was recently exacerbated by wind drought – what Germans refer to as ‘dunkelflaute’ – and also that wind and solar projects are taking too long. So, any criticism of nuclear denies the lessons from overseas while pretending the current renewables rollout is progressing well.

Can renewables meet current demand? And can renewables scale-up like nuclear can? (As Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are betting on.)

The short answer is no. The long answer is that Mr Bowen’s Plan A is failing rapidly, and, by his own admission, he has no Plan B.

It will take more than hot air to fix Australia’s energy woes. It would seem that only a change of government will solve the crisis Mr Bowen got us into.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/it-will-take-more-than-hot-air-to-fix-labors-renewables-woes/

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Lessons from the new American right

Australian centre-right politicians are very fond of quoting Winston Churchill. One of the last pieces of advice that great wartime leader gave before finally stepping down was that: ‘We must never get out of step with the Americans – never.’

Today, it is striking how much leaders in Australia have diverged from their US counterparts.

Take foreign policy. Tony Abbott, now on the international speakers’ circuit, likes to use very bellicose rhetoric when discussing Ukraine and indeed many other trouble spots. In recent weeks, our former Prime Minister has encouraged bombing Iran and wants to send Australian military ships and jets to that part of the world.

But JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is much more circumspect. He has said bluntly, ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.’ Though supportive of Israel, the Iraq veteran is more reluctant to get America involved in another war in the Middle East.

It is an attitude he shares with his running mate. John Howard may still say he ‘does not regret’ the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and that the Afghanistan debacle was ‘not entirely a failure’. But this is in stark contrast to the way Donald Trump talks about those terrible wars – ‘the single worst decision ever made’, ‘throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest’ etc.

The new American right increasingly looks at the last 30+ years of failed interventions – from Somalia to Serbia to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Afghanistan to Ukraine – and believes they are the product of a fundamentally flawed ideology.

Their new stance is not ‘isolationism’, but one which stresses realism, rather than the utopian dreams of the George W Bush era and earlier. It is one which recognises that not every bad regime or godawful ethnic dispute on the planet is a re-run of the second world war or the Cold War and shouldn’t be treated as such.

JD Vance, as he often does, sums things up pithily: ‘There is nothing radical about having a strong national security so that when we go to war we punch, and we punch hard, but being cautious and not trying to get involved in any far-flung corner of the world. Sometimes, it is just none of our business, and we ought to stay out of it.’

Trade policy is another area where the Australian right is increasingly out of sync with the Americans.

‘Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,’ Trump recently told the crowd at a campaign stop in Michigan. ‘The most beautiful world in the English language is tariff…’ he told the Economic Club of Chicago a few days ago. One can well imagine Peter Costello’s head exploding when hearing stuff like that.

Yes, the Orange Man’s language is typically bombastic. But he is nevertheless right that a serious reappraisal of America’s trade agreements was long overdue. During his first time in the White House, Trump changed the bipartisan consensus on trade in Washington. If he gets a second term, his great big, beautiful tariff wall will only get higher.

In Canberra, no such reassessment has taken place. We remain ideologically stuck in the 80s and early 90s when questions about trade policy were supposedly solved for all time.

There is perhaps no better illustration of this out of date thinking than the agreement we signed with China on June 17, 2015 – the same day a flamboyant New York businessman came down the escalators in Manhattan promising to re-industrialise America.

Under that agreement we allow close to 100 per cent of Chinese manufactured goods to be imported duty free. So long as that continues, our country will never have a serious manufacturing industry.

Such a policy is neither economically sensible nor geopolitically wise as everyone from Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Robert Gordon Menzies could have told you. Yet we ignore this key issue and instead fret about whether Chinese leaders in Beijing will decide to have our lobster and wine for dinner.

On immigration, the US and Australian right are also dividing.

It is true we have been better in recent times at preventing unauthorised arrivals crossing the Timor Sea than Americans have been at the Rio Grande. Trump was elected for the first time to rectify this. However, our success at ‘stopping the boats’, has been used as an excuse to justify an excessively high legal immigration intake. As a result, in many ways, we are now in a worse position than the Americans. Our universities, cities, and real estate markets have been completely transformed.

While there have been some moves to reduce numbers, there has not been a recognition that the reliance on mass immigration in and of itself is a structural defect of our economy, not a benefit.

No amount of earnest talk about the need to inculcate ‘Australian values’ or minor adjustments will improve social cohesion if such high numbers continue. As Mark Krikorian, an influential advisor to the Trump-Vance ticket, has long stressed – the best immigration policy today is for it to be ‘low and slow’. This is the direction the Republican Party of the future is heading.

The above is not an argument that Australia must always adopt the same policies as America. But it is a plea, particularly to Liberal Party types, to take more seriously the ideas of the new American right. In many ways they reflect a wiser older conservativism. They have better solutions to today’s problems than the open borders liberalism that the centre-right in Australia has adopted since at least the end of the Cold War.

Left-wing Baby Boomers like to overly celebrate changes they made to social policy, overlook any downsides, and imagine they were the only ones who ever considered questions about family life, and how one should live a good life.

But the Australian right has a similar attitude when it comes to the Hawke-Keating-Howard era on questions of foreign policy, trade, and immigration. It is long past time that for that policy framework to be upended. The torch is being passed to a new generation. The times they are a-changin

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/lessons-from-the-new-american-right/

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Fudging on extremism has real consequences

Dallas McInerney, the chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW, shone last week for saying nothing more than what most of us already thought.

He balanced the scales, if you like, by stating the obvious.

He called out the “utter failure” of universities nationwide to counter outbreaks of Pro-Palestine protests marked by their menace and marauding absolutism.

He also called out teachers who wore keffiyehs to class for seeking to “indoctrinate” rather than “enlighten”.

McInerney’s candour is likely shared by a silent majority who wonder at the barbarism of the protest clarion calls, and who need not engage in the quibbling over the legalities of waving terrorist flags to know that doing so is drastically wrong.

He invites us to wonder why the safety of a section of the Australian community could be so readily jeopardised, in large part because the leaders and institutions charged with protecting such interests have been cravenly reluctant to do so.

His point also reminds us of the lessons of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who figured that appeasing Hitler might temper the German’s obsession with conquest. Pandering to extremism, his country discovered, promotes more extremism.

The past 12 months has felt like a moral vacuum in Australia. Tolerance has failed to confront intolerance. Activists masquerading as politicians have parroted ugly and infantile demands which ignore the battlelines of this crisis, as well as the battlelines of many Middle East conflicts over the past 80 years.

New beach house owner and prime minister Anthony Albanese has demoted himself to spectator status throughout much of it. His only conviction has been his adherence to statements and speeches which lack conviction.

One day, Albanese might get around to delivering the speech that had to be delivered, the one which explains who we are and what we believe in – and who we are not and what we do not believe in.

Six former prime ministers have condemned hate speech against Australians by Australians. But this prime minister has fudged on the big questions which, until he stumbled over them, had never seemed that hard to answer.

You may not always like what the likes of NSW’s Chris Minns and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have to say. But you like that they are unafraid to say it.

Albanese’s reticence also goes to a deeper misunderstanding. Call it a refusal to acknowledge the blindingly obvious.

There are no compromises in existential war.

There will be no Israel in the harder visions of Palestine statehood. Calling for ceasefires, and possible breaches of international law, misses the point. Laying down rules, from the cheap seats on the other side of the world, does not address the dire issue of one people’s determination to obliterate another people.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has played at Pollyanna behind a lectern this year. She has tut-tutted at Israel, like a schoolteacher who sees a playground brawl as an opportunity for innovative safety strategies, such as forbidding children from punching another.

She demanded the imposition of a two-state solution last month, and never mind the six or seven compelling reasons why it will not happen, not least the Palestinian intolerance for any version of Israel. Her words sounded like the geopolitical equivalent of inviting two grand final teams to accept a draw.

Wong heads our national interests overseas, but she has also seemed mindful of electoral interests at home. The Greens and Muslim votes may swing results in marginal ALP seats.

Wong has lamented the loss of civilians and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Both, of course, seem like reasonable positions, except that they have been offered without context for the blindingly obvious: that this war was triggered by a Hamas massacre; that if Israel did not fight back, Israel and its people would cease to be.

She was heckled last week, by Pro-Palestine protesters who had decided that she had “blood on her hands” because Australia had failed to act against Israel.

There will be no satisfying the more extreme elements, not unless those extreme elements succeed in destroying Australia’s friend and ally.

What remains obvious? That there will be more shows of anti-Semitism, and more efforts of appeasement in response, in loops which will have no impact on events in the Middle East, but could have real consequences here in Australia.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/fudging-on-extremism-has-real-consequences/news-story/d09a96c8ff30c9d3dc20f1100d96ef07