Sorry for the infrequent posts but I've been busy writing a bit. Yes, I'm writing a damn novel. It's about 1984 but not the Orwell novel. It's about what my part of the world looked like that year, before it totally fades away and people think 1984 looked like 'Back to the Future'. I'm getting to the meaty part of it and so I can no longer give it my divided attention so to speak. I have to really knuckle down and weave all the bits together and that has meant less blogging here.
Anyway... today's headlines sort of compelled me to drop what I've been doing and make a few points.
Idiots Will Be Idiots
I think "boys will be Boys" is too general a generalisation. It is more specific to say stupid people will do stupid things, idiots will be idiots. Which brings us to the Coalition government down in Canberra who own a particularly negative distinction for having put in a policy that is not meant to work but looks like it's working because the government throws money at the problem without any accountability, namely the Direct Action plan to control carbon emissions.
Having signed up to the Paris accords, this very same government is meant to do something about carbon gas emissions in this country but it cannot bring itself to even study its own policy's limitations, let alone propose something that sounds like a policy they campaigned hard to pull down.
And so this week we had this fracas:
Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg on Monday launched the long-awaited review - which controversially promises to look at whether to introduce an emissions intensity scheme for electricity generators, which is a type of carbon price - though he emphasised a focus on household electricity prices and energy security.
Energy and business leaders immediately issued a plea to the Coalition and Labor: end a decade of destructive politics and come up with a shared national plan to cut emissions over coming decades, including some sort of carbon price.
Most were open to that being an emissions intensity scheme, which would set a baseline for how much carbon dioxide a power station could emit for every unit of power generated, penalising those that breached their limit and rewarding cleaner models that emitted less.You would think that such pleas form their own constituency of businesses would be enough to reconsider their position, wouldn't you. But you would be wrong.
Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, freshly returned from three months at the United Nations in New York, said transitioning to an emissions intensity scheme was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It is not in the Australian national interest for the government to chase policies that ingratiate it with the Greens.
"To get back on the right economic track, we need the cheapest electricity in the world."
West Australian MP Andrew Hastie said his overriding concern was the cost of living for families and asked: "Why would we unilaterally, economically disarm [by adopting a price on carbon]?"
South Australian MP Tony Pasin said that given the current economic climate, "the government should be doing all it can to put downward pressure on the cost of electricity generation to reduce the power bills of hard-working Australians".
NSW MP Craig Kelly said it was fair enough for Mr Frydenberg to leave "everything on the table" as the review was undertaken but then added: "I do not see how any form of carbon trading scheme would put us at a national competitive advantage".
Another MP, who asked not be named, said he was "scratching his head" why the government had released the review - and opened up a new political fight - just three days after securing year-ending wins in Parliament.
"There is very real concern among colleagues that this goes down a track we were promised we would not go down."You can just feel the train crash going on there. There's this myth that somehow Australia's economy needs cheap electricity derived from fossil fuels to be competitive in the world economy. This is from the same government that manoeuvred to shut don the automobile manufacturing industry in this country. We don't have the kind of secondary sector in this country that would benefit from said cheap electricity. Not to mention the fact the countries that do have such secondary industries are moving over to renewables faster than you can say "George Bataille and the Solar Anus".
The broader picture is that because the Coalition turned it into their raison d'être to deny climate change is even real, has made it singularly unable to turn around and deal with the problem. And the joke is on them because they took the junkets to Paris to sign the goddamn piece of paper to say that they would do something serious about it - and they can't blame the Labor Party for that like they do all things.
So what did our Prime Minister do? Like brave Sir Robin, he quickly ran away.
Two days after Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg put consideration of an emissions intensity scheme on the table, Mr Turnbull said such a scheme had never been part of the Coalition review of its climate policies.
"The position is very clear, it is absolutely clear, this review is business as usual . . . The one thing I want to be very clear about, we are not going to take any steps that will increase the already too high cost of energy for Australian families and businesses," Mr Turnbull said.Well, bravo sir, bravo!
Peak Stupid In Canberra
Some people have asked me, if I'm willing to say name calling didn't exactly help Hillary Clinton's cause, why do I continue to call the Coalition government in Canberra stupid? The short answer to that is that stupid is not a name, it is a description, an adjective. That is to say, if I called them stupid bastards or stupid cunts, then well, I would be name calling - but the important part still wouldn't be that they are bastards and cunts, but rather, that they are stupid.
In that spirit, I want to show it is not me in the wilderness hurling invective and abuse from my blog, it is even the journalists who cover these people firsthand that cannot but describe the way this government behaves as being stupid.
At the end of the political year, the government looks like a bunch of people clinging to their jobs, and doing whatever it takes to keep clinging to them – or if they are not doing that, they are trying to engineer the downfall of others, week after week, issue after issue.
Sensible people in the government would of course tell you this process of reviewing the manifestly inadequate Direct Action policy was doomed from the start – that it would be impossible to engineer a rational climate policy, one which reduced emissions at the least cost to taxpayers, and steer it successfully through this particular Coalition party room.
Sensible people would say this process was always going to degenerate into a battle of straw men and a proxy war about leadership.
They are doubtless correct in that assessment.
This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime.
That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.
Year ends with Senate roulette and deals spun as grand bargains and cunning plans
Like I said, it is hard to escape that conclusion.
Like I said, it is hard to escape that conclusion.
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