This Is The Shit You Voted For II

The Shit For Which You Voted, Part 2

If you've been a long time reader of this blog, you know I'm staunchly in favour of liberal democracy over fascism or communism or abject anarchy. So what I'm about to write next needs that stated before proceeding because I don't want this to be interpreted as a fascist screed railing against populism. 

One of the vexing things about democracy is that the majority gets their way even if it's a bad idea. That's kind of it. It's a natural derivative of the decision making chain, but the way it works out for big policy items is terrible. Global Warming has been on the agenda since the late 1980s. Since then I've watched as successive Australian governments mostly tried to put off doing anything about Global Warming. The early list of recalcitrants include Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard. John Howard was particularly bad in that he kept pushing off the discussion, striking the pose of a reasonable sceptic. Maybe the scientists were wrong, he argued. Like, all of them? Really? 

Kevin Rudd was the only Prime Minister who went to election claiming Global Warming was indeed a priority issue, and thanks to a drought at the time he was able to drive that point home and win. He went to Copenhagen to negotiate something tangible and as Copenhagen talks failed, he expended his political capital. Then, of course Rudd was undone by Julia Gillard who promptly went to election promising not to do anything about Global Warming (and was forced to the table to negotiate with the Greens who made her do something-not-nothing). Tony Abbott used that back-up to get into government with the promise to undo what the Gillard/ALP-Green government had done. He had no intention of doing anything about Global Warming. Malcolm Turnbull who replaced him ostensibly did want to do something about it, but his denialist party hamstring him enough that he could not do anything - but that is of course like a dog eating his homework. He was then unseated by our current imbecile Prime Minister Scomo who is aspirational about zero emissions by 2050. Will he do anything about it? Not if his new deputy PM and erstwhile denialist nut job Barnaby Joyce has anything to say - and of course Joyce has a lot of dumb things to say about climate. 

The personally alarming thing about that sequence of bad-for-the-environment Australian Governments is that it covers 30 years and only the 3 years with Kevin Rudd marked a moment of leadership on Global Warming. 90% of the time, our governments put other things as their priority. Now, I'm not crazy, I understand things like Mabo, tighter gun laws, Post-9/11-war-on-terror, disability insurance, and budget deficits are kind of important. Be that as it may, we all live on this planet and if we fuck it all up, there's no point having surpluses on budgets or Aboriginal Native Titles on a scorched Earth. I'm sorry but that's just the pragmatic reality. I was about to include the GFC on that list but amazingly Kevin Rudd's government was dealing with that while still putting Global Warming front and centre. He had his faults but his priorities were not one of them. In fact, with hindsight his time in government looks much better than the press of the time described. 

The really disappointing thing is that through that 30 years - and more before even then - I have been voting for people who put Global Warming as something that needs to be addressed; and what that has amounted to is a lot of lost elections for my votes. Understand this: my conscience on the issue of Global Warming is clear. I might have had the dubious moment where I voted for Mark Latham's ALP when he was in charge, but to be fair, he had a better policy platform on Global Warming than John Howard who poo-poo-ed the notion at that election. For all my time voting on the issue, I've got bupkis for it. Nada. The debate has remained fixed along idiotic lines with nary a policy worth shit.  

It's enough to make you wonder if Democracy has failed itself. Consider the extent to which China with its authoritarian Communism with paranoid characteristics, has managed to swing towards renewables. It's a little like how Fascist governments were able to massively industrialise at the drop of the hat back in the early 1930s. It's enough to draw in some kind of approval from the rest of the world. Here we are in Australia with one of he most robust democracies in the world, and somehow we can't get our shit together to deal with Global Warming. Meanwhile there's paranoid authoritarian China doing its part to stave off the calamity. It makes you wonder about democracy itself, no? Just why is it that we somehow can't deal with the Big Picture ticket item when we put things to a vote? 

The answer is of course the strident Murdoch media outlets with their hectoring, bulling, irrational hostility towards anybody who wants to do anything about it, but the big bill will be coming their way just as it will come to you and I. Murdoch with his money and influence, kept winning while I kept losing out. The way I see it, they have more houses that can't be insured ready to be burnt down by firestorms or washed away by mega-storms or just generally more crap to lose in Global Warming. So we'll see who's laughing when their part of the world goes up in smoke is or is washed away in storm waters. Me? I don't have kids who will inherit this sorry Earth ruined by rapacious capitalism and industrialisation. I don't have a house, I don't have any serious assets vulnerable to Global Warming. I might lose my car in flash floods, that's about it. 

I think there should be a clause in democracy that says if you keep getting out-voted and your interests just aren't met over a prolonged period, you should be able to withhold paying taxes. I mean let's face it, I didn't vote for this shit. They did. Why the hell should I be lumped with the costs of their bad decisions? 

This is exactly the shit they voted for.

Come Join The Fun!

Quick Shots - 23/Jun/2015

Good Heavens Is That You?

The Sydney Morning Herald now wants to campaign for action on climate change. Unfortunately it reinforces the notion that Darren Goodsir is a moron.

Human-induced climate change is real. The risks of inaction are real and mounting.
The Herald today offers an opportunity to be part of something special - the climate for change. Our aim is to help Australians reconnect with the urgency of acting, by seeing how our nation is contributing more than our fair share to the problem but also how our best minds and businesses are hunting for solutions. 

We can all support them and do our bit. But fine intentions will mean nothing if our leaders do not do more. And that, ultimately, is up to us all.
The time is 2015 - not 2009 when the world split over how to tackle global warming; when the then prime minister Kevin Rudd was caught out and retreated; and when climate sceptic Tony Abbott swooped to defeat Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal leadership. 

It's not 2012 or 2013 when Labor's shenanigans and the carbon tax made it impossible to have a reasoned climate debate; when the climate sceptics capitalised and gained disproportionate sway with their boutique views. 

It is 2015. The overwhelming evidence is that the Earth is warming and will heat further without concerted action. The Australian Alps, the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait Islands will be affected regardless of adaption strategies. Rising sea levels will threaten some of your homes and contribute to more extreme weather events. Higher carbon dioxide levels will even reduce proteins in wheat and change the sort of bread you eat.

If they were going to get so worried about the climate, why in the nine hells of stupidities would they back Tony Abbott at the last election? Seems utterly self-defeating to me. As for this business of 2009, well, more on that in a moment.

If you want picture on what the world might look like food wise, here's something really scary from Lloyds.

The ability of the global food system to achieve food security is under significant pressure.

Global demand for food is on the rise, driven by unprecedented growth in the world’s population and widespread shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand.1 As this chronic pressure increases, the food system is becoming increasingly vulnerable to acute shocks.

There is a pressing need to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the impacts of an extreme shock to the food supply.

Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability
to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability.

Lloyd’s commissioned the development of a scenario of extreme shock to global food production in order to explore the implications for insurance and risk.

Experts in the field of food security and the economics of sustainable development were asked
to develop a scenario describing a plausible, relatively severe production shock affecting multiple agricultural commodities and regions, and to describe the cascade of events that could result.

The systemic production shock to the world’s staple food crops described in the scenario generates widespread economic, political and social impacts.

There are uncertainties in the scenario, arising from the difficulty of obtaining key data, the applicability of historical data to modern food trade networks,
and the uncertainty surrounding future impacts of climate change. However, the scenario provides a robust tool to allow these uncertainties to be explored, and to begin to think about the possible implications of a global food shock for the insurance industry.

It's actually grim reading inside. So yes, take that!

Climate Change Retribution

According to 'the Killing Season' episode 2, Kevin Rudd was there the earliest and was the last to leave in Copenhagen 2009, working and hoping for a climate change deal. It never happened. In that moment in history, the Prime Minister of Australia was the most progressive leader in the world, trying to get a deal done. The failure to do so led to his demise; and in the subsequent flip-flopping and backstabbing and argy-bargy, led to a Carbon Tax which was then repealed by our current idiot-in-chief Prime Minister.

It strikes me as odd that we are in this situation where we've gone from the most progressive to the most regressive, but what annoys me more is when other countries get self-righteous about this situation. Tony Abbott is known as the wrecker of the climate according to our Nobel laureate Peter Doherty. Yes it does reflect badly upon us.

Nonetheless if there is something that needs to be said, it is this: the country that expended the most political capital in trying to reduce emissions was Australia, and the politician who gave their political life to that cause was Kevin Rudd. Dare I say, the progressives of Australia lost out big in Copenhagen in 2009.

If the world thinks so highly of itself and its engagement with the issue, why wasn't there a deal in 2009? If the world reviles Tony Abbott now, well, frankly they got what they deserved. I take delight in their suffering. If they're discovering only now just how much was riding on an agreement in 2009, well, I say stiff shit. It's too late now. Sometimes too late is just too late.

Because As Mrs. Gump Said, Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Peter Hartcher is now pleading with Tony Abbott to do something about climate change.

Abbott and his ministers are being guided by two opposing influences.
One is international movement. This is accelerating rapidly in the direction of solving the problem. 

Illustration: John Shakespeare 

In just a few months, the global debate has gone from cutting carbon emissions to "decarbonising" altogether, as the Group of Seven rich democracies illustrated with its June 8 communique.

Australian public opinion has been moving in the same direction, as the Lowy Institute poll last week revealed. 

The other is the right wing of Abbott's party. This refuses, still, to admit that there is a problem to be solved. 

Abbott himself mightn't hold deep personal conviction on this. In opposition, he said that he was a "weathervane" on climate change. 

But, as Malcolm Turnbull said after losing the leadership to Abbott: "The fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming." 

Most of them have not gone away; many were promoted into Abbott's cabinet.

Thus Tony Abbott will do as little as possible.

'Storytelling In The Digital Age'

I went to this forum chaired by none other than my favourite whipping post Darren Goodsir. He was up on stage with some other luminaries of the SMH, but did most of the speaking. It struck me that these people were way too much in awe of themselves. They wear a nice suit, but gee, that was a really shallow talk.

The audience was predominantly white with greying hair, if they had hair at all. A lot of rhetorical questions were asked and in response got largely mundane answers. Nothing controversial was uttered all night long. I wanted to ask Darren Goodsir whether the NBN was an asset to the digital storytelling, and if so, why did he support the worse candidate with the worse NBN offering? Of course, I never got the damn microphone.

Will It Never End?

No, Really, Is This The Way We'll Be Forever?

When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).

In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.

Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.

During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)

It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.

Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.

Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.

On Wednesday, Mr Rudd fired back at the woman who knifed him politically and took over the nation's top political job in June, 2010. 

"Consistent with the past, Mr Rudd has no substantive comment to make on Ms Gillard's latest contribution to Australian fiction," Mr Rudd said through a spokesman. "The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard's relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax." 

"They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard's continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010 by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government."  

Mr Rudd's former deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, moved to shut down discussion about the damaging political split that ultimately cost Labor government after just six years, during a National Press Club speech on Wednesday. 

"People have their critics but the fact is that Julia Gillard is a friend of mine, she remains a friend of mine; Kevin Rudd is a friend of mine, he remains a friend of mine. I'm about looking towards the future," he said. "If the entire caucus was concentrating on the needs of the Labor government rather than internals every day then I might be here without shadow before my portfolio."

At this point I want the both of them to fade back into history instead of trying to get their version out. It doesn't matter any more. Between the both of them, they managed to screw the pooch.  The both of them need to make a sanguine appraisal of that bit of history and their lousy part in it. We, on the other hand, have the immensely ugly and hopelessly difficult task of living under the utterly insane Abbott Government - a disaster they played great part in ushering in.