Sir George Brandis, Defender of the Fossil Fuel Faith
Greens hit back at Brandis’ comments on climate change, ABC Radio Saturday AM 19 April 14 Will Ockenden reported this story on Saturday, April 19, 2014 ASHLEY HALL: The Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, says people who say the science is settled on climate change are ignorant and medieval.
In an article published in the online political magazine Spiked, Senator Brandis says he’s been shocked by the “sheer authoritarianism” of those who’ve excluded climate-change deniers from the debate.
The Greens have hit back, saying it’s a feudal way of thinking to say that everyone’s view of climate change is equally valid.
Will Ockenden spoke to acting leader of the Greens, Adam Bandt.
ADAM BANDT: This Abbott Government is using every trick in the book to hide the fact that they’re not taking the action that the science calls for on climate change. And to suggest that somehow people in this country are being restricted from airing albeit very wrong views on climate change is completely misleading. I mean, if someone said ‘two plus two equals five’, would you insist on giving them as much airtime in the media as someone who said ‘two plus two equals four’? That’s in effect what the country’s highest law officer is arguing, and it’s very worrying……..
WILL OCKENDEN: Should people be able to, though, nonetheless be able to say that climate change doesn’t exist?
ADAM BANDT: Well people are saying that, and they’re saying it at the moment and they’re wrong. The science community is now essentially speaking with one voice.
To say someone without science training can somehow simply on a free speech basis say that they’re all wrong is a very feudal way of thinking….
Saturday AM requested an interview with Senator George Brandis, but we haven’t heard back from him. http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2014/s3988495.htm
Tony Abbott has effectively stopped Australian large scale renewable energy
Australian large-scale renewable energy projects at standstill http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/australian-large-scale-renewable-energy-projects-standstill-59733 By Giles Parkinson on 16 April 2014
This is despite the fact that existing policy calls for 41,000GWh of renewable energy to be provided across Australia by 2020. However, the renewable energy industry, along with the utilities that must acquit their obligations, and the banks that would finance these projects, are convinced that the target will be severely reduced, if not dismantled.
This pessimism is reflected in the market for large-scale renewable energy certificates, which have slumped to $28.55, down 15 per cent from late December, and down nearly half from before the election of the Abbott government last September.
The pessimism has infected the industry since early 2013, when, despite the findings by the Climate Change Authority that the LRET should stay as is, the equivocation of the Coalition, and its presumed success in the September poll, brought the market to a halt.
According to data from Green Energy Trading – a major player in the market for renewable energy certificates, only four new projects have been “committed” since the start of 2013. Of these, the 53MW Broken Hill and 102MW Nyngan solar power stations are mostly financed from the now defunct Solar Flagships project, with large grants from the federal and state governments; and the 20MW Royalla solar plant in Canberra is getting a fixed tariff as part of the local government’s reverse auction program.
The only new wind farm approved in the last year – a 47MW extension to Pacific Hydro’s Portland projects – seems to have been committed because it received financing from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the $10 billion green bank that the Coalition wants to dismantle, despite it making a profitfor the government.
The only other new projects that are likely to be committed in the short-term are the other solar projects in the ACT, and the wind projects that will be awarded in its forthcoming auction. (It should be noted that committed projects are different to “approved” projects, which merely means they have approval to be built, but not necessarily the finance).
Those solar and wind projects, part of the ACT government’s commitment to a 90 per cent renewable energy target, do not rely on the LRET. However, the proposal for new wind farms is being vigorously opposed by conservative politicians, both state and federal, as well as the Murdoch press.
Green Energy Trading estimates that if the market for LRECS is to maintain an acceptable level of market liquidity, around 4,450 MW of new projects need to be committed in the three-year period from 2014 to 2016. That is unlikely to happen until the RET review is completed mid year, and then considered by the Abbott government.
However, if the incumbent electricity industry has its way, there will be no new projects built before 2017 at the least. This is its estimate of the impact of the LRET target being reduced to a “real” 20 per cent target, which might equate to a new fixed target of around 26,000GWh.
Numerous studies have shows that not only will this result in a sharp fall in the deployment of wind and solar, it will also mean more coal-fired generation. And a new study from French energy products giantSchneider Electric says cutting the renewables target will also mean higher prices for consumers. This came as a surprise to the large energy users that commissioned the Schneider analysis. They had anticipated the opposite finding.
Still, the renewable energy industry is finding doors closed in Canberra, with ministers and advisors promising only that projects already built will not be impacted by any changes to the RET, which will be recommended by a review headed by climate science sceptic and nuclear advocate Dick Warburton.
International groups such as First Solar and Acciona have already signalled their intention to re-assess their commitment to projects in Australia, in a likely repeat of the exodus that was caused when the current energy minister Ian Macfarlane ended the then MRET (mandatory renewable energy target) when he was last in the same job a decade ago – and that decision was taken despite an independent review recommending the MRET be expanded.
Australian Labor Party thinks it’s a good idea to mine in radioactively polluted nuclear test area
Labor pushes for more mining in South Australian nuclear weapons test range Australian Mining, 16 April, 2014 Ben Hagemann Labor has renewed calls to allow more in the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA), urging the Coalition to pass a bill that will facilitate easier access.
Earlier this month a bipartisan committee recommended that the Senate should not support Labor’s WPA amendment bill, raising doubts about access arrangements……..
Mining is currently allowed in the Woomera Protected Area, however the applications process is difficult, and mining companies have been easily rejected on grounds of national security, as was the case in 2009 when a Chinese investor was rejected on those grounds……. The WPA is a military testing range used by Australia and its allies for long range and experimental weapons, and is notorious as the site of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.
The site is 450 kilometres from Adelaide with an area of 124,000 square kilometres. …..http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/labor-pushes-for-more-mining-in-south-australian-n
Senator Scott Ludlam issues a clear warning on the need to act on Climate Change
Greens senator Scott Ludlam says global warming will kill and Australia will cook http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/news/politics/greens-senator-scott-ludlam-says-global-warming-will-kill-and-australia-will-cook/story-fnkerdda-1226887324936 APRIL 17, 2014
AUSTRALIA is going to cook and people will die through global warming, West Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam says.
Senator Ludlam said Australia needed to stop giving climate sceptics airtime and just get on with the job of responding to climate change.
He said the weather had become a political actor.
“We are swinging back into an El Niño cycle, this country is going to cook and people are going to die. It will be, I think, much harder to sustain the argument that nothing unusual is going on,” he said.
Senator Ludlam rejected suggestions that he was being alarmist or extremist.
“We are in steep trouble here. I don’t think I am being an extremists in just stating the bleeding obvious. The weather is turning violent on us because we have left this for decades,” he said.
Senator Ludlam, re-elected with an increased vote in a re-run of the West Australian senate election, said the solution, renewable energy, was available, but that Prime Minister Tony Abbott was trying to decapitate the industry.
“That’s why people are responding to the sense of urgency that the Greens bring to the table,” he said.
Australia’s Anti Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, goes for coal and nuclear, and against renewables
Hunt commits to ‘cleaner’ coal, as renewables despair deepens, REneweconomy, Giles Parkinson on 16 April 2014 Australian environment minister Greg Hunt, the man most likely to be sympathetic to renewable energy in the current conservative Coalition government, has effectively thrown his lot in with the coal industry. In an interview with the Murdoch-controlled Sky News, Hunt said coal would be a fundamental part of the energy mix for decades and decades, and added algae and coal drying technologies would be the focus of the government’s emissions reduction efforts. Not so much “clean coal” as “cleaner coal”. He also said nuclear energy could provide “relatively low-cost, low emissions or zero emissions energy”, although he said it would not occur in Australia without bipartisan support.
The comments from Hunt – once considered a relative moderate in a hard right conservative Coalition government – came as the renewable energy industry reports that large-scale developments are at a standstill, with no new projects committed in Australia during the first quarter of 2014, despite the need for some 8,000MW of new capacity by 2020 to meet the renewable energy target as it now stands.
However, the industry is convinced that this target will be diluted following the completion of the current RET review headed by climate change sceptic and pro-nuclear advocate Dick Warburton.
The industry is increasingly pessimistic about its prospects. Insiders say recent meetings with various ministers and advisors have increased the gloom, with promises only made that projects already built would not be affected by any changes.
Hunt, when pressed on the issue in the Sky interview, said only that the government would be able to offer the renewables industry “certainty” – which could, of course, mean that the target will be less, with no further review for another four years……..
No mention of renewables – or a carbon price – despite new data (quietly) released by Hunt’s department on Tuesday showing that electricity emissions fell 5 per cent in the last calendar year – a fall no doubt due to the combined impacts of the carbon price, renewable energy and falling demand. Continue reading
Dick Warburton, nuclear power enthusiast, is heading Renewable Energy Review Panel
Tony Abbott’s renewable czar: Nuclear only alternative to coal REneweconomy, By Giles Parkinson on 9 April 2014 Tony Abbott’s handpicked head of the panel reviewing Australia’s renewable energy target, the self-avowed climate “sceptic” Dick Warburton, is no fan of renewable energy. In an article co-authored for Quadrant in 2011, Warburton insisted that nuclear energy was the only alternative to fossil fuel generation.
The two-part series for the conservative magazine – co-authored by Warburton along with poet and accountant Geoffrey Lehmann and Resmed founder Peter Farrell – is an eye-opening compendium of the major arguments that climate science deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists have ever thrown at climate science, against carbon pricing and against renewable energy.
The title of the two-part series was “An intelligent voter’s guide to global warming” (you can find Part 1 here and Part II here), and the authors pretended to “provide basic information often missing from the debate.” In fact, it is a collection of scientific howlers normally only found in right-wing blogs.
This, though, is the paragraph that might interest those likely to feel the impact of the decisions made by the RET review panel that Warburton now heads:
“Except for nuclear power, there are no straightforward strategies for reducing dependence on fossil fuels without large economic costs. Wind and solar generators often cannot function when needed. Wind machines operate at only about 25 per cent capacity in the UK. Even when the wind is blowing, “back-up capacity, usually gas-fired … had to be kept running, using fuel, generating steam, emitting CO2, ready to ramp up its turbines the moment sufficient supply from the wind machines stopped coming”. Two main obstacles with renewables are the difficulty of establishing transmission lines from sunny or windy places to where the power is needed and the absence of utility-scale storage technology for intermittent renewable energies. A US comparison estimated the following electricity generation costs per kilowatt hour: hydroelectric $0.03; nuclear and coal $0.04; wind power $0.08; natural gas $0.10 (other estimates for gas suggest about $0.04); solar power (construction costs only, ignoring production costs for which reliable data were unavailable) $0.22.”
And, a little later….
“The only current viable alternative to burning fossil fuels is to go nuclear. Although current known reserves of uranium are limited, it is likely that by developing new nuclear technologies and with new sources of uranium, humanity’s electricity needs could be satisfied by nuclear power for many hundreds of years or more.”
Fantastic. In the true sense of the word. One hopes that Warburton has caught up a little on the various technology costs. In the US, where his electricity generation costs are cited, nuclear is four times the price that he quotes. In fact, you would have to go back many, many years to find a time when it was just 4c/kWh.
Ditto with solar. Solar PV, including production costs (for which there is plenty of reliable data), costs around half that quoted by Warburton in the US. Some recent solar PV power purchase contracts, aided by a tax credit, have been at one-quarter of the price he quoted. Wind, according to General Electric, the largest provider of power equipment, is also around half of that quoted by Warburton, and new coal – according to investment bank Citigroup – is also four times the price quoted by Warburton. Even fracked gas is being priced out of the market by utility-scale solar. As Citigroup noted, quite bluntly: Nuclear and coal are not competitive with renewables on cost.
One also assumes that Warburton is aware that the cost of energy storage is falling, and likely to follow the pathway of solar, as Morgan Stanley has pointed out. This is one reason why grid operators in WA and Queensland are looking to reduce their poles and wires delivering centralised fossil fuels, because they cannot compete economically with solar and storage any more.
Warburton can catch up with Australian technology cost estimates at the Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics, which recently doubled its estimated costs of nuclear and dramatically reduced its estimates on the cost of solar.
One also hopes that Warburton is disabused of his idea that “fossil fuel” generation is left running, and polluting, waiting for the sun to stop shining and the wind to stop blowing. Such nonsense is only propagated by the most infamous of blogs haunted by climate science deniers, nuclear boosters and the anti-wind brigade. (Who are often the very same people).
A report by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory puts this myth to rest. Those grids that have high renewables are actually using less fast-response peaking power than those relying almost exclusively on inflexible coal or nuclear generators………
The question that the renewables industry will be asking is this: Given that Warburton says he has investigated the climate science and declares that climate scientists do not know what they are talking about, what are the chances that he will accept the evidence from the renewable energy industry? Ideology, as we have seen with the media and the government since the September poll, is a mighty powerful editor. http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/tony-abbotts-renewable-czar-nuclear-only-alternative-to-coal-65816
Climate denialists and opponents of renewable energy in power in Australia
Australia’s renewable future in hands of policy fringe dwellers, http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/australias-renewable-future-in-hands-of-policy-fringe-dwellers-71359 By Giles Parkinson on 7 April 2014 So, it’s come down to this. The defence of Australia’s renewable energy industry has been entrusted to the hands of a man who thinks carbon pollution is caused by nature, not people, and another who is openly hostile to wind farms.
The re-run of the Senate election in Western Australia this weekend provides some interesting fodder for the psephologists: Labor’s continued electoral implosion, the Scott Ludlum-inspired revival of the Greens, and the outstanding success of Clive Palmer’s expensive electioneering.
But for the key policies that will affect Australia’s renewable energy industry – and the decarbonisation of the Australian economy – the equation is essentially unchanged. The numbers in the new Senate, to site from July 1 means that the carbon price – despite whatever hoops that Palmer may try and get the Abbott conservative government to jump through – is effectively dead and buried.
Any changes to the renewable energy target – or even its ditching – will likely go unimpeded through parliament. At best, Labor and the Greens would need support for the RET from Nick Xenophon, not a fan of wind farms, and the DLP’s John Madigan, who has been celebrating what he is sure is the impending demise of the RET.
“The wind industry is panicking in Australia with the likely death of the Renewable Energy Target and this is another example of its peddling influence and money to manipulate the truth,” Senator Madigan told The Australian last week.
At worst, Labor and the Greens would need support from the Palmer United Party to support the renewables target. Good luck with that; Palmer, who now has three of his own Senators and a fourth from the Motoring Party tied up in an unspecified “alliance,” says renewable energy targets should not be compulsory.
“We don’t intend to legislate to make people do something they may not want to do,” Palmer told ABC’s Lateline program last week. This, as economist Ross Garnaut pointed out on the same program, would be about as effective as making taxes voluntary.
What’s not clear is the future of the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, or likely budget cuts to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, both of which would require legislative approval.
The CEFC was actually supported by Xenophon and Madigan in a repeal vote earlier this year because, while they are not supporters of wind energy, they see the upside of bringing in new renewable technologies. Xenophon, in particular is a fan of what he calls “baseload” renewables, meaning geothermal and ocean energy – even those these are years away from commercial deployment. The CEFC has been largely focused on energy efficiency, waste-to-energy, and some emerging solar technologies. ARENA is similarly focused on techologies that do not yet match wind energy on cost.
If Labor can somehow grab the sixth seat in the WA Senate, then Xenophon and Madigan could protect the CEFC, and allow it to continue beyond early July. If not, and the sixth seat falls to the Liberals, then the fate of the CEFC lies in the hands of Palmer.
Quite what he makes of the CEFC is anyone’s guess. The fact that it brings in private money at a ratio of nearly $3 for every $1 in loans may be appealing, so might its ability to develop a profit to the government, and abatement at a “net benefit.”
The abatement equation, however, may just fall on deaf ears. Palmer, it seems, appears to believe that any sort of abatement is a waste of time. Quoting material from what must be one of the more extreme climate denier websites, Palmer told Lateline last week:
“Now we know that 97 per cent of the world’s carbon comes from natural sources. Why don’t we have money to look at how we can reduce the overall carbon signature by reducing it from nature, not just from industry. It’s entirely wrong-focused.”
And there’s more. Check out the transcript, it gets feisty in part but it is as though Palmer is channeling the thoughts of Tony Abbott’s main business advisor, Maurice Newman, and those of Dick Warburton, the head of the RET review panel. The climate skeptic brigade is now in full control of climate and renewable energy policy in this country.
Of course, it did not need to have come to this. Climate change and renewable energy policies were supposed to be bipartisan, and for a brief moment in time they were, before the relentless and pig-headed push by the Rudd government to make climate change a wedge issue for the conservatives saw Malcolm Turnbull’s reign at the head of the Coalition ended abruptly, the Liberal Party swerve dramatically to the far right with his replacement by Abbott, and the Greens reject the then CPRS after Rudd refused to even talk to them.
The renewable energy target was also supposed to be bipartisan, and Labor had the opportunity to put this issue to rest if it had the conviction to accept the Climate Change Authority’s recommendation to provide certainty for the industry and push the next review out to 2016.
In the end, Labor backed off. It was the only one of the CCA’s key recommendations that Labor refused to implement. Not only did that decision make the rest of the CCA’s recommendations and endorsement of the RET irrelevant (because of lingering uncertainty about the future of the policy), it left the way open for the Abbott government to conduct its own review, and justify it as a legislative requirement.
And so it appointed a special panel comprising a climate change sceptic, a fossil fuel lobbyist and the former head of one of Australia’s most emissions intensive generation companies to consider the merits of wind and solar.
Now, the renewables industry has to rely, possibly beyond hope, on the support of politicians who think that human-caused climate change is a myth, and that renewables should not be mandated, probably cause health problems, are expensive and unreliable.
It should never have come to this. But it has.
The Greens’ Scott Ludlam polled16% of the primary vote, in Western Australia’s Senate election
Western Australia Senate election: is this a new moment for the Greens? Ben Eltham theguardian.com, Monday 7 April 2014 Scott Ludlam’s victory in Western Australia has some important implications for those keen to write off the Greens as a political force
Saturday’s Senate by-election in Western Australia is certainly good news for the environmental party. The Greens polled nearly 16% of 
the primary vote, a result that saw Scott Ludlam handily re-elected with quota to spare. The result represented a swing to the Greens of more than 6%.
Ludlam’s result is a personal triumph for the soft-spoken Western Australian. After narrowly losing his seat in the contested result of 2013, Ludlam has roared back into the Senate for another six years on the back of a highly effective Greens campaign.
Beginning with the unexpected social media success of his “Welcome to Western Australia, Tony” speech, Ludlam honed a re-election campaign that was well targeted and technologically savvy. He leveraged his excellent online profile and policy expertise on issues like the NBN andsurveillance to attract a wider following of voters under 40. In just a month, Ludlam has tweeted and DJ’d his way from likely has-been to future leader.
While Saturday’s result may not herald a new age of verdant ascendancy, it does have some important implications for those keen to write off the Greens as a political force in Australia. Their demise is regularly forecast by major party figures and journalists, many of whom appear to believe that the environmental party will one day share the fate of the Australian Democrats……….http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/western-australia-election-is-this-a-new-moment-for-the-greens
Western Australian election – so far – 7 % swing to the Greens
WA Senate count shows swing to Greens, PUP, The Age, April 6, 2014 – Rebecca Le May Greens Senator Scott Ludlam appears to have retained his seat in the re-run West Australian Senate election, with early results showing a big swing to the party.
At 12.44pm local time, when 70.88 per cent of polling places had counted first preferences, there was a 5.91 per cent swing against the Liberals and a 5.33 per cent swing against Labor, while the Greens had put on 6.69 per cent.
At the same time, there was a 7.51 per cent swing towards the Palmer United Party (PUP).
Labor’s member for Perth, Alannah MacTiernan, said it appeared some of her party’s traditional voters had backed the Greens……….<>Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said it appeared from comments made to her at polling booths that the party had gained votes from both of the majors.
She said one woman told her: “I’ve been a Liberal voter but we need to keep a check on Tony Abbott.”
“This is the strongest vote [for the Greens] I’ve seen,” Senator Siewert said……Both major parties had low-profile lead candidates, he said, but the Greens had promoted a lead candidate – Mr Ludlam – who made the others look dull.
And the party was creative in its campaign, said Former Labor workplace relations and tertiary education minister Chris Evans………”It looks like Scott’s home and hosed,” Labor Senator Sam Dastyari said……”It will be interesting to see where the Greens end up – how much over a quota they’ll get.”
Queensland government incapable of properly monitoring Mining industries
Summary of Auditor-General’s report on mines Tony Moore SMH, 4 April 14 What was revealed in the Auditor General’s report on the monitoring of Queensland’s resource and waste industries by the Departments of Environment and Heritage Protection and Natural Resources and Mines.
Communications
“Poor data and inadequate systems continue to hinder EHP’s planning and risk assessments. As a result, EHP cannot target its monitoring and enforcement efforts to where they are most needed.”
This situation is exacerbated by the lack of coordination and sharing of relevant information across agencies, particularly between EHP and NRM……..http://www.smh.com.au/queensland/summary-of-auditorgenerals-report-on-mines-20140404-362w5.html
Clive Palmer very flustered over Climate Change, contradicts his Western Australian candidate
Palmer loses cool in climate debate http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2014/4/4/policy-politics/palmer-loses-cool-climate-debate Palmer United Palmer leader Clive Palmer has lashed out an ABC interviewer who was probing the MP about his dismissal of the IPCC climate consensus.
In a debate with economist Ross Garnaut on Lateline last night, interviewer Tony Jones questioned Mr Palmer’s dismissal of the IPCC process and suggestion the world needed a “proper report” on climate change, prompting a reply of “shut up” from the mining magnate.
CLIVE PALMER: I don’t want to be interrupted. Well, I haven’t made my point.
TONY JONES: Well, I’m sorry, every now and then …
CLIVE PALMER: “Well, I’m sorry.” Why don’t you shut up for a while and let me finish?
TONY JONES: Every now and then – every now and then …
CLIVE PALMER: Why don’t you just keep quiet while – why don’t you just keep quiet and let me finish what I’m saying? “Every now and then,” come on, we’ll have a fight if you want to. But why don’t you just shut up while I’ll can say what I want to say? I’m saying that 100 per cent of carbon, we’ve got to reduce it. 97 per cent comes from nature. Let’s reduce it, let’s look at both areas, not just look at industry, not just take away our jobs, up our electricity prices…
Scott Ludlam’s speech went viral -by 13 March 700,000 viewings
Scott Ludlam’s speech worth paying attention to, SMH, Elizabeth Farrelly 13 March 14 Australian politics measures itself in landmark speeches. Menzies’ ”forgotten people” speech, 1942. Keating’s ”Redfern” speech, 1992. Gillard’s misogyny speech, Hockey’s entitlement speech. And now, Scott Ludlam’s ”Welcome to WA, Tony Abbott” speech.
I like such speeches, if only for their comforting illusion that there’s more to our political life than the mundane squabble over money and resources. Not exactly ”I have a dream” territory, perhaps, but they do at least imply core principle.
And apparently I’m not the only one hungry for it. Sorry to say I don’t mean our political leaders, whose indifference to the parlay for which we pay them is so profound that Ludlam found himself delivering his adjournment speech to a near-empty Senate, occupied by just one of his 75 elected colleagues.
But it was the populace came thundering through on horseback. Ten days on YouTube garnered Ludlam’s speech 700,000 views; more than Cate Blanchett’s Oscar win. This kind of response makes Australian politicians’ disdain for principle the more surprising. Take, for example, Tony Abbott’s recent address to the ForestWorks dinner. It was a classic crowd-pleaser, a cynical exercise in wrongful and duplicitous nonsense.
Abbott told the logging industry lobby group that ”too much” of our pristine forest is protected, that loggers are the ”true conservationists” and that the Greens – which he characterised as ”the devil” – are to blame for Tasmania’s high unemployment, low life-expectancy and low school retention rates. It was dumb. It was embarrassing. But it worked.
The subtext was appeasement; a placatory sop to an angry state for Abbott’s shameless downgrade of his national broadband network optic fibre promise to slow old copper.
Against such background blather, statements of principle stand in stark contrast. True, even principled speeches can have destructive consequences. Menzies’ ”forgotten people” speech, in validating the middle classes, helped justify a century of bloat and sprawl. Helped feed the entitlement from which we are now forced painfully to resile.
Far more dangerous, however, are those speeches that appear principled and are not. A comparison of Ludlam’s ”Abbott” speech with Joe Hockey’s ”entitlement” speech is edifying here. The first, marked by a kind of reckless candour (driven, no doubt, by Labor’s threat to redirect preferences on April 5) is a lucid, point-by-point explication of principle. The other merely deploys principle to cloak economic expedience.
As opponents, the Liberals and the Greens could hardly be more adamant. Yet the weird thing is, if Hockey were serious about ending entitlement he would adopt just about every principle Ludlam so eloquently voiced……..
by far the bigger and more urgent picture is how entitlement on all our parts, and most especially the parts of wealthy hyper-consumers, drives our wanton planetary destruction.
Ludlam’s speech showed where Hockey’s reasoning should have taken him, if he’d only had the courage and imagination to go there.
Ludlam begged Abbott to see Western Australia as ”a place where the drought never ended, where climate change from land clearing and fossil fuel combustion is a lived reality that is already costing jobs, property and lives”. He sketched a moving vision of ”Australia as it could be – an economy running on infinite flows of renewable energy; a society that never forgets it lives on country occupied by the planet’s oldest continuing civilisation; and a country that values education, innovation and equality”.
He went on to log some of the ways in which Abbott’s government has allowed its agenda to be driven by expectations of entitlement. Entitlement to what? Well, broadly, to exploit natural resources for immediate financial gain, entitlement to predator capitalism, whatever the long-term cost.
Ludlam cited Abbott’s ”blank cheque” for West Australian Premier Colin Barnett’s ”bloody and unnecessary” shark cull (over which an unprecedented 12,000 public submissions were received), and his summary cancellation of half a billion dollars’ worth of funding for Perth light rail.
He also cited Abbott’s support for gas-fracking and uranium mining, despite the known dangers and evident toxicity. And Abbott’s determination to log Tasmania’s old-growth forests, pretending that they’re already ”degraded” when in fact only a fraction of the world’s-tallest flowering forest has ever been logged.
And Abbott’s support for Monsanto and other global biotechs, in proposing the so-called Investor State Dispute Resolution clauses for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. ISDRs will effectively allow these massive biotechs, their clanking war-chests bigger than many state budgets, to sue Australian states that try to legislate against coal-seam gas or GM crops or for consumer labelling.
The writer Tim Winton says WA’s ground-wealth has bred a ”smugness that has paralysed parts of the communal brain”. Ludlam insists otherwise. This is his gamble, that we’re wrong to act ”as though the western third of our ancient continent is just Gina Rinehart’s inheritance, to be chopped, benched and blasted”.
Ludlam finished by thanking the PM because ”every time you open your mouth the Green vote goes up”. In three weeks, we’ll know whether he was right.http://www.smh.com.au/comment/scott-ludlams-speech–worth-paying-attention-to-20140312-34ml1.html
Greens leader Christine Milne is scathing about Tony Abbott’s lack of climate policy
Tony Abbott a fool on climate change says Greens leader Christine Milne WA Today, April 1, 2014 Judith Ireland “………We have a government with its head buried in the 19th without a plan for the nation in the 21st century.
With no plan for the future, Tony Abbott will fail as Prime Minister.
No one can lead at this moment without a plan to address global warming. It is a defining characteristic of leadership to identify the risks and threats to the nation and lead people to address them. The IPPC has made it clear. Time has run out, we are suffering already and are on track for 4 degrees of warming and we are not prepared. The Greens are the only party in the Australian Parliament who recognise the two possible futures, as the IPCC has said: “one of inaction and degradation of our environment, our economies, and our social fabric. The other, to seize the moment and the opportunities for managing climate change risks and making transformational changes that catalyses more adaptive and resilient societies where new technologies and ways of living open the door to a myriad of health, prosperity and job- generating benefits. The path of tomorrow is undoubtedly determined by our choices today. We must decide which path to follow.”
The Greens have chosen the future of transformational change – the government has not.
Nowhere is this lack of a plan for a climate change dominated future more obvious than in WA.
Yesterday’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasised the enormity of the global task to avoid climate. In WA, the south west of the state is drying out, and Perth recently recorded its second hottest summer on record and sweltered through their hottest night on record ever, at 29.7 degrees, life will get harder with more heatwaves and extreme fire danger days resulting in loss of life and reduced productivity.
Tony Abbott is a fool to pretend climate change is not happening and even more foolish to try to prevent action that would help people, create jobs and create a future for WA, and the country, after the mining boom………
This election offers WA the chance to vote for a future which takes the science of climate change into account, delivers billions of dollars and jobs in renewable energy, public transport, housing and education, saves money on power bills by supporting solar and gives hope and the promise of happiness to this and the next generation by standing up for people and the environment in the face of the biggest power grab for the greedy seen in generations.
If you’re feeling the “vibe” Vote Green! http://www.watoday.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/christine-milnes-speech-to-the-national-press-club-april-1-20140401-35vnj.html
Lined up against Renewable Energy – These Liberal and National Members of Parliament
MPs unite against ACT’s renewable energy scheme, Braidwood Times, 1 April 14 Liberals and Nationals in NSW have joined forces to send a strong message to the ACT Government over its renewable energy policy: Leave our farms alone!
Windfarms have been controversial in the area surrounding the ACT and an110 tower ‘farm’ is in the wind for the area from Tarago, south across the Kings Highway down to Manar.
Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is not worried about Climate Change
(Video) T
ony Abbott unmoved as UN report finds climate change happening all over the world BERNARD HUMPHREYS AND KATRINA STOKES THE ADVERTISER MARCH 31, 2014
PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has played down a United Nations climate report that predicts a dire future for the Murray-Darling Basin and the Great Barrier Reef, saying that “Australia is a land of drought and flooding rains, always has been and always will be”.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says governments around the world can still avoid the worst of forecast droughts, floods and bushfires, but Mr Abbott says he remains reluctant to link extreme weather events to climate change.
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Host Contact Info: australia@icanw.org
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 