Nelson takes 20 steps back, but the troops refuse to follow

Leader of the Federal Opposition, Brendan Nelson, has briskly taken 20 steps back (one for each of the last twenty years) when announcing his 'new' climate change policy.

Yesterday the Herald Sun reported:

"BRENDAN Nelson has foreshadowed a tougher line on emissions trading that hinges on action by big polluters including China and India.
Announcing the policy shift, Dr Nelson said Australia must move ahead with an emissions trading scheme, but insisted that it "must be informed by what the major emitters throughout the world choose to do". He said Australia must "methodically and responsibly" implement its scheme with a price on carbon. "Australia must act with the rest of the world, but not be so far in front of the major emitters that we risk Australian jobs and we don't do anything for our environment," he said this afternoon. Coalition sources told The Australian Online earlier that hardliners in the shadow ministry were claiming a victory after today's meeting and claim the "big shift" was from frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt."

However, it seems the troops are still wedded to Howard's tardy timetable for an emissions trading scheme and didn't take to Nelson's even tardier conditional scheme.

In another ratchet to leadership tensions, the Libs are once more floating the idea of nuclear power.
Is Deputy Leader Julie Bishop deliberately seeking to undermine Nelson's earlier anti-nuclear stance or is this an issue she just doesn't want to let go of.
Either way the Opposition has absolutely no way of pushing such an unpopular idea onto the Australian people.

Who'd have thought that those right-wing goose steppers who created fear when in government would turn out to be as amusing as a barrel of monkeys once in opposition.

Is this the shape of things to come if 'hie heidyin' Iemma gets his way over privatisation of NSW electricity supplies?

With Morris Iemma due to meet with the ALP administrative committee next week, after previously attempting to smooze State President Bernie Riordan, I would like to remind Iemma, Costa, Sussex Street and the Coalition Opposition that voters are still watching their manoeuvres.

Thus far, none of those pushing for the sale of NSW power assets (or those Nationals currently pretending to oppose the idea) have been able to satisfy that the following will not come to pass.

Dozens of governments have embarked on the pathway to electricity deregulation and privatisation since the mid-1990s. It has become the accepted wisdom amongst governments and opinion leaders despite the consequent price rises and disasters that have followed in its wake: the series of blackouts that have been experienced from California to Buenos Aires to Auckland; the government bailouts of electricity companies that have been necessary in California and Britain; the need for electricity rationing in Brazil; and the fact that it has become too expensive for millions of people from India to South Africa.

Electricity deregulation and privatisation is referred to as ‘liberalisation’ by its advocates who use the term to disguise what is in essence a massive shift of ownership and control of electricity from public to private hands, in the name of economic efficiency and in the cause of private profits. ‘Liberalisation’ has meant that maintenance teams that were once fully staffed have been dramatically cut leading to frequent equipment failures. It has meant that privately owned electricity conglomerates are able to blackmail governments into bailouts and high prices with threats of blackouts. And it has meant that the planning function of electricity authorities that once ensured adequate generating reserves for times of peak demand, and kept infrastructure up to date in developed countries, have been abandoned to market forces. Because of market forces electricity prices are based, not on the cost of production, but on how desperately consumers want electricity and this has led to sky-rocketing prices whenever private companies have been able to limit supply in times of high demand.

The privatisation of electricity is not something that citizens have demanded nor wanted. In general, there has been very little public participation in electricity reform decisions and as the consequences are observed, there have been many bitter protests against electricity privatisation.
[From Sharon Beder,'Critique of the Global Project to Privatize and Marketize Energy', June 2005, pp. 177-185]

One more Australian creature is about to join the red list of those which may disappear because of climate change

If anything was needed to convince Australian governments and all domestic political parties that this continent has run out of time to fiddle about over decisions to back climate change mitigation measures, then the ABC News report on this little marine snail might do the trick.

Tasmanian scientists are concerned a microscopic marine snail species found in the Southern Ocean may soon die out due to climate change.
The scientists say it is field evidence that sea life in the Southern Ocean is being affected by warmer water....
"Many researchers have been assuming we would see this kind of result for the past 50 years and this is the first time we've got a measured response to the changing of the ocean chemistry," she said.
Dr Roberts fears if the snails die out there could be dire effects on the food chain.
"It's interesting to know what's going to happen to commercial fish that eat them because a change in their diet might mean a change in where they actually are living, so it's not just we might loose one variety of snail it actually could change the whole eco-system of the southern ocean.
"That's what we're most worried about that it could completely upset our commercial fish stocks."

I would like to remind Federal Nationals MP for Cowper, Luke Hartsuyker, that the regional economy of the NSW North Coast relies on both commercial and recreational fishers.
Perhaps he might also remember that the many low-income families in the area supplement their diet with fish they catch themselves.

Mr. Hartsuyker needs to think of both his electorate and the nation, before he decides to participate in any stalling tactics that the Federal Opposition may think fit to indulge in when Parliament considers the proposed national emissions trading scheme.

Sadly, this small mollusc joins a long list of Australian species, that are now on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and which may become extinct due to climate change.

Australian 2007 list here.

First round of Federal Government climate change advertising is missing the mark?

Federal Leader of the Opposition (for now at least), Brendan Nelson, has accused the Rudd Government of missing the bigger picture in its multi million dollar climate change ad campaign.

Missing the bigger picture? The current televised ad is nothing except the Big Picture.
A big picture of which 99 per cent of all Australians would already be well aware.

Now is the time for advertising that actually tells us something about the finer details of how global warming is expected to affect our regions and communities.
Now is the time to go into more detail about how the Federal Government intends to proceed.

Whoever convinced the Rudd Government that it should run such a generic and simplistic presentation of the issues has, in my opinion, got it badly and expensively wrong.

As for the Coalition objections to this ad. I doubt whether Howard's planned Clever Climate advertising would have been any different and, this is what makes the Rudd-Wong televised advertisements so disappointing - they weren't elected to be a mere mirror of the Howard Government.

A new hybrid animal sighted roaming the political neighbourhood

Mal (B)rough has taken his bat and ball onto a plane for home, now that the Queensland Liberals and Nats have created that strangest of political hybrids, the Liberal National Party (LNP).

At it's new website the LNP promises:
"Government that is open and honest;
Government that has plans for the future, not just for the next five years but for the next 50 years;
Government that is caring and empathetic;
Government that is in touch and understands what life is like for Queensland families;
Government that builds for the future today, not just talks about it...
And that is what your new LNP will deliver."

A two-man executive currently musters this mob.
X marks the spot of the Draft Constitution and the lengthy amendments are here.

I think that Bleak's daily cartoon in The Australian has it about right.

Slate's interactive guide: Who in the Bush administration broke the law, and who could be prosecuted?

A little 'light' Sunday reading from Slate online magazine last Thursday.

What kind of lawbreaking has happened on President Bush's watch, among his top and mid-level advisers? What hasn't? Who is implicated and who is not? Despite the lack of or*l s*x with an intern, the past seven years have yielded an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potentially prosecutable crimes. We have tried to sketch out a map of who did what and when, with links to the evidence that is public and notes about what we may learn from investigations that are still pending....

Click here for the diagram, and here for a text-only version.