Friday 26th of April 2024
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Key Coalition-held seats will be targeted by a wave of independent campaigns at the next federal election, with the aim of achieving stronger action on climate change.

Previously, at the 2013 federal election, independent Cathy McGowan led a successful grassroots campaign to oust Sophie Mirabella in Indi, and climate action was a cornerstone of her platform.

In 2019, Winter Olympian Zali Steggall led an independent campaign that hinged on climate action to win the seat of Warringah from Tony Abbott.

 

These victories have spawned similar campaigns like Voices of North Sydney and Voices of Kooyong, as well as other nationwide efforts that will focus on multiple key electorates.

 

A day after the government announced its net-zero target, the Smart Energy Council – Australia’s peak body for solar power and electricity storage – kicked off a campaign to target a handful of government-held electorates around the country.

“There are some ardently, stridently anti-renewables members of the National Party and the Liberal Party, and we will be targeting them,” CEO John Grimes told The New Daily.

“And there are a number of moderate Liberals who have – consistently – lost the debate internally, who have voted time and again to actually roll back and attack our industry, and we will be targeting them too.”

The plan is to hold town halls, take out advertising, and otherwise raise awareness in a “ruthless” campaign against the government.

Mr Grimes cited seats such as Kooyong and Higgins in Melbourne, and Mackellar and Wentworth in Sydney, among others.

One of those “moderate Liberals” is North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman.

After the 2019-20 bushfire season, North Sydney architect and urban planner Rod Simpson felt frustrated by politicians who he felt were ignoring the science of climate change.

 

Inspired by the campaigns in Indi and Warringah, he and his partner launched the Voices of North Sydney group, which is working to oust Mr Zimmerman.

Mr Simpson said after he conducted research that found the “vast majority” of the electorate wanted stronger action on climate change, Mr Zimmerman responded by lecturing him about the ins and outs of the Westminster system of representative democracy.

“That’s first-class 18th-century thinking,” Mr Simpson told TND.

“We’ve actually got the technology, techniques and communication channels to do things quite differently to people getting to London on horseback.”

Although Voices of North Sydney won’t explicitly endorse a candidate, it’s hoping to foster the democratic process through ‘kitchen table talks’ and advocacy, which organisers hope will see Mr Zimmerman voted out.

It’s a similar story in Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s electorate of Hume.

Moss Vale pilot Alex Murphy felt disaffected after the last federal election.

While he was off work during the lockdowns of 2020, he turned his energy to political organising by founding a group called Vote Angus Out.

“Our primary intention is in the name,” Mr Murphy told TND.

Climate change is a key issue for the movement, but it’s one of many, including transparency and accountability, both of which are recurring themes for grassroots movements around Australia.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/federal-election/2021/10/28/lnp-electorates-climate-change/

 

 

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In the press gallery at Parliament House, there's a bell that years ago was rung regularly to alert journalists to press conferences and statements. Email has made it an anachronism.

But shortly before 8am on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce appeared in the gallery, looking rather agitated, and personally rang the bell.

Joyce was there to lay an ownership claim to the exclusion of a methane reduction pledge from the 2050 net zero climate plan Scott Morrison announced on Tuesday. "One of the key reasons that the Nationals went in to bat has become so clearly evident today," Joyce declared.

This followed a report in The Australian, briefed by the office of Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor, rejecting the United States' push for a 30 per cent reduction by 2030 of methane emissions (produced by cows burping, gas extraction, and the like).

Taylor apparently had been onto the methane exclusion issue for some time. Later on Thursday, Morrison said the government never had any intention of agreeing to the reduction. He also rejected Joyce's confusing claim there was an agriculture carve-out from the climate plan.

Who gets political "branding rights" on the treatment of methane was just the latest pinch point in the fallout from Tuesday's announcement.

Much doubt has been created by the government's failure to release the plan's modelling, which Morrison says will be out in a few weeks — that is, after COP26 is well and truly behind him.

Delays, flaws and inadequacies

An industry department official told a Senate estimates committee the material was being put into digestible shape.

"As the plan was only finalised on Tuesday, we need to make sure we have written that technical work up. The actual modelling, of course, had been finalised at that point.

"But the write-up of that — we just need to take a little bit of extra time to make sure that it's written clearly and able to be presented well to the Australian public," Jo Evans, a deputy secretary in the department, said.

Meanwhile, most of the trade-offs the Nationals have received for their reluctant support continue to remain a mystery.

Joyce, who became Acting Prime Minister after Morrison departed on Thursday night for the G20 in Rome followed by COP26 in Glasgow, is likely to announce certain measures while he's in the spotlight.

But others are to be in the budget update at the end of the year, presented as election commitments, or in next year's budget if that occurs before the election.

Some of these unknown measures still have to be brought forward as cabinet submissions and go through the formal bureaucratic hoops, including being costed.

That shows how unsatisfactory the process has been — the government had months to deal with net zero, settling things with the minor Coalition partner and finalising the trade-offs.

More importantly from the Nationals' standpoint, they're left exposed as they return to their electorates now parliament has risen for a three-week break. When they meet their constituents, they are not able to produce the suite of benefits they obtained in return for their policy sign-up.

 

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-29/morrison-net-zero-plan-glasgow-nationals-climate-policy-storm/100577390

 

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This no-plan plan by ScoMo is not even worth the toilet paper he uses every day...

 

 

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zero-plan...

 

Acting Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes have clashed over the federal government’s net-zero emissions plan.

In an often tense exchange at The Daily Telegraph‘s virtual bush summit on Friday, the tech boss repeatedly asked the Nationals leader how the government was going to reach its emissions targets.

The co-founder and CEO of software company Atlassian said while “there are things in the pamphlet that I agree with”, the details hadn’t been explained and he did not understand “the how”.

 

The billionaire this week tweeted that the 129-page plan was “ridiculously embarrassing”.

The modelling for the federal government’s plan is due to be released in the next few weeks.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said the idea that methane challenges would destroy the beef industry, as outlined by the Nationals leader earlier in the week, was “bulls–t”.

“How are we going to get methane down to zero? Is it going to come at the expense of the gas industry or ag? Where is it going to come from?” he said.

The tech boss shook his head while Mr Joyce argued that renewables were unreliable and more costly.

“To say that wind makes power cheaper … We’ve had a six-fold increase in power prices in a year … because wind power is unable to fill the void,” Mr Joyce said, adding it was a “BS argument” that power prices and reliability were not affected.

But Mr Cannon-Brookes said “blaming renewables … is the same old tired argument”.

They had contributed to a 7 per cent drop in NSW power prices, he said.

 

The two men also clashed over whether renewables would help underpin regional towns in Australia.

“I can’t think of one renewable town in Australia, not one, so all these hundreds of thousands of jobs .. surely there would be some of these ‘renewable’ towns popping up. But they don’t exist because it’s a mythical statement,” Mr Joyce said.

The billionaire hit back.

“I can’t tell you where there’s a renewable town in Australia because it’s all of them,” he said.

“Australia’s future is underpinned by renewables in a decarbonised economy, in every region in every town.”

Mr Joyce wrapped up the session saying the government had to be honest with regional workers and that “right now we are exporting more coal at a higher price than ever before, and that’s the truth”.

But it was left to Mr Cannon-Brookes to have the last word, and he criticised the government’s emissions plan for its lack of detail and ambition.

“We need a plan. We don’t have one,” he said.

-AAP

 

Read more: https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2021/10/29/barnaby-joyce-mike-cannon-brookes/

 

 

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importing soiled nappies...

Recent economic data brings the tally of failures in economic management by Prime Minister Morrison and Treasurer Frydenberg to 40, as Alan Austin documents.

WORLD BANK DATA shows the value of manufacturing in Australia as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 13.83% when that dataset began in 1990. It stayed above 12% until 1999, when a decline began.

This fell to an all-time low of 5.64% in 2019, six years after the Coalition was elected on promises to 're-invigorate manufacturing industry'. The 2020 level was 5.72%, the second-lowest ever.

The Australian Sovereign Capability Alliance reports that Australia now has the lowest manufacturing self-sufficiency of any country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

 

This brings to an even forty the outcomes under the current federal Government which are “worst ever” or “worst for a very long time”.

The first ten are listed here, with links to the raw data. The second ten are here and the third ten here.

The collapse in manufacturing was number 40. The dismal count continues.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/morrison-government-notch-up-40-worst-on-record-economic-outcomes,15796

 

See toon at top.

 

 

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