The Morrison government’s proposed response to the threat of climate change tries to reconcile different interests by deceiving them both.

A decade ago, the then Liberal leader Tony Abbott pronounced that “climate change is crap”. Ever since, the Liberal Party has torn itself apart over climate change. In addition, they must also satisfy their recalcitrant partners in the National Party.

In the 2019 election Scott Morrison successfully handled this dilemma by diverting public attention with his allegations about how Labor’s proposed cuts to carbon emissions would destroy the economy and how electric vehicles would “end the weekend”. That way the Coalition’s policies, or lack of policies, avoided scrutiny.

Since then, however, Australian opinion has moved on and the polls now report a solid majority of voters want to take the necessary action to reduce carbon emissions. Morrison understands this switch in public opinion, but he still has to continue to satisfy his nay-sayers.

Morrison’s solution is first, to tell us that the new target of zero emissions by 2050 means that his government will take the necessary action to avoid catastrophic climate change. But second, he reassures the other audience that there will be no threats to any jobs, nor will the government introduce mandates or prices and taxes that inhibit people from doing what they want to do.

In effect, Morrison is trying to pretend that we can have our cake and eat it too. But this fantasy has necessarily had to be built around a series of deliberate attempts to mislead which are discussed below.

The government’s target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will be unlegislated and therefore is no more than a statement of intent. Nevertheless, Morrison would have us believe that this is sufficient to constrain global warming to an acceptable extent — commonly considered to be an increase in temperatures of significantly less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial temperatures.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. To achieve that goal of limiting global warming to less than 2C, we must have an ambitious target for cuts in emissions by 2030 instead of the government’s leisurely linear progress towards net zero.

All the other advanced market economies have understood this point and have increased their target emissions cuts by 2030 in the lead-up to Glasgow climate summit. Australia is the sole exception.

Under pressure Morrison has responded to this criticism, and thanks mainly to the efforts by State governments, he is now able to project that Australia’s carbon emissions will fall by 35 per cent by 2030. This is an advance on the government’s previous target of a cut between 26–28 per cent proposed back in 2015, but it is nowhere near enough.

First, this new projection means that in the 25 years between 2005 and 2030, carbon emissions in Australia are expected to fall by only 35 per cent. By contrast, Morrison is telling us that in the following 20 years from 2030 to 2050, net carbon emissions will have to fall by another 65 per cent — or almost twice as fast after 2030 — to achieve the target of no net emissions by 2050.

In other words, Morrison is deliberately leaving all the heavy lifting to a future government, but it should be the other way around.

And that leads on to Morrison’s second deception, which is that Morrison is asking us to ignore all expert opinion about how quickly we need to achieve lower carbon emissions. The experts are almost unanimous that if we don’t achieve at least a 50 per cent emissions cut by 2030, we have no hope achieving the most critical target which is to constrain global warming to significantly less than a 2C increase in temperatures.

The next set of deceptions relate to the government’s so-called “plan” which purports to outline how the reduction to net zero emissions will be achieved.

As the government puts it: it is essentially relying on new technologies to reduce carbon emissions in future. The favoured technologies are:

• Clean hydrogen;
• Ultra low-cost solar;
• Energy storage;
• Low emissions steel and aluminium;
• Carbon capture and storage; and
• Soil carbon.

Apart from carbon capture and storage and soil carbon, where the economics are so far not good, these technologies make sense. But as many commentators have complained, the lack of detail means that it is again misleading to call the government’s latest statement a “plan”. It is more a statement of hopes.

Most of the necessary technologies already exist, but there is nothing in the plan that tells us about the rate of take up and adaptation to these technologies. Here again this Plan is asking us to trust the government.

Already the cost of renewable energy is lower than the cost of energy derived from coal or gas, but what will accelerate the rate of switching over. In particular, much of the necessary action will be at the discretion of private households and businesses, and we need to know how and why they will become more incentivised to make the necessary changes.

First, setting an ambitious target for carbon reduction by 2030 would have helped. It would provide the necessary signal to business that it could invest with confidence, and now.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/how-scotty-from-marketing-seeks-to-deceive-about-climate-change/

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BY Michael Pascoe

The Coalition/One Nation voter ID proposal is a solution in search of a problem, but in the process it highlights an actual problem bedevilling the conservative end of Australian politics – cultural cringe.

Credit where it’s due: Last week’s “thought bubble straight out of the Donald Trump playbook”, as Anthony Albanese labelled it, served the government’s immediate political purpose of providing a distraction amid all those uncomfortable climate and Nationals’ extortion headlines.

It fed the paranoid end of the government’s base a little more fear about anyone who might not fit the “Quiet Australians” team uniform.

Well, “they’ll steal your ute and end the weekend” doesn’t work as well now that the government is promoting electric vehicles.

But as the adults in the room were quick to explain, there is one-quarter of three-fifths of stuff-all multiple voting in this lucky land of Democracy Sausages and compulsory polling station attendance.

And if the motive was a little voter suppression of the underclass supposed to not favour the Coalition, there was no need.

Former Liberal state minister Pru Goward has infamously assured us the “proles” don’t vote much anyway.

The distraction only annoyed those who get annoyed with the Morrison government. The Quiet Australians are, by definition, quietly compliant.

So beyond that little distraction value, why do it?

Because it is a barrow being pushed hard by the Trump Party and thus the local conservatives can be relied upon to ape the masters, surrendering to their kind of “me too” movement.

Our slavish over-reporting of American news ensures American social trends and causes flow across the Pacific, unfortunately with the same growing divisiveness.

You can rely on local culture warriors to copycat both sides of “taking the knee”, for example, and watch out for more frothing about “critical race theory” thanks to that phrase reportedly being the horse the Republican candidate rode to become Virginia’s Governor on Wednesday.

A difference though is that the centre-left here is comfortable enough with its own standards. It does not define itself by the standards of America’s Democrats.

Labor would not want to be the Democratic Party. Progressive Democrats might well look to the Labor Party for inspiration instead.

That seems not to be the case on the Right.

The Republican Party’s march ever further to the neoliberal extreme has been the route map for the Liberal Party as its more moderate leadership has vacated the field, as conservative “Prayer Group” numbers men have taken control of the federal party room and the most obvious local conservative “think tank” (I use the term loosely), the Institute of Public Affairs, pumps out the sort of doctrinaire propaganda associated with the US lobby groups funded by the Koch brothers.

(“A franchise operation for US pamphleteers”, as one of the Twitterati neatly described it.)

And now there is no retreat with the Republican Party’s wholesale plunge into the scarier end of Trumpism. It has become the Trump Party, merely trading as the GOP.

There has been and is no sign of any reticence in the federal Liberal Party to identify with the Trump Party.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison happily took part in a Trump election rally during his Great Mates Tour two years ago, criticised no aspect of Trump policy and adopted Trumpian rhetoric.

“The future does not belong to globalists, the future belongs to patriots,” Donald Trump told the UN and a week later Scott Morrison was decrying “elites”, “negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community” and “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”.

In his maiden speech in 2019, Senator Andrew Bragg happily referenced  “our sister party in the United States”. Senator Bragg’s sister party had already become Trump’s whore.

Scott Morrison stood out among world leaders with his pussyfooting refusal to criticise Mr Trump’s role in Washington’s January 6 insurrection.

The Prime Minister also declined to criticise George Christensen for spreading “dodgy votes” conspiracy theories.

So with the Trump Party going hell for leather on voter suppression, gerrymandering and official stacking, never mind their success on Wednesday night in again blocking key parts of the Voting Rights Act, it’s little surprise that the Trump’s Australian “sister party” would want to join in with a little voter ID game.

It is not original and serves no good purpose, but it apparently fills a need in the Coalition to be Trumpy.

That certainly is not the party of Menzies.

Read more: https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/11/05/michael-pascoe-local-trump-party/

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Freedom’ has been a rallying point for those disaffected by Covid restrictions, and Clive Palmer’s UAP is trying to capitalise on it.

Protests against the Covid lockdowns imposed in Victoria over the past five months have achieved particular virulence at various times and have been given widespread coverage in the mass media. But are they simply a response to Victoria’s stringent lockdowns or do they go deeper than this?

In the past 10 days such demonstrations have moved up another step with a minority of the demonstrators threatening violence against the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. The most conspicuous of these threats was a wooden gallows replete with hangman’s noose being driven past Parliament House on a trailer. In response, comments from Matthew Guy and Scott Morrison came thick and fast and these have just made the situation about the demonstrators aims and their political ambitions more confused.

Several commentators have focussed on the likely heterogeneity of the crowd.

Single-issue anti-vaxers have been conflated with QAnon members and a rag-bag of other extreme right groups, seemingly becoming more visible as the federal election looms closer. Josh Roose has argued that “the movement is riddled with far-right and alt-right extremists who … pose one of the more significant challenges to Australian democracy in recent memory”. But it may not simply be a random group of people with a set of diverse complaints about the Victorian government encapsulated in the figure of Andrews? Their anger may be the culmination of many years of discontent?

It has frequently been noted that a range of authoritarian populist movements have sprung up across the world, including in parts of Europe, Turkey, Venezuela and Brazil, and in America during and leading up to the Trump presidency.

(GusNote: the authoritarian loony chaotic Trumpian populist movement in the USA has morphed into the pseudo-left woke-yoke corporate Democrats movement that is full of vengeance and intransigence, and still keeping Assange in Prison...)

Such movements have long existed in Australia with notable examples being groups centred around Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Pauline Hanson, with a more recent example of populism represented by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

The latter, in particular, has been spending vast amounts of money on advertising in the mass media with the tagline: “WE CAN NEVER TRUST THE LIBERALS, LABOR OR GREENS AGAIN”.

Above all, in a most opportunistic manner, it has begun projecting itself as the party of Freedom with a capital F, though apparently of nothing else.

Freedom is sufficiently vague to function as a rallying point, bringing together disgruntled people, in increasing numbers, for whom the Covid situation over the last two years has brought much disaffection to a head. Given the importation of some of the language and imagery from right-wing groups in America one has to ask if this series of increasingly dramatic demonstrations — though with little actual violence now — reflects something more than just the frustrations and uncertainty caused by the Covid restrictions.

Since the early eighties there has been a well-documented transformation in governance, economy and culture of most European and Anglo-centric countries and even beyond this, plus a strong move towards gender equality and multiculturalism. For the first few decades of this transformation the majority of the population scarcely noticed much change, change exacerbated by the ubiquity of digital technology and the ease of communication it provides. Recognition is coming to a head now.

For a large percentage of the population the supposed benefits of the withdrawal of governance and the dominance of the market have not produced the lifestyle improvements they were promised. Instead, work has become more insecure, wealth inequity has exploded and, in Australia at least, housing has almost ceased to be an option for the younger generations.

One of the cultural shifts associated with neoliberal governance has been an excessive individuality, pushed strongly by the very idea of the market as an instrument for mediating individual preference. And over the past two decades a similar kind of individuality has also been given tremendous airplay at the popular level by the ubiquity of so-called reality television. Its characters place individual choice over community responsibility, aspiration over sharing, and freedom to act in a manner favouring oneself over those around one. As such, and even if it is not theorized in a coherent way, the freedom from constraining forces has acquired considerable emotive value.

This has been severely exacerbated during the Covid restrictions when an easily identifiable external body, that is, the government, imposes limitations on behaviour, limitations not seen in living memory. As such an appeal to Freedom can unify many discontents that seem to all arise when external limitations are placed on individual activity.

The fact that neoliberal governance, supposedly predicated on the relative freedom of individual choice, has essentially resulted in corporate welfare and diminished choice for many groups in society is likely not in the consciousness of most of those involved in the recent demonstrations against government regulation. Nor is the paradox of somebody like Clive Palmer spending millions on advertising Freedom, demonstrating a financial freedom completely denied to most other people. This paradox is heightened by the underlying aim of the UAP being to see the LNP returned.

Whether any of this will be effective, and how that effectiveness might be measured, remains to be seen. The prime minister is spruiking greater freedoms for travellers and the return of international students, and has over the past few months been urging some state governments to be less stringent on their restrictions. In doing this he places himself firmly within the trope of Freedom — without needing to define it precisely — a trope that has always had resonance within traditional Liberal Party thinking and amongst those whose appeal is to the populist UAP. It also allows him to avoid spelling out any serious policies.

The underlying message of many of the people who participate in the kinds of demonstrations we have seen is a mistrust of government, again another theme that the prime minister has been mouthing. Superficially this might also be seen to stand firmly within the neoliberal ethos of withdrawal of government from the economy and people’s lives. Yet the massive amounts of money wasted on JobKeeper testify to the underlying truth that government intervention, not withdrawal, is a central part of neoliberal welfare.

The test of the demonstrators’ zeal will be revealed if the demonstrations continue and if the participants off any coherent policy framework for the country. For the UAP, Freedom will be ditched as its motto if the Coalition wins the next federal election.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/united-australia-party-is-invoking-freedom-to-win-votes-so-is-the-prime-minister/

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