ausculture.com

LOL! Abbott and Bishop leading the Libs – Christmas has come early for ausculture!

First came the stocking fillers: Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate leader, belligerently traipsing Bob Carter, the one climate change denying scientist he could muster, across drought-ravaged country Australia telling farmers there was zero warming between 1958 and 2005! And then Steve Fielding calling for a Royal Commission into the climate change science* after a Senate deal to wrap up the ETS debate – “The temptation to weep with laughter is great” said Chris Uhlmann on Monday’s 7.30 Report.

And now the Liberal Party joins the Nationals to form a hilarious double-act of out-of-touch polices** and bombastic sound bites.

What the majority of the Australian public wants is a set of effective policies to address climate change, the effects of which are starting to look scarily catastrophic. That’s what we gave Labor a mandate to do. Unfortunately, Rudd’s been bowing to pressure from the worst polluters and promising them absurdly generous ‘permits to pollute’, something famously denounced by his own lead climate change advisor, Ross Garnaut, as well as The Greens and many others. Rudd has been trying to conjure up a scheme which no one really feels the effects of. Which, of course, defeats the whole point: if the tax on a packet of cigarettes was 20 cents just how many people would give up smoking?

Elsewhere in the developed world, conservatives have been supportive of emissions trading schemes. The EU, an alliance of 27 countries ranging from left- to extreme right-wing, already has one. Even the US has one, albeit watered down. Leaving Australia very much on the outer.

So as funny as it is to have a Leader of the Opposition who only a month ago said “I think the climate change argument is crap!”, at the end of the day the joke’s on us.

* Funny enough in itself – “Right, we need to summon Dr. David Suzuki to testify in Canberra – I mean, how are we supposed to accept him as a serious environmentalist when he keeps manufacturing petrol motorbikes?”

** Well, not so much policies as opposition to policies – all the more ironic as the Coalition would have brought in their own ETS had they retained power.

Image: ABC