15/12/2019

(AU) Australia’s Democracy Has Faceplanted And Labor Is Staring Down Some Disturbing Truths

The Guardian - 

Labor is the only major party that is halfway serious about climate change, but it has been unable to move the dial
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, has copped a hiding on social media and elsewhere for visiting coal communities during the bushfires. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP
Katharine Murphy
Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor.
One of the most striking findings in the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study – the survey of voters the university has undertaken after every federal election since 1987 – are the results on satisfaction with democracy.
The survey tells us that back in 2007, Australians were sanguine. Kevin Rudd had won the federal election, and politics was hovering on the brink of a decade of profound disruption. At the tail end of the revolving door of prime ministers, and the failure of our parliament to achieve a durable consensus on important issues like climate change, only 59% of us are satisfied with democracy, and trust has reached its lowest level on record, with just 25% believing people in government can be trusted.
Loss of faith, given the experience post-2007, is to be expected. But the striking bit for me in the latest AES was the rate of decline in satisfaction with democracy. The faceplant in Australia has been steeper than the experience in the United Kingdom after the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the United States following Donald Trump’s 2016 election win. Just roll that small insight around in your head for a minute. Politics in the US and the UK has completely jumped the shark – yet our citizens are hitting the screw this button faster than the citizens of America and Britain.
Assuming this insight is correct, that’s really quite something. It tallies with the despair I encounter among the community of politically engaged people on social media, day in and day out, heaving and crashing. My inbox is studded with it. Progressives, engaged folks, are clearly angry, frustrated, thwarted.
Some of this roiling is currently trained in Labor’s direction. Anthony Albanese has copped a hiding on social media and elsewhere this week for visiting coal communities during the bushfires – the visit seen as a portent of capitulation by Labor on climate policy. I want to work through the points I’m going to make about this reaction, step by step, just so we are clear.
This first thing to say is I’m minutely interested in where Labor ultimately ends up on climate policy. If Labor does ultimately capitulate on climate action, producing an execrable policy for the next federal election, then I will be the first one lining up with the rhetorical baseball bat. I will be taking no prisoners.
But rather than fly off in a rage because Albanese went to Emerald, or looked sideways at a coalminer while Sydney choked in smoke, right now I’m content to wait, and watch. I’m content to wait and watch, not because I’m a naturally patient person, or a trusting person, or a generous person, but because I’m a student of history.
It’s worth laying out the recent history just so it’s clear, because right now the debate feels a bit untethered, and things that can be known and proved (as opposed to being speculated about) are a bit obscured in the thicket of fail hashtags.
History tells us that Labor has made mistakes on climate policy, significant errors of hubris, fear and poor judgment, that have set back the cause of progress.
But history also tells us this political party shows up on climate action. It is the only party of government in Australia that does, election cycle after election cycle. That basic fact seems a bit lost in the wash in some of the current emoting and hectoring.
The other lesson of history that may not be obvious is this. Labor has lost two elections on climate change – 2013 and 2019.
Climate change wasn’t the only negative factor in these contests. Labor lost predominantly in 2013 because it was more interested in conducting a civil war at taxpayer expense than serving Australian voters, but Labor also lost because Tony Abbott was successful in weaponising climate change. It was diabolical, what Abbott did, but it was a precision, partisan, demolition.
A backlash against climate action in regional Queensland was also part of the story of Labor’s election loss in May. I don’t think a lot of progressive people have really grasped this basic fact, because they prefer to think climate change switched votes Labor’s way in 2019, because that’s a more comforting story.
I can’t fathom, given what the science says, why climate change goes on being Australia’s Brexit.
Now it’s true, climate change did help shore up Labor’s left flank against the Greens, and pushed a number of swing votes Labor’s way in 2019. But it’s important to look where those positive swings happened, and they were largely in seats Labor had no prospect of winning.
Any political party will happily bank any positive swing. It’s gratifying. It suggests the dial is moving. But obviously it is better if the swings deliver you government rather than just a warm inner glow, and abstract validation.
So what I’m trying to convey this weekend is Labor has paid a price electorally for pursuing climate action.
I don’t high five this fact. I don’t find it comforting. I can’t fathom, given what the science says, given the clear evidence that warming is under way, why there is even a debate in this country about what needs to happen, why climate change goes on being Australia’s Brexit.
But there is a “debate”, pushed by corporates with vested interests, and culture warriors intent on routing progressivism, whatever the cost; and materialist anxiety is stoked assiduously by poisonous agitprop rags like the Daily Telegraph, and other alleged news outlets in the Murdoch stable that act like sheep dogs rounding up thought criminals, fully resolved to let no good deed go unpunished.
I thought after the defeat in May we would see ignominious surrender from the ALP. I fully expected that to happen, not because it’s right, but because retreat is not irrational in terms of the electoral calculation.
But the only person I’ve heard in Labor saying we need to lower the level of ambition is Joel Fitzgibbon, who got the fright of his life after suffering a huge negative swing in his coal community in the Hunter Valley, and has now embarked on a coal worshipping tour of the country as an act of contrition.
Mark Butler isn’t saying lower ambition. Albanese isn’t saying it. Penny Wong isn’t saying it. Senior New South Wales rightwingers, such as Tony Burke and Chris Bowen, are saying we need to maintain ambition consistent with the science and find a way to do that while reassuring our blue-collar base. Burke and Bowen have floated the New Green Deal, or something like it, as a mechanism that might square the circle.
Maybe Labor will, ultimately, surrender. It’s certainly possible. But what’s happening now isn’t surrender – it’s an attempt to stitch climate action and blue-collar jobs together. It’s an attempt to craft a nuance.
Now some progressive people will argue that’s impossible, so don’t even bother; Labor should just draw a line now and say we are for climate action, no compromises, no redux on the messaging. If you don’t like it, vote for someone else.
That’s fine, as long as the people making these arguments understand a couple of basic things.
Labor can’t win an election by saying that. Not on current indications.
Perhaps that could change in time, because public sentiment will shift as the evidence and experience of warming grows. The community is clearly mobilising. But right now, Australians are telling pollsters they are increasingly worried about climate change, but a majority is not voting in favour of climate action when push comes to shove. The country remains divided, and rancorously so. That’s the legacy of our busted arse politics, and our busted arse media “conversation”.
While ever that remains the case, Labor will have to hold its progressive post-material constituency and hold its traditional base, or enough of it to win enough seats to form a government.
If it’s either/or, Labor loses.
So let’s be precise about what that means. It means the only party of government in Australia that is halfway serious about climate action, the only party with the capacity to deliver tangible action, remains out of power, unable to move the dial.
This is less of a problem obviously if the Liberal party can enjoy a Damascene conversion. I remain hopeful that it might happen. But there’s not much evidence of that happening currently.
These are just facts. These might be irritating facts, facts disruptive to the flow of feelings, but they are facts.
Let’s loop back to despair, which is where we started this weekend. I get despair. I understand why people who care about the fate of the planet are so worried about the failure of our political system, particularly on this issue. I worry about it constantly. I report on it incessantly in the hope that something will change.
I understand the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. I battle these feelings myself. But also know this. Lashing out is a waste of time and energy. Rage in advance of the facts is just more noise. Some of it’s eloquent noise, but it is just noise.
David Remnick of the New Yorker wrote one of the finest pieces of the year about the challenges of reporting during the age of Donald Trump. He told his readers despair is not an option. “Despair is a form of self-indulgence, a dodge.”
Remnick is absolutely right. Despair is not an option, particularly in advance of the facts.
The times are just too serious.

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(AU) Grattan On Friday: Climate Winds Blowing On Morrison From Liberal Party’s Left

The Conversation - 

Morrison has refused to meet calls for a national summit or a COAG meeting on the fire effort. Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Scott Morrison is picking up that Australia’s devastating, prolonged fires are producing a soured, anti-government mood among many in the community.
It may not be entirely rational for people to turn on politicians in such situations. The actual fighting of the fires, driven primarily at state and local levels, appears to have been efficient.
But the government has invited anger in terms of the broad debate by being so inactive and partisan about climate change over years.
Morrison is struggling to navigate his way through these fraught days before Christmas. He’s stressing unity - “I want to reassure Australians, that the country is working together … to deal with the firefighting challenge”. He’s refusing to meet calls for a national summit or a COAG meeting on the fire effort, but he’s highlighting the federal government’s co-ordinating activities.
He’s placing the most positive spin he can on what Australia is doing on climate change, but all the time emphasising Australian emissions are only a tiny portion of the global total “so any suggestion that the actions of any state or any nation with a contribution to global emissions of that order is directly linked to any weather event, whether here in Australia or anywhere else in the world, is just simply not true”.
The fires are putting pressure on the government by elevating the climate issue and opening new division among Liberals. Only this time – and importantly - the internal wedge is coming from the left rather than the right of the party. The PM is being pushed to do more, rather than being held back.
Morrison is no longer able to gloss over the climate debate. The big question for the next year or two is whether he will reposition the government.
As former treasury secretary Ken Henry has argued, “today’s catastrophic bushfires, and rapidly vanishing water security, again following years of drought, put the present government in a similar position” to when John Howard moved on climate change in 2006.
“The political economy of late 2019 is looking a lot like late 2006,” Henry writes in an article titled “The political economy of climate change”.
Morrison is the ultimate pragmatist and so, if he sees it in his interest, he may well be willing to readjust. Not radically, nor quickly. Just enough, as and when he judges it, to satisfy middle ground voters.
He did a little of this before the election, when he topped up funding for “direct action” and advanced pumped hydro, although some read more into the shift than was there.
This week NSW Liberal environment minister Matt Kean bluntly called out his federal colleagues’ dancing around the climate-fires link.
NSW environment minister Matt Kean. Joel Carrett/AAP
“Let’s not beat around the bush … let’s call it for what it is. These bushfires have been caused by extreme weather events, high temperatures, the worst drought in living memory - the exact type of events scientists have been warning us about for decades that would be caused by climate change,” said Kean, who is the leader at state level of the moderate faction.
“There has been a lot of talk since the federal election about ending the climate wars. I think that that talk has been misplaced. It’s not time to end the climate wars. It’s time to win the climate wars.”
Kean also notably acknowledged the “leadership” on the climate issue of Malcolm Turnbull (who again prodded the bear on Monday’s ABC Q&A).
One federal Liberal says, “for a long time [Kean’s line] is where the overwhelming majority of the party has stood [but] nobody was willing to say it. The community is so concerned it has given us the cover to come out and say it”. The MP points to the impact of the issue in Liberal heartland seats in Sydney and Melbourne.
The federal government has repeatedly derided the Victorian and Queensland Labor governments for what it argues is their excessive ambition on renewables and emissions reduction. Kean has flagged NSW plans to strengthen its stand. The federal government is clearly exposed as the odd player out.
Yet it is the states’ targets for renewables that are helping the national effort on emissions reduction, according to figures just released by the environment and energy department in its report “Australia’s emissions projections 2019”.
Looking at Australia’s progress towards its 2030 Paris target of a 26-28% reduction on 2005 levels - which, incidentally, can only be reached via the much-criticised course of carrying over Kyoto credits - the report has revised down its 2018 estimate for projected 2030 emissions.
Reasons for this revision include the boost to the “direct action” fund and “stronger renewables deployment”. A factor in the latter was “the inclusion of 50% renewable energy targets in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory”.
The projection is now for Australia to have renewables generating 48% of its electricity by 2030 – very close to the Labor policy of 50% of which the government was so critical.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s speech at the United Nations COP25 conference in Spain this week showed how, as the inevitable transition to clean energy progresses, the government is conflicted. Regardless of years of scepticism about renewables from the federal Coalition, Taylor in Madrid lauded Australia’s achievements in this area.
“In Australia, an unprecedented wave of low emissions energy investment is already underway,” he boasted.
“Last year, renewable investment was Australia’s highest on record at A$14.1 billion, which is world leading investment given our population. Renewables are now more than 25% of our electricity supply in our National Electricity Market.”
Reality is gradually proving stronger than ideology as the energy mix changes, but not entirely. The debate around a new coal-fired power station goes on. The government before the election promised a feasibility study into a possible venture in Queensland, and the Nationals continue to push for action.
If a feasibility study left the way open for a coal-fired station, would the government be willing to provide any financial help or guarantee for a portion of the energy output? Given the reluctance of private capital, that would likely be the only way it could happen.
There was a certain irony in Anthony Albanese touring coal country in central Queensland this week, given the climate debate.
Visiting Emerald, Rockhampton and Gladstone among other stops, Albanese was beginning his mission to reconcile the strands in Labor’s climate messages, after Bill Shorten failed to do so, costing vital Queensland votes.
This week Albanese has been talking up the domestic transition to renewables, while providing reassurance to the coal areas by declaring the world will continue to want Australian coal for the foreseeable future.
He says the role of government in relation to new coal mines is to make the environmental judgements; if they pass that test, then such projects live or die on their ability to raise private finance. On Adani, he says it has its approval and he’s urging it to get on with providing the jobs (the company says it is doing so).
As to a new coal fired power station: he believes it would not get private finance.
Very aware Shorten was smashed for trying to walk in different shoes on climate and coal when he was in the inner city and in regional Queensland, Albanese is aiming for a story to which he can get a favourable reception all round the country.
That won’t be easy. Then nothing is, for anyone, on the climate issue.

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(AU) What Albanese Could Have Said: We Lied – Australian Coalmines Have No Future

The Guardian - *

Richard Flanagan imagines an alternative speech from the Labor leader this week as the climate crisis rages
‘It strained belief of both our supporters and opponents that we could be for Adani and not for Adani. In truth we were too much for ourselves.’ Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images
On Monday, ahead of a visit to Queensland coalmining communities, Anthony Albanese announced that there would be no ending of coal exporting under a Labor government. Here is the text of an alternative speech the Labor leader could have given that day instead.

 Today we witness an unprecedented situation as a people and as a nation. Our country is burning and there is no end in sight, nor will there be an end unless we have the courage to face the truth. Our country is burning because it is warming up and drying out, and these things are happening because of a climate crisis for which human beings all over the world are responsible.
We cannot escape our responsibility to act on these truths.
Last election we lied to Australia because we lied to ourselves. We thought we could run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. But in the end, the hares didn’t believe us and the dogs came for us.
It was not possible to say we were serious about addressing the climate crisis and yet promise $1.5bn to subsidise the development of the Beetaloo gas basin as we did during the election. It strained belief of both our supporters and opponents that we could be for Adani and not for Adani. In truth we were too much for ourselves.
All we achieved was to entrench the fossil fuel industry as our most powerful vested interest. Today that industry has as its handmaiden the most authoritarian government in our history. It attacks journalistic freedom, derides those who question it, uses parliament as a forum for lies and criminalises democracy.
Today fires burn over an extraordinary 2.1m hectares in New South Wales alone and yet, despite the lies, our carbon emissions are rising. In the greatest city in our country Australians are choking and falling sick with the resultant pollution that make its air rank among that of the worst polluted cities in the world. Our beaches are black with soot, our towns are running out of water, and yet we are opening new coalmines and gasfields.
Where is our prime minister? Where is the leadership the country is crying out for?
Agreeing with the government, staying mute on the great issue of the day is not clever politics. It is capitulation. It is collaboration. It is, finally, criminal.
My policy will not be to out-Nero Nero Morrison. That is his crown of ash, his name, his infamy, his shame and his destiny.
And so from today our position is no longer ambiguous. Our policy means only one thing: to stay alive. Today, in the smog and suffocating filth of Sydney, at a moment of despair for all Australians, I am announcing that our policy of appeasement of the coal industry ends here and now.
Today I say to the fossil fuel industry this: we will no longer gift you endless billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in subsidies and tax breaks, only in order to see the Australian people’s gift repaid as more fire, worse drought, rising seas, more floods, increased cyclones, soot in our lungs and despair in our souls.
Today I am announcing that if Labor is elected to government there will be a moratorium on all future coal and gas projects. Because if we don’t we will by 2030 be the sixth-largest producer of carbon emissions in the world. We are already the largest per-capita carbon polluter.
These simple, terrible facts shame us. Worse, we now are paying their terrible price. That is why today I am announcing that if we should win government we will end all thermal coal and gas exports. This will be a complex process but that process begins the day we take power.
I could pretend that it’s not against the rules of the Paris accord to export fossil fuels, that we have only committed to a reduction of carbon emissions in our own country. But such an argument is either a nonsense made in bad faith or shows no understanding of the science underlying the accord, an ignorance so profound as to be implausible. It is only consistent with a party which values neat tricks of language over the substance of public good.
And under my leadership we will not be that party.
I could argue that if we do not sell our coal, others will step in and fill the hole in the market. It is the seductive excuse of the pusher, the smuggler, the slaver. It is the argument of every criminal enterprise. Are we a people who make no distinction between a criminal act and knowingly aiding a criminal act?
No, we are not that people.
I could lie that there is a distinction between domestic emissions and international exports. But scientifically there is none. Science makes clear that the problem doesn’t stop at our borders; that the problem is shared, that the horrific consequences are shared, and that the solutions must also be shared. Far from being a crucial distinction, it is cowardice posing as realism.
The coal cuddlers say that we are insignificant in the world. They have no belief in Australia. I do. I believe we are something, and that we can be something more. Australia can be, as it once was, a leader in the world. We are a significant country. If we take this step it increases the pressure on every other coal-producing country to hasten the transition out of fossil fuels. It allows us to resume our place at the seat of civilised nations, rather than as the dirty rogue nation we are becoming. It permits us to argue with the force of example for recalcitrant countries to join the coalition of the clean.
The hard people of my party argue that the realpolitik of Australia in 2019 means carrying Queensland coal communities. And they are right. But that doesn’t mean lying to them.
If Labor supports the Paris deal – which we do – that means zero emissions by 2050. If that is achieved globally what future is there for the thermal coalmines of Australia and their communities in 30 years? Closure in 30 years or less. It is the cruellest hoax for politicians to tell these communities they have a future in coalmining when they do not.
The new coalmines that the Morrison government wishes to greenlight will be automated, roboticised and short-lived. They will be zombie workplaces whose promise of jobs are hollow. They will exist only for the greed of their owners.
Any leader with a shred of decency would be seeking to work with these communities to find the best and most just ways for them to find good jobs in a new economy. And that’s what I intend to do.
Today I am announcing that I am going to visit the coalmining communities of Queensland. They deserve to know the truth, and it will be my difficult task to tell them that no matter who they vote for, thermal coalmining is ending. It is ending because the market for coal will collapse – at first, as it already is, slowly – and then catastrophically and completely.
I could pretend these things are not so. I could lie as so many politicians have and will. But I respect the good, hardworking people of these communities and, with them, we will begin the hard work now of ensuring that the end of coalmining is not a catastrophic collapse but a just transition that guarantees good futures with good jobs. They will not be left behind.
It is well known that my hero and mentor was Tom Uren. Uren was a political realist. But he also believed in principle. At the great historic juncture of Australian history, when Menzies’s idea of Australia, backward, reactionary, was firmly in place, Uren marched at the head of the young, as a leader of the Vietnam moratorium movement, to change Australia.
It’s time for Labor to once again walk with those young people on the street demanding action.
To the prime minister I say this: join with us to fight this terrifying problem. It is not a Liberal problem or a Labor problem or a Green problem. It is a practical problem. It is a threat to our very future as a society, as an economy and perhaps even to us as a species. It is the greatest threat in our history. Whatever our beliefs, we are choking on the same smoke. Whoever we voted for we face the same water restrictions and, in more and more of our towns, no water. Across parties, classes and regions we are possessed of the same fear. The fire that now consumes our country doesn’t discriminate whose home it destroys or who it kills because of politics. And in fighting this horrific force nor should we. Human beings have collectively made this problem, and only collectively can we solve it.
Let me be clear. There is no other way. The climate crisis no longer just means the Great Barrier Reef and our ancient forests will die. It means we will suffer too. The climate crisis no longer means our children will experience shorter and more difficult lives. It means we will too. It means our homes becoming uninsurable. Our agricultural sector shrivelling. Our fisheries vanishing. Our economy unravelling. Clean air and water becoming increasingly scarce. I say this not to panic you but to alert you to the scale of the challenge.
I cannot tell you where we will end up. The hour is late, the situation is dire and we have left action to the last moment. I can promise you only this: that I will fight shoulder to shoulder with you in the hope of a better tomorrow. And I ask only this in return: will you join with me?

*Richard Flanagan is the Man Booker prize winner for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. His latest novel is First Person
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