Prime Minister Abbott’s Commission of Audit report is a bloody disaster for ordinary Australians. And no wonder given that, according to SMH Economics Editor Ross Gittins, that it was “effectively handed over to one business lobby group … composed of the most highly paid chief executives in the country.”¹

The result is nothing less than the end of the fair go for all Australians:

• A new $15 “Sick Tax” to see our GP and fees to visit public hospitals

• Slashing the minimum wage by $130 per week for low-income earners

• Increasing the pension age to 70 and including the family home in means testing

• Killing off or clawing back family tax benefits relied on by the vast majority of Australian families

• Increasing students’ share of university fees by 34%

When billionaire-backed lobbyists disguised as independent experts get the ear of the media and those in power, we need to speak out even more strongly for ordinary Australians. So to fight back, we’re partnering with the Australia Institute — a leading progressive policy voice — to put everyday Australians back at the heart of this year’s budget.

The Australia Institute knows how to get progressive values and policies front and centre in the public debate, and we know how to fight for them online and in the streets. But this important partnership can’t go forward without your help.

Click here to chip in to advance our people-centred vision of Australia against a radically conservative agenda: www.getup.org.au/fight-the-radical-conservative-agenda

The Australia Institute has been the policy muscle behind some of GetUp’s most powerful campaigns. For just one of their reports on Tasmanian forestry, they generated over 820 media stories, seen by more than 1 million people.

Our fight back against the conservative agenda starts right away, with the release of the Australian Institute report “Auditing the Auditors: The People’s Commission of Audit.” It will expose the horribly one-sided Commission of Audit report for what it is: the dismantling of “the lucky country” that Australians know, love, and have built together for the past 50 years.

And with your help, the fight will continue in the months ahead with cut-through ads, polling, and election-changing grassroots networking – the very tactics that have made the GetUp movement such an effective force for change. We’ll even carry the fight right through to the next election, with our biggest campaign effort ever, holding our politicians’ feet to the fire on Medicare, family benefits, school fees and all the things that our movement stands for.

Chip in to join the thousands of other Australians who refuse to let vested interests decide the future of Australian families.

www.getup.org.au/fight-the-radical-conservative-agenda

Mr Abbott promised the budget pain would be “fair” and “equitable.” But glancing at the 15 key areas identified by the Commission for cuts, see if you can spot many that hit the big end of town:

“The aged pension, Medicare benefits, hospitals, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, carers’ payments, aged care, the Disability Support Pension, childcare and paid parental leave, family tax benefits, job seeker payments, school funding, higher education, defence and foreign aid.”²

Mining magnates, media moguls, and carbon polluters don’t make it anywhere in the top 15. So when we put it to Australians that we now have a choice — between a tax on multinational mining companies or ending Medicare as we know it — we’ll drive a narrative based on a fair go for ordinary Australians instead of a free pass for polluters and big business.

But bringing that vision to Australians, while battling well-funded right-wing propaganda, will take both great policy work and powerful campaigning. And this may comes as a shock, but the last time Rupert Murdoch or Gina Rinehart turned up at a GetUp fundraiser was never. Thankfully, we’ve got something better: a community of hundreds of thousands of fellow Australians standing up for themselves and each other.

Chip in and join the thousands of other Australians who refuse to hand our country over to big business: www.getup.org.au/fight-the-radical-conservative-agenda

Thank you, always, for all that you do,
Mark, for the GetUp team

PS – Through grassroots campaigning, cutting edge political advertising and High Court advocacy, GetUp has literally been able to change the course of elections. Adding more policy muscle to our campaigning will only increase the influence of GetUp members in the media and the halls of Parliament. But if we can’t raise new funds, the Australia Institute may have to pull back on some of this important work, which would leave us unarmed against the business-backed think tanks and lobbyists. You can make all the difference by chipping in: www.getup.org.au/fight-the-radical-conservative-agenda

PPS – Below is a long sample list of some of the media coverage the Australia Institute has been able to generate for progressive policies:

• ABC 24 News (Richard Denniss), Commission of Audit

• ABC 24 News (Matt Grudnoff), Commission of Audit

• ABC The Drum (Ben Oquist), Commission of Audit

• Radio National Breakfast (Richard Denniss), Commission of Audit: bracket creep

• Radio Adelaide (Matt Grudnoff), How might the budget affect you?

• The Sydney Morning Herald, Super and tax: striking a balance

• The Guardian, Tony Abbott’s duplicity in proposing a ‘temporary debt levy’ is astounding

• Australian Financial Review (AFR), Target super tax concessions, not pensioners

• Wealth Professional, Slash superannuation tax concessions

• WA today, Happy to pay the price to protect age pension

• The Sydney Morning Herald, It’s super tax concessions, not pensions that are killing the budget

• The Drum, Pension plans won’t win many fans

• ABC ‘AM’, Superannuation tax breaks described by Australia Institute as the Hindenburg of the federal budget

• Crikey, A fairer way to provide pensions (and save the government money)

• Michael Pascoe Yahoo!7, Boost pensions to save on aged costs – no, seriously

• ABC News, Super tax breaks for the rich while average Australian forced to work longer

• The Canberra Times, Coalition’s cacophony of sound leads to discordant mess

• Background Briefing (Richard Denniss), The price of power

• The Project (Richard Denniss), Free trade deal with Japan

• Wake Up (Richard Denniss), Expensive Energy

• The Canberra Times, Nothing free about Tony Abbott’s free trade agreements

• The Drum, Want a case for regulation? Look at CSG

• The Canberra Times, Goodies and baddies lost in Tasmanian logjam, PM Tony Abbott will find

• The Conversation, Three myths the coal seam gas industry wants you to believe

[1] Commission of Audit: Be afraid, but only mildly so, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 May 2014
[2] Pensioners, health, family payments face cuts under Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit report, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 May 2014

WASHINGTON -– Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a real and present danger in the United States, according to a government report issued Tuesday.

The report is the latest update from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and details ways that climate change — caused predominantly by the emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — is already being felt across the country.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the report says in its introduction. The full report, at more than 800 pages, is the most comprehensive look at the effects of climate change in the U.S. to date, according to its authors. (Even the “highlights” document provided to reporters the day before the release weighed in at 137 pages). The report includes regional and sectoral breakdowns of current and anticipated impacts, which have implications for infrastructure, agriculture, human health, and access to water.

Those impacts include increased severity of heat waves and heavier downpours. On the coasts, sea level rise is already contributing to increased flooding during high tides and storms, the report notes. And in the West, conditions are getting hotter and drier, and the snowpack is melting earlier in the year, extending wildfire season.

Average U.S. temperatures have increased 1.3 degrees to 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (depending on the part of the country) since people began keeping records in 1895, and much of that warming has come in recent decades. The report notes that the period from 2001 to 2012 was warmer than any previous decade on record, across all regions of the country.

The length of time between the last spring frost and the first fall frost also has increased across the U.S. The average time between frosts in the Southwest increased by 19 days in the years 1991 to 2012, compared with the average from 1901 to 1960.

Heat waves are already the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S., and that will only get worse. Extreme heat can cause more heart, lung and kidney problems, especially among the poor, sick and elderly. The number of days where temperatures top 100 degrees is predicted to increase in the future. If emissions continue to rise, temperatures on the very hottest days during the last 20 years of this century may be 10 degrees to 15 degrees hotter across most of the country, the report finds. Under a lower-emission scenario, those hottest days of the years 2081 to 2100 would still be 3 degrees to 4 degrees warmer than now.

Another impact that scientists are already seeing that they have linked to climate change is an increase in major precipitation events. In the Northeast, for example, there has been a 71 percent increase in storms that would classify as “very heavy” -– in the top 1 percent — from 1958 to 2012.

While the outlook could be considered bleak, Radley Horton, a scientist at Columbia University Earth Institute’s Center for Climate Systems Research and the lead author for the assessment’s chapter on the Northeast, said the report “delves into much more detail about opportunities to address climate change.”

“The climate hazards are looking as severe as ever, but I think there is a message contained in the report that our ability to respond is about getting going,” Horton told The Huffington Post. “The question is, are we able to meet the challenges, given the growing understanding of how much the climate could change this century?”

The amount of climate change in the future, the report says, “will still largely be determined by choices society makes about emissions.”

The report notes that American society and its infrastructure were built for the past climate — not the future. It highlights examples of the kinds of changes that state and local governments can make to become more resilient. One of the main takeaways, said David Wolfe, a professor of plant and soil ecology at Cornell University and a coauthor of the chapter on the Northeast, is that “you don’t want to look at the weather records of yesteryear to determine how to set up your infrastructure.”

This report, said Wolfe, signals that the country is “beginning to move beyond the debate about whether climate change is real or not, and really getting down to rolling up our sleeves” and addressing it.

A 60-person advisory committee comprised of government, private and academic representatives oversaw the assessment, which took four years and involved more than 300 scientists, engineers, and technical experts.

In an appearance at the White House press briefing on Monday, White House senior counselor John Podesta said the updated assessment provides “practical, usable knowledge” for state and local decision-makers as they prepare for climate impacts and is the “most authoritative and comprehensive” to date.

The reports are supposed to be issued at least every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and are meant to analyze “the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity.” The reports are to be presented to the president and Congress.

This is the third report of its kind. The first came in 2000, during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration was accused of push for climate legislation in Congress early in its first term.

President Barack Obama plans to meet with meteorologists to discuss the report’s findings, and the White House has several related events planned later this week.