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  • Plain-speaking PM’s blatant grab for centre

     

    Are we really that tolerant as a nation? I’m not sure.

    Surely, Julia, you can hear them when you’re standing out front of the goals for the Bulldogs? No full forward ever missed the taunts of the hardcore barrackers behind the big sticks.

    And it’s equally fine in theory, too, until you sit around the nation’s salons (OK, make that legal precinct wine bars and restaurants that specialise in the $350 a head degustation) and listen to them bang on about what’s best for the workers . . . and the people clamouring to get here on unsafe boats.

    In her speech last week about border control, Moving Australia Forward, Gillard identified the polar ends of the asylum seeker debate in Australia. She then went on to define them in carefully crafted terms that suit her immediate political requirement. Which is, of course, the re-election of Labor and the public legitimisation of her prime ministership.

    On the extreme “evil” right, she placed Tony Abbott, who would turn the boats back, wherever possible, if he could. On the extreme left, meanwhile, she word-sketched a detached (mostly Labor voting) elite that seeks to guillotine the human rights/refugee debate by political correctness.

    Specifically, she took a whack at the respected human rights lawyer and refugee advocate Julian Burnside, QC, for allegedly referring to “rednecks in marginal seats” who are concerned about “unauthorised arrivals”. Burnside maintains he actually said “that people who say we should turn the boats back at gunpoint are rednecks whose views I can’t accept”. There is, in fairness, quite a difference.

    But then again Gillard seems acutely sensitive to the political potency of the asylum-seeker issue in marginal electorates. This was perfectly illustrated by the appearance of Labor’s MP for the western Sydney knife-edge seat of Lindsay, David Bradbury, aboard a patrol boat in Darwin just a day after she made the speech, when the PM was extolling her apparent plan (most charitably described as embryonic) to process all asylum seekers headed for Australia in East Timor.

    Excuse me for being passing cynical here, especially as Gillard now, most improbably, says the East Timor proposal – for all its meritorious potential to process asylum seekers quickly and humanely under the auspices of the United Nations – seems little more than a case of prime ministerial thinking aloud.

    Her dissembling is damaging this close to an election. She needs to fix the details fast.

    Regardless, now that she has defined the parameters of the debate on asylum, she is swimming in a politically perilous rip that runs through the middle of it. Along the way she is identifying – and paying something more than lip service to – the resentments that doubtless simmer in some marginal electorates about asylum seekers.

    “That hardworking Australians who themselves are doing it tough want to know that refugees allowed to settle here are not singled out for special treatment,” she said. “That people like my parents, who have worked hard all their lives, the thing that they can’t abide is the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges.”

    Special privileges? Special treatment? Express yourself, prime minister. What are you talking about?

    Rudd, famously, was criticised as a captive, not to public opinion – but to public opinion polls. What, some must wonder, has really changed . . . and who is she listening to?

    Nonetheless, there seemed scarcely a word out of place in a speech that vindicates, if nothing much else, Gillard’s capacity for plain speaking that reaches the voters who will determine the election. While swimming the rip last week, Gillard displayed her profound and enviable capacity to read a complex political situation, spot the orthodoxy and channel it back to the people who matter most.

    This was an appeal to neither the left nor right. No, it was a blatant pitch to the place where elections are won and lost – the centre.

    While her government scrambles to find an electoral policy fix for what is, in global terms, a minor issue with boat people, she has done her best to grant the public ownership of both the solutions and the perceived problems. Government works best when you can make the punters genuinely feel like passengers.

    There is unseemly, uncharacteristically clumsy urgency about Gillard’s efforts to tick off a fix for the boat people issue, as evidenced by Bradbury’s appearance off Darwin.

    Just as there is also a nagging sense that Gillard’s leadership – while mostly lending the government clearer direction – is still something of a veneer that hides deeper-seeded dilemmas about Labor’s essence.

    In the Australian Labor Party, just like the British Labour Party, there will always be those who believe government takes an unequal toll on the party’s heart and soul. Gillard is not one of them.

    What then, to make of John Faulkner, regarded as a conscience of the party’s true left, who has quit as defence minister barely a year into the job? It’s a bad look on the eve of an election, when he could easily have made the announcement afterwards.

    But then again the war in Afghanistan that he has been waging on Australia’s behalf is also becoming an increasingly bad look, as more young Australians return home in caskets. Here, then, is a gratuitous prediction for whoever wins the next election: Afghanistan will soon become as polarising an issue as asylum seekers.

    Julia Gillard reckons she’s all ears. So please, express yourself.

    As Charles Wright wrote:

    Some people have everything And other people don’t But everything don’t mean a thing If it ain’t the thing you want.

     

  • Greens Leader Bob Brown is tipping an August 21 or August 28 election

     

    Related Coverage

    “However I think a lot of Green votes went across and parked with Julia and Labor voters came and parked with us.”

    Voters did not like the mess Ms Gillard has made of the asylum seeker policy or her discrimination against same-sex couples in marriage laws, Senator Brown said.

    The major parties did not realise the importance of climate change and setting a carbon price to voters, he said.

    “The big parties are out of kilter with the majority feeling in this country,” he said.

    “They need to change and get a carbon price.”

    The Prime Minister could not avoid setting a carbon price and if she did it would disadvantage the opposition, Senator Brown said.

    “Tony Abbott will be seen as last century, totally out of touch on this issue,” he said.
     

  • Gillard fiddles while the country burns

     

    Waiting that long means giving up on deep cuts by 2020, because, as Origin Energy’s Grant King has explained, all the investment decisions that determine our emissions outcome this decade will be taken by 2013.

    Whatever our diminishing federal cabinet comes up with next week, if it does not set a price on carbon soon it will put Australia further behind. In the past fortnight we have been overtaken by New Zealand (a limited ETS with carbon priced at $NZ12.50 a tonne) and India (coal levy, as a prelude to a carbon tax, set at 50 rupees a tonne, to fund clean energy projects).

    Our major trading partners, the US and China, are the ones to watch, of course. Perhaps they will announce that action on climate change is to be deferred until 2013, and then we can all get on with business as usual.

    Unlikely. We are blinded by a coal rush. As the author Guy Pearse observed in his recent ”King Coal” essay for the magazine The Monthly, Australia will soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading carbon exporter. Australia is betting that (a) the world will not switch from coal (but it will) and (b) carbon capture and storage will save us (but it will not, as I will argue next week).

    AGL Energy’s managing director, Michael Fraser, hardly comes to this debate with clean hands (who does?) but he put the problem in stark terms in a speech yesterday: ”Do you think the community would accept 1000 oil wells, leaking at the same rate as BP’s Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon well, every day into our oceans for the next 40 years? The answer is clearly a resounding ‘no’.

    ”Yet every single day we emit the equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of not 1000 BP Deepwater wells but over 9000.”

    Australia, he warned, risked a ”Kodak moment” (in reference to the film giant all but killed off by the digital camera).

    ”Given the significant value from export dollars and employment, we cannot afford to wake up one day and find the world no longer wants to keep consuming our biggest export.”

    We are firmly in the hands of a newly ascendant Energy and Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson – fresh-faced and back-slapped after surrendering up to $35 billion in future resource rent tax revenues to BHP, Rio Tinto and XStrata and friends in what were politely called ”negotiations” but which you and I would recognise as bending over.

    Ferguson’s answer to Australia’s climate change challenge dilemma is simple: target Bob Brown. The minister said in Brisbane this week: ”I take the view Bob Brown is seeking to demonise the coal industry in the same way he has sought to demonise the forest industry.”

    Ferguson is a coal guy. Among his most pressing concerns recently has been energy security. Australia’s oil production has already peaked and our trade deficit in the fuel is likely to reach $20 billion a year between 2015 and 2020.

    Ferguson’s answer? Burn more coal, using you-beaut coal-to-liquids technology.

    So we are now countenancing a $3.5 billion proposal, from Ambre Energy of Brisbane, to develop an open-cut coal mine and the country’s first coal-to-liquids petrochemical plant on about 2000 hectares of land at Felton, near Toowoomba, amid the fertile dryland cropping country of the Darling Downs.

    Ambre is a private company, which may soon float, founded by Edek Choros in 2005. Choros made his fortune selling the coking coal exporter Millennium Coal to Excel Coal, later taken over by Peabody. Ambre has a 500 million tonne black coal resource that could be burned for power generation (as similar-quality coal is nearby) but has too much ash content for export. And Felton is too far from port and rail infrastructure to consider exporting the coal, anyway.

    Ambre has spent about $70 million over the past three years working up its plan, now awaiting state environmental approval, to mine, crush, wash and gasify about 4 million tonnes of coal a year. Out the other end, if the plant is built, will come 940 million litres of petrol and 150 million litres of LPG – which represents about 4.9 per cent of the country’s annual consumption. To get a similar amount of fuel from sugar cane you would need 400,000 hectares of land, Ambre says.

    The greenhouse implications? Enormous. Ambre says its plant would emit 4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and that does not count the emissions from burning the petrol, which would add another 2.2 million tonnes a year. In ballpark terms, that is 1 per cent of the country’s total current emissions for this one project.

    About 3.5 million tonnes of pure CO2 is captured as part of the gasification process and, while the initial plan is to ”vent” it (you know where), Ambre aims to find storage sites in the nearby, prospective Surat Basin or – nirvana, triple whammy – use the trapped gas for enhanced oil recovery, targeting depleted oil fields in the Surat Basin.

    The project has a positive internal rate of return at current oil prices of about $US70 a barrel and assuming a carbon price of about $20 a tonne. Ambre says there are other benefits – fewer dirty air pollutants like sulfur dioxides, and there is no chance of Gulf-like oil spills. ”CO2 gets all the press,” says Ambre’s spokesman, Michael van Baarle. ”The environmental movement is obsessed with the CO2 issue. I understand why that is, because it’s the latest issue.”

    There is stiff local opposition – check out Friends of Felton online – and Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail has been following the story. The proposal has been staunchly opposed by the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce, and the Greens’ leader Bob Brown went to Felton Hall this week and promised, if his party the balance of power in the next federal election, to stop the project.

    He later told ABC radio: “It’s a very clear choice between unnecessary coal mining and petrochemical works, for which there are good alternatives – and absolutely essential alternatives in an age of climate change – and food production, for which there are no alternatives.”

    paddy.manning@fairfaxmedia.com.au

  • Her hair may be red, but she’s no bleeding heart

     

     

    In 16 days as prime minister, she has already disappointed many gay couples by ruling out a change in the law to recognise homosexual marriage.

    Many voters have bought Gillard based on the personal packaging. They see a prime minister who breaks the mould. Not a man, not married, no kids, no careful positioning for the cameras in front of a church, not a hint of a white picket fence anywhere.

    And her background as an industrial lawyer working primarily for the union movement, a member of the Victorian Left of the Labor Party, seems to confirm the obvious – in life choices, in career decisions, in factional identification, this is a left-wing person. Peter Costello liked to call her Red Julia, and he was not just talking hair colour. Surely all of this builds clearly and consistently the profile of a progressive character, perhaps even a closet socialist?

    About a million voters seem to think so. This is the number of electors who have rushed to say they will now vote Labor based solely on the change of leader, and apparently on the assumption that she is the progressive politician they have been craving.

    How do we know this? Adding together the first three credible opinion polls taken after her elevation – one Nielsen, one Newspoll, one Galaxy – 8 per cent of the electorate abandoned stated support for another party and embraced Labor immediately she took the leadership.

    Extrapolating from that sample of 2900 to the total electorate equates to 1.1 million voters, as the poll watcher Andrew Catsaras has pointed out.

    Of these, only one in 10 had been planning to vote Liberal. The rest, or 990,000 voters, were until now saying they would vote for the Greens or “other”. These were the left-leaning people who supported Kevin Rudd in 2007, grew disenchanted with him, and decided they could not vote Labor at the next election.

    They wanted Rudd to be more progressive. The big deal-breaker for these voters was Rudd’s decision to shelve the emissions trading scheme for at least three years. But they were also let down by his decision to take a harder line on asylum seekers. This disheartened progressive vote became a classic “protest vote”. Sullen and frustrated, they “parked” their votes with the Greens and “other” minor parties.

    Gillard’s ascension has given them a surge of hope. They are now back, telling pollsters they intend to vote Labor. They think they see in the new Labor leader the embodiment of their progressive ideal.

    Catsaras has dubbed the prodigal progressives “Gillard’s grateful”. I think it would be more fitting to call them “Gillard’s gulls”. They are destined to be disappointed. They have bought the personal packaging, without heeding the political contents. Gillard does not pretend to be anything she is not. Indeed, if you read the list of policy ingredients printed clearly on the pack, you will see why.

    As education minister, she confronted the unions, and the Australian Education Union, the big left-wing umbrella public-school union, in particular. She outwitted it, out-campaigned it, and out-manoeuvred it. She got what she wanted – a national curriculum, with mandatory national testing, and a public disclosure of school performances on the My School website. Her agenda was pro-student and pro-parent, and it left the union angry and badly battered.

    As industrial relations minister, she gratified the unions by abolishing the remnants of Work Choices. But she also infuriated one of the biggest left-wing unions, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. Withstanding all its demands, Gillard preserved the coercive powers that the Howard government had given the construction sector cop, the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner. The commissioner has forced the building unions to observe the law, and they hate it.

    Remember when Gillard addressed the ACTU Congress last year? Heckled and booed by hundreds of union delegates, some of them turning their backs on her, it was blindingly obvious she is no favourite of the unions, and the left-affiliated unions in particular.

    Now, as PM, she has briskly, systematically demolished the hopes of the progressives on half a dozen issues.

    First, she yielded to the intimidation of the big mining companies and cut a deal to appease them. The government has admitted this will cost the Treasury $1.5 billion in the first two years of the tax, compared to the Rudd proposal. The investment bank Goldman Sachs has told clients that, over 10 years, the Gillard deal will reap $20.9 billion in taxes, which is $35 billion less than Rudd’s plan would have produced.

    Second, she has moved to harden the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Like the Howard government, the Gillard government wants to have all boat people processed in another country. Where Howard favoured Nauru, Gillard prefers East Timor, a proposal the East Timorese government has now challenged. Gillard did not propose going quite as far as Howard – at least she wants the processing done within the rules of the UN. But it is nevertheless an unmistakeable move to the right that will dishearten the progressive side of Labor.

    There is nothing new or confected about Gillard’s position. At a meeting of the Left faction caucus at the Labor Party’s national conference in 2004, Gillard proposed toughening the party’s stand on boat people.

    Among the hundreds in the room, she could not find anyone to second her proposed amendment. Once again, Gillard stands far to the right of her putative factional position.

    And on climate change, too. By promising no attempt to put a price on carbon until there is “community consensus”, she has effectively put the government’s climate policy in the hands of Tony Abbott. Action is on the never-never.

    What about foreign policy? She told the Herald that the fundamentals of foreign policy would remain unchanged: “So, obviously, support the American alliance; support the continued deployment in Afghanistan – I had a comprehensive briefing about that; our support for Israel; focus on our region.”

    The missing words? The US gets pride of place, but no mention of China. Israel is supported, but no mention of the Palestinians. There is absolutely no hint of any of the residual favourites of the traditional Labor Left, not even a token gesture.

    What about cultural or social issues? Gillard this week reaffirmed government determination to press ahead with the proposed internet filter, a move to censorship which has driven younger progressive voters to distraction. Yesterday, in a backdown, the government decided the filter would be put on hold while a review of classified material was undertaken.

    And then, as we’ve seen, she is not budging on gay marriage.

    So much for the surging hope of the centre-left vote. Gillard is, on the whole, more conservative than Rudd. Where he had started to edge his way to the right on climate change and asylum seekers, she has raced there. Why? First, because it’s authentically her. She has been consistent on these issues for years. She is only a member of the Left in name. Second, because it is her support base. She entered Parliament with the support of the Right faction, defeating for preselection a candidate backed by the Socialist Left. And the coup that delivered her the prime ministership was also mobilised by the Right. Why do you think that the Left – outside Victoria – was the last bastion of support for Rudd?

    And third, because of the electoral logic that was pushing Rudd in the same rightwards direction. Labor treats its left-leaning voters with contempt. It assumes that even if they leave Labor for the Greens or “others”, their votes will always flow back to Labor through preferences. Rudd, and now Gillard, assumes the progressive vote is captive.

    The voters Labor worries about are the ones on the right end of the spectrum, the ones most likely to desert Labor and go Liberal. That’s why it caters with slavish devotion to the proclivities and prejudices of the people Rudd deified as “working families”, previously known as “Howard battlers”.

    To vote for Gillard because she looks like a leftie would be like buying a red car because you think it will go faster. If you want to know about performance, you have to look under the bonnet.

    Peter Hartcher is the political editor.

     

  • There is no substitute for carbon price action now -Greens

    10 July 2010
    There is no substitute for carbon price action now – Greens

    The Australian Greens want action now on a carbon price set by
    legislation as critical for climate change action Australian Greens
    Leader Bob Brown said in Canberra today.

    “Energy efficiency, renewable energy measures and saving forests – as
    already put to Parliament by the Greens – are needed but are not
    substitutes for a carbon price,” said Senator Brown.

    “There is an estimated $50 billion investment in electricity production
    awaiting a carbon price signal.

    “We are ready to set this signal with either a Gillard or Abbott
    Government after the election.

    “However the Gillard delay until 2012 and worse still, the Abbott delay
    until 2015, before putting the price mechanism to Parliament is not on.

    “It leaves business uncertain.

    “It leaves the Australian electorate fearful of failure on climate
    change.

    “The Greens’ option of the Garnaut-style carbon tax set up to facilitate
    a future carbon trading scheme is now the live option around which
    political debate will take place,” Senator Brown said.

    Media contact: Erin Farley 0438 376 082
    www.greensmps.org.au

    _______________________________________________
    GreensMPs Media mailing list
    Media@greensmps.org.au

  • PM Julia Gillard told to slow down on climate

     

    Related Coverage

    When she replaced Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, Ms Gillard identified the government’s position on climate change as one of her key priorities that had to be fixed before going to the polls. She has sharpened the position on the other two priorities — the mining tax and asylum-seekers — but has since been embroiled in debates over both.

    Criticism is building that Ms Gillard is moving too quickly to address Labor’s policy weaknesses in her haste to clear the deck for an election.

    The government is considering a suite of measures to reclaim support from voters lost to the Greens when Mr Rudd ditched the ETS. These include a controversial idea to place tough new restrictions on all new coal-fired power stations and a national energy-efficiency target.

    Reports this week have suggested the government is considering setting a price on carbon pollution, while green groups have urged the government to adopt an interim carbon tax.

    “I think we need to develop a deep and lasting community consensus about pricing carbon,” Ms Gillard said yesterday, declaring herself to be a believer in human-induced climate change.

    The Prime Minister’s special taskforce on energy efficiency has concluded its report to hand to Ms Gillard, calling on her to adopt a national energy efficiency target. The target will lead to bans on many energy-sapping appliances being sold in Australia.

    The Weekend Australian understands the government is considering placing an energy-efficiency target on retailers. They could meet the new target by buying “white certificates”, which represent an amount of energy they have saved.

    In practice, certificates can be awarded for a wide range of actions, including replacing inefficient heaters or airconditioners with more efficient models, installing insulation, improving the thermal efficiency of windows, installing energy efficient lighting and buying efficient refrigerators.

    There is no national energy efficiency target. Some states have their own energy efficiency schemes such as the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target and the NSW Energy Savings Scheme. South Australia also has a scheme that provides incentives to adopt energy saving measures.

    While the Greens are pushing for a 3 per cent annual energy efficiency target, The Weekend Australian understands the government’s target will be lower.

    In an interview with ABC TV’s Lateline this week, Ms Gillard would not be drawn on whether her climate plans included a carbon tax, declaring she still supported an emissions trading system from 2012, while saying there were things the government could do in the meantime.

    Although not wanting a hasty solution, many business figures do want whichever party is successful at the forthcoming election to set a clear direction on climate policy.

    AGL Energy chief executive Michael Fraser said yesterday a price on carbon was needed to guarantee Australia’s energy future.

    “It is my firm view that a broad-based cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme is the best way to deliver least cost solutions for reducing emissions,” he said.

    An interim carbon price has been backed by MPs. One said a carbon tax was now the only option to restore Labor’s battered reputation.