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  • Why it’s harder to enrol to vot

    Gary Nairn gets the facts on electoral reform

    Posted on the campaign blog , April 13th, 2007

    It’s hard to see who wins from the changes to the Electoral Act, which effectively make it harder to vote. Surely a democracy is strengthened by the removal of obstacles that bar access to the ballot box. That’s why the key aim of the Electoral Act is to make it as convenient as possible for people to get on the electoral roll.

    And in the absence of any evidence of widespread voter fraud, it is obvious both convenience of enrolment and the integrity of the electoral roll can be achieved at the same time. That’s why, around the world, many developed nations don’t close the rolls until right before the election. In that case, then who benefits from amendments that make it harder to get on the roll, especially for first-time voters? Well, according to the statistics indicating young people are more likely to vote progressive, the Coalition does.

    Perhaps that explains Liberal MP Gary Nairn‘s vehement opposition to GetUp’s campaign. He has issued a press release accusing GetUp of "misinformation and lies" and stating that GetUp has "a strange habit of distorting the truth". Here are his claims:

    That GetUp asserts that the roll will close as soon as an election is called.

    GetUp has never made this assertion. The roll will close for new voters at 8pm on the very night the election is officially called – it is officially called when the writ is issued by the Governor General.

    That GetUp claims that proof of identity will be needed when voting.

    GetUp has never made this claim. Perhaps Mr Nairn is referring to the proof of identity that will now be needed to enrol to vote.

    That GetUp asserts asking young people to provide ID when enrolling is too onerous a burden, and will serve to disenfranchise young first time voters.

    People who have turned 18 since the last election and are not yet on the roll will have to enrol before 8pm on the day the writ is issued for the election. Last election, 78,816 new voters enrolled in the week after the writ was issued. Those who enrol before then will now have to either have an Australian Driver’s licence or, if using another form of ID, find an ‘authorised person’ (ie. a Justice of the Peace or other listed person) to verify their ID. If they have no form of ID they need two people who are on the electoral roll and have known them for more than a month to sign their form. This is more onerous than the current system.

    That GetUp claims that the government moved by stealth to rush these laws through the parliament.

    GetUp has not made this claim. The Government did not need to move by stealth to pass these laws because their Senate majority could, despite widespread opposition by experts and the other parties, rubber stamp it.


    Mr Nairn’s claims against GetUp are not supported by any evidence. He argues that "[T]hese laws will protect the fundamental right to vote," but any inspection of them reveals the opposite to be true.

  • Democracy for sale

    Democracy for sale

  • Police Back Down on Greens Climate-Saver Event In APEC Security Zone

    The event is to be a media conference with a group of Greens members
    dressed to resemble lifesavers as a colourful backdrop. The media will
    be addressed by Senator Kerry Nettle who will be calling on APEC leaders
    to be “climate-savers” by taking urgent action to address climate
    change, which threatens the future of millions of people throughout the
    Asia-Pacific region.

    “Like any citizen I find it disturbing to have formal written threats
    made against me by the NSW Police to the effect that they intend to
    commence immediate, and potentially costly, proceedings against me in
    the Supreme Court,” Ms Hale said.

    “The issue that we are addressing in the media conference, the urgent
    need to take serious action about climate change, is a matter of great
    concern to many Australians.”

    “I confirmed with Police that Martin Place is to remain open to the
    public before I submitted my notice of intention. If it is open to the
    public it should be open for a media conference and some street
    theatre.”

    “I believe that the Police were trying to act beyond the powers they
    were given by the parliament in trying to ban political activity in
    Martin Place. It is important to maintain the right to express a
    political opinion in a public place,” said Ms Hale.

    To quote Commissioner Scipione from yesterday “this is a victory
    for common sense.””

  • EU to Fall Just Short of 2010 Renewable Target

    However, a big increase in wind capacity in Germany, Spain and Denmark as well as in the UK, France, Italy and Portugal has boosted electricity from renewable sources to record levels, compensating for droughts that have hit Europe’s hydroelectric power production, and paving the way for the EU to come within a whisker of reaching its electricity sector target of 21% by 2010.

    A record 7,500 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity was built in Europe in 2006. Wind energy now supplies 3.3% of the EU’s total gross electricity consumption. It is estimated that the wind power capacity will increase from today’s 50,000 MW, producing 100THW of energy, to 180 GW, producing 500 TWH of electricity by 2020. Wind power could, some studies say, supply 16% of the EU’s total electricity consumption by 2020.

    In 2005, 16.3% of renewable electricity came from wind, 15.8% came from biomass, 1.2% from geothermal and 0.3% from solar power; the majority, 66.4%, came from the EU’s expanding hydroelectric power sector.

    Nine countries are on track to meet their national renewable electricity targets of 21% for 2010: Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxemburg, Spain, Sweden and The Netherlands.

    Germany has already overshot the EU target and 14 per cent of its gross electricity consumption is expected to come from renewable energy by the end of 2007. In 2000 the share was 6.3%.

    About 22 billion kWh of electricity was produced by wind power in the first half of 2007 in Germany with 21,283 MW of installed capacity. The country is also the third biggest generator of electricity from biomass behind Finland and Sweden and ahead of Spain, the UK and Denmark.

    New legislation that set a feed-in tariff guaranteeing a fixed price to suppliers has played a key role in increasing the amount of electricity coming from renewable sources in Germany, analysts say.

    Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was hopeful that Germany could extend its use of renewable energy to 30% by 2020.

    Some European countries are set to miss all the EU renewable energy targets, including Belgium, the UK, Italy and Greece.

    UK government officials estimated that the UK can hope at best to have 9% of its energy by 2020 from renewable sources; it currently has 2% from renewable sources.

    Stephanie Schlegel from the Institute for International and European Environmental Policy in Berlin said that the key to meeting the renewable energy targets as well as to cutting GHG emission cuts was reducing the overall consumption of energy in the EU.

    However, electricity consumption in the EU member states has continued to grow in spite of energy saving policies. Total electricity consumption in the residential sector for the EU grew by 10.8 per cent between 1999 and 2004 from TWH in 1999 to 765 TWH in 2004. The electricity in the industrial sector grew by 9.5 % between 1999 and 2004.

    Also, Schlegel said that some of the EU renewable targets might not help cut GHG emissions: in particular the environmental benefits of the EU target on biofuels is hotly debated among experts.

    Looking ahead, she said that the EU could only meet its target of 20% energy from renewable sources by 2020 if the next round of talks between the EU member states is successful.

    The European Commission is opening up negotiations with member states this autumn to set specific targets for each country and for each renewable energy sector; national plans are to be finalized by December 2007.

    "Setting EU wide targets is a good policy instrument for increasing renewable energy use, but the negotiations on which country has to meet which specific target are bound to be difficult this autumn, and it is only when each country has clear targets that the progress can really be measured," Schlegel told RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

    Jane Burgermeister is a freelance science writer based in Austria.

  • Kyoto recalcitrance costs billions

    New research released by the Australian Conservation Foundation today shows Australia is losing a staggering $3.8 billion per year in investment opportunities as a result of the Government’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. “Australia continues to miss out on business opportunities worth billions of dollars by refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, because Australian businesses cannot gain credits under the Protocol’s carbon trading mechanisms,” said ACF executive director Don Henry.

    The Kyoto Protocol’s Joint Implementation (JI) and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) would allow Australian companies to gain credits from investing in low-emission and renewable energy projects here and overseas.

    The new study, conducted for ACF by sustainability consultancy Cambiar, concludes Australia’s failure to ratify Kyoto means:

    • Australian companies are missing out on $2.4 billion every year in credits from carbon reduction projects through the CDM, because of the immense hurdles facing most Australian companies interested in participating in such projects.

    • Australian companies involved in carbon reduction projects in Australia are not realising the full value of those projects, because they cannot generate offset credits that could be sold on the JI or EU carbon trading markets. This results in an estimated loss of $1.2 billion per year.

    • As a major existing financial hub for the Asia-Pacific region, Australia is a natural centre for a regional carbon trading hub. But this cannot happen without Kyoto ratification. The loss of trading revenue and associated legal, accounting and other services to Australia is estimated at $180 million per year.

    “By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol Prime Minister Howard could achieve a great practical economic result from APEC – boosting Australian investments in renewable energy and efficiency measures and helping reduce emissions in other APEC economies,” Mr Henry said.

  • Arctic ice beats worst case predictions

    Arctic sea ice melt worst than all IPPC projections

    The Arctic’s ice cover is retreating more rapidly than estimated by any of the 18 computer models used by the 2007 IPCC assessments.
    Source: Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast, Geophysical Research Letters vol. 34, L09501, doi:10.1029/2007GL029703, 2007]

    Source: Slide 7 from: "Feedbacks in the climate system and implications for future climate projections", Presentation to ”Climate, Oceans and Policies”, Washington DC, November 1, 2005 by Tore Furevik (Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen
    Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway).

    This is of great practical signifance: In 2006, predictions on the final demise of the Arctic’s floating ice were brought forward from 2080-2100 to 2040 and more recently 2030. The melting of the floating ice around the north pole is now considered unstoppable. The polar bear’s only habitant will be the zoo. Data presented at the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 suggests that the Arctic may be free of all summer ice by as early as 2030, "a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic region" according to Dr Marika Holland, because the Earth would lose a major reflective surface and so absorb more solar energy, potentially accelerating climatic change across the world. "Our hypothesis is that we’ve reached the tipping point," says Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington in Seattle. "For sea ice, the positive feedback is that increased summer melt means decreased winter growth and then even more melting the next summer, and so on". With no ice, the Arctic region will rapidly begin heating, perhaps by as much as 12 degrees, with dramatic consequences for the stability of the Greenland ice sheet, which is likely to begin irreversible melting at less than 2°C of warming and is almost certain at less than 3°C, resulting in an eventual sea level rise of seven metres.

    NASA’s Prof. James Hansen in "Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise" identifies a ‘scientific reticence’ that "in at least some cases, hinders communication with the public about dangers of global warming… Scientific reticence may be a consequence of the scientific method.  Success in science depends on objective skepticism.  Caution, if not reticence, has its merits.  However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, there is a danger in excessive caution.  We may rue reticence, if it serves to lock in future disasters". The case of ice sheet disintegration at the recent IPCC meetings caused deep concern amongst scientists.
    Sources: Fred Pearce, "Climate change: What the IPCC didn’t tell us", New Scientist, 9 February 2007; McKie, R.,
    "Scientists challenge ‘cautious’ UN report", The Observer, 28 January 2007
    Little time to avoid big thaw, scientists warn

    Emissions rises

    CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1 percent/year for 1990-1999 to >3 percent/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios (known as "business as usual") developed in the late 1990s.
    Source: Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions

    As well New Scientist reports that the temperature rise from 1990 to 2005 — 0.33°C — was "near the top end of the range" of IPCC climate model predictions.

    Is the IPCC process dangerously conservative?

    The summaries of the IPCC research, known as Summary for Policy Makers (SPMs), are subject to political interference. The IPCC process is bogged down in line-by-line negotiations by government representatives from around the world that produces a lowest-common-demoninator, conservative report. British researchers who saw drafts of the February 2007 IPCC Working Group 1 SPM claim it was significantly watered down when governments became involved in writing it. As early as the IPCC’s first report in 1990, US, Saudi and Soviet delegations acted in “watering down the sense of the alarm in the wording, beefing up the aura of uncertainty” (Jeremy Leggett, "The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era" 2001, p 15).

    Reflecting this reticence, a number of impact events are occuring more rapidly than the IPCC reports. For example, whilst recent research supports climate science models which say that the earth’s carbon sink is weakening, the 2007 IPCC WG1 says "Models used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedback… because a basis in published literature is lacking… Climate-carbon cycle coupling is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain".

    Compiled by David Spratt
    3 September 2007