At the time of writing, the result of yesterday’s Senate re-run in Western Australia is still up in the air, but is much clearer and easier to understand than the 2013 result.
The first two Liberal candidates (David Johnston and Michaelia Cash) and the lead Labor and Greens candidates (Joe Bullock and Scott Ludlam) will win their seats with a full quota of primary votes.
Dio Wang of the Palmer United Party sits on 0.87 quotas, and should have little trouble winning a seat.
The final seat is a race between the third Liberal candidate, Linda Reynolds, and the second Labor candidate, Louise Pratt.
At the time of writing, the ABC Senate calculator gave the final seat to Reynolds by 0.07% of the vote, which is just over 600 votes. Of course, we all now understand that this isn’t the end of the story. The addition of declaration votes is likely to increase Reynolds’ lead.
In this post I will run through what votes are left to be counted, how they might skew the result, and what preferences Reynolds and Pratt will be relying on in their race.
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Sustainable Population Party candidate Peter Strachan at the voting poll in North Fremantle. Picture: MARIE NIRME Source: News Limited
SUSTAINABLE Population Party top candidate Peter Strachan is glad to have finally put the state’s record population growth on the political agenda.
At times during the senate re-run it looked like Mr Strachan may be a dark horse for the elusive sixth Senate spot thanks to preferences.
Last night, he said even if he didn’t make it to Canberra he was happy because he had put an often neglected topic on the radar.
“The population’s been growing in Western Australia at 3.2 per cent per annum,” he told The Sunday Times.
“The global population is growing 1.1 per cent per annum – so Western Australia’s population is growing nearly three times the global average.”
Mr Strachan said such growth put pressure on traffic, water, food, education, health and employment.
“When I came here in 1995, you could get virtually anywhere in Perth in 20 minutes,” he said.
“And now, a journey that used to take 20 minutes typically takes 40 minutes or an hour.
“We’ve got to the point now where as soon as Fiona Stanley (Hospital) is completed, we’re going to have to start building another on because the population is growing so rapidly.”
The Sustainable Population Party other candidate, William Bourke, is the president and founder of the party and ran as the lead candidate in NSW last September.
Mr Bourke was not in Perth yesterday to help rally voters with Mr Strachan – he was in Melbourne for a family event.
However Mr Strachan said the party had been buoyed by the support of entrepreneur Dick Smith during the campaign, who not only endorsed the group but even
Mr Smith endorsed the party back in March, putting his name in their campaign and funding radio ads.
It was the first time Mr Smith has publicly endorsed a political party during an election.
Mr Smith said Australia could not afford to keep rapid population growth because “you can’t grow forever in a finite world.”
Climate change is a problem for democracy. The scientific modelling is compelling and the evidence alarming. The problems begin when the science crosses into the democratic sphere of politics and public…
By declaring climate change a ‘great moral challenge’, Kevin Rudd owned the issue. That set him up for a political fall when the Coalition and Greens blocked his path. EPA/Matthew Cavanaugh
Climate change is a problem for democracy. The scientific modelling is compelling and the evidence alarming. The problems begin when the science crosses into the democratic sphere of politics and public policy.
The scientists do not simply want a response. They want a disruption, a critical juncture, a new narrative challenging the status quo. This requires new institutions that create a new normal path to low emissions.
To forge new institutions requires a good understanding of democracy itself and the successful management of three democratic decision points. The first is the exogenous event (climate change) and the accompanying narrative that influences the choices made and paths taken.
Second is the critical juncture when an emergent institution supported by democratic practices such as participation may or may not get established. Third is the success of the new institution as the path becomes normal and is sustained by providing increasing, not decreasing, returns to supporters.
In democracy, small contingent decisions can have large and long-term consequences. Whitlam Institute research shows scientists, economists and environmentalists have failed to manage four critical junctures in the last six years.
The first failure
The failure at critical juncture #1 – then-opposition leader Kevin Rudd declares “climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our generation” – can be laid squarely at the feet of Rudd and scientists. At this juncture, those advocating a response to climate change needed to manage the narrative arising out of the science.
Rudd recognised that waiting for the future might mean there was no future. Rudd became prime minister in November 2007 and immediately set up a new Department of Climate Change.
The problem was the narrative. In “owning” the issue as he did, and in calling it the greatest moral challenge, Rudd accepted the scientists’ call for a disruption, a critical juncture, in a way that his opponents did not. But that small decision, to use “morality” not “science”, had long-term consequences in distorting the climate change narrative in Australia.
Scientists proved to be unreliable managers of this narrative. Science alone is not enough to sway democratic decision making, but scientists fractured support by conflating weather with climate modelling.
To show that climate change causes extreme weather it would be necessary to prove that greenhouse gases create events that are not caused by observed weather patterns such as La Niña or El Niño.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states there is “low confidence” in attributing any changes in tropical cyclone activity to greenhouse gas emissions or anything else humanity has done.
Unfortunately, Australia’s most prominent climate scientists have fallen into the trap of suggesting global warming is causing extreme weather events. The issue here is whether it is wise for scientists to embrace a narrative that they know is not substantiated by the science for the purpose of building public support.
The second failure
The failure at critical juncture #2 – Rudd abandons climate change – can be laid squarely at the feet of Rudd and the economists. At this juncture, those advocating a response to climate change faced the problem of choosing the path to the new institution, establishing that as the status quo path and justifying paths not taken.
The path chosen was the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. This was twice rejected in parliament. As a consequence, Rudd effectively shelved climate change policy, releasing sceptics and deniers nourished by the lack of participation and the abandonment of morality.
Labor enlisted experts like Ross Garnaut but failed to engage the public. AAP/Alan Porritt
In Australia, economist Ross Garnaut was adviser to two Labor prime ministers. His neoclassical approach considered human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are an externality, emitted into the atmosphere by individuals and firms without cost.
However, a wide range of victims will bear the resulting damages from climate change across time and space. A price on carbon through an emissions trading scheme aims to correct this market failure by making the value of social damages internal to the polluter’s decisions.
Garnaut and the economists adopted an inflexible, “rational” approach insisting that carbon pricing was the one best way to reduce emissions. Consequently, many policy options were ignored, many paths not taken, many trade-offs rejected.
It is not wise to try to build new institutions by being unwilling to listen to other views. Institutions, after all, solve collective problems and are by definition inclusive and participatory mechanisms.
The third failure
The failure of critical juncture #3 – prime minister Julia Gillard establishes the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC) – can be laid squarely at the feet of Gillard and the environmentalists. At this juncture, those advocating a response to climate change faced the problem of using democratic means such as participation to get the new institution established.
After the 2010 election, Gillard signed an agreement with the Greens to put a price on carbon. A small decision later, to narrow formal membership of what became known as the MPCCC to cross-parliamentary party participation, had long-term consequences for Gillard, the Greens and the environmental movement.
In accepting a narrow form of participation in the MPCC, the Greens severed its connection with the broader environmental movement.
Having overwhelmed ALP attempts to manage a climate change narrative, Tony Abbott also faces a high risk of failure as his government seeks to institutionalise its non-pricing ‘Direct Action’ policy. AAP/Julian Smith
A fourth failure?
We now find ourselves at critical juncture #4 – carbon-pricing legislation passes parliament, and is repealed? The fixed-price mechanism for carbon was legislated in July 2012 but in 2013 Tony Abbott became prime minister, promising that his first act would be to repeal this legislation.
Failure at these critical junctures tells us that what has happened before will influence the Coalition’s “Direct Action” policy, as the government attempts to form a new critical juncture and institutionalise a non-price approach to emissions reduction. Path dependence suggests “Direct Action” will fail.
Scientists, economists and environmentalists need to learn how democracy works. That means learning to collaborate, explain, negotiate, teach and learn in the community if this (last) chance to save the planet is to work.
The re-election has come about because of the closeness of the result last September and because the missing ballot papers made it impossible to establish a result. For background on the legal case that brought on the by-election, read this blog post by Constitutional Law Professor Anne Twomey.
Notes: In 1984, Jo Valentine was elected for the Nuclear Disarmament Party, who polled 6.8%. In 1987 she was elected for the the Vallentine Peace Group which polled 4.8%. She was elected again in 1990 by which time her party had morphed into the WA Greens. One Nation polled 10.4% in 1998 and 7.0% in 2001.<br/><br/>The two entries for 2013 represent the two counts at the election overturned by the Court of Disputed Returns. Palmer United Party polled 5.0% and elected a senator on the first count. On the re-count that excluded the missing ballot papers, Labor lost a seat and the seat initially won by Palmer went to the Australian Sports Party, its candidate Wayne Dropulich elected from 0.23% of the vote.
Forget the cost of mitigating climate change, say two researchers. It’s impossible to work out how much it will be – and whatever it is, we should do it anyway.
Two researchers who tried to work out the economics of reducing global climate change to a tolerable level have come up with a perhaps surprising answer: essentially, we do not and cannot know what it would cost.
Even more surprising, probably, is their conclusion: not knowing is no excuse for not acting. “Mitigating climate change must proceed regardless of long-run economic analyses”, they conclude, “or risk making the world uninhabitable.”
The pair are Dr Rich Rosen, who specialises in energy system planning and is a senior fellow of the Tellus Institute, based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Edeltraud Guenther, professor of environmental management and accounting at Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
In a densely-argued analysis of the long-term economics of mitigating climate change they say various kinds of uncertainties raise serious questions about whether or not the net costs and benefits of mitigation over periods as long as 50 years or a century can be known accurately enough to be useful to policymakers and citizens.
Crisis ‘trumps uncertainty’
Technological change, especially for energy efficiency technologies, is a key factor in making the net economic results of mitigation unknowable over the long term, they argue. So policymakers should not base mitigation policy on the estimated net economic impacts computed by integrated assessment models (IAM – models which combine scientific and economic insights).
Instead, “mitigation policies must be forcefully implemented anyway given the actual physical climate change crisis, in spite of the many uncertainties involved in trying to predict the net economics of doing so”.
This argument directly challenges the many politicians and others who insist that governments should adopt policies designed to limit climate change only if they can make a strong economic case for doing so. Essentially, it shifts the ground of the debate from “what is affordable?” to “what is survivable?”
The authors say economic analyses of mitigating climate change rely on flawed sets of IAM results, which are invalidated by uncertainty over future technologies and their costs. They also believe changes in production and consumption patterns will affect mitigation costs.
‘Meaningless’ results
They write:
Since the Western lifestyle can probably not serve as a role model for the life styles of the nine billion people likely to inhabit our planet by 2050, significant but unpredictable changes to consumption and production patterns not incorporated in existing IAMs are likely to occur, adding another layer of uncertainty to the economic calculations made by these IAMs for the net costs and benefits of mitigating climate change.
The IPCC and other scientific bodies should no longer report attempts at calculating the net economic impacts of mitigating climate change…
The authors do not hide their scorn for the results provided by existing IAM scenarios. These, they write, are “not useful because even the simplest comparison of model results yields meaningless results — the uncertainties are too profound.”
They end by posing a question:
Should these findings and conclusions about the inadequacies of current IAMs really matter to policymakers who are trying to figure out when, and to what extent, to implement effective climate change mitigation policies?
Their response is terse:
Our answer is ‘no’, because humanity would be wise to mitigate climate change as quickly as possible without being constrained by existing economic systems and institutions, or risk making the world uninhabitable.
In order to meet the Renewable Energy Target, established by the federal government, a scheme of renewable energy certificates, equivalent to 1 megawatt of renewable energy, was created to provide a financial incentive for renewable energy creation.
Initially this was in the form of a “Renewable Energy Certificate” (REC), a uniform scheme covering all means of creating renewable energy. But with the runaway success of small-scale solar PV, the government split the scheme and replaced Renewable Energy Certificates with a scheme for small scale generation below one hundred kilowatts, known as a “Small-scale Technology Certificate” (STC) and for systems over 100 kilowatts a certificate known as “Large-Scale Generation Certificate” (LGC) was created. This change occurred because the huge amount of small-scale solar PV systems being installed kept certificate prices lower than predicted and reduced the incentive for large-scale renewables investment.
A split system was designed to allow each of the two sectors to operate separately. The government could then prescribe the amount of renewable energy certificates each camp must supply. The small-scale certificates program also came with a clearing house facility, a means of ensuring certificates were always available, regardless of the amount of certificates being created. It also guaranteed a fixed price of $40 per STC for all certificates sourced from it. For the great majority of time it has been in place, the open market has been a cheaper and reliable source of STCs, therefore few purchases have been from the clearing house to date.
As open market STCs continue to firm in price, the spectre of a clearing house in deficit looks very possible. It looks clear that liable entities are swiftly emptying their stockpiles of STC’s and have even contacted STC creators directly to shore up supplies at a cheaper cost than via a broker. This would not happen if the market was awash with certificates. My story of the revised surrender quota (the amount of STC’s needing to be surrendered) reinforced my prophecy.
So what happens next? It appears that despite the industry’s best efforts to change the Abbott agenda through influencing the WA senate election re-run, this may not bite as much as expected and the Libs could well increase their number of effective votes, rather than lose them. With the complete vacuum of new policy announcements since the federal election, one can only assume that a master plan has been drawn up for just about everything, including the renewable energy target (RET), and even small-scale solar.
So what is in this plan? Will Abbott close the clearing house as soon as it empties and leave STC’s to float with no upper or, more importantly, lower limit? Any moves to favour large-scale renewables at the expense of small-scale projects would decimate the PV industry, it could happen by simply taking away the need to surrender STC’s or reducing the amount required.
You can almost be assured that when Abbott is embarrassed enough to retain the RET, he will be taking into consideration the screams of state governments, who are crying about lost revenue streams from their state-owned distributors due to small-scale solar.
Joe Hockey’s incentives to the states to sell off state-owned distributors almost guarantees that only large-scale, centralised renewable energy projects, backed by the big corporates, will benefit from a retained RET. Centralised and remote renewables still need all those poles and wires that small-scale rooftop installations have been making redundant, thus rescuing an asset from devaluation just in time for it to be sold off.
I would be watching very carefully for legislation that forces an access charge on households for having a grid connection available, even if it is not used, the same as we have for water and sewerage. What a fantastic underlying, guaranteed income stream the states could lure prospective buyers with, a guaranteed charge to every household even if they are off-grid.
