A persistent flaw in political coverage in Australia is the inability or refusal of most journalists to explore the systemic and structural motivations for much of what happens in the political class.
It’s so pervasive that readers probably don’t notice its absence, but it’s as if sports journalists stuck to reporting what happened on the field without bothering to explain the financial position of clubs, the economic health of the game, the role of sponsors, and social changes that affected participation.
Coverage of the dramatic escalation in debate about climate change last week was a classic example. A number of journalists, including some of our best political observers, wrung their hands at the state of climate debate in Australia. Several engaged in a lame moral equivalising, putting climate denialists and angry Greens on the same level; others more openly acknowledged the role of the Coalition in acting to stymie climate action. None explained why; a visitor to Australia wondering why we were yelling at each other last week might have thought it was all the result of some peculiarity in our political psychology.
But the reason is that federal politics is corrupt. Not corrupt in the brown paper bag, ICAC-style sense that we’re so familiar with from NSW Labor, or the persistent corruption of local government by property developers, but pervaded by a soft, entirely lawful corruption that comes from the dominance of political donations in public life, the lack of transparency around donations, and the way they facilitate the influencing of policy by vested interests.
So if you want to know why Australian politics has failed to address climate change for over 20 years, it’s not merely the psychological composition of the old and middle-aged white men who have wielded power for most of that time. It’s the way they were paid to stymie climate action.
Look at the political donations data of recent years. Fossil fuel and energy companies are some of the largest donors in the country; flush with profits from repeated commodity and investment booms, as a sector they rival the big banks (and, in recent years, the four big accounting firms) as the most dominant industry in political donations.
In this decade alone, since 2011, mining and energy companies have given $8.4 million in donations to the Coalition’s state and federal branches, as well as $2.8 million to the ALP’s branches. In comparison, the financial industry gave around $12 million in total to both sides, split roughly $7m/$5m.
That donor list is dominated by major carbon emitters. It is headed by Woodside, one of the most powerful Australian companies, which has been assisted by successive Australian governments, including with the use of ASIS in illegal commercial espionage against Timor-Leste. It has handed over $1 million in donations to the Coalition since 2011 and nearly $900,000 to Labor.
Caltex has handed over $330,000 to the Coalition and another $130,000-odd to Labor; its former parent company Chevron, the 12th-biggest carbon polluter in the world, has given $420,000 to the Coalition and $341,000 to Labor.
Santos — who can forget Abbott government ministers attacking divestment in the company, a few short months before as it lost three-quarters of its market value in 2015 — gave over $670,000 to the Coalition and $508,000 to Labor.
Origin Energy gave $370,000 to the Coalition and $290,000 to Labor. Gina Rinehart’s companies gave $200,000 to the Coalition and another $75,000 to Labor. Coal companies pumped money into the Coalition: the now shuttered Linc Energy gave $170,000, Whitehaven Coal $107,000, White Energy $80,000, Peabody (16th-biggest global polluter) $70,000.
Peak bodies, too: the Minerals Council has given nearly $140,000 to the Coalition and nearly $50,000 to Labor (all since 2016); the NSW Minerals Council gave $95,000 to the Coalition and $19,000 to Labor.
It was generous donations from the banks that encouraged the Liberals to protect them from regulation and investigation; it is generous donations, tilted even more heavily in favour of the conservatives, that encourage the Coalition to protect fossil fuel and energy companies from regulation and investigation, including climate action.
And just as there was a revolving door between the financial services industry and political ranks, with multiple financial services ministers being former bank executives, so too is there a revolving door between fossil fuel industries and political ranks.
On the Labor side, former Woodside executive Gary Gray, and Martin Ferguson, the mining industry’s friend at court now advising the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
On the Coalition side, Ian Macfarlane now lobbies for the Queensland Resources Council; Alexander Downer famously worked for Woodside after leaving politics; Scott Morrison’s chief of staff is former Minerals Council and Rio Tinto executive John Kunkel, and former Minerals Council CEO Brendan Pearson also works in the PMO; former Howard staffer Stephen Galilee heads the NSW Minerals Council.
Climate denialism and the unwillingness of Australian politicians to devise effective climate action policies is no fluke, any more than the long-term willingness of the Liberal Party to defend the big banks and enable their misconduct was a fluke. It was the result of millions in donations, the influence of industry figures at both staffer and political levels, and the capacity of mining companies to offer politicians lucrative jobs after they leave public office.
That’s how power works in Australia, and it happens out of sight, courtesy of a near-complete lack of transparency about how influence is wielded — and the strange reluctance of the media to explain it.
Hmmmm. I agree that our Australian political system is deeply corrupted by fossil fuel and mining interests, but I’m starting to think there’s more to it than just that.
McCormack’s comment last week about greenies came, I believe, from a place of deep anger. Yes, he may be corrupt like all of the LNP, but I don’t think that anger was feigned.
It occurred to me that, for most of us who accept that climate change is happening, it’s not a political issue at all. The solutions to the climate change problem may be political, but the problem itself is a matter of observation and data, reinforced by well-established laws of physics and chemistry and supported by statistical and mathematical modelling. While there may still be some debate about the details, the fundamentals are so well grounded as to be beyond dispute.
For the political right, however, climate change is seen as a purely political disagreement and an expression of political alignment. The real world of facts and figures doesn’t enter into it. “Climate action” is seen as a cypher for ‘I’m a leftie socialist who dedicates my life to the overthrow of the capitalist order and who will rob you of your fortune and your status in society and your political power. Rant! Rant! Rant! Long live the Bolshie revolution!”, and which immediately triggers a decades-old response to the Red menace. This view is so deeply entrenched in their mentality that even when a significant portion of the country is disappearing in smoke before their eyes, they still can’t form a mental connection between what they are seeing and what is an all too obvious cause. Anything other than outright denial is a betrayal of party: a treasonous concession to the enemy. One does or does not ‘believe’ in climate change in the same way as one does or does not believe in ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’.
I don’t know how we break this nexus. The right-wing anti climate change paradigm is now so well entrenched and so well supported by a complex web of conspiracy theories and crazy folk beliefs that is is impervious to any sort of rational discussion – and yet rational discussion is what is so desperately needed to get us out of this mess. It would certainly help if industry funding was removed from the mix but I fear that the paradigm is so deeply entrenched that it may be self supporting. It’s not just the politicians that need to be addressed, it’s also the people who vote them in and none of the latter are being funded by fossil fuel interests.
There are inroads. I think farmers are slowly being forced to accept reality. We can only hope that change is happening fast enough, otherwise Nature has its own cure for a species that outgrows its ecological niche. It’s called population collapse.
I don’t know about the farmers, many of them would vote for the devil rather than a party that addresses climate change.i’ve watched many of them on TV in the last week and most can’ t bring themselves to mention the existing and looming cause of their dilemma. They have the fucking thoughts and prayers of the coalition, the very organisation that has brainwashed them for decades. They have the government they deserve.
Well said.
Well observed Graeski, what you have described is the outcome of a life long Conditioning process, initially passed down within the home then reinforced daily in the external world. Such outlooks and loyalties have become self replicating.
1. I’m a committed environmentalist – and as such won’t even bother to rebut your claim that 97% of scientists agree that CO2 drives global warming, a fraudulent claim which started to fade from public view a few years ago as the stark reality behind it emerged…so in 2019 if you’re still repeating that silly claim, then may I respectfully suggest that you remove yourself from the global warming discussion, and go outside and sweep up some leaves for your compost bin.
2. Climate change i.e. global warming and cooling have been in play for more than 4 billion years the planet has existed.
3. The earth is currently in a warming period, which based on the approx 500-year cycle of the past few thousand years (notwithstanding the as yet not fully understood Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715) could start to cool soon or anytime within the next 100 years – or maybe it’s just going to keep getting hotter indefinitely.
4. ALL measured temperature warming variations in the earth’s climate history were followed by CO2 rises i.e. there is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything whatsoever to do with global warming & cooling…..and the wildly inaccurate claims by the IPCC that extreme weather events have been worse since 1950, than in the period 1900 to 1950, have been shown to be a fabrication….Google the 2016 Cambridge University Engineering Department literature research results re same.
5. The fact that CO2 can play a part in regional/local temperature variations was first known in the mid 19th century – THIS IS NOT GLOBAL WARMING, AND DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL WARMING….there is NO CREDIBLE PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THIS VIEW…if there is, please quote it.
6. The IPCC, was co-founded by a Canadian billionaire & convicted criminal in 1988 who has since been stripped of every UN title/award. THIS WHOLE CO2 HOAX EXERCISE IS AN ATTEMPT TO SHIFT TRILLIONS OF $’s OF TAXPAYERS MONEY INTO THE BANK ACCOUNTS OF RENEWABLE SCHEME PROMOTERS, based on a global academic hoax…and I’ll let you figure out who the respective beneficiaries are.
7. The IPCC’s current leader Prof Michael Mann has in August 2019 had his 2011 defamation case against Dr Tim Ball, dismissed by the Canadian High Court, for refusing to provide the data on which the IPCC relies to make its asinine claims re CO2 & climate, with costs awarded to Dr Ball….Professor Mann was never going to supply this data, as clearly it will show what all Western developed economies have already decided it will show i.e. absolutely NOTHING. It’s all about data validation/verification you see…..with around 500 data entry points into the IPCC modelling, if you won’t provide for public scrutiny the validation/verification criteria for your modelling, then that modelling is automatically dismissed by your peers as voodoo mathematics…..it’s as simple as that…..and it’s this fundamental methodological flaw in the IPCC’s work, that allows it to be summarily dismissed…as it has been by all of the world’s leading economies and their scientific advisors, including Australia’s Labor & Liberal Party hierarchies………”But why don’t they come out and say it publicly?”, you ask……hmmmmm think about it…and maybe it’ll occur to you.
8. Therefore, Prof Mann and his IPCC cronies are nothing more than academic fraudsters who have knowingly used doctored data, to shore up their departmental funding for decades, thereby robbing the legitimate scientific community of hundreds of billions of $ annually, for legitimate scientific research.
9. In 2019. climate change mitigation is absolutely necessary…but to add substantial costs to consumer’s monthly bills by closing coal-driven plants which have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH GLOBAL WARMING, is just plain stupid…
Face it folks, many of you have been conned by the click bait driven legacy media…but your egos won’t let you admit it…..
Finally, it’s the Sun silly…Maunder Minimum anyone
0. I won’t comment on your claims that you are a committed environmentalist – let the reader decide.
1. The 97% figure is from one study only and measures papers addressing the question. Six others give figures from 91% to 100%. Katherine Hayhoe along with some other scientists reviewed the 3% of papers rejecting the idea and found flaws in all of them which would have reversed their conclusions.
2. Indeed the climate has been changing since the formation of the Earth. What is different in this case is an industrial civilization with billions of people relying on a stable climate to survive.
3. The Earth is certainly in a warming period, and one look at a temperature graph of the Earth shows the warming trend is far beyond a 500 year cycle.
4. CO2 didn’t initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming. In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase.
5. An enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence. Looking up the references is left as an exercise for the reader.
6. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988.
Persons concerned about money making plots might think about what the trillion dollar FF industries might do to defend their businesses…and did, to the tune of USD$200 million for 30 years.
7. The IPCC’s current leader Prof Michael Mann has in August 2019 had his 2011 defamation case against Dr Tim Ball, dismissed by the Canadian High Court because of the ill health of Dr Ball. The judge ruled that Mann had a weak case in his claim of injury to his reputation due to Ball’s smear campaign is that Ball has so little credibility as a climate expert that no reasonable person would take his claims against Mann seriously. All the wild claims by the man-made climate change denier misinformation campaign that Mann refused to produce his data are total lies
8. Your comments on Professor Mann are certainly wrong, and may be defamatory, but as you are just an internet troll, it would be pointless him suing you.
9. Yes, climate change mitigation is necessary. As the clapped out coal plants of yesteryear struggle in the increasing heat waves, we must decide what to replace them with. Firmed RE is cheaper than any rollout of new coal plants (especially if external costs are considered). So what are you arguing about?
10. It’s not the sun. In the last 50 years, solar irradiance has been dropping, just as the temperature has increased dramatically.
Agreed, but I think we can go further on the contribution of CO2 in the ice ages. The temperature record in the ice cores from Antarctica show the slow rise of each glaciation and the subsequent rapid warming following each of them. During the slower, cooling periods, the CO2 lags the temperature. However, the CO2 record is in step with the temperature rise during each of the rapid warmings, confirming the prediction that increases in CO2 force global warming. As to what initiated each warming, the consensus among the climate people is that there was some sort of turnover of the ocean to release a surge of CO2 and CH4, but they don’t agree on quite what that turnover was. Regardless, denialists can’t blame the oceans this time!
Surely we are all aware that ‘donations’ are not just donations? Time and again it has been shown that they are also ‘down payments’ for access, active consideration of lobbied for policies and, wherever possible, favourable outcomes. The old saying of ‘money talks’ is never truer than when used in regards to politics.
Money doesn’t talk anymore, it just goes without saying.
Perhaps you expect too much?
“Political coverage”? From a viewsmedia that has largely degenerated to virtually little more than a swarm of waspish, partisan, subjective, self-opinionated gossip columnists – “press secretaries” for their preferred (Limited News) party – rather than “journalists”?
Rupert Murdoch – on the Advisory board of US fossil fuel giant Genie Oil & Gas (along with Dick Cheney) – a United States of American, owns and runs his fiefdom (that is our biggest media lump) to his unelected political tune, paying and promoting his ‘pipers’.
Would that be the same Genie Oil, a subsidiary of which was granted exclusive oil exploration rights by Israel in the occupied territory of the Golan Heights and never mind the absence of sovereignty? I’ve seen it reported that Murdoch, along with Jacob Rothschild, bought a slab of equity shares in Genie Oil and Gas back in 2010. The following year Genie was granted the exploration license by Israel. This goes some way to explaining News Corp being a 100% uncritical cheer squad for Israel. And also likely explains the company’s climate change denialism/support for the planet-killing fossil fuel industry.
Oh dear, could it be that Mr Murdoch has completely thrown off the mantel of “newspaper man” so that his giant and influential media corporation now operates not to report the news ethically and in a largely non-partisan manner in the public interest, but purely to bolster and protect his own commercial interests?
This is clearly foreign Corporations influencing Australian Politics.
We need a Federal ICAC now.
It’s corruption – it might be legal, but it’s still corruption. You give money to someone, expecting them to act in your favour and contrary to their official responsibilities – that’s the definition of corruption.
Government by the (misled) majority for the minority.
No matter how much money the Coalies, and their ilk, donate to our political parties, an outraged electorate would still count for more. A million fish were caused to be slaughteted by the nation’s water wasters. Where were the letters from appalled members of the National Party-and their supporters? The Great Barrier Reef is dying-do enough people care? The premier of NSW has cut billions of dollars off that State’s fire fighting abilities-does anyone care?
We are worse that America’s National Rifle Association. We scream at superficialities but are too lazy to put in the hard yards to keep clowns like Michael McCormack and Barnaby Joyce out of politics.
Well said VA. I have been waiting in vain for some, any, sign of serious discontent, especially from the young. My generation (older) were the majority in our region against fracking. I hope XR might at last be the start of a more sustained protest from the younger generations.