Blue Sky Mine Should Labor’s chief mining enthusiast Joel Fitzgibbon end up on Sky News’ payroll if he quits politics (or loses his seat), he’ll know firsthand how considerate the Murdoch media outpost can be when dealing with expenses.
When the Member for Hunter and NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro got together for a chummy chat with Sky’s Chris Smith, 270 metres underground in Airly Coal Mine, Sky was good enough to stump up for Fitzgibbon’s “accommodation and hospitality” according his recently updated register of interests.
All the Craig The target audience of Liberal deserter and Aldi-Trump Craig Kelly is often clear enough: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers (all of whom have been giving him some of the best social media engagement of any Australian politician). But this time… we’re not so sure.
Over the weekend he posted: “What type of world do we live in today, when the woke try and ‘cancel’ Dr. Seuss, while CyberPunk 2077 is all the rage where ‘four types of damage can be inflicted and resisted — physical, thermal, EMP and chemical’. Clearly promoting great woke wholesome values??”
We’re not sure where to start. For one thing, we weren’t aware of the the great left-wing consensus in favour of CyberPunk 2077. Secondly, it’s certainly an interesting approach to oppose the shrill joyless scourge of cancel culture by being shocked, just shocked, that video games contain violence.
Wait ’til he hears about the game’s lack of gendered pronouns and the ability to modify your character’s body.
Chris almighty Chris Mitchell’s column in The Australian this morning criticises Australia’s non-News Corp media for its credulity in reporting other countries stated climate change policies. It opens with this: “Many of the media’s environment writers seem to believe what countries say about their emissions reduction plans is more important than what they actually do.”
That’s certainly interesting coming from a publication which, as we’ve previously noted, has adopted Scott Morrison’s “shift towards net zero emissions” rhetoric in its totality without even requiring a him to make a concrete commitment to it.
The paradigm is shifting from “reducing” to “zeroising” on both sides of politics. As long as we didn’t get too serious about how much or how fast, we were in a position to make reductions every year forever and paint ourselves as virtuous at every point. In contrast, zeroising by say, 2050 is about practicality, no longer about virtue, so we should now be debating what tools we are going to deploy to reach zero, on time.
On climate science and global warming, Australian media and journalists are well on board in adopting the US GOP tactic, on behalf of donors, in accepting narratives round delaying any substantive action by claiming technology (or ‘clean coal’!) can be used to ameliorate the effects of global warming from carbon emissions.
This has been called out globally and VOU EU – CEPR in ‘The cost of delaying action to stem climate change: A meta-analysis’ warned over five years ago of this tactic…..and the future economic costs of such delays…..