And now for something completely different. A week of solid campaign style talking does not seem to have made the slightest difference. The Labor Government is still on the nose. There’s even a chance that it is held in less regard now than before announcing the details of its carbon tax plan. Certainly the pollsters suggest so for whatever that’s worth.
So what’s a Government to do? Well for a start it should realise that it has two negatives to combat — the messenger and the message. The first, and probably the biggest of them, is that many people don’t like Julia Gillard and many more don’t trust her. There is no general acceptance that the circumstances Australia finds itself in justify doing something that before the election the PM said she would not do. If you can’t believe what she solemnly promises why should you take notice of anything she says — things like the science is proven and action just has to be taken to combat global warming.
Clearly this is a difficult negative to overcome. The most likely way of doing so is to stop the word games and bluntly say that a promise was broken because it was wrong in the national interest to have made it but at least people will now be given a real say in whether they agree or not. Instead of the electorate being asked to vote on a promise of something to come they will be given the opportunity to pass judgment on the reality of a carbon tax after they have experienced it for 12 months. Should the Labor Government be rejected, Ms Gillard should say, Labor will accept that the tax should be scrapped along with itself.
On the question of the carbon tax and its impact, it is time that will tell the story not the words of various ministers or television advertisements. Once the necessary legislation is through the Parliament, Labor should get back to running the country for the now rather than the future. The Prime Minister should start spending her time in her office rather than flitting around on a perpetual election campaign.
Global warming might be the great issue of the future but there are other things presumably that Labor thinks are necessary to do. Julia Gillard should get on with them.
Good at measuring pain but what about the pleasure? The kill joys of the medical profession are at it again with an article in this week’s Medical Journal of Australia calling again for increases in alcohol taxation. They argue that the success of the alcopops tax in cutting teen drinking could be used as a model to introduce a minimum price on all alcoholic beverages.
Undoubtedly these experts can produce some excellent evidence of the costs of alcohol abuse but what they do not even attempt to do is estimate the value of the pleasure given by alcohol to the vast majority of Australians who do not abuse it.
The Artic ice keeps shrinking. Satellite monitoring by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado shows that the area of the Arctic ocean at least 15% covered in ice is lower than the previous record low set in 2007.
It’s one of those danger signs that the scientists keep pointing to as a consequence of global warming induced by carbon dioxide emissions.
But what does it actually mean? the German magazine Der Spiegel has an interesting article on how difficult 18 scientists from 10 countries are finding it to reach a consensus on what will happen to sea levels if the ice keeps melting.
The scientists are working on a chapter for the next report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and trying to establish a possible range of sea level rises by 2100 if human behaviour does not change. The estimates of the experts, reports the magazine, currently differ by almost five meters (16.5 feet).
Things like that do make you wonder about claims that the science is settled!
The Right-wing of NSW Labor destroyed the NSW ALP, then they move into Federal politics and destroyed the Federal ALP. At this rate, Bob Brown’s prediction of the Green overtaking ALP will come much sooner than 2050
The dumping of the ETS was bad politics, and the carbon tax is even worse. The carbon tax is contains a lot of ‘poison pills’ which speaks more about the political calculation rather than merits. Rolling it back is not viable.
I don’t think anybody has claimed that every detail of the science is settled. What is “settled” (agreed on by an overwhelming majority of scientists) is the big picture: human activity is changing the climate and the consequences will be severe. It’s nonsensical to imply that predictions by a range of experts of the state of complex systems in 89 years time *should* be “settled”.
Keith Dunstan has outed this type of journalism today in the Age. And that’s being kind. You really should educate yourself, the science is all available on line.
The decline in alcopop sales is almost entirely made up in the growth of cider sales. So the tax just switches drinks of choice, rather than consumption per se. Although there has been a slight dip in overall alchohol sales across the board, but I doubt the alcopops tax is what caused it… We are talking gigalitres of consumption here…
“The estimates of the experts, reports the magazine, currently differ by almost five meters (16.5 feet).” – true. But none of them argues that there will be no sea-level rise at all. So while there is some uncertainty on the magnitude, the understanding that there will be a rise is shared by all working climate scientists.