Human activities are triggering self-reinforcing existential climate risks that are growing more lethal with time — our extinction is likely
Over the last 200 years prodigious amounts of carbon-based fossil fuels (coal, oil, methane) have been burned to produce waste gases (mostly CO₂) and useful energy to drive the Industrial Revolution, our affluence, our toys, our technologies, our wars, and everything that has followed. The fossil carbon humans have extracted from the Earth and burned in an instant of geological time took our planet millions of years to accumulate and store in the geosphere (i.e., rocks & soil). In the same geological instant, the waste gases released from the burning are fundamentally changing Earth’s atmosphere (the air we breathe, etc…). Because of the physical properties of CO₂ molecules and other atmospheric emissions, this has trapped enough additional solar heat in the atmosphere to significantly raise average temperatures around the world. In turn, the added heat is already causing unprecedented climatic disasters. These existential climate risks will only become more frequent and catastrophic as temperatures continue to rise. (See CO2: Past, Present, & Future – one of many dozens of articles covering the same facts, and Climate apocalypse).
However, natural regulatory processes in the climate system have kept the environment stable enough for more than 800,000 years up until the 20th Century – enough time for humans to evolve and develop the social systems, agriculture, technology, and cultural riches we benefit from today.
Atmospheric CO2 levels (blue line) and temperature (red line) from year 1,000 to 1978. Data for CO2 from Vostok ice core, Law Dome ice core, and Mauna Loa air samples. Data for temperature from Vostok ice core. CO2 measured here is in parts per million (ppm = by weight), which is similar to ppmv (by volume).
As shown in the graphs above, the shock to the composition of the atmosphere caused by these human generated changes is increasingly disrupting natural climate regulation. If we do not quickly stop and repair the damage we have done to the atmosphere, then over the next few decades increasingly extreme, frequent and extensive climate changes and catastrophes will be causing more death and destruction to our societies than we have the capacity to repair. In turn, this climate collapse will lead to agricultural, economic and social collapse followed by mass die-offs and probable human extinction within a century or two.
Business as usual cannot cope with a global systems breakdown. Nor can uncoordinated individual actions. However, at least for a few more years before systems breakdown has progressed too far, we should still be able to assemble the technology and knowledge to avoid this doom. Beginning with primitive Victorian era steam-punk technologies backed by a very limited scientific understanding of climate and geophysics, humans took over 150 years to burn enough fossil fuel to accidentally cause the present crisis. Today we have now developed a deep and detailed scientific understanding of how the world works and vastly more powerful technologies. With will, leadership, and cooperation at international, national, state, and local areas we should be able to locate, diagnose and repair aspects of the climate system we have broken to re-stabilize it in a state we can live with.
However, to do this we will have to revolutionise many of our governments. We need to change them from their usual businesses of representing and working for the special interests of their donors, patrons and puppet masters (many of them associated with fossil fuel industries), to a new business of truly representing the needs of the citizens they supposedly represent – – especially in the face of the growing climate crisis.
If you are an MP, you need to join this revolution!
The factual scientific evidence of the consequence we face if we fail to stop and reverse global warming is overwhelming. However, I recognize that a life in politics where almost everything can be ‘negotiated’ does not prepare most politicians to understand the difference between responding to non-negotiable facts of physical reality and the business-as-usual of getting elected/re-elected and trading influence.
In the remainder of this work I present some of the overwhelming evidence of the dangers we face from an increasingly destabilised climate system driven by unrestrained global warming, and why our governments must change and act if we are to have any hope of surviving the existential global crisis this is causing. Because this evidence is based on scientific laws developed over some 400 years of testing and practical use, it is totally independent of whatever people might want to ‘believe’ now about how the world works.
Laws of physics, geology, chemistry and biology
The scientific laws of physics and chemistry describe how the universe we live in works, irrespective of anything we humans might want to believe. Because atoms and molecules work the way they do, burning carbon releases ‘greenhouse’ (i.e., heat trapping) gases into the atmosphere. Because the increased concentration of these gases in the atmosphere traps reduces the amount of solar energy leaving our planet, the world is growing warmer.
It should be no surprise that dumping millions of years worth of carbon accumulation into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases at an accelerating rate over 200 years or so has significantly affected global temperatures.
Berkeley Earth’s Global Temperature Report for 2022 – Posted on by Robert Rohde. The global mean temperature in 2022 is estimated to have been 1.24 °C (2.24 °F) above the average temperature from 1850-1900, a period often used as a pre-industrial baseline for global temperature targets. This is ~0.03 °C (~0.05 °F) warmer than in 2021. As a result, 2021 is nominally the fifth warmest year to have been directly observed, though the years 2015, 2017, 2018, 2021, and 2022 all cluster closely together relative to their uncertainty estimates. In particular 2022 and 2015 are essentially tied, and 2022 could just as easily be regarded as the 6th warmest year. This global mean temperature in 2022 is equivalent to 0.91 °C (1.64 °F) above the 1951-1980 average, which is often used as a reference period for comparing global climate analyses. The last eight years stand out as the eight warmest years to have been directly observed. (Note: Berkeley Earth’s methodologies and their differences from other groups providing similar global temperature records are described here.)
OCEAN HEAT CONTENT CHANGES SINCE 1955 (NOAA) Data source: Observations from various ocean measurement devices, including conductivity-temperature-depth instruments (CTDs), Argo profiling floats, and eXpendable BathyThermographs (XBTs). Credit: NOAA/NCEI World Ocean Database. A more detailed graph including additional measurements from instrumented mooring arrays, and ice-tethered profilers (ITPs) covers the period 1992 – 2022. Credit NASA ECCO. Covering more than 70% of Earth’s surface, our global ocean has a very high heat capacity. It has absorbed 90% of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases, and the top few meters of the ocean store as much heat as Earth’s entire atmosphere. Note: If you want to grasp how many and what kinds of precision measurements – cross-checked across a variety of measurement platforms go into constructing these graphs, I suggest taking the time to go through one of ECCO’s presentations: ECCO: Integrating Ocean and Water.
Water (= H₂O) is a major component in the climate system and the main carrier of energy driving weather and climate change.
Each of water’s three physical states: water vapour (=gas), liquid water, and frozen water (=ice), together with transitions between the three states, all play important roles in the absorption, storage, transport, and release of heat around the planet. In its own right water vapour is also the most important and variable greenhouse gas.
Of all the natural materials forming the outer layers of the Earth, water has the second highest heat capacity of any known chemical compound. A lot of energy needs to be absorbed or released to warm or cool a quantity of water by even one degree — the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gm water by 1 °C at standard pressure and temperature has its own name, the calorie. (An old unit of measure, but the easiest to follow here.) This same amount of heat is released when the 1 gm cools by 1°. To raise the temperature of 1.3 sextillion litres just by 1° of the world’s oceans takes the absorption of a humongous amount of heat!
Water (Hydrosphere) and Air (Atmosphere)
Water in the world Ocean
At temperatures above 4 °C, water expands as it warms. In other words, a parcel of water composed of a given number of molecules occupying space expands in volume as it warms from 4 °C to boiling. Thus, as the ocean warms, sea levels rise. Water running off the land from melting glaciers and ice sheets causes sea levels to rise further and faster.
Warmer waters lying over cooler waters of the same salt content tend not to mix. However, as warm salt water evaporates, salt is left behind, making the remaining surface water denser, until it becomes heavier than cooler water below, allowing the warm water to sink and mix with the cooler water. This helps to suck in ocean currents to replace parcels of the cooling saltier water as they become denser and sink into the depths.
Thus, ocean currents are important engines for transporting heat around the globe.
Water in the atmosphere
Boiling or evaporating 1 gm of liquid water to gas (i.e., invisible steam) at one atmosphere of pressure takes approximately 540 calories of energy (= ‘heat of vaporisation/evaporation‘)! Similarly, when H₂O gas condenses to form visible steam (i.e., a mist of liquid water) the same energy of vaporisation is released as heat.
When liquid water freezes to form solid ice it releases ~80 calories/gm, while 80 calories of energy needs to be extracted from the surrounding environment to freeze 1 gm of liquid water to ice.
The gas laws discovered in the 1800s through practical experience with the thermodynamics of steam and internal combustion engines govern the relationships between temperature, volume, and pressure of gases. As heat energy warms a parcel of gas at a standard pressure, the absorbed energy causes the gas molecules comprising the parcel to move faster – resulting in increased volume (lowering the density of the parcel compared to surrounding parcels that have not changed in temperature). Or, vice versa increasing pressure will cause the gas parcel to heat up. Similarly, cooling gas will shrink in volume (i.e., become more dense) as its temperature decreases, or warming gas will increase its volume becoming less dense as it is heated. This is why parcels of warm air tend to rise in generally cooler air and vice versa.
Finally, another set of laws describes the solubility of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, and the solubility of the various gases forming the atmosphere in water. A parcel carrying the maximum concentration of a dissolved material is said to be ‘saturated’. Normally any excess over the point of saturation is precipitated out of the solution. Where precipitation of water vapour in the atmosphere is concerned, the precipitated water is called dew (if it collects on a surface), mist (if the droplets are small enough to remain floating in the atmosphere), rain (if droplets are large enough to fall to the ground) or snow (if it is cold enough for the precipitation of solid water). Hail is precipitated as liquid droplets that coalesce and freeze on the way to the ground. Basically, the capacity for the atmosphere to carry water as dissolved water vapour and the rate at which the vapour evaporates from the liquid increases substantially with temperature.
Note that the process of evaporation absorbs a lot of energy (i.e., the vapour stores the energy that drove the evaporation as latent heat) which is released as sensible heat when the dissolved vapour condenses and precipitates. Warm air can hold a lot of water vapour while cold air can only hold a little vapour. Thus a warm air mass is often able to suck moisture out of vegetation and soils, but as that mass rises in elevation and cools a temperature may be reached where the air is saturated (this is called the ‘dew point‘) and possibly massive amounts of water are precipitated as rain or snow together with the release of huge amounts of latent heat as sensible heat causing the air mass to rise still higher (e.g., into towering anvil topped cumulonimbus clouds). The rising air is liable to suck in high speed winds and possibly even form small and large hail, cyclones, and tornadoes. The higher the temperature of the air mass is when the dew point is reached, the more precipitation, heat and wind is generated.
As global warming increases baseline and average temperatures around the world, the amount of energy contained in parcels of water vapour increases, and thus increases the total amount of energy available to drive extreme weather events.
Water on the land and in the biosphere
Liquid water is a powerful solvent for all kinds of minerals and flows downhill wherever it can. Flowing water is relatively dense, and therefore an important agent for the transport of solid materials ranging from particles of sand to potentially huge boulders and even buildings. Consequently, standing and flowing waters are the major agents of dissolution, erosion and storm damage: especially when combined with storm-force winds.
All living things on Earth are partially comprised of water, with humans being about 60% water and even trees 50% water. The water in and around living things acts a) as a solvent and as a medium of transport for the dissolved gases required for photosynthesis (where this exists) and respiration; b) as a medium of transport for the ions, molecular nutrients and waste products of cellular metabolism and growth; c) as a structural element in the three-dimensional folding of proteins and other macromolecules; and d) as a structural element in the maintenance of hydraulic rigidity of the shapes of cells and vesicles, and even whole organisms.
Every type of living thing requires the availability of a minimum amount of water of a minimum quality to survive. Conversely, too much water and/or water of the wrong quality (i.e., it may be transporting harmful substances as particles or in solution) or wrong temperature (i.e., the shapes and activities of proteins involved in metabolism unavoidably change with changing temperature) may also kill.
Air in the water
Atmospheric gases (e.g., nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide) are more soluble in cold water than warm water. In other words, cold water can carry a lot more dissolved O₂ and CO₂ than warm water can.
CO₂ is relatively soluble in water because it readily forms carbonic acid. This is important for global warming because the oceans currently absorb about 30% of all global CO₂ emissions, thus slowing the rise of global temperatures due to the greenhouse effect. However, this is bad news for life on Planet Earth for three reasons: First, as the gas is increasingly absorbed into the water some of it turns into carbonic acid. This makes the water more acidic, dissolving calcium from shells and bones – contributing to the die off of plankton, corals, shellfish and bony fish. Secondly, given that CO₂ is the waste product of respiration it slows the respiration of all marine and aquatic organisms. Three, as water temperature rises CO₂ becomes substantially less soluble. This can be catastrophic for global warming because it acts like a time bomb. Rising temperatures drive significant amounts of CO₂ out of solution in the ocean, back into the atmosphere, where it acts as a positive feedback driving global temperatures still higher in a potentially vicious cycle.
O₂’s solubility in water is limited, but dissolved O₂ is critical to life for all complex organisms that respire water. This includes all aquatic or oceanic organisms: many bacteria, most protozoa, single-celled and multicellular algae (net O₂ producers by day, overnight they must extract O₂ at night for respiration) up to whole forests of giant kelp, giant squids, whale-sharks, and the largest whales. In the pre-industrial world O₂ levels in most waters were close to saturation. Any degree of warming beyond what species are adapted to live in reduces the amount of O₂ the water can carry. Species will begin dying when the O₂ levels fall below levels the different species have evolved to tolerate. For example, along the Southern California coast where I grew up, whole forests of giant kelp die off when the ocean temperature rises to around 23 °C. So do the myriad of other species living in those forests that may still be able to respire, because at some to many points in their lifecycles they required something the kelp provided. Other kelp forests around the world, and in Australia are also dying off, e.g., the once rich kelp forests of Tasmania – possibly even more comprehensively than they have in California (e.g., northern Tasmania).
And then there are the horrific die-off events in the rivers and lakes of Australia’s Murray-Darling region, where the combination of blistering heat combined with off-the-charts CO₂ levels is absolutely lethal to whole ecosystems. This year’s event even killed carp that can breathe air!
How will our Atmosphere, Hydro-/Cryo-sphere, Geosphere and Biosphere respond to global warming on the real Planet Earth?
Meteorology, climate science, earth systems science extend the basic laws of physics, chemistry and a little bit of biology into the real world. However, even a brief review of some of the basic laws of physics and chemistry above for water, oxygen, and CO₂ gives some hint of just how complex weather and climate change really are. Earth’s Climate System that generates weather and climate change in the world we live in is a complex dynamical system composed of probably hundreds of variables often interacting with one another in non-linear. Some of these interactions are poorly understood or even unrecognised even by the scientists studying them.
Even though the Earth System is absolutely and fundamentally governed by the physical laws of nature, trying to predict future weather and climate conditions is fraught with difficulties of two kinds. First, complex systems of many variables, where some of the variables have non-linear positive feedback relations with one another, often behave chaotically under some or even many conditions. (See also climate change feedback.) Second, is that some of the variables are probably still unknown to science or not well understood. Even the largest supercomputers in the world capable of performing more than 100 quadrillion calculations per second and working with millions of daily observations from around the world can only make usefully accurate weather predictions out to around 8 days before wandering off into random noise.
For these reasons, predicting the future trends of global warming with a high degree of accuracy and certainty is frankly impossible. However, what is almost certain is that if we do not stop and reverse the process of global warming there will be major disruptions to all of these systems which will make much of the Earth uninhabitable for complex life.
How trustworthy are the sciences and the warnings?
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deals with the uncertainties by running large numbers of similar earth/climate system models (ensembles) with slightly varying inputs on supercomputers to forecast possible future trends and their likelihoods. These outputs are analysed statistically to determine frequent trends and the range of uncertainties around these trends. Thus, many believe that the models give us a relatively good idea of how changes in specific environmental variables are likely to change the climate.
Unfortunately, with regard to managing climate risks, the reality is that this approach is too conservative because:
Most scientists agree that the RATE of climate change is increasing with time. However, the delays in knowledge flow between observation of reality and assessment and presentation of results mean that there is a lag built into the IPCC reports. That is, the delays inherent in analysing and writing up the results, delays in conducting peer review and publishing the original research, conceiving and constructing and running the mathematical models based on those results to forecast the future, analysing and writing up the results of the modelling, delays in publishing these results; and then comes the added time cost to incorporate the published results in an IPCC Report. This IPCC process alone takes a minimum of 2-3 additional years of three drafts, two peer reviews, and a final sign-off by the political appointees of the 170 countries comprising the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. Thus, the years-old input data providing a baseline for the models’ predictions necessarily do not include the array of record-breaking temperature, greenhouse gas, and weather readings associated with the increasingly extreme weather events of the last few years.
Finally most IPCC scientists are associated with academic and research institutions funded by governments, where academic progress and promotions depend on not being too novel or controversial (i.e., exhibiting ‘scientific reticence‘). This leads to scientific self-censorship — downplaying alarming findings, reinforced by the need that IPCC Reports require political approvals by government appointees to be published.
The following graphic is the IPCC’s own depiction of their authoring and review process.
The graphic and a comprehensive description of IPCC’s writing and review processes are given in their document, Preparing Reports. In turn, even more detail on how each kind of document is prepared, reviewed and signed off is provided in the IPCC [Documentation] Procedures, according to the thePrinciples Governing IPCC Work that lay down the role, organisation and procedures of the IPCC. These guiding Principles establish comprehensiveness, objectivity, openness and transparency for all IPCC Work .
Thus, when the formal IPCC reports publish their predictions for the future consequences: it follows that this is a gold-standard, scientifically correct but somewhat rose-tinted statement of the best possible outcomes we can hope for from the present state of the escalating climate emergency. The actual future is most likely to be worse, or even more worse.
Given all of these factors, it is virtually impossible that the IPCC reports are in any way overstating the magnitude and dangers of the climate crisis. Those who claim the IPCC reports are ‘alarmist’ are seriously misinformed or else aim to be deliberately misleading.
How do we know all of this?
There is a vast array of direct observational evidence from the real world (e.g., the graphs of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and rising global temperatures presented above) showing that our global climate is already deteriorating at historically and even geologically unprecedented rates. A few recent observations sample this kind of evidence.
Identifying, analysing, and managing climate risks
Most climate scientists have backgrounds in mathematics, physics or geology where they are used to working with well behaved regular systems — not complex dynamical systems with potentially chaotic and unknown variables where the models are inherently fallible in their predictions of the future. Although the mathematical theory of chaos emerged from early attempts to model climate, few have any formal grounding in complex systems or chaos theory. Consequently, they tend to believe their models can predict the future with some degree of statistical accuracy, rather than accepting that models are good for explaining what can happen but not what will or won’t happen.
Scientists (including a few climate scientists) who continue to deny that current climate change is mainly due to human activity are often used to dealing with changes over long periods of time, where natural and well understood processes are more or less adequate to explain how climate has changed in the past. Many of today’s deniers formed their opinions years ago (e.g. 1980s) when even climate specialists actively debated the extent and causes of climate change. In people prone to denial, ‘confirmation bias’ then begins to reinforce conclusions, where data fitting their belief is eagerly accepted, but seemingly contradictory data is critically scrutinised and rejected.
Over time, with the overwhelming additional data supporting unnaturally accelerated climate temperatures on land, air and sea, almost all genuine climate scientists have come to conclude that human activities are in fact changing the climate. The holdouts are usually in those other disciplines that have a default assumption that natural processes always explain changes in climate.
And then, there are those who have totally unscientific reasons for denying that humans cause climate change.Following on my career as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard 1973) with strong backgrounds in geology, physics, systems sciences (systems ecology, genetic systems, cybernetics), I was employed for 17 years as a knowledge management systems analyst and designer with what became Tenix and then Tenix Defence through the life-cycle of “Australia’s most successful naval surface combatant project – by far” – the ANZAC ship project. I worked very closely with the company’s engineering systems analysts and risk managers (often the same people did both). The ANZAC Project was so successful because the prime contract was performance-based rather than specifications based. We were contracted to deliver for a fixed price certain capabilities and reliabilities in service rather than meticulously detailed products.
Large defence systems – especially like warships and aircraft with their multitudes of subsystems, assemblies and piece parts, are complex dynamical systems that are inherently but unpredictably fallible due to unanticipated dynamics, human errors, or unpredictable failures of critical parts. It was the job of contract analysts, systems engineers, design engineers and knowledge managers (me), to work out a ship design and construction process that could be trusted to meet the customers’ requirements within the negotiated fixed price.
Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA)
The critical analytical tool in Tenix’s success, apparently unknown to climate science, is application of the Military Standard, Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) within a risk analytical and management framework. Briefly, this involves (1) tabulating all conceivable failures and the potential consequence of the particular failure mode (i.e., its criticality) for every component of the system that might have a detrimental effect on the system’s safety or functionality, (2) preparing at least a matrix for every failure mode showing the approximate likelihood of failure, and (optionally) the likely consequences/costs to the system should the failure occur, and the costs to repair or mitigate the mode.
Applying FMECA to global warming
Should we ignore a risk because its consequences are so severe we fear accepting that it is real?
The following graphic plots an analytical matrix for the risk of human extinction from a failure to stop global warming at a safe global temperature for human survival. A serious analysis of this risk (that is unthinkable to many) demands examining the physical realities associated with each dimension of the matrix and looking for solutions to reduce consequences and likelihood of the risk happening, and to provide the maximum time possible to manage it; or alternatively, to entirely avoid the activities causing the risk. Unfortunately, given that the risk from global warming is associated with the project to power industrial, technological, and population growth by burning fossil fuels that began 150 years ago. Thus we have no choices but to live or die with the consequences arising from this project.
Our planning to manage the risk must consider the third dimension — TIME. How much time do we have to manage the risk if we are to avoid its consequences? The possible consequences of the risk are existential – i.e., extinction of human society as we know it or even the entire species. The probability is likely to be certain if we do not stop and reverse global warming. The timescale is imminent, i.e., within the expected lifespan of today’s children.
Should we heed the science and the warnings?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by the United Nations to research and provide the “best” scientific advice available to governments of the world regarding the science, trends, and likely progress of climate change. The Panel’s staff is selected and overseen by all the member states of the World Meteorological Organization. The peer review is exhaustive and intensive – probably more so than for any other scientific endeavour ever.
For reasons I have detailed it would be virtually impossible for any formal publication of the IPCC to overstate the dangers represented by climate change. Where the IPCC says that even the current trends will be catastrophic if realised, I would say that they are ‘existential’: A word the IPCC rarely uses and never defines.
Existential risks are defined as “risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential.” The instantiation of an existential risk (an existential catastrophe) would either cause outright human extinction or irreversibly lock in a drastically inferior state of affairs. Existential risks are a subclass of global catastrophic risks, where the damage is not only global but also terminal and permanent, preventing recovery and thereby affecting both current and all future generations.Note: This discussion of definitions may seem to be highly pedantic. It isn’t. It is deadly serious. Humanity faces a serious risk of triggering a global mass extinction event akin to the End Permian event that was “Earth’s most severe known extinction event,[11][12] with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species[13][14][15] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.[16] It is the largest known mass extinction of insects.[17]” If you are declaring a state of emergency, it does not help to describe the emergency in soothing terms.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
There is actually a lot more on the front burner than El Niño. There are signs we may have just crossed a catastrophic ocean tipping point over the last three and a half months. The following thread of tweets and news items summarizes a very scary thread of observational data.
We may have broken Earth’s Thermohaline Circulation.
In 2020 Argo collected 12,000 data profiles each month (400 a day) or around 436,500 profiles a year. Each profile provides for each increment of depth a a record of the variation in ocean temperatures, salinity, and pressure from 2,000 m deep to the surface, together with the precise global positioning coordinates where the probe surfaced.
In the past water flowing into the polar regions was quite salty because a lot of moisture evaporated from the surface in tropical and sub-tropical regions, leaving the salt behind to make the water more dense. However, because the water was hot the density was somewhat lowered due to thermal expansion it stayed on the surface because it floated over the surface of cooler but fresher water. As the salty water flowed into polar regions it cooled enough that even though it was being diluted by precipitation and runoff from melting snow and ice on the land, the cooling and increasingly diluted water become dense enough sink under the warm salty waters drawn towards the poles by the sinking polar waters. This circulation also carried oxygen into the depths and nutrients from the depths towards the surface in areas where deep water wells up to replace the surface water flowing towards the poles in tropical and temperate areas.
Wikipedia:Thermohaline circulation (THC) is a part of the large-scale ocean circulation that is driven by global density gradients created by surface heat and freshwater fluxes.
However, as global average temperatures rise and more heat is trapped in the ocean evaporation everywhere puts more moisture into the air that falls as rain in tropical and subtropical areas, diluting the warmer ocean surface waters. In polar and sub-polar areas the increased moisture greatly increasing the runoff from the land from rain and melting snow and ice, that further dilutes the increasingly diluted ocean surface water flowing into polar regions from tropical and subtropical areas.
The result is that the thermohaline conveyors driving the major ocean currents are probably being choked and possibly being completely stopped by masses of water that are too hot and dilute to sink. Even worse, the warm dilute water washing against the ice sheets and glaciers reaching the ocean melts ice at an increasing rate making the surface waters even fresher.
On 26 May, 2023 we are seeing an all-time low extent of sea ice since the satellite record began in 1979. http://kjpluck.github.io/seaice/
Denmark’s Polar Portal (below) shows the melting of the multi-year Arctic sea ice from its winter peak in June 2004 until now. [Click the picture to load the live site, scroll up to to see the “Sea Ice Thickness and Volume” title. Note the grey slider bar below the map. Click the “Animate Monthly” to load the animation — which will take some time to download the data. You may use the slider to scroll through the series of monthly maps, or you can control buttons below the slider to start and stop the animation or step back or forward one month at a time. The red color represents multi-year ice around 4 meters thick, lavender to blue ice is single year ice less than about 1.5 m thick.]
Note, there is an interesting but deadly physical twist here: As water temperature drops below 4 °C cold/freezing fresh water floats on top of warmer relatively salty water, and freezes-over in the winter at higher temperatures than saltier water. Paradoxically, floating ice and snow accumulating on the surface actually insulates the lower layer of warm salty water from further cooling, where the winter surface temperature may be 20-50 °C below freezing. However, the fronts of large glaciers flowing into the ocean may be grounded hundreds of meters below sea level or floating on even deeper warm water(!). This means they will still be melting rapidly from the bottom up even in the dead of winter when fresh water is freezing. The ice melt dilutes the polar oceans even more – so say nothing of raising sea levels that will, in turn, lead to the floating of glacier fronts, exposing even more areas to melting.
What is happening as I write this warning?
If you follow the threads and commentary attached to these tweets here, the links show what was happening a week ago.
Daily global sea ice record low is small, but it doesn't show how significant it actually is. The volume and regional changes are even more telling.
The following Guardian articles highlight the existential risk we are facing.
Melting ice around Antarctica could cause a 40% slowdown of a global deep ocean current by 2050 if current greenhouse gas emissions continue, according to researchers. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images / from the article
New research by Australian scientists suggests 40% slowdown in just three decades could alter world’s climate for centuries.
[Actually, the data presented here suggests that as of the last three months or so this stoppage has already begun!]
Melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise, according to scientists behind new research.
The research suggests if greenhouse gas emissions continue at today’s levels, the current in the deepest parts of the ocean could slow down by 40% in only three decades.
This, the scientists said, could generate a cascade of impacts that could push up sea levels, alter weather patterns and starve marine life of a vital source of nutrients.
Read the complete article….
Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf. There has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week. Photograph: staphy/Getty Images/iStockphoto / from the article
With the continent holding enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt, polar scientists are scrambling for answers.
For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline.
The continent’s fringing waters witness a massive shift each year, with sea ice peaking at about 18m sq km each September before dropping to just above 2m sq km by February.
But across those four decades of satellite observations, there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week.
…
“We are seeing less ice everywhere. It’s a circumpolar event.”
In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979.
The Southern Ocean overturning circulation has ebbed 30% since the 90s, CSIRO scientist claims, leading to higher sea levels and changing weather.
A major global deep ocean current has slowed down by approximately 30% since the 1990s as a result of melting Antarctic ice, which could have critical consequences for Earth’s climate patterns and sea levels, new research suggests.
Known as the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, the global circulation system plays a key role in influencing the Earth’s climate, including rainfall and warming patterns. It also determines how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans store.
Scientists warn that its slowdown could have drastic impacts, including increasing sea levels, altering weather patterns and depriving marine ecosystems of vital nutrients.
Global temperatures are rising. This paper demonstrates for the first time that the global temperature increase has not been linear but is exponential with a doubling time of about 25 years. Both the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the combustion of fossil fuels and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have also risen exponentially, with a similar doubling time. The exponential trajectories of rising global temperature, carbon dioxide emission, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration support the idea that all three are entirely man-made. This analysis shows that during the past 70 years, the increasing use of fossil fuels results more from human activities than population growth, and that reducing the use of fossil fuels by 7.6% each year, the “7.6%-scenario”, can prevent annual global temperatures from surpassing pre-industrial temperatures by 1.6°C, a critical threshold to sustaining life on Earth.
Driven by exponentially increasing global temperatures, this process is also very likely to be accelerating at an exponential rate (doubling time of about 25 years).
Or worse!
What I think we are seeing in this data is that we have crossed a chaotically discontinuous ‘tipping point’. Prior to March 12, the thermohaline circulation was slowing as surface waters were gradually becoming warmer and more dilute, and thus less dense, decreasing the sinking rate of the cooling warm salty water that was driving the circulation. Around March 12, the surface waters actually became less dense than the deeper waters and thus stopped sinking at all to begin piling up in the polar regions where they would increase the rate of ice melting to be diluted still further.
With no sinking water to keep the the thermohaline circulation working, it has effectively been jammed and we are now in a totally new climate regime that is likely to get a lot hotter, a lot faster.
If this isn’t a climate emergency, I don’t know what is.
As at May 30, the heat anomaly is still growing. The average surface temperature of the World Ocean is a good 0.2 °C hotter than it has been on this day since the satellite records began in 1979; and it is only 0.1 °C cooler than the hottest temperature ever recorded in this era for any time of the year.
Featured Image
Figure from https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1663936433801887744/photo/1. “Will a Super El Niño materialize like in 1997 and 2015? What will that mean for global Sea Surface Temperatures? And for global and regional weather extremes?” This seems to be answered by https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1663195220207362048/photo/1
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
As if a planetary system is going to pay an iota of attention to what Iowa thinks. New law says state regulations must ignore climate change!
The only people who will suffer will be those harmed by and dying from increasingly extreme weather events as a consequence of global warming from the fossil fuel industry’s continued contributions to Earth’s greenhouse layer.
Blind stupidity driven by boundless greed! You have to read the article to understand just how stupid and greedy some American legislators can be…
Labor puppets will work to benefit fossil fuel industries’ continued hyper-profitable exploitation come hothouse hell or high water flooding! How do we know this?
Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are the itsy-bitsyest “reforms” about, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a fancy new bow. Michael West reports on how the Treasurer is merely returning a couple of billion in gas sector subsidies, and only for a while.
“Chalmers slaps $2.4bn tax hit on oil and gas,” cried Murdoch’s The Australian. “$2.4bn gas tax hit on energy giants,” declared the AFR. Santos chief Kevin Gallagher was nowhere to be heard with his “Soviet-style” scaremongering. Is Australia still going the way of Venezuela and Nigeria, Kevin?
Not on your Nelly. The foreign gas giants are profiteering from Australia’s resources like there is no tomorrow, and paying pocket fluff in tax to boot. Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are itsy-bitsy, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a bright new bow, really just “up-fronting” a piddling amount of gas revenue for the next few years, a clawing back of subsidies for a while.
You know it’s a fake “hit” when the fossil media talks it up as a “hit” but the gas lobbyists from APPEA say it gets “the balance right”. Reality is there is no balance, just ongoing pillage.
Clearly our Government is receiving or expecting to receive some kind of quid pro quo that they think will help them stay in power. Staying in power is clearly more important to the party that has the majority in government than doing whatever is necessary to stop and reverse the carbon emissions currently forcing us all down the road to hothouse hell and global mass extinction.
How else could the robber barons of the FF industries count on our Government helping them to rip off such extraordinary profits from their pillaging of so many Australian non-renewable resources?
Following this theme a little further, see the news from Alberta, Canada, that is currently burning to a crisp. This gives some of the evidence demonstrating how FF puppetry works through its ‘influence’ on the media:
The stark reality is that the successful puppetry of the fossil fuel industry to protect and possibly even enhance next year’s earnings is driving us ever faster down the global warming road that leads to human oblivion in the 6th global mass extinction. Even if the heating doesn’t kill us directly, the die-offs of increasing numbers of keystone species, will cause whole ecosystems (including human agricultural systems) to collapse, taking our species along as well.
The weather causing the fires in Alberta today is a sign of the times:
Now: There are 89 active fires in Alberta, Canada. Active area burned is ~1 million acres!! In the past 5 years the average burned area to date only +-1000 acres. Southern Canada has been super dry the past few months. A 4 sigma heat ridge this weekend will compound the issues! pic.twitter.com/rdNJ90kEgG
Indigenous communities, including three First Nations and a Métis settlement, have been among the hardest hit in the Alberta wildfires. Indigenous peoples are bearing the brunt of climate change.https://t.co/Yp6PLKDjss
— Dr. Kisha Supernant, social agitator (she/her). (@ArchaeoMapper) May 9, 2023
Confidence is increasing in a potentially record-smashing heatwave across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada this weekend into early next week, which could rapidly escalate the already serious wildfire situation across Alberta. pic.twitter.com/UItmnbSiwZ
Note: The normal progression of waves in the Jet Stream is from west to east. In this time series, the Jet Stream is so disordered that the eddy is actually moving the heat dome from east to west!
What we are seeing here is the operation of a positive feedback look driven by increasing global temperatures. As the Arctic grows warmer, temperature differences driving the jet streams diminish. This change allows the streams separating frigid polar air from much temperate zone air to slow and meander both far north and south of their normal paths. As demonstrated above, this is how the monster heat dome causing the Alberta fires formed. Amongst other things, slow overall warming accompanied by periodic heatwaves like this over most of the world’s boreal forests has allowed bark beetles, normally killed off every year by winter freezing, to proliferate to the point that they are killing vast numbers of trees. This increases the forests’ vulnerabilities to fires and the ferocity of the fires themselves. Not only does this turn the carbon content of the trees into greenhouse gases, but the fires are often hot enough to ignite the peaty soil to release that carbon as greenhouse gases as well.
In sum, fossil fuel interests have convinced (1) our government to protect and even extend fossil fuel’s profits from producing and burning Earth’s carbon stores into energy and greenhouse gases, and (2) our press from advertising the facts of this pillage to the people whose futures will be destroyed by the consequent global warming.
Governments controlled by political parties in majority are easy targets for special interests, especially when the parties operate on the basis that the only issue that matters is to retain control of the government. They will represent the special interests of any person/group/industry they think can help them keep that control before the interests of the people in their electorates or people in general.
To mobilize and coordinate the necessary forces to turn off the downhill road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell, our governments need to work for us humans, not vested interests:
we need to convince our elected and candidate representatives that we will absolutely not vote for them if they put a vested interest before our interests;
that we need to elect enough independents from our own communities who will represent us to ensure that no major political party can form a majority government in its own right.
Item 2 ensures that community interests can veto legislation favoring special interests put up by the party in power.
Featured Image:
A protest against the US government’s decision to exit the Paris climate deal in 2017. ‘Ignorance-building strategies’ by fossil fuel companies have bred climate change scepticism among conservatives in the US and Australia. Photograph: Anthony Anex/EPA | from the Guardian article by Graham Readfearn (08/05/2018), “‘It’s all about vested interests’: untangling conspiracy, conservatism and climate scepticism“)
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The climate emergency needs a revolution: from governments supporting dogmas and special interests to supporting citizens.
Vote Climate One is working to inform Australians of the scientific facts relating to the ever growing climate emergency and what can be done politically to ensure that our governments actively join the battle to solve the emergency. We hope this will help drive a political revolution enabling this to happen.
Due to humans’ alteration of Earth’s atmosphere, the physical world we live in is generating a climate emergency
Scientific evidence shows this is the case
This image of a burning home in Lake Conjola in New South Wales, Australia, was taken in the middle of the day on New Year’s Eve. Credit…Matthew Abbott for The New York Times. Our Black Summer Bushfires should be more than enough to convince every Australian that we are facing a very real and very dangerous climate emergency.
Where scientifically validated facts are concerned, two weeks ago on the 20th of March the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) controlled by 195 nations of the world forming the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published their dire forecast for our future climate. This report’s Summary for Policy Makers was signed off by the delegated representatives of every one of the WMO member nations. This summary report crossing many different scientific disciplines concludes some 6 years of some of the most stringently peer-reviewed scientific research ever published. In other words, the forecast is based on a vast array of solid and tested evidence, not just anecdotes and beliefs.
In other words, where the IPCC says our future is dire if we don’t stop global warming, the actual reality is likely to be even worse, i.e., involving social collapse and even possible/likely human extinction within a century or two. Hence, our warning on Vote Climate One’s cover page:
Humans triggered the climate emergency over a little more than 100 years. In this geological instant of time we burned prodigious quantities of safely sequestered fossil carbon accumulated over millions of years to produce and release the greenhouse gas CO₂ and, even more potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This was done more-or-less accidentally with the invention of primitive, Victorian era-based steam- technologies. However, even the low tech used and applied by billions of people significantly changed the composition of an entire planet’s worth of atmosphere so it traps more solar energy to significantly warm the whole planet. Today, we are continuing to dump still more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating the planet even more.
Given that humans only took a century to accidentally create the climate emergency using steampunk technology, surely, by working together and using our most up to date science and technologies, we should be able to solve the emergency. Unfortunately dogma and selfish greed promoted by special interests controlling the planet’s resources are working against stopping greenhouse gas emitting activities. This, unavoidably, becomes fraught with politics: internationally, nationally, state, and even at local council levels. Political revolutions will be required at all levels to favor climate action.
Before we can work together to solve the climate emergency in the physical world, we must revolutionize our current political world working to protect special interests by keeping us divided
Puppet governments
Where politics is concerned, for several decades at least, Australian Governments (federal, state, and even many local councils) have governed primarily to serve entrenched party-political dogmas and vested special interests. Parliamentary parties have worked to impose their dogmas on the nation’s citizens rather than listening to them. Special interests influencing the governments include multinational companies in the resource and fossil fuel industries, super-wealthy individuals, land-developers and religious groupings. Parties (and party discipline) tends to support the interests who support their campaigns and provide them with favorable media. Our Climate Sentinel News article provides a case study of Liberal government in NSW: Is Premier Perrottet a far-right puppet, or the puppet master?
Unfortunately, the uncoordinated actions of people alone, no matter how well motivated, cannot possibly organize, marshal, and control all the resources and technologies needed for effective action on the climate emergency. This requires the tools of and coordination by government. Effective action to stop global warming requires stopping industrial carbon emissions. This just isn’t going to happen as long as puppet governments guided by fossil fuel industries continue subsidizing their puppet masters and jailing protesters campaigning to stop emissions. Several Climate Sentinel News posts document such cases under the search term “puppet master“.
Revolutionary political change is the solution
Vote Climate One concludes that the critical first steps in mobilizing effective climate action must be to: (1) inform citizens of the genuine reality of the climate crisis (i.e., via Climate Sentinel News); and (2) provide knowledge and tools to influence or replace parliamentary puppets of the special interests with MPs who will place citizens’ interests first (i.e., “Traffic Light Voting” and “Voting Guides“).
In other words, we aim to facilitate fundamental political revolutions in Australian parliaments: From ‘democracies’ guided by the greed of large special interests for profits and power; To a genuine democracies representing their citizens and being concerned with their health and well being.
In Australia’s political environment we think the best governments will be Labor in a minority (with labor more progressive than the usual opposition parties) where Greens and a diversity of greenish community independents hold the balance of power to prevent Labor from catering to vested interests.
This revolution has begun! Current state of the political revolution in Australia
Australian Parliament
In last year’s Federal election, the COALition majority government was decimated: replaced by a Labor government with a razor thin margin and a large cross bench with 14 green-light candidates.
House of Representatives Elections
COALition
Aust. Labor Party
Centre Alliance
Katter’s Australian
Australian Greens
Ind (Teal)
Ind (other)
2022
58
77
1
1
4
9
2
2019
77
68
1
1
1
3
1
-18
+11
(Sharkie)
(Katter)
+3
+6
(Gee + Dai Le)
(Majority ≥ 75): Labor 77 + Aston = 78; Red lights 61 – Aston = 60; Green lights = 15
Green lights include (Greens: 1 carryover and 3 new ones – replacing Libs in metro Brisbane) plus a swag of greenish community independents from 4 other states; Labor controls the lower house in majority but with a narrow margin. Several seats could easily go to independents in by elections.
In the 1 April (April Fool’s day!) by-election in Aston (Ferntree Gully – Rowville in eastern Melbourne), in a 6.44% swing, Labor gained another ex-safe Liberal seat. This is the first time since 1920(!) that any party in power has won a seat in a Federal by-election anywhere in Australia. Only 3 out of 32 booths in the once safely Liberal Aston had a majority of Liberal votes.
Liberals are left holding only 2 of 23 seats in Inner Metro Melbourne (Deakin and Menzies), 3 of 7 Outer Metro (Casey, LaTrobe and Flinders), and 0 of 3 Regional Metro areas (Bendigo, Ballarat, and Geelong).
Senate Elections
COALition
Aust. Labor Party
Greens
Pauline Hanson’s
Jacqui Lambie
United Australia
David Pocock
Lidia Thorpe
2022 Election
15
15
6
1
1
1
1
Total Senate 2022
31
26
11
2
2
1
1
1
Majority > 38: Labor 26; Red lights 36; Green lights 13 — (Labor + green lights) = 39
Where Labor has only 26 seats compared to 36 seats for the red lights, the green lights clearly hold the balance of power in the Senate. David Pocock (community independent) and Lidia Thorpe (elected as a Green) must be included along with the Greens party to give Labor a majority. David Pocock’s vote is critical in decisions where the red lights are unanimously against.
In our analysis of the results, Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Election Guide was accessed hundreds of thousands of times during the pre poll and election day voting period – which might have helped some candidates over the line to either second place (allowing preferences to be distributed to them) to pass the 50% two party preferred winning position. In the ACT Vote Climate One funded distribution of paper versions of the Guide in a few of the suburbs — where Pocock did statistically better than in suburbs we didn’t cover. This may have been a significant component in the winning margin.
Since the Federal Election we have had state elections in Victoria and NSW.
Victorian State Parliament
The Victorian Parliament has more resistant to revolutionary change because of the many barriers to Greens, minor parties and independents crafted into the electoral laws designed to favor the major parties. Victoria allows ‘group voting tickets’ for election to the Legislative Council and secretive backroom ‘preference trading’ among the mobs. Combined with this, Victoria’s heavyweight restrictions on campaign contributions and funding gravely hamper independents and minor parties’ abilities to campaign compared to major parties’ major funding.
Legislative Assembly
The Assembly (lower house) ended up with Labor holding 56 seats, Liberals with 19, Nationals 9 (red lights = 38), and Greens 4; where a majority is < 45. None of the 120 independents or candidates from 16 minor parties won a single seat. Labor’s 11 seat majority in the lower house combined with party discipline does little to hinder autocratic government from the Labor side.
On the other hand voting for the Legislative Council turned out well for green-light candidates. MLCs serve for 4 year terms, with all seats contested in each state election.
Legislative Council
For Legislative Council Elections in Victoria, the state is divided into 8 geographically defined electoral regions, with 5 members representing each region, for a total of 40 members. Elections are determined by ‘optional preferential voting‘. Voters have a ‘single transferable vote‘, which may be used either
‘above the line’, to vote one party’s group voting ticket listing all candidates for the region in the party’s preferred order, or
‘below the line’, where you must number at least 5 candidates in your preferred order, and may number all candidates for the region in your preferred order. If you number less than 5 or give more than one candidate the same number this invalidates your ballot.
The use of group voting tickets enables upper house elections allows voters’ intentions to be rorted in many ways as described by Glen Druery, the ‘Preference Whisperer’. However, despite all of this, after the 2022 election, green-light MLC’s on the cross-bench with 7 votes hold the balance of power.
Victorian Legislative Council Elections
Labor
COALition
Greens
Animal Justice
Derryn Hinch’s
Fiona Patten’s
Labor DLP
Legalize Cannabis
Liberal Democrats
Pauline Hanson’s
Shooters, Fishers, F…
Sustainable Aust.
Transport Matters
2022
15
14
4
1
0
0
1
2
1
1
1
0
0
2018
18
13
1
1
3
1
0
0
2
0
1
1
1
change
-3
+1
+3
-3
-1
+1
+2
-1
+1
-1
-1
Labor 15, Greens 4, Cannabis 2, Animal Justice 1 (22); vs red-lights: Libs 8, Nat 6, Lab DLP 1, Lib Dem 1, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation 1, Shooters & Fishers 1 (18). With 21 needed for a majority in the upper house, Greens are clearly in the balance of power.
Way ahead for Victorian voters
Given that Labor is already relatively progressive on climate action, a green light majority on the cross bench may be in a position to block favorable treatment of Labor’s fossil fuel special interests, and to encourage strong action to shut down fossil fuel emissions. Victorians need to keep a close watch on their representatives and make sure via letter bombing, phone calls, and personal visits to electorate offices that they stay on the job to stop global warming!
New South Wales State Parliament
The NSW State election was held a week ago (1 April), but like Victoria the NSW’s election laws work against minor parties and independents. However, Vote Climate One may have had a bit more influence here. Liberal/Nationals were soundly defeated and Labor is in, but with a definite minority government. Labor is two short of a majority pending possible recounts. (The Liberals held the seat of Ryde by only 50 votes when the last of the postal votes were counted on 8 May).
NSW State Legislative Assembly Election
On the Labor/green-light side, Labor 45; Greens 3 (Ballina – thanks to the repeated extreme flooding events, plus Sydney electorates of Balmain & Newtown); and 3 green-light independents – one of them backed by Climate200, for a total of 51; where 47 votes are required to pass legislation.
There are also 2 orange-light incumbent independents with significant green credentials.
Note, for the count here I have reclassified Michael Regan (Wakehurst), listed orange light before the election. Due to time constraints our analysis missed his strong record of climate actions as Mayor of Northern Beaches Council and the fact that he was supported by Federal teal MPs, Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Sophie Scamps (Mackellar).
On the Lib/Nat red-light side there are 25 Libs; 11 Nationals and 4 independents (1 ex Lib and 3 ex shooters/fishers/farmers) for a total of 40.
This leaves NSW with a Labor minority government with Greens + green-light independents with a strong hold in the balance of power.
NSW State Legislative Council Election
The NSW Legislative Council has 42 members, elected by proportional representation in which the whole state is a single electorate. Members serve eight-year terms, which are staggered, with half the Council (21) being elected every four years. 22 votes are required for a majority.
All registered parties are listed ‘above the line’ on the ballot paper. All candidates running in the election for a party (as listed above the line) are listed for that party in preference order below the line. Unaffiliated independent candidates are only listed below the line.
A single ‘1’ above the line is formal and counts for the chosen party but has no preferences for other parties. If they wish, a voter may show a second, third and so on preference for other parties above the line. These preferences are implied to be preferences for candidate of each group as printed on the ballot paper.
If a voter wants to re-order a party’s candidates, pick candidates from different parties, or vote for candidates in any group without a voting square above the line, they must vote ‘below the line’ by numbering boxes for candidates. Electors must complete 15 preferences below the line for a formal vote. DO NOT number a sequences that crosses the ballot paper line.
NSW Legislative Council Election
Coalition
Labor
Greens
Pauline Hanson’s
Shooters, Fishers, +
Animal Justice
Cannabis
Lib Democrats
2023 election
7
8
2
1
1
0
1
1
Total Council 2023
15
15
4
3
2
1
1
1
In the Legislative Council 22 votes form a majority, and there are now 15 Labor, 6 green lights (4 Greens, 1 AJP, 1 Cannabis), totaling 21 votes, versus 21 red light votes (Coalition 15, Pauline Hansons’s 3, SFF 2, Lib Dems 1).
Note: According to the ABC on 9/04/2023, as this is being written:
There are still some uncertainties in the count. Four seats are still not finalized, but are likely to be filled by a seventh Liberal member and one each representing Legalise Cannabis, the Liberal Democrats and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. These are included in the above table.
“The Legislative Council consists of 42 members. Traditionally one of the government’s members is elected President. The President only has a casting vote meaning votes are determined by the 41 members on the floor with a government needing 21 members to pass legislation. After appointing the President, Labor will have only 14 members, which means the new government will need votes from seven of the 12 crossbench members to pass legislation.”
Based on trends in the present count, only 6 on the cross bench will be green lights. In other words, Vested interests working through normally cooperative red lights in the upper house, may still have some ability to block important legislation on climate action.
Way ahead for NSW voters
Noting that the Liberal Democrats and Shooters, Fishers are farther to the right and dogmatic on energy policy and climate action than the Liberal Party, we must hope that the Liberals in the upper house will follow the lead of green lights in the lower house on climate legislation.
Voters concerned to see serious action on climate need to stay alert to what their representatives in both houses are saying and doing. Make sure they know via letter bombing, phone calls, and personal visits to electorate offices that they must stay on the job to stop global warming!
What will Vote Climate One do to help?
Insofar as our limited resources allow, we will endeavor to keep Australian voters up to date with the latest news on the still growing climate emergency (i.e., why we need action) and what our governments are doing to solve it. Towards this end, we will be establishing an email service you can subscribe to, and publish contact details for all federal and state parliamentarians so you can send them hearts and flowers or brick bats depending on how well they are addressing needs for climate action.
It seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, then a 16 year-old school girl, who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on what even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is truly the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”.
People hope for their children’s futures. She doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so all of our offspring can have some hope for their future.
In our present situation where most governments still support and even fund fossil fuel production and use, the most effective actions we can take as individuals is to revolutionize our governments to prioritize action on climate change above all other things. Nothing else matters if we have no future….
If we can get climate savvy governments in power soon enough, we may be able to mobilize enough action to survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in…
This is who we are working for! Think of your families’ futures.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
IPCC warns we have only a few years left when climate action can reverse human caused global warming to avoid a crescendo of climate catastrophes
Unfortunately, we are living in a world where the greedy self-interests of billionaires and multi-national corporations tend to control media and politics. These special interests are threatened by things that must be done to slow and stop global warming. They use their power over the media and politicians to deny the need for and to prevent critically important climate action. However, the real-world understanding reported in the concluding summary of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report on Climate Change (published this week) documents and explains the very real dangers and even mass deaths society faces if global warming is not stopped by 2030. We genuinely face a climate emergency that threatens human survival. To have any hope of organizing and implementing the kinds of statewide and national actions needed to stop the warming process citizens have to replace the parliamentary puppets of special interests with MPs who will genuinely work for the citizens who elected them. In New South Wales, how you vote this week is a life-and-death matter!
I have explained that this approval process is highly conservative and cannot avoid downplaying the extent and dangers of climate change. In reality, the actual dangers to humanity are likely to be a lot worse than described by the IPCC. New South Wales residents who are currently voting on their state government (polls close on 25 March) should note that all the modeling and predictions discussed in the Report are based on weather and climate data collected only up to 2020. The models and predictions do not include evidence on or predict how extreme climate events have actually been: e.g.,Black Summer bushfires, more than two years of unprecedented and widespread flooding, extreme heatwaves and drought, etc. If you are living on the land or close to Nature, you will know that the reality you are living with is already significantly worse than anticipated by the IPCC.
At nearly 8,000 pages, the full report is virtually unreadable. Every statement is documented, justified, and qualified. Fortunately, the World Resources Institute has done an admirable job of highlighting critical content in a readable way:
Cover Image by: Anirut Thailand/Shutterstock (from the article)
It also makes for grim reading. Across nearly 8,000 pages, the AR6 details the devastating consequences of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around the world — the destruction of homes, the loss of livelihoods and the fragmentation of communities, for example — as well as the increasingly dangerous and irreversible risks should we fail to change course.
But the IPCC also offers hope, highlighting pathways to avoid these intensifying risks. It identifies readily available, and in some cases, highly cost-effective actions that can be undertaken now to reduce GHG emissions, scale up carbon removal and build resilience. While the window to address the climate crisis is rapidly closing, the IPCC affirms that we can still secure a safe, livable future.
…
Looking Ahead
The IPCC’s AR6 makes clear that risks of inaction on climate are immense and the way ahead requires change at a scale not seen before. However, this report also serves as a reminder that we have never had more information about the gravity of the climate emergency and its cascading impacts — or about what needs to be done to reduce intensifying risks.
Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) is still possible, but only if we act immediately. As the IPCC makes clear, the world needs to peak GHG emissions before 2025 at the very latest, nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero CO2 emissions around mid-century, while also ensuring a just and equitable transition. We’ll also need an all-hands-on-deck approach to guarantee that communities experiencing increasingly harmful impacts of the climate crisis have the resources they need to adapt to this new world. Governments, the private sector, civil society and individuals must all step up to keep the future we desire in sight. A narrow window of opportunity is still open, but there’s not one second to waste. [my emphasis]
As reported extensively in all Australian media today (21 May) the agreed IPCC summary says that near-term (i.e., ASAP!) climate action is urgent because the window is closing for us to secure a livable and sustainable future, and that: “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years”. These and many other critically important points are clearly summarized in the Headline Statements, which are the overarching conclusions of the approved Summary for Policymakers. Taken together these provide a concise narrative as to why effective action on the climate emergency is so urgent.
If you care for your future and the future of your family and society, you need to take the IPCC’s cautions and warnings seriously. And consider what this means in a world where your political representatives are likely to be more concerned to satisfy the wants of their big donors and special interests rather than you or other citizens of their electorates. These big donors are developers, fossil fuel industries, miners, etc., who are more concerned about immediate profit rather than future survival.
Think: if you are a “rusted-on” voter who can be counted on to vote for the incumbent or party you have always voted for, especially in a ‘safe’ seat, your ‘representative’ has no reason to consider your future in any way, and can work full time for the special interests.
However, in Australia, we still live in a democracy where your considered vote can actually work to throw the bastards out, by electing someone you can reasonably trust to work for the community of those who vote rather than those who pay…. Given the nature and reality of the climate emergency, you should consider Vote Climate One’s motto:
We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters — reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species will soon end up extinct no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship.
If you need more evidence that we need to change our governments, there is plenty on our Climate Sentinel News blog covering both science and politics.
How to vote
We don’t tell you how to vote. We work to help you achieve the results you want when you vote.
In Australia, Vote Climate One works to assess and rank how we think every party and independent candidate on the ballot in Federal and all State elections will respond to the climate crisis. Thanks to modern computer technology this is actually do-able. How we rank candidates is explained in our Climate Lens Traffic Light Assessment process. Sometimes, we’ll even get on the phone to find out more. The undeniable task of the climate lens is to prioritise the protection of everything we hold dear. The hubris of our species needs a dose of the reduction perspective tranquilizer encapsulated in this painting by Peter Trusler.
Our conclusions are presented via downloadable and printer-friendly voting guides for each and every electorate in NSW. You can find the guide for your electorate here (in this case, Lismore). The electorate screen tells you how we can help. Parties and candidates we think will work for climate action are designated with green lights. Those who we think won’t or who haven’t given us much to go on, are designated with red lights, Those we think are better than the worst, but not fully trustworthy are designated orange.
If you are concerned to see action on climate change, number all the green-light independents and parties first. Thus, even if your number [1] selection doesn’t win, you still maximize the chances that someone else with good climate credentials will be elected. If you want detail to help you decide how to rank green-light candidates, the Research Tools provide links to candidate websites and other information about them.
As Rob and his grandchildren explain in the video, the printable voting guides make it easy for you to transfer your preferences to the ballot paper in the voting booth:
Remember, we are voting in hopes of leaving a happy future for our families and society.
About the featured image: Figure SPM.6 from Summary for Policymakers, AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023
There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. There are a multitude of political choices that need to be made during this window. If we make good ones we can go on living in a world with a sustainable future. Bad choices will rapidly constrain our future to pathways that are likely to lead to societal collapse and eventual human extinction in a still rapidly warming world.
Figure caption: The illustrative development pathways (red to green) and associated outcomes (right panel) show that there is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. Climate resilient development is the process of implementing greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation measures to support sustainable development. Diverging pathways illustrate that interacting choices and actions made by diverse government, private sector and civil society actors can advance climate resilient development, shift pathways towards sustainability, and enable lower emissions and adaptation. Diverse knowledge and values include cultural values, Indigenous Knowledge, local knowledge, and scientific knowledge. Climatic and non-climatic events, such as droughts, floods or pandemics, pose more severe shocks to pathways with lower climate resilient development (red to yellow) than to pathways with higher climate resilient development (green). There are limits to adaptation and adaptive capacity for some human and natural systems at global warming of 1.5°C, and with every increment of warming, losses and damages will increase. The development pathways taken by countries at all stages of economic development impact GHG emissions and mitigation challenges and opportunities, which vary across countries and regions. Pathways and opportunities for action are shaped by previous actions (or inactions and opportunities missed; dashed pathway) and enabling and constraining conditions (left panel), and take place in the context of climate risks, adaptation limits and development gaps. The longer emissions reductions are delayed, the fewer effective adaptation options.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Reason, truth, and proportionality have triumphed over the Perrottet government’s fascist desires to stop climate protests and the police’s compliant fake evidence.
As I discuss further below, the judge’s finding in the Violet CoCo case raises the hope that people are beginning to realize how undemocratically oppressive New South Wales governments have become — because voters have allowed them to remain in office.
My featured article from the Saturday Paper reports the results of serial protester Violet CoCo’s District Court appeal against her brutally totalitarian jail sentence (15 months, 8 months minimum) under the new anti-protest law for protesting government inaction on climate change. Her crime was blocking a one-lane on-ramp to the Sydney Harbour Bridge for less than a half hour to raise public awareness of the climate crisis that threatens all of humanity with mass extinction from global warming due to fossil fuel emissions.
In 2022, the law was rammed through Parliament in less than a week with with Labor’s support, despite calls from a coalition of almost 40 civil society organizations to scrap it. Premier Perrottet and Labor’s leader, Chris Minns, (both members of their parties’ religious right wing factions) both expressed to the press how pleased they were with the draconian nature of the sentence.
Are these the kind of leaders you want to follow in NSW?
Climate activist Violet CoCo. Credit: Isabella Moore / from the article
by Royce Kurmelovs, 18/02/2023 in The Saturday Paper
In an exclusive interview, climate activist Violet CoCo, who won her appeal against a jail sentence this week, details what she has learnt about the ‘theatre’ of politics:
…District Court judge Mark Williams read his ruling this week on whether or not Violet CoCo would serve a 15-month prison sentence for blocking the Sydney Harbour Bridge during a protest…
Four months earlier, Magistrate Allison Hawkins described CoCo as “childish” and “emotional”. In sentencing her, she relied particularly on submissions by police that alleged CoCo’s protest had blocked an ambulance.
“You have halted an ambulance under light and siren,” Hawkins said. “What about the person in there? What about that person and their family? What do they think of you and your cause?”
Only, the ambulance never existed. New South Wales Police Force had been so eager to make their case, they had embellished their account with what Williams described as a “false fact”. Reviewing the evidence, he said: “How did that find its way in?” [my emphasis]
Footage recorded by Channel Seven of the protest, played for the court by Crown prosecutor Isabella Maxwell-Williams, was set aside. An assertion that CoCo had been motivated more by scorn at the treatment of her partner in a separate protest rather than climate change was also rejected. So, too, was any suggestion the protest was “not peaceful” or that CoCo should be punished harshly based on her “criminal history”.
Williams upheld CoCo’s appeal. Convictions were recorded for blocking the bridge, resisting arrest and using a flare, but no jail time was imposed. CoCo was given a 12-month conditional release order.
Read the complete article….
The red-back spiderweb controlling the NSW Liberal Party
A couple of weeks ago my article, “Is Premier Perrettet a far-right puppet, or the puppet master?“, detailed evidence on the public record showing how Dominic Perrottet’s current “Liberal” government represents the culmination of an infiltration of the NSW Liberal Party started more than 40 years ago by a Slovenian Nazi fascist propagandist by the name of Lyenko Urbanchich (wanted after WWII by Yugoslavia as a war criminal deserving the death sentence).
Lyenko successfully planted, co-opted and mentored helpers in the Ethnic Branch and Young Liberals, including David Clarke (MLC 2003-2019). Together Lyenko and Clarke also established themselves in the State Executive of the Party.
Clarke added hard-right Opus Dei Catholicism (Clarke became a “Co-operator”) to Urbanchich’s fascism. In turn they recruited several of the Perrottet brothers who had been immersed from birth in this sect. Their parents John and Ann were/are both self-acknowledged “supernumerary” members of Opus Dei). Some of the brothers, including Dom were schooled at Redfield College (overseen by Opus Dei pastors); and even through their Law/Commerce degrees at Sydney University the brothers lived in UNSW’s Warrane College, also established by Opus Dei. Dominic is now state Premier and brothers Charles and Jean Claude (at least) came through the Young Liberals are still involved in the nefarious branch stacking and other highly dubious politicking by hard-right Liberals.
Damien Tudehope was first elected to Parliament in 2015 after playing musical chairs in the seats of Baulkham Hills, Ryde, and Epping, sometimes as an apparent placeholder for Perrottet. One of his tasks on being elected for the first time was to Chair the Parliamentary Committee on the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
In 2018 Tudehope surrendered his lower house seat of Epping to Perrottet (because Perrottet wanted to shift there because it was “closer to home”), and was given a safe upper house position in return. In this repetition of musical chairs, David Clarke retired from Parliament to free the winnable space on the upper house ticket for Tudehope).
Alex Hawke is another David Clarke protege (MP from Mitchell, NSW, in the Australian Parliament 2007-present) from a strong Anglican background. Hawke’s presidency of the Young Liberals was one of the things being celebrated at Dominic Perrottet’s infamous 21st birthday party where Perrottet costumed himself as a uniformed Nazi. Hawke defected to Morrison’s Hillsong crowd around 2009 and is now considered to be a traitor by the Opus Dei religiofascists. The resulting Hillsong vs Opus Dei holy war for control of the NSW Liberal Party and government continues until today.
Do you want to be governed by these kinds of people and their ideals?
These masters of the spiderweb are only a dark corner of NSW’s overall political corruption
Today’s Saturday Paper’ also features “A brief history of Liberal Party scandals“. This outlines the incredibly long list of voluntary and forced resignations of Liberal premiers(!) and other politicians driven by ICAC investigations. “By sheer number of resignations, the NSW Coalition government goes to next weekend’s election as one of the most scandal prone in history.”
However, even this isn’t the whole story of Coalition government. The corrupt Liberal/Coalition government followed a scandalous Labor government: and then, there is the extensive “‘Fraud, money laundering’: Inside the Hillsong papers“, where a cache of leaked financial documents appears to document staggering misconduct and outrageous spending by leaders of the ‘church’ backing Scott Morrison’s motley crew.
What is the fundamental problem here, and what do we do about it?
The big issue here is that political parties who impose party discipline on elected members almost unavoidably end up reflecting party dogma and beliefs rather than working towards considered solutions to real-world problems. Where one party has a majority to govern in its own right, this makes it easy for leaders controlling the dogma and belief to become quite authoritarian and autocratic.
In states where unelected party apparatchiks and organizers (‘storm troopers’) beholden to a charismatic leader can gain control over nominations to safe seats (e.g., like in NSW), such thugs can control who can be elected, and continue controlling them after they are elected. Depending on the ‘Leader’s’ motivations and sanity, this control can easily lead to authoritarianism and outright despotism. Given that most charismatic leaders are psychopathic narcissists lusting for power, dictatorship is the common outcome. Basically this is how Adolf Hitler took over Germany, Vladimir Lenin took over the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Putin took over Russia (again) after Perestroika and Glasnost, Xi Jinping is taking over of China from what was a slightly democratic Communist Party; and how Donald Trump has been trying so hard to take over America by outright insurrection and rebellion.
In Australia our democracy is still strong enough to block and remove potentially fascist leaders and their political followers from our governments and political parties. We do this by ensuring that no one party has enough parliamentarians to govern in its own right. Both Liberal and Labor need to be downsized to the point that the balance of power is held by community independents genuinely working to represent the communities that have elected them rather than by sheepish puppets of a major party controlled by a charismatic leader supported by a cadre of thugs.
Where party MPs in ‘Safe seats’ can count on being reelected by ‘rusted on’ members of the Party they have no motivation to do anything for their electorates. Their positions are not risked if they work to force party dogma down everyone’s throats. Only where the seat is genuinely marginal do incumbents pay much attention to what their electorates actually want.
Only if you vote for someone else to actually win the seat (e.g., a community independent) can you count on replacing the party puppet with someone committed to listen to your needs and wants.
In the following election, if you still want to vote for your old party, you are far more likely to be presented with someone who knows that they will have to work for you – rather than the party leader – if they want to be elected, and then stay in office.
How can Vote Climate One help you do this?
Vote Climate One is driven by the ever-increasing flood of solid scientific evidence that humans are totally altering our planet’s atmosphere and ecosystems in ways that is triggering a global emergency that will lead to planet-wide economic and ecological collapses and our possible/probable extinction over the next century or so. Some of the rapidly growing evidence for this is documented in our Climate Sentinel News. Failed states, dying coral reefs, and towns that remain unrepaired following climate disasters show these collapses are already beginning….
“We need to treat the climate emergency as a global war we are on track to lose unless we can focus our efforts on the only task that matters — reversing global warming. If we fail here no other tasks matter — our species will soon end up extinct no matter how we arrange the deck chairs on the burning ship.”
For this reason Vote Climate One is working to encourage and help voters replace dud and corrupt parliamentarians (who ignore our daily realities to serve their own greed and the desires of their leaders and special interest puppet masters) by electing others who place the evidence-based needs of their local communities first. These needs may range from working to bring climate change under control, to the often related issues of emergency management, water, transport infrastructure, telecommunications, better health services, or even just integrity in government.
Our Traffic Light Voting System seeks to assess every candidate in every electorate of your state as to how they are likely to respond effectively to the climate emergency — or your local needs…. We have only given our green-light ranking to candidates where we have found good evidence that they can be trusted to work for your community rather than their own or others’ greed and special interests. We provide a lot of detail on many of these candidates so you can make up your own mind how you want to preference them.
Our Convenor, Rob Bakes, explains in his home-made video how easy it will be to use our election guide when it comes time to fill in your ballot papers.
Daggy Grand-Dad explains how easy our voting guide is to use to help give our children and grand children some hope for the future.
Featured Image
“The protest in April 2022 saw an entire citybound lane [actually a one-lane on-ramp] shut down on the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the peak rush hour. (9News)” Wow! The evidence from this photo actually shows that traffic on 7 lanes of the Bridge is flowing normally. Perrottet’s implication in justifying the outrageous sentence, that the whole City was in gridlock, was a bare-faced lie – fake news supporting the application of autocratic power.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Religious fascism on the far-right of the NSW Liberal Government.
Dominic Perrottet’s responses to Violet Coco’s demonstration against government inaction on the climate emergency were so disproportionate that I had to uncover what stimulated them — a red-back spider’s web of political influence and manipulation. The Slovenian fascist/anticommunist, Lyenko Urbanchich, began to build it by infiltrating the NSW Liberal Party in the mid 1970s via his presidency of the Liberal Ethnic Council, membership in the powerful Liberal Party State Executive (beginning 1977), and his “mentoring” of Opus Dei Catholic convert, David Clarke (also a member of State Executive and MLC 2003-2019). The web was maintained and kept growing as Clarke mentored Alex Hawke (Australian Senator for NSW since 2007) and at least three of ‘supernumerous‘ Perrottet family of Opus Dei[1] devotees who dominated the Young Liberals and State Executive. Dominic celebrated this at his 21st birthday party in 2002 by wearing a Nazi uniform. The spiderweb now seems to be owned by Dominic (currently state Premier) and two of his brothers (political operatives) with the aid of David Tudehope.
A Redback Spider with [her] latest catch in my garden – DrFacetious
The following article is long, but sorting the major threads in the web of influence and control into a coherent picture was a major and surprisingly informative and important task.
First thread: Why would NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet say it was “pleasing to see” a woman sentenced to a minimum of 8 months jail for delaying motorists to warn that humanity faces extinction from the climate emergency.
Climate activist jailed for blocking Sydney Harbour Bridge granted bail – Violet Coco was part of a protest that disrupted morning peak-hour traffic. / By William Ton, 14/12/2022 in Channel 7 News[1a]
Is Perrottet’s feeling of pleasure important?
A very serious question for NSW voters is: What is more important to you and everyone else? That you and a few hundred or even a few thousand people might be inconvenienced for half an hour or so, because a one lane on-ramp to a bridge that you use on your way to work is temporarily blocked?
Or that highly qualified scientists who have studied Earth’s climate system for many years agree that the entire human species (including you and all of your family) face increasing misery from a crescendo of climate disasters. And that this crescendo is leading to the possible extinction of all humans in several decades or so from accelerating global warming?[2]
What do you say to the many thousands of NSW residents who have already been “inconvenienced” as their properties, businesses and lives have already been irrevocably ruined by extreme bushfires, flooding, and drought – almost certainly made worse by global warming that has already occurred over the last few decades?
Contrast Violet Coco’s “offense” with that of the filming of a scene from the upcoming Fall Guy “action film”. This closed the entire Harbor Bridge, and the surrounding city roads for 7 hours, from 3 am to 10 am! Trains continued to run, but footpaths and cycle ways were also closed. For the inconvenience this caused, the Federal Government gave the production company a $30 million grant, that was topped up by a $14.5 million grant from the State Government’s “Made in NSW” fund.
No cars or pedestrians were allowed across the bridge during the movie production. Credit: 7NEWS (from the article)
According to Premier Perrottet, this “disruption” and “inconvenience” for “many people” (probably tens of thousands over the 7 hours of closure) was “justified” for the purposes of the film industry distracting us from doing something about a grim future… but the closure of a one-lane on-ramp for around half an hour for the purposes of warning all people of the catastrophic dangers we face from uncontrolled global warming is a heinous crime deserving 15 months in prison.
Caleb Taylor for Daily Mail, Australia, 22/01/2023
‘Sydney Harbour Bridge closed this morning for filming. All lanes closed both directions to cars, bikes, pedestrians. What prison sentence will they get? Oh wait…It’s for money making purposes not for reducing emissions to save the climate,’
Violet Coco’s crime was protesting against the the fossil fuel industry’s continuing rape of our Mother Earth that is literally threatening survival of our families and our species in a global mass extinction event triggered by the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. Even the highly conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that cannot bring itself to discuss “extinction”[3] accepts and advertises the fact that our entire civilization is threatened with global catastrophe from global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions (see Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability)[4].
For this Coco was sentenced to 15 months jail, with a minimum of 8 months. Compare this with the Fall Guy’s $44.5 million reward for totally blocking the main connection between the northern and southern halves of Sydney for 7 hours.[5]
That the extent of Coco’s sentence is so pleasing to Liberal Party Premier, Dominic Perrottet, seems to show that he considers Coco’s protest worse than most criminal offenses except rape and murder. In fact, “the majority of offenders are not sentenced to prison”[6] at all. She is now out on bail[7] until March, when her appeal against the sentence will be heard:
Asked about the jail term …, Perrottet said the sentence was “not excessive” and warned others against taking part in protests that “inconvenience people”. [To Perrottet the crime is protesting, not inconveniencing — as he soon proved.]
“If protesters want to put our way of life at risk, then they should have the book thrown at them and that’s pleasing to see,” Perrottet said. [What about the fossil fuel polluters whose impacts on global warming are putting the life our entire civilization and species at risk of collapse and extinction? Why is he pleased to reward them with project approvals and government grants?]
“We want people to be able to protest but do it in a way that doesn’t inconvenience people right across NSW.” [More than a bit of hyperbole — a one lane on-ramp to the Sydney Harbor bridge was blocked for around half an hour.]
He said the sentencing should serve as a “clear lesson” to people who wanted to protest. [See first para above]
“My view is that those protests literally started to grind our city to a halt,” he said. [Putting this view in context, what about the inconvenience climate catastrophes have already caused people in (e.g., in Lismore), many of them who still have no habitable homes after global warming-related flooding or incineration?]
“The clear message here, and it is a clear lesson – everyone has the right to protest, but do so in a way that doesn’t inconvenience people.” [i.e., that doesn’t inconvenience people in the fossil fuel industry.]
Is it important what these circumstances say about the ‘leader’ and Liberal Party in power in NSW?
Perrottet’s callous expression of pleasure over and support for punishment of people protesting[8] to bring attention to the fact that many people are suffering greatly and even dying as a consequence of government supported greenhouse gas emissions reminds me of the actions of government autocracies like Stalinist/Putinist Russia and Nazi Germany.
I suspect that this is a fundamental character flaw of many privileged, privately educated and ‘born to rule’ males who entered politics in their teens as Young Liberals. These have been well represented on the hard right of the of the Liberal Party in NSW.
Hints of fascism
Dominic Perrottet, born in 1982, was President of the NSW Young Liberals in 2003 by the age of 22. He served on the NSW Liberal Party executive between 2008 and his appointment in 2011 to the Legislative Assembly for Castle Hill at 28. Then, he was fast-tracked through two more electorates to be NSW’s youngest Premier ever[8a] in 2001 soon after his 39th birthday.
Choosing to wear a Nazi uniform at his 21st birthday party do[9],[9a],[10],[11], as quoted here from an anonymous source by the Daily Telegraph, would certainly seem to fit the ‘born to rule’ mold.
‘It was the year after we had taken over the Young Liberals,’ [when Clarke protege Alex Hawke was elected president] the source told the Daily Telegraph.
‘We’d taken over a lot of the branches … We were feeling on top of the world….
‘I don’t remember too much – we were young and there was some drinking … so it is a bit of a blur.
‘But I do remember Dom in his Nazi uniform, which he offered to take off that night.’
Sources at the party say another guest was also wearing a similar Nazi uniform.
The party took place in the lower level garage and driveway of Mr Perrottet’s split-level family home in Sydney’s northwestern suburbs.
It was well attended, with sources recalling seeing from 50 to 100 people.
Among the guests were Mr Perrottet’s close-knit group of friends, ex-students from Redfield College in Dural [an Opus Dei boy’s school], where he had attended high school, students from Sydney University where he was studying law, and Warrane College, the Opus Dei residential college attached to the University of NSW.
One guest, an unnamed sitting NSW MP, attended in a Osama bin Laden costume.
No photos have yet been released of Mr Perrottet’s costume, though sources suggest his father walked around with a camera at the event.
A more comprehensive summary of the circumstances surrounding Perrottet’s 21st birthday party is provided in an article by Oscar Grenfell on the World Socialist Web Site[12]. To me the article seems well researched (see below). The Nazi connections with the NSW Liberal Party’s far-right extremists known as the “Uglies” were via the infamous Liberal strongman Lyenko Urbanchich/Ljenko Urbancic;[13]
17/01/2023 – World Socialist Web Site: Australian Labor Party saves right-wing NSW premier after admission he wore Nazi uniform[12]
Perrottet and the “Uglies” faction
In the 1970s, Ljenko Urbancic, a Slovenian migrant, came to prominence in NSW Liberal circles, becoming president of the Liberal Ethnic Council in 1977. Urbancic was an unrepentant Nazi and a war criminal.
As documented in Mark Aarons’ book War Criminals Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945, Urbancic was “a close confidant of President Rupnik,” head of Slovenia’s Nazi-aligned government.
Aarons wrote: “Urbancic earned his title of ‘little Goebbels’ from the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission precisely because he was one of the most proficient and fanatical propagandists in German-occupied Europe.” Urbancic legitimised the Holocaust, as it was underway, with foul anti-Semitic tirades, and was complicit in the mass murder of European Jewry.
After his record was exposed, Urbancic’s colleagues in the NSW Liberals prevented his expulsion. The war criminal had assembled an informal faction, dubbed the Uglies, that would continue, in all but name, for several decades [seemingly up to 2023!].
A 2016 article in the Australian Financial Review [seen in the original] noted: “Despite official moves to expel him from the party, Urbanchich survived and worked hard with David Clarke, a conservative Catholic solicitor, and a Liberal member of the NSW Upper House, to recruit new members to the Uglies faction.”
In 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald [also seen] reported that NSW Liberal “moderates are claiming that right-wing Catholics, including members of the secretive Opus Dei organisation, have helped stack branches, taking control of the Young Liberals from the moderates for the first time in decades.
“A significant number of the 125 male students at Warrane College, affiliated with the University of NSW—where Opus Dei is entrusted with pastoral care—have been signed up to the Randwick-Coogee Young Liberal branch, according to a membership list seen by the Herald.”
The article cited NSW Young Liberal President Alex Hawke who “refused to comment on allegations of branch stacking,” but declared: “We had large membership growth and I’m very proud of that.” Hawke was then a staffer for Clarke and was described in the press as his “protege.”
Among those from Warrane College, who entered the Liberal Party at this time, was none other than Mr Perrottet.
As the Daily Telegraph [also seen] reported last week, in discussing Perrottet’s birthday party: “The guests included Mr Perrottet’s close-knit group of friends, ex-students from Redfield College in Dural, where he had attended high school, Sydney University where he was studying law, and Warrane College, the Opus Dei residential college attached to the University of NSW where he resided.” [see also]
The Telegraph continued: “Guests recalled other predominantly right-wing members of the Young Liberals being in attendance, including federal MP Alex Hawke, who told media on Friday night he had attended events with Mr Perrottet but did not recall being at his 21st.
“The source remembered the mood on the night to be particularly jovial given the faction had just taken control of the organisation from the moderates. ‘It was the year after we had taken over the Young Liberals,’ the source recalled. ‘(Upper House MP) Nat Smith was trying to take over Ryde. Alex Hawke was Young Liberal president. We were feeling on top of the world.’”
Clarke’s son-in-law Kyle Kutasi was president of the University of Sydney Liberal Club for the two years before the position was handed to Perrottet. After he became premier, a 2021 Sydney Morning Herald [also seen] profile of Perrottet noted that one of his first positions within the Liberal Party had been to work “as a staffer for David Clarke.”
In other words, Perrottet’s party not only marked his 21st birthday. It was a celebration of the factional triumph of the Uglies.
Given its origins in Urbancic’s activities, some may see Perrottet’s decision to wear a Nazi uniform in a different light to those presented by explanations of historical ignorance. Was it, they may ask, at the very best, an “ironic” nod to the forces who had set the ambitious young politician’s career in motion?
Following Urbanchich’s death in March 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Urbanchich’s involvement with the Liberal Party.[14]
I will now review these fascist / Opus Dei connections on and through Dominic and the Perrottet family on and through the radical right-wing of the NSW Liberal Party in more detail because they seem to be still alive and functioning up to the present state election.
As a Young Liberal, Dom Perrottet was immersed in Catholic fervor and fascism within the far right of the Liberal Party
Arguably, the fascist undertones in Dom Perrottet’s youthful character (as demonstrated in the scandal of his wearing of the Nazi uniform for his 21’s birthday party) were molded by his strong family, educational and social connections (1) to the right-wing Catholic organization, Opus Dei[15]; and (2) to NSW Liberal MLC, David Clarke[16], his Nazi and Opus Dei influenced mentor, political sponsor and power broker on the extreme right of the NSW Liberal Party.
These influences may have colored Dominic’s desires both to crush protest and his pleasurable response to harshness of Violet Coco’s sentencing. They may also have a more general (and what I would consider to be a malign) influence on his actions today as state Premier looking for reelection; and continued leadership of the NSW Liberal Party.
Paul Grigoire in his recent article, “Jesus the Agitator and the Perrottet Anti-Protest Regime” explores some ideas about what happens when a religion originally reflecting people’s needs and desires becomes enshrined as an autocratic theocracy[17]. These ideas are particularly relevant here, and will be explored again in my conclusion to this essay.
Because Dominic Perrottet was continuously and profoundly surrounded by religio-fascist[17a] influences in his family, at school, through his university days, and even beyond his election to Parliament, these influences need to be explored in more detail in the next sections. Not only have they probably affected Perrottet himself, but also for what is revealed more generally about the diabolical nature of far right-wing factions (Labor Party included!) in the NSW Parliament.
Opus Dei’s influence Dominic’s family and school environments
As far as his family influence is concerned, Dom’s parents, John and Ann, were Opus Dei “supernumeraries”[18]. Dom Perrottet’s father, John, testified in the Opus Dei newsletter of 16/02/2004[19] that he and his wife Anne closely followed St. Josemaría Escrivá’s[20] teachings. St. Escriviá[21], born in Spain 9/01/1902, died in Rome 23/06/1975, canonized in the Vatican by Pope John Paul II on 06/10/2002), founded Opus Dei in 1928. Tony Jones, in a 2006 episode of ABC’s Lateline[22]. explores the nature of Opus Dei and its involvement with Redfield College soon after Dom’s graduation from that environment. ABC’s Four Corners 2023 episode, “Purity”[23], describes how Escriviá’s version of Catholicism still permeates the schools and study centers he founded today, including Redfield College[24].
Dom, his father John, and several if not all of his 6 brothers attended Redfield. Several other NSW politicians are also affiliated with Redfield, including: Liberal MLA Nathaniel Smith – Government Whip[25], MLC Damien Tudehope — Finance Minister[26]; and Labor MLC Greg Donnelly[26]. Beginning at time 36.40m, “Purity” discusses Redfield College’s involvement educating boys[23], including a snippet from a July 2000 ABC Compass program (that I have been unable to source) where Dom’s parents John and Anne clearly say they are supernumerary members of Opus Dei and what this means to them.
Unavoidably, Dom Perrottet’s schooling would have been heavily imbued by Opus Dei’s teachings. Redfield College, where he was one of the top students and school captain, was supervised by Opus Dei “chaplains”. Dom was active in student politics as a Young Liberal while studying commerce and law at the University of Sydney.
While studying at Sydney Uni and working the Young Liberals, he lived in Warrane College[27] at University of NSW (that also strongly influenced his father[19]). Warrane was also established by Opus Dei members[28],[29] where “The ethos of the College was to be closely associated with the principles and values of Catholic doctrine;” as continues today[30] (see also Opus Dei’s current point of view[31] on Warrane). Dom Perrottet in his own words describes (some of) his Warrane experiences{32]. His father, John[19], and at least five of his seven brothers[33], John, Gabriel, Alex, Charles, and Oliver[34], were also residents at Warrane during their university days. Alex, is currently Dean of the College, and was previously an associate dean there[35]. According to his father, at least one of Dominic’s brothers (probably Alex) is an Opus Dei “member” (a celibate “numerary“?[36]).
NSW’s Liberal Party fascist connections to Dominic Perrottet via Lyenko Urbanchich and David Clarke
The Fascist influence (plus yet another another Opus Dei thread in Dom Perrottet’s background) is likely via David Clarke (b. 1947), a rabid anti-communist and beginning in 2002, a Young Liberal promoter of the religious right/’fascist’ “Uglies” faction[37] in the Liberal Party. Clarke’s suspected fascism was probably enhanced by his close association with (and probably mentoring by) the notorious Nazi collaborator/sympathizer Lyenko Urbanchich. From the mid 1960’s through his death in 2006, Urbanchich was a major power broker and branch stacker on the extreme right of the NSW Liberal party[37]. Both Clarke and Urbanchich worked together as members of the State Executive of the Liberal Party.
Guided by or working closely with Urbanchich, Clarke quickly became an accomplished branch stacker for the religious right[38], and was elected to the NSW parliament in 2003, where he remained until 2019.[16] While not a member, David Clarke is a co-operator[39] of the Opus Dei “personal prelature”[40] of the Roman Catholic Church (see also, Clarke’s own description of his involvement with Opus Dei[41],[41a]). Brought up as an Anglican, Clarke was drawn to Opus Dei’s version of Catholicism by his wife, a member of Opus Dei.[42]
A 2007 article by Mike Steketee in the Australian[43] summarizes Urbanchich and Clarke’s creation of the Uglies’ faction and their involvement in shaping the Liberal Party’s far right around the time Perrottet was beginning his close involvement with the Young Liberals:
04/10/2007 – The Australian: Liberal loss may lead party into arid zealotry[43]
An insight into the group that controls the NSW party comes in historian Ian Hancock’s new book The Liberals – the NSW division 1945-2000 (The Federation Press). Informed by access to Liberal Party records as well as ASIO files, it is a story of passionate personalities fighting for the party’s soul against more sober-minded pragmatists. One of the former is David Clarke, now a NSW Legislative Council MP and right-wing leader instrumental in his faction’s recent successes. Little known outside the party, a parliamentary career and public profile always have run a long second to Clarke’s dedication to moulding the Liberals to his own image of a true conservative party .
Hancock writes that in 1970 an ASIO informant saw Clarke and Lyenko Urbanchich, who was to become one of the NSW party’s most controversial members, at a meeting of the Australia-Rhodesia Association addressed by the anti-Semitic Eric Butler of the Australian League of Rights.
Clarke was a vice-president of the association, as well as of the Australia-Chile Society. Clarke’s obsession at the time was with fighting communism and he was prepared to overlook the shortcomings of white minority governments in Africa, as well as what became the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, in pursuit of his cause.
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Urbanchich was the first president of the Liberal Ethnic Council in 1978 and Clarke became one of its executive members. The following year, the party conducted an inquiry into allegations against Urbanchich and found that articles he had written as a Slovene nationalist in the 1940s contained “virulently anti-Semitic propaganda”. The party’s state executive recommended his expulsion but the vote at state council fell [just] short of the 60 per cent majority required.
During the controversy, Clarke proposed a public rally in support of Urbanchich, which he predicted would be attended by between 5000 and 7000 people, including 3500 Croatians. Hancock observes: “This perhaps was the first occasion in the party’s history where an office bearer thought it appropriate to utilise ethnic warriors for a political battle.”
…
The point of this history is that it captures Clarke as an ideologue whose zeal tends to lead him towards extreme positions. With the communist dragon slain, he and his followers have turned their attention to a moral crusade. One of [Clarke’s] disciples is Alex Hawke, whose election as Young Liberal president in NSW in 2002 [-2005, succeeded by Dominic Perrottet in 2006, who then served on the Liberal Party State Executive from 2008 to 2011] ended two decades of control by the moderates. [Hawke] went on to Clarke’s staff before toppling sitting federal Liberal MP Alan Cadman to gain preselection for the safe Sydney seat of Mitchell for the coming election….
Besides the above excerpt from the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald from 2005 provides more early detail on Clarke’s relationship with Urbanchich:
Whatever the truth about David John Clarke, … the upper house MP is not only the leader of the most powerful factional force inside the NSW Liberal Party but … this role is the culmination of a deliberate, unswerving political and recruitment strategy which began four decades ago – and has now come to a triumphant fruition.
“The far right have never had such dominance. They control more than 70 per cent of the executive, the Women’s Council, the Young Liberals and now, they – and David Clarke – control the leader,” says a senior Liberal Party official.
To really get a sense of who Clarke is – and what shaped his political beliefs – it is necessary to wind back to the mid-1960s. Clarke, then a conservative and politically active law student, joined a group called the Fifty Club, whose main aim was to provide a forum for anti-communist campaigners.
The club was headed by Ljenko Urbancic, who had migrated to Australia in 1950 and became active around the Liberals’ migrant advisory council, then a driving force in the recruitment of anti-communists, particularly from central and eastern Europe. Many had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, according to the historian Mark Aarons.
Urbancic, who was later exposed as a former Nazi propagandist, was a charismatic figure and, with a handful of others, worked meticulously to create an active, far-right bloc within the Liberal Party. The first evidence of their activities emerged in 1966 when they launched a vicious campaign against the Sydney lawyer Ted St John, a candidate in the Warringah by-election. He was pilloried by the faction as a “white traitor”, his “crime” the support of black political prisoners under apartheid in South Africa.
Clarke was then also an office bearer of the Australia Rhodesia Association, a role he would retain until the late 1970s. The faction had also launched its first major foray to seize strong representation on the party’s 800-strong state council, using the recruitment strategies born in the ’50s of targeting recently arrived migrants, particularly those fleeing communist regimes, to stack branches and increase its control.
By this time, the old migrant advisory council had evolved into an autonomous party division, known as the Liberal Ethnic Council, becoming the body which provided Urbancic, Clarke and others with a formal vehicle to harness Sydney’s migrant communities.
Early relations between Urbanchich and Clarke are further discussed in Saleam’s University of Sydney PhD thesis covering the years 1975-1995[45] [search independently within the document for “Urbanchich” or “Clarke”]. Urbanchich’s direct influences on the NSW Liberal Party prior to 2000 are detailed in debates recorded in NSW and Federal Hansards. Urbanchich’s Nazi connections are considered in most detail in the Australian Senate Hansard Adjournment Debates of 04/09/1980[46] [search in the document for “Urbanchich”]. Some of this history also involving Clarke is discussed in the NSW Legislative Council Hansard (24/09/1997) by the Hon. P. T. PRIMROSE in his contribution to the Governors Speech: Address in Reply[47] [search in the document for “Urbanchich” or “Clarke”].
March 2003 to March 2019:[16] David Clarke the Political Manipulator: Member of NSW Legislative Council
Reports of Dominic Perrottet’s early formal relationships with David Clarke are possibly confused by the fact that his brother, Charles Perrottet, was Clarke’s Chief of Staff at least up to early November 2009, and was heavily involved in Young Liberal political skullduggery.[48] As the following history will show, Clarke’s association with at least two more of Dominic’s brothers and other religious extremists on the far-right of the state (and the federal Liberal Party in NSW), including Dominic, was close and strong up to and probably including the lead up to the 2019 state election.
Other than the Perrottets, several other players on the far right of the NSW Liberals have also been closely associated or worked with Clarke.
Kyle Kutasi (Clarke’s son-in-law) heavily involved in Young Liberal branch stacking exercises and other dubious acts. His roles will be discussed below
Damien Tudehope (NSW MLC, until last week Finance Minister, and father of) Thomas Tudehope (son) were others who will also be discussed below closely involved with Clarke.
Federal MP, Alex Hawke[49] (raised Anglican, now Hillsong Pentecostalist) was closely associated with Clarke into Clarke’s first term in the Legislative Council. Probably with Clarke’s help, Hawke was President of the NSW Young Liberals from 2002 to 2005[49a], Federal President in 2005 and 2006[50], and elected to the Australian Parliament for Mitchel, NSW in 2007 to the present. (Dominic Perrottet was only 22 years old when he replaced Hawke as NSW Young Liberals President in 2006[49a]). Hawke also served on Clarke’s staff and helped with controversial mass recruitments (i.e., branch stacking) in north-west Sydney before the previous state elections[51].
From here on in this essay I will use media clippings to tell the story in their words, not mine.
An ABC Stateline program exposed some of Hawke’s activities, apparently for Clarke.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: … The apparent suicide attempt of John Brogden on Tuesday night – the day after his resignation as leader of the Opposition and State Parliamentary Liberal Party – has raised serious questions about the use of dirt files – or adverse information reflecting on character – in John Brogden’s political destruction and personal despair. … David Penberthy, editor of the ‘Daily Telegraph’, under attack this week, has said that his paper’s stories about Mr Brogden’s behaviour, quote: “Wouldn’t be appearing, if there weren’t people inside the Liberal Party who were trying to get them out,” unquote. Who were these people inside the Liberal Party? Journalists protect their sources, so we’ll probably never know for sure. Just who’s behind the political destruction of John Brogden and the extent to which journalists have allowed themselves to be used in that process – they’re the main issues to emerge from this dramatic week. And tonight a serving Liberal Party MP, Patricia Forsythe, MLC, says extremists and zealots of the religious right are taking over the party.
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QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Faced with damning headlines arising from his public admission of inappropriate behaviour and a racist remark at a social function on July 29, on Monday at 11am opposition and Liberal leader John Brogden resigned.
JOHN BROGDEN: The majority of my colleagues have urged me to stay and their loyalty this morning has been absolutely outstanding. That’s exactly why I am resigning. Their loyalty to me must be returned by my loyalty to the Liberal Party.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: It was a humiliating end to the 36-year-old’s leadership. But through his oft-repeated and abject apologies about his behaviour, which had occurred one month before, Mr John Brogden’s suspicions about Liberal Party back room machinations emerged in this context.
REPORTER: Are you prepared to say now that there was no-one in the Liberal Party working against you on this story?
JOHN BROGDEN: I think that’s pretty clear that that was the case.
REPORTER: That no-one in the Liberal Party…
JOHN BROGDEN: No, that they were.
REPORTER: That they were spreading?
JOHN BROGDEN: I think that’s pretty clear. One of them has been named in today’s media – the Federal President of the Young Liberal Movement, Alex Hawke – has been named as pushing it. He needs to take a long hard look at himself.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: In a statement that day, Alexander Hawke, Federal President of the Young Liberal Movement of Australia, issued a blanket denial of any involvement the media reports that led to the exposure of John Brogden’s behaviour.
STATEMENT BY ALEXANDER HAWKE, 29 AUGUST 2005: The allegations that I in any way pushed this or assisted this affair are false. I have not spoken to a single journalist, on or off the record about this matter.”
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Alex Hawke works for Liberal Party Upper House member David Clarke. Former State, now Federal Liberal Bruce Baird has confirmed now-widespread reporting that Mr Clarke and Mr Hawke have been organising for an emerging right faction within the parliamentary and organisational wings of the State Liberal Party. In May, the faction won a narrow majority on the party’s 20-member state executive. Events this week have confirmed that the power of the moderate parliamentary faction known as “The Group” has now been eclipsed. Both Mr Hawke and Mr Clarke have declined Stateline’s request for interviews. Like Mr Hawke, Mr Clarke has denied any involvement in the exposure of Mr Brogden’s behaviour. David Clarke entered the Upper House on the Liberal ticket at the 2003 State election. In his maiden speech he declared himself to be a strong Christian, a conservative, a constitutional monarchist, opposed to institutionalising homosexual concepts, such as same-sex marriage, and unchangeable opposition to the culture of abortion and human embryo stem cell research and compulsory student unionism. David Clarke, 58, a devotee of the Catholic Church’s Opus Dei order has been a life-long member of the Liberal Party. It’s not the first time he’s been involved in controversy. In the late 1970s, he was on the Liberal’s ethnic council and was pictured in a 1989 book which covered the political activism of Lyenko Urbanchich and his organisational work to develop an extreme right-wing network in Australia.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: When you say extremists and zealots, are you prepared to name the extremists and zealots?
PATRICIA FORSYTHE: Look, I’m prepared to say that within the parliamentary party I am very fearful of the power of David Clarke.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: Why?
PATRICIA FORSYTHE: Because he has around him a significant group of people who are absolutely fixated on their agenda, and a very narrow agenda. When I talk of extremism and I talk of zealots, I’m talking about a group of people who in my view seem to lack a focus on normal human decency of tolerance, and the sort of compassion that most of us see is at the heart of the liberalism. It’s the basis upon which we operate, as individuals standing up for the rights of individuals – that’s not what these people are about. They’re trying to shift the agenda of the Liberal Party. I’ve been in the Liberal Party all my adult life. I believe my policies are grounded in good liberal principles. And I don’t see that in many of these people.
QUENTIN DEMPSTER: It’s a hard right agenda. It usually goes to social issues like abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia, homosexuality, things like that. It’s the religious right. Is that what you’re talking about?
PATRICIA FORSYTHE: Yes, at the heart of it is a religious right, but it seems to be an extreme religious right, because people are invoking religion and yet my understanding of religion is also one of tolerance and compassion. What is lacking in this agenda is any sense of tolerance and compassion. You are either with them on all of those policies or they want to take you out. …
2006: In the run-up to 2006, Clarke’s agents are working to take over branches to control the Liberal Party
Janine Cohen’s 2006 report for ABC Four Corners explores how genuinely democratic branches were infiltrated and turned into puppets of the religofaschistic extreme right of the Liberal Party, beginning with the Petersham-Lewisham branch in the western suburbs of Sydney that had been nurtured by the Mihic family for more than 50 years[52]:
JANINE COHEN: Betty Mihic and her family ran the Petersham-Lewisham branch in the western suburbs of Sydney for more than 50 years. In 2004 the Prime Minister presented the 78 year old and her sister Anne with a meritorious award for their services to the party. How much have you loved your local branch of the Liberal Party?
BETTY MIHIC: Oh, it’s been the main part of my life really, and my sister. We just loved it.
JANINE COHEN: Then one day a young stranger named Kyle Kutasi started attending the Petersham-Lewisham branch meetings. He was asked if he knew any factional players in New South Wales, and he said he didn’t. On the day of the 2005 Petersham-Lewisham branch annual general meeting, Betty Mihic had baked cakes and made tea.
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): At 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon about 20 people congregated on the footpath, had a little meeting, marched down the hallway.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: Pretty much after we sat down, Kyle Kutasi, his entourage arrived and it was also Alex Hawke and Kyle’s parents and a few other people that I obviously didn’t know.
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): A Young Liberal stood at the end of a dining room table with his arms folded in an aggressive sort of manner and challenged every step of the way the right of people to vote.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: It just turned icy. You could tell that there was some sort of a confrontation.
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): It was the most distasteful things I’ve ever seen in all my time in politics.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: They just snapped people, they wouldn’t allow people to finish talking. If somebody made a point or tried to say something, they were pretty much talked down.
JANINE COHEN: Kyle Kutasi and his supporters took over all the positions in the branch. Kutasi took over from Bette Mihic as president.
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): When it was all over they grabbed the papers, they marched out the door and you had these little old ladies and gentlemen sitting there with the afternoon tea ready on the side table just absolutely in shock and horrified at what had gone on.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: She was in shock. I do remember another lady was crying. Her husband, Betty’s husband, was sort of slumped over the side of a cupboard.
JANINE COHEN: According to some of those at Betty Mihic’s branch that day similar takeovers are happening all over New South Wales. They say that Kutasi was a sleeper, working on behalf of the party’s right-wing faction, that far from not knowing factional leaders he is close to – and was following a strategy devised – by this man, David Clarke.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: It’s very difficult to protect a branch from someone like Kyle, especially if they slowly muscle in and then bring other friends in with them. How do you protect a branch?
JANINE COHEN: For the last few years an obscure backbencher has been the subject of speculation by New South Wales political observers. Three years ago David Clarke was elected to the State’s Upper House. He’s a moral conservative and a devotee of Opus Dei.
…
MICHAEL OSBORNE, NSW LIBERAL STATE PRESIDENT (1996-1999): Well, my experience with David Clarke and at the time was that he had views which were, in my opinion, intolerant towards religion, views which were not compatible with the modern role of women as the broader community sees it, and views on abortion that are not compatible with the broader community’s views.
JANINE COHEN: Few dispute Clarke’s right to hold hardline opinions within a broad conservative movement. What his opponents are concerned about is his apparently determined campaign to capture the party’s organisation and shift the New South Wales Liberal Party to what was once its right-wing fringe. Clarke’s faction this year gained absolute control of the all-powerful State Executive of the Liberal Party. Clarke says he has no religious agenda for the party. His critics disagree.
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JANINE COHEN: Clarke first surfaced in the ’70s as a member of the right-wing liberal group called by their enemies the ‘Uglies’. The Uglies were led by Lyenko Urbanchich, a migrant who had fled Slovenia after World War II.
IAN HANCOCK, LIBERAL PARTY MEMBER AND ANU HISTORIAN: He stood for the preservation of the things that he thought were essential to Australian democracy, namely the monarchy, the family, old values. I mean, he would be opposed to anything, as all the right wing were, to homosexual law reform, to drug reform, to feminism, to removal of censorship to pornography, the whole range of those things which were identified as Liberal trendyism.
JANINE COHEN: Urbanchich and his supporters started branch stacking in the Liberal Party.
IAN HANCOCK, LIBERAL PARTY MEMBER AND ANU HISTORIAN: I think there is evidence in the Liberal Party files of the Uglies engaging in forming and stacking branches and there is also evidence of senior Liberals within those branches feeling as if they no longer belonged. I think what you do have direct evidence of them engaging in, is intimidation. And there were plenty of examples of that.
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CHRISTOPHER PUPLICK, FORMER LIBERAL SENATOR, NSW: The Uglies were the beginning of an attempt by people to penetrate the Liberal Party, which led to a reaction. Now, they were well organised. They were, in fact, a faction that didn’t have the Liberal Party’s best interests at heart.
RECORDING: Are there Nazis in Australia? Are there Nazis in Australia?
JANINE COHEN: The hatred between the Uglies and The Group intensified in 1979, after an ABC documentary exposed Urbanchich as a Nazi propagandist, who’d written a series of anti-Semitic articles in Slovenia during World War II. Urbanchich claimed the articles had been doctored by the Nazis. His friend and supporter, lawyer David Clarke, gave him legal advice.
JOHN DOWD, NSW LIBERAL LEADER (1981-83): David Clarke was not a high-profile person at that stage. He did not express views. He was not seen up front. He was perceived as a lieutenant who carried out the views of Urbanchich and co in their branch stacking and endeavouring to take control of a large measure of the party.
JANINE COHEN: A move within the Liberal Party’s State Executive to expel Urbanchich failed by a handful of votes to get the 60% majority needed. David Clarke reportedly organised the numbers to stop Urbanchich’s expulsion for writing the articles.
IAN HANCOCK, LIBERAL PARTY MEMBER AND ANU HISTORIAN: But there did seem to me, I must say, looking at the evidence that’s available on the Liberal Party records, that there’s a fair case for saying that he wrote a series of anti-Semitic – quite ferociously anti-Semitic – articles around 1944.
JANINE COHEN: In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Lyenko Urbanchich and David Clarke’s power base waned. The Group, known today as the moderates, controlled the Liberal Party in New South Wales for many years. They dominated the State Executive and ran the party, controlling many preselections.
IAN HANCOCK, LIBERAL PARTY MEMBER AND ANU HISTORIAN: They played a zero sum game of politics. It didn’t allow for broad church didn’t allow for any right-winger to go on the ticket, despite Nick Greiner’s pleas that they should. I would say that one of the problems The Group has got since then came from that moment when they behaved exclusively, instead of inclusively.
JANINE COHEN: Then in 2003, David Clarke launched his public political career, winning a seat in the New South Wales Upper House. But Clarke had already shown a keen interest in the party membership most crucial to the future – its young people.
JOHN HYDE PAGE, FORMER YOUNG LIBERAL: In about the year 2000, we started seeing David Clarke coming along to Young Liberal meetings, just sort of maintaining this baleful silence somewhere in the background. But as the power of the right wing within the organisation grew, and their numbers grew, obviously his involvement in the decisions of the organisation became much more prominent.
MICHAEL OSBORNE, NSW LIBERAL STATE PRESIDENT (1996-1999): If the group controlled by David Clarke are promoting people within the Liberal Party, within the Young Liberals, it’s almost inevitable that they will seek to promote the same views that Clarke and his colleagues espouse.
JANINE COHEN: In 2003, one of Clarke’s proteges and a personal staffer, Alex Hawke, won for the second consecutive year the presidency of the New South Wales Young Liberals. Traditionally progressive, NSW Young Liberals under Hawke did a backflip on social policy. Clarke’s critics say it’s the strongest evidence yet of his views starting to effect policy agenda.
JOHN HYDE PAGE, FORMER YOUNG LIBERAL: Everything about it’s changed, the whole outlook of the organisation. A few years ago, an organisation that was pro-republic, pro-gay rights, sort of very sympathetic to the concerns of minorities and women, now an organisation that’s rabidly conservative.
…
JANINE COHEN: Young Liberals are used by both the right faction and the moderates as the foot soldiers in factional warfare in which control goes to the faction which has the most branches. John Hyde Page used to stack branches in the wealthy harbourside suburbs of Sydney. He says he did it for the moderate faction, which responded to the right with its own power play. He’s written a book about his experiences, soon to be released. What is branch stacking? …
[JOHN HYDE PAGE gives a detailed explanation of what branch stacking is, how it works, and its results from his own extensive personal experience doing it for the moderate “Group” and from his observations of it being done by the religiofascists, and especially Kyle Kutasi, on the extreme right.]
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JANINE COHEN: Last year, three people were suspended by the Liberal Party for paying for the renewal of other people’s memberships. The most extreme of those cases involved Kyle Kutasi, the man who turned up at Betty Mihic’s branch. In breach of party rules, he renewed multiple memberships using one credit card. It’s unclear whose credit card he was using.
JOHN HYDE PAGE, FORMER YOUNG LIBERAL: He was suspended from the Liberal Party for membership rorts which were so profound and blatant that even the right wing had to support an expulsion motion to get him out of the party for at least a year.
JANINE COHEN: Kyle Kutasi is reportedly engaged to David Clarke’s daughter, Anne Marie, and has been a major branch stacker for the right wing. Four Corners has statement and statutory declarations from people who have complained that Kutasi has been abusive and intimidating to fellow Liberals. Kutasi claims that Four Corners has been misled by his political rivals. …
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JANINE COHEN: And it was in 2005, after taking over many other branches, that Kyle Kutasi and the right turn their sights on the Petersham-Lewisham branch. Betty Mihic complained in a letter to the party that her branch had been targeted for take-over by David Clarke “As part of the extreme right wing fundamentalist push “to take over the Liberal Party.” She said the tactics used were frightening, intimidating and members were treated aggressively. Betty Mihic said the tactics were similar to those she observed the last time David Clarke and Lyenko Urbanchich attempted to take over the New South Wales Party in the 1970s. The letter was leaked to Four Corners but Betty Mihic refused to discuss it. Betty, in her letter, actually says they have an extreme-right agenda, or religious agenda. Is that your view?
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): I would take that view as well. From my experience, yes.
JANINE COHEN: Ken Henderson knows Betty Mihic well. He was regional Liberal Party president for five years, and Betty Mihic’s branch was under his supervision. He’s a conservative Liberal and a former member of Clarke’s inner circle. Is this happening in other branches across New South Wales?
KEN HENDERSON, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1995-2000): I believe so. I believe it’s becoming quite common now.
…
[After a long discussion of branch stacking in the lead up to 2006, the transcript concludes as follows:]
…
JANINE COHEN: Don’t you think ordinary supporters of the Liberal Party would be shocked about all this? Don’t you think they think that people who belong to the State Council would be voting themselves?
MICHAEL DARBY, LIBERAL PARTY FEDERAL COUNCIL: What planet are you from? People really expect political parties to function like political parties.
DR JOHN HEWSON, FEDERAL LIBERAL LEADER (1990-1994): If it’s a well-founded accusation, there should be an inquiry. And I think the Liberal Party ought to be pretty concerned about any of those claims.
JANINE COHEN: In this year’s State Executive election, the right faction won an even greater majority – an unprecedented 80% of the vote. This means it now has the power to suspend sections of the party’s constitution. How do you think the right gained such a huge majority on the State Executive?
FRAN QUINN, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1997-2002) Through branch stacking.
JANINE COHEN: And blank ballots?
FRAN QUINN, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1997-2002) And blank ballots. Yes.
JANINE COHEN: Did you think it would ever come to this?
FRAN QUINN, NSW LIBERAL STATE EXECUTIVE (1997-2002) No. Not to this extent anyway.
JANINE COHEN: Four Corners spoke to more than 100 Liberals during the making of this program. Some party figures portray the situation as normal political jousting. State leader Peter Debnam and senior party officials declined to be interviewed. The concern for many Liberals is that the NSW party is at risk of no longer being a broad church.
DR JOHN HEWSON, FEDERAL LIBERAL LEADER (1990-1994): It’s the hardline right religious element that you should worry about, in my view, ’cause they have no concept of the broader realities in the electorate.
JANINE COHEN: Furthermore, they fear that branch stacking, vote rigging and factional control of preselections is eroding the integrity of the party. What’s at stake, they say, is democracy within the party.
MICHAEL OSBORNE, NSW LIBERAL STATE PRESIDENT (1996-1999): It requires a coalition to be formed between the parliamentary leadership and the organisational leadership to stop it, to make sure the influx of hundreds of new members into a branch, the obvious targeting of areas is stopped and that the people who are responsible for it are, in one way or another, prevented from doing that – that’s what’s required.
ELLEN LIAUW, LIBERAL PARTY BRANCH MEMBER: I guess I’m afraid for the future of the Liberal Party because we find it very difficult now to get people to turn up on election days. What’s going to happen if we disenfranchise people like Betty? Nobody will be turning up. You might was well stick a ‘how to vote Liberal’ card on the side of a door and leave it at that, and hope for the best.
The above extract leaves a lot out – the whole story of how ‘undemocratic’ the preselection process can be if the only people toeing the religiofascistic hard line can be preselected for election. And in 2023 this kind of denial of democracy is still plaguing this month’s state election….
2009: Young Liberals in action during the Clarke/Hawke split
Some exchanges in the July 21 runup to the Sydney University Liberal Club AGM give some idea of how far right Young Liberals thought about democracy worked to fix elections.
The split in the NSW Liberal Right continues to develop in new and mysterious ways.
Forces aligned with upper house MP David Clarke and a younger brigade associated with Alex Hawke MP continue to fight for dominance. Some see it as an inevitable generational divide taking form, others see it as an epic struggle between small government libertarian types and more socially conservative Christian true believers.
VEXNEWS received an email that touched on some recent events in NSW which gives you an indication of the depth of feeling between the two camps. …
Read the complete discussion…. Search text for “Urbachich”, “Clarke”, “Hawke”, “Perrottet” (Charles / Dominic), Kutas”
July 27 – Young Liberal correspondence gives an “after action review” of the battle for the presidency of the Sydney University Liberal Club.
THE RETURN OF THE UGLIES: NSW Liberal Hard Right MPs invade Sydney Uni Liberal Club and fail
Thinking of the Warrane College set Blog published by Landeryou (Vex news – Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet. Associated with former factional leader David Clarke, Perrottet attended the Opus Dei-run Redfield College — where one of the men behind the “Children’s Future” flyer teaches. Perrottet has also advocated for cuts to pensions to stop the state “acting as a substitute for the family“.)
Read the complete discussion…. Search text for “Opus Dei”, “Clarke”, “Hawke”, “Perrottet” (Charles/Charlie, Dominic/Dom
An overview of the larger and continuing civil war in 2009 between the recently split Clarke and Hawke factions on the far right of Liberal Party is provided by the Sydney Morning Herald.
The war between David Clarke and his one-time protege, Alex Hawke, for political control in north-west Sydney has taken a surreal turn:
… The target was Alex Hawke, a 32-year-old federal backbencher whose footsoldiers are battling for control of Liberal branches in Sydney’s north-west, where Hawke’s seat of Mitchell is centred. Their rivals are the forces of state upper house member David Clarke, a leader of the ultra-conservative Catholic wing of the party and Hawke’s former employer and mentor.
… The YouTube posting [illustrates] this. … It manipulates the 2004 German film Downfall and portrays an enraged and bunkered Hitler ranting at cowed lieutenants. Captions purport to translate the exchange as an attack by Hawke (as Hitler) on his deputies for failing to wipe out the Clarke forces. [Note: The video is no longer available] …
The YouTube posting … manipulates the 2004 German film Downfall and portrays an enraged and bunkered Hitler ranting at cowed lieutenants. Captions purport to translate the exchange as an attack by Hawke (as Hitler) on his deputies for failing to wipe out the Clarke forces. An email chain seen by the Herald seems to link the clip to a junior Turnbull staffer, Thomas Tudehope, and a key Clarke staffer, Charles Perrottet, though both have denied it. The Herald does not suggest involvement or knowledge by Turnbull or Clarke, and Hawke slammed the video as an ”anonymous smear”.”
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A Hawke ally says: ”The problem is that there is a perception in the community that there is an extreme group of Catholic fundamentalists trying to take control of the party.”
…
[Additionally, on September 30, 40-odd Clarke supporters turned up to a Baulkham Hills Young Liberals meeting at Hawke’s electorate office. Hawke ordered staff to call police, saying the new arrivals intended to cause trouble. Abrams, who arrived after the initial confrontation, told supporters Hawke blatantly tried to exclude new members who might have challenged Hawke’s control of the branch. But a Hawke supporter says Clarke forces were trying to secure Clarke ally, Damien Tudehope (father of Turnbull staffer Thomas [Tudehope]), into the state seat of Baulkham Hills.
The Hitler parody video led to the resignations of two operatives from their Liberal Party staff positions: Charles Perrottet (Dominic’s most involved brother working for Clarke) and Thomas Tudehope (Damien Tudehope’s son and online media advisor to Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull). The fallout also appears to have led to the cancellation of a ‘peace treaty meeting’ between the party’s state president, Nick Campbell, Hawke, Clarke, and prominent right-winger, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.[56]
2010: Clarke successfully continues his controlling influence on the religiofascist right wing
In the battle to control the right wing of the Liberal Party, Alex Hawke’s forces failed to take preselection away from David Clarke in the Legislative Council’s North West Province, giving him another 8 years to influence and shape the Liberal Party’s religiofascistic extreme right wing.
THE Liberal Party powerbroker David Clarke – known as the leader of the ”religious right” – survived a challenge for his upper house seat last night led by his former lieutenant Alex Hawke, which will ensure he can serve in the Legislative Council for another eight years.”
Beyond protecting his own incumbency, Clarke worked to extend his ‘influence’ by ensuring that his collaborators were preselected in as many districts as possible. For example, Dominic Perrottet, was preselected in Castle Hill over the wealthy Ashley Pittard, Vice Chairman of the Liberal Party Finance Committee and has donated more than $360,000 to the Liberal Party since 2007,[58] seemingly demonstrating that Perrottet’s allegiance to Clarke’s dogmas was more important than funding election campaigns.
An ABC News report documents some of Clarke’s other successes and failures in his war with Hawke in the run-up to the 2011 election.
… [T]he Liberal Party’s head office [has used] new powers to override the branches – the first time it has ever done so.
“It is only in rare circumstances that State Executive would intervene and overrule the local branch members. We believe in this instance, such action is warranted,” said Liberal State President Natasha Maclaren-Jones.
Factional unrest in the seat of Baulkham Hills led one candidate, Damien Tudehope [a Clarke operative elected to Parliament in 2019], to take action in the New South Wales Supreme Court.
Mr Tudehope tried unsuccessfully to delay the preselection contest over a dispute about the eligibility of some branch members to vote.
In the neighbouring seat of Castle Hill a dirt sheet on the candidate Ashley Pittard was circulated to some journalists. Mr Pittard ultimately lost to Dominic Perrottet.
There were also dummy spits by two losing candidates in the Vaucluse preselection.
It is not surprising there has been fierce competition for seats in the state Liberal Party – with the Coalition apparently on track for victory in March 2011.
It shows high-quality people are willing to stand for the party because they want to be part of a Coalition Government.
Labor on the other hand has struggled to attract high quality candidates – something the ALP strategist Bruce Hawker conceded last week.
“It has been a long time since we have really gone out of our way to find people who can bring really highly skilled and finely tuned skills to the political process in New South Wales,” Mr Hawker told 702 ABC Sydney.
“We haven’t had a QC [Queen’s Counsel] for example drawn into the ranks of the party since the late Jeff Shaw was recruited into the Upper House by Bob Carr in the mid-1990s.”
Yesterday the Liberal Party was able to achieve what Mr Hawker complained the Labor Party has been unable to do.
In the seat of Cronulla the Liberal Party preselected the barrister Mark Speakman SC (Senior Counsel – equivalent to a QC).
While factional fighting over preselections has boiled over in some seats it has not derailed the Liberals, or led to World War Three as some warned.
The disputes did lead to (limited) negative media coverage, but the good news for the Liberal Party is the messy work is now done well ahead of polling day.
Castle Hill is a narrow south-to-north electorate located 25 kilometres north-west of the Sydney city centre, extending from Carlingford north to Castle Hill itself. It is the successor to the electorate of The Hills which was abolished at the redistribution before the 2007 election. The Hills was created at the 1962 election when it was won by Max Ruddock, father of Philip, who held the seat until 1976. Michael Richardson became member at a 1993 by-election after his predecessor Tony Packard was convicted of using surveillance devices on customers at his car yard. After surviving repeated preselection challenges over the years, most recently before the 2007 election by Australian Family Association spokesman Damien Tudehope (who more recently sought preselection in Baulkham Hills), Richardson announced he would not seek another term in mid-2010. [Tudehope was finally elected to the Legislative Assembly for Epping in 2015].
The ensuing preselection developed as yet another turf war between the David Clarke and Alex Hawke forces of the Right. The former favoured Dominic Perrottet, political staffer and factional operative, who was said to be organising for a move against Richardson before his retirement announcement. The Hawke camp’s candidate was Ashley Pittard, fund manager to Frank Lowy. The faction was reportedly deeply concerned at the prospect of having a Clarke man working turf covered by Hawke’s electorate of Mitchell, and sought a deal with the moderates in exchange for backing of their candidate Matthew Kean in Hornsby. Perrottet nonetheless prevailed and Pittard quit the party, which reportedly came as a blow in light of his fundraising record.
Even before a Tudehope managed to be elected to high office, the evidence suggests that this conservative Catholic family were propagating David Clarke’s factional influences behind the scenes in the Liberal governments. Frances Jones’ Catholic Connection blog focusing on the roles Damien Tudehope and his brother, Anthony, played in association with the prosecution of Catholic priest Father Finian Egan, charged with the sexual abuse of four children in two parishes near Sydney during a 15-year period in the 1970s and ’80s.
The NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, is under fire for letting a senior staff member with links to Father Finian Egan block the release of government documents relating to the alleged paedophile priest.
Damien Tudehope, Mr Smith’s chief of staff, refused access to the documents despite once having worked as Father Egan’s solicitor. The priest was arrested in May and charged with multiple sex offences against boys and girls stretching back decades.
Mr Tudehope’s brother Anthony Tudehope, a barrister, attended the police station with the Catholic priest when he was charged.
Mr Smith used to attend Father Egan’s church in Carlingford and thanked him in his inaugural speech to Parliament for his ”Irish wit and pastoral devotion to his flock”. …
Mike Baird appointed PM. In the Cabinet, David Clarke remains Parliamentary Secretary for Justice; Dominic Perrottet, a Clarke protege, is appointed Finance Minister.
As Mike Baird moved into the Premier’s office this week so did a significant influence: Jesus Christ.
Mr Baird is a proud and committed Christian who once considered becoming an Anglican minister. His rise to the top has seen a concentration of powerful religious conviction among the upper echelons of the new government.
…
New finance minister Dominic Perrottet – a former protege of one-time ”religious right” faction leader David Clarke – attended Redfield College in Dural, a school run by the conservative Catholic order Opus Dei.
Mr Clarke … remains parliamentary secretary for justice.
Throw into the mix the deputy Premier and Nationals leader Andrew Stoner – who attends the evangelical C3 church – and the Baird/Stoner government is shaping as the most devout in living memory.
The hard right faction of the NSW Liberal Party has formally dumped long-time leader David Clarke and regrouped in a bid to reinvent itself after hearings of the Independent Commission Against Corruption devastated its parliamentary ranks.
In what is being seen as a major realignment, cabinet ministers Jai Rowell and Matthew Mason-Cox have rejoined the faction they split from two years ago to significantly boost its influence within the party structure.
The pair have emerged as leaders of a newly strengthened hard right faction along with former NSW Liberal deputy director Richard Shields and party state executive member Peter Poulos. Mr Rowell and Energy Minister Anthony Roberts form the new parliamentary leadership, with Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet also influential.
The new grouping claims seven of the 20 members of the party’s state executive.
Hard right Opus Dei ally Damien Tudehope ran against the Liberal party in 1999 as the Australian Family Alliance candidate for the NSW Legislative Council. After that he nominated successively for the safe Liberal seats of Baulkham Hills, Ryde and Epping, but withdrew each time for factional reasons before the preselection stage. However, in the lead-up to the 2015 election, Tudehope was successfully preselected for the ultra-safe seat of Epping after defeating Nathaniel Smith, son of the incumbent right-wing Catholic Greg Smith.
The 61-year-old [Tudehope] smashed his closest rival Nathaniel Smith, son of incumbent Greg Smith, 103 to 27 at the preselection battle held at the Epping Club on Thursday night.
It is understood there was a reluctance to impose a family dynasty on the electorate and that Mr Tudehope was favoured for his experience in politics, having served as Mr Smith Snr’s chief of staff when he was attorney general.
His profession also worked to his advantage, with Mr Smith Snr and his predecessor Andrew Tink both working as lawyers before serving in the safe-as-houses seat, which the Liberals hold on a 27.5 per cent margin.
…
Lawyer Noel McCoy, who was seen as a favourite, pulled out of the contest at the last minute — it is understood he urged voters to back Mr Tudehope when it emerged he had slightly more support.
The following article highlights Damien Tudehope’s powers to influence government in his previous role as Chief of Staff to the then Attorney-General as noted above in 2012:
FORMER attorney-general Greg Smith was advised against changes to the bail laws by then chief-of-staff Damien Tudehope, who looks set to take his old boss’s Epping seat at the state election.
The 61-year-old Mr Tudehope said he opposed the changes to the bail laws enacted by Greg Smith and revealed the two had numerous “vigorous debates” about the issue: “(The law change) didn’t take into account that magistrates would take a very lenient approach
“If I had been in that position I probably would have been more cautious. I would have been careful to consider the victim before going to the legislature.”
Mr Smith’s bail laws removed a presumption against bail for serious offences, replacing it with the legal test of assessing if an offender posed an “unacceptable risk”.
Mr Tudehope is a former lawyer and chief-of-staff to Mr Smith and has revealed ministerial ambitions.
The devout Catholic and father-of-nine said greater attention should be placed on the prison system and he would like to see the Justice Department split, with him taking on a new portfolio as Minister for Corrective Services.
…
Mr Tudehope is a member of the controversial Roman Catholic Opus Dei movement [and at least two of his sons are associated with Opus Dei colleges (Redfield and Warrane)[66],[67],[68]].
According to Crikey, the religiofascists Damien Tudehope and Dominic Perrottet (who was Baird’s Finance Minister) on the Liberal’s hard right probably controlled Mike Baird even though he was elected because he didn’t share their views.
Mike Baird is electorally popular at least in part because he does not share the extreme right-wing views of the radicals in his party. But they own him anyway.
…
Elected in 2015, the current Liberal member for Epping Damien Tudehope once ran against the Liberals as a candidate for the Australian Family Association and served as the spokesperson for the same organisation, funded by B.A. Santamaria (of National Civic Council fame). A staffer to former attorney-general Greg Smith (himself a past president of Right to Life), Tudehope has added petitioning against Safe Schools to his list of morality issues, which include adoption and abortion.
Also against equal marriage is Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet. Associated with former factional leader David Clarke, Perrottet attended the Opus Dei-run Redfield College — where one of the men behind the “Children’s Future” flyer teaches. Perrottet has also advocated for cuts to pensions to stop the state “acting as a substitute for the family“.
…
As the SMH noted in 2014, the Baird/Stoner government was then shaping up as the most devout in the country. Baird seemed to be able to balance the retrograde obsessions of his own party members and maintain his popularity through steering a conservative economic, rather than social, course. After several missteps within his own Coalition — the Nationals’ revolt over greyhounds being the most recent — Baird now presents the same vulnerable position as Malcolm Turnbull to a resurgent right currently riding the hobby horse of equal marriage. Meanwhile, the favours required to pass electricity privatisation from Fred Nile are yet to be called in, in an upper house where no one holds the numbers and two Bills relating to abortion are foreshadowed.
All this comes at a time when fringe religious groups are working to cement their ties with the Liberal Party. Dominic Perrottet remains a spokesman for Marriage Alliance despite that organisation copping a public scolding for using an internal Liberal Party email list. The organisation itself is run by Sophie York, a Liberal Party candidate and councillor of the Catholic Lawyers Guild. …
2018 Perrottet and Tudehope play musical chairs in preselections to keep their hands on the levers of power
When Premier Mike Baird retired from politics in January 2017 and was replaced by Gladys Berejiklian, Perrettet was promoted from the Finance Ministry to Treasurer and Deputy Premier, plus several other ministries. Infighting over safe seats in the run-up to the 2019 election threatened both Perrottet and Tudehope.
Treasurer [and Deputy Premier] Dominic Perrottet has backed down on his bid to unseat Castle Hill MP Ray Williams, in a last-minute deal to settle instability in the New South Wales government.
ABC reports Mr Williams will stay put and Mr Perrottet will instead move to Epping, in an agreement struck just minutes before Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s 6pm deadline. [Note: the ABC link, including 3 related articles gives substantially more detail on how the religofascists fight over the spoils of safe seats in their heartland. [Note the ABC link provides access to four additional articles providing much more detail on how the spoils came to be divvied up.]
The New Daily was only able to confirm a deal was reached and that Mr Williams would not be moving.
Epping MP Damien Tudehope will reportedly move to the upper house, replacing the retiring David Clarke. …
Shortly after the liberals led by Gladys Berejiklian were returned to power in the 2019 NSW State Election the factional warfare resumed between Alex Hawke’s “moderates” and those on the far right now including the Perrottets and Tudehope carrying on with Clarke’s aim force “family values” on the state.
Members of the Liberal Party’s hard-right faction are attempting to erode the support of factional rivals in Sydney by organising religious freedom meetings that double as branch stacking events.
…
The politicians targeted in the stacking exercise include federal MPs Julian Leeser (Berowra) and Alex Hawke (Mitchell), as well as state representative Ray Williams (Castle Hill) [is the targeting of Williams pay-back because he resisted Dominic’s attempt to take over his seat?]
…
NSW Finance Minister Damien Tudehope, a senior member of the party’s hard-right, spoke at at least one of the meetings, as did one of his staffers, who was allegedly critical of Mr Leeser.
Christian Ellis, who had worked for Mr Tudehope since the March state election moved on to new opportunities in July, according to the minister’s office.
…
Text messages obtained by The Herald also suggest Jean Claude Perrottet, the brother of NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet and employee of Mr Tudehope, was also working to sign up members to Liberal branches in the Sydney Hills district. [Following in the footsteps of his elder brothers Dominic and Charles in the previous decade?]
The texts appear to show Jean Claude Perrottet working to sign Liberal members up to branches between February and May, including photographs of the membership sheets. In one exchange he says “we must be discrete [sic]”.
Richard Whitington’s thoughts on the crazyness of the religiofascist infighting on the Liberal Party far right that continued even after Glady’s Berejiklian managed to win a third term in power for the Liberal Party.
Happy snap with one Tudehope in London, while another Tudehope was in Sydney, with others, having a brain snap.
…
[Thomas] Tudehope is an adept practitioner of social media, one of the pioneers of its use in political campaigning. Back when Malcolm Turnbull was Leader of the Opposition (before he was deposed by Tony Abbott), Thomas was Malcolm’s social media manager. He left the role in 2009 amid allegations, denied and never proven, that in supporting Turnbull’s moderate faction of the Liberal Party, he’d engineered a tasteless post against a far-right factional enemy, Alex Hawke, portraying Hawke as Hitler.
On becoming PM in 2015 (after he’d deposed Abbott) Turnbull re-hired Thomas Tudehope as social media manager.
Meantime, Alex Hawke deserted the radical right of the Liberals, did a deal with the moderates, served as an assistant Minister under Turnbull (after Turnbull deposed Abbott as PM), and is now a Minister in the Morrison Government (after Morrison deposed Turnbull; well, OK, Turnbull “deposed” himself).
Hawke is being credited with helping to strategise Morrison’s “feint” manoeuvre – momentarily shifting a few votes to Peter Dutton, just long enough to frighten people into voting, instead, for Morrison, at the next ballot.
Another alleged accomplice in the anti-Hawke post back in 2009 was Charles Perrottet, brother of the NSW Treasurer, Dominic. Charles worked for a time for another arch-conservative Liberal MP, David Clarke. Charles also made one of those “I don’t recall” appearances at the ICAC hearings into corrupt political donations which claimed the careers of then-Premier Barry O’Farrell, and several others.
Charles is not to be confused with Treasurer Perrottet’s other brother, Jean Claude, who in 2017 faced but was found not guilty of rape charges.
Alex Hawke, like Charles Perrottet, had also been a David Clarke staffer.
Clarke has now left the NSW Parliament but his remaining factional allies on the conservative right are playing merry hell over the way Premier Berejiklian has tried to rush through a bill to “decriminalise” abortion in NSW. She’s caved to them and deferred a vote on the issue for another month.
Alex Mitchell, a former Sydney Sun-Herald State Political Editor whose commentary appears every Friday, gives his view of the hard right’s increasing powers to direct Liberal politics in NSW:
Damien Tudehope, ultra-conservative Minister for Finance and Small Business, is the new Leader of the Government in the NSW Upper House. He replaces former Arts Minister Don Harwin who quit in disgrace. The Liberal Party’s right-wing faction is now calling the shots.
When NSW Legislative Council MLC Damien Tudehope was appointed Government Leader of the House in mid-April, his salary shot up to $345,152. The promotion came with a limousine and chauffeur, luxury offices in Parliament House, a personal staff and a full bar and fridge (exclusively for guests).
Premier Gladys Berejiklian approved Tudehope’s grand new job but Parliament House is swirling with rumours that in fact Deputy Liberal Leader, Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, made the call. If so, Premier Berejiklian appears to have ceded control of her Government to the Liberal Party’s right-wing faction and its two leading powerbrokers, Perrottet and Tudehope.
Both are Catholics, close friends, political allies and uncomfortably ambitious. Working closely with the NSW division’s John Howard, Tony Abbott and Alex Hawke, their aim is not to defeat Labor but to defeat Liberal “wets” who are secret “socialists” like Malcolm Turnbull.
Talking about the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party in Canberra, former Prime Minister Turnbull told Leigh Sales this week: “The right-wing operates in the Liberal Party … the way they operate is to basically bully and intimidate people. And what they do … is to create enough mayhem, enough damage, that people in the middle say, ‘It has got to come to an end, how can I stop this terrible horror?’”
Warming to his theme, Turnbull let fly at the “sea of paranoia” in Canberra: “Power for power’s sake is what drives far too many people in politics. I would say most people in politics frankly and a huge number of people in the media. It is just power for power’s sake. It turns them on. It is an aphrodisiac. A drug, whatever you want to call it.
…
The Tudehope-Perrottet alliance on Sydney’s North Shore goes back a long way. In 2010, Tudehope, then a spokesman for the grandly titled Australian Family Association, a rabidly anti-gay and anti-abortion lobby group, failed in a bid to become Liberal candidate for the safe seat of Baulkham Hills. Tudehope, a father of nine children and reputedly a member of the Opus Dei sect, the strong arm of orthodoxy at the Vatican, rose to attention campaigning against PM John Howard’s ban on same-sex marriage in 2004.
He ran for the Lower House seat of Epping and won. He was gifted the seat by former NSW Attorney-General Greg Smith, another reported supporter of Opus Dei, who employed Tudehope as his chief of staff. Tudehope held Epping from 2015 to 2019.He relinquished the seat in a deal with Dominic Perrottet who wanted to shift from marginal Hawkesbury to safe-as-houses Epping. In exchange, Tudehope sought pre-selection on the Liberal ticket for the Upper House and duly became an MLC in March 2019. One month later he walked straight into Berejiklian’s Government as Minister for Finance and Small Business.
…
Tudehope’s mercurial rise in the Parliamentary Liberal Party is nothing short of astonishing. Elected to the Legislative Council one year ago, Tudehope has climbed from backbencher ($169,192 per year), to committee chairman ($190,342), to junior Minister ($309,621), to Government Leader of the Upper House ($345,152). That’s a whopping pay rise of $175,960 or 100%. All in a mere 12 months.
He is now concentrated on pet projects: stopping any reform of euthanasia laws, reversing Parliament’s legislation supporting gay marriage and decriminalising abortion (he opposed both law changes) and recruiting new members to Parliament’s prayer breakfasts.
When Gladys Berejiklian’s unfortunate secret love affair with former NSW MP and allegedly corrupt political operator Daryl McGuire was outed in the ICAC hearings she was left with little choice but to resign from Parliament,[74] Dominic Perrottet rose to the top of the heap as the new Premier and leader of the NSW Labor Party. He now had his hands on all the public reins of power – as well his influences on increasingly entrenched family and co-religious zealots.
Dominic Perrottet speaking after being elected leader of the NSW Liberal Party and PremierCredit:Dominic Lorrimer
… “Until now, all of our Liberal premiers have been infrastructure premiers, building roads, rail, schools and hospitals for communities right across our state, and that will not change with me,” Mr Perrottet said in his first public statement after Tuesday’s leadership ballot. “But I will also be a family Premier, focusing on how we can make life better for working families, living the Liberal values of opportunity, aspiration and hard work.”
…
Mr Perrottet has enjoyed a political rocket ride since being elected to NSW Parliament as the member for Castle Hill in 2011, aged 28 (he has since shifted to the seats of Hawkesbury and then Epping).
He was promoted to the front bench just three years later when he became minister for finance and services in the Baird government. When Gladys Berejiklian became premier in January 2017, he was elected deputy leader of the Liberal Party and took on the Treasury portfolio.
Mr Perrottet, who turned 39 last month, will be the youngest person ever to become Premier, a post established in 1856 while New South Wales was still a British colony.
But it has not all been plain sailing – Mr Perrottet’s political career was almost derailed in 2020 over revelations of financial mismanagement and the underpayment of injured workers by the public insurer icare, which was set up when he was finance minister.
…
Mr Perrottet is popular with business – one lobby group said he had been “a great advocate for the business community” throughout the pandemic and lockdowns – but others are cautious about how his personal religious values could influence broader policy choices as Premier. A devout Catholic, Mr Perrottet voted against removing abortion from the state’s criminal code in 2019.
During his political career, Mr Perrottet has styled himself as a reformer and during his first press conference as Premier he identified John Howard and Paul Keating as leadership role models.
Soon after becoming Treasurer in 2017, Mr Perrottet told the Herald: “You don’t get into politics to stay still. You get into politics to reform.”
…
A leading member of the Liberal party’s right faction, he has been involved in politics since he joined the Young Liberals. He worked as a staffer for David Clarke, then a leader of the Liberal Party’s conservative right.
The last paragraph above may be inaccurate. Dominic was undoubtedly nurtured and mentored by David Clarke, but I have found no other statements that he actually worked directly for Clarke. The author may be confused by the fact that brother Charles Perrottet was an important staffer and acknowledged operative for Clarke for some time.
Two of his brothers have clearly been heavily involved in ‘works’ to shape NSW Liberal politics towards the hard right. Charles Perrottet’s activities have been highlighted in several of the media clips extracted above.
Dominic Perrottet’s youngest brother, Jean Claude, is also beginning to make waves as he comes of age. His history in the press started on a bad note when he was around 20.
… Jean Claude Perrottet, the younger brother of NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, was at the ball as a guest of a college resident, and spent the evening drinking, dancing, and having a political argument with “a leftie”.
A 19-year-old woman got ready with friends, drank champagne, and was spotted running into the crowd and dancing like “crazy” at the end of the night.
Mr Perrottet and the woman met and kissed on the dance floor at the after-party, then moved to a canopy of trees near an area called the Lemon Grove.
What happened next, in the early hours of October 18, 2015, changed everything.
The woman remembered being raped, repeatedly telling Mr Perrottet to stop and get off her. Mr Perrottet remembered some consensual sex acts, before the woman sat up, said she did not want to continue, and they stopped.
In the NSW District Court on Thursday, a jury of seven women and five men took less than two hours to find Mr Perrottet not guilty of three counts of sexual assault.
…
The defence case was a textbook example of the principles of “beyond reasonable doubt” and the burden of proof.
…
Mr Perrottet, who comes from a large family belonging to the conservative Catholic order Opus Dei, later told police there was no way they had sexual intercourse [and where have we heard that before? “It’s against my religion,” he said.
THE morning after Jean Claude Perrottet allegedly raped a woman at a university party he admitted he had been drunken “mess”, a NSW jury has heard.
Perrottet, 20, is on trial at the Downing Centre District Court after pleading not guilty to three counts of sexual intercourse without consent after a University of Sydney end-of-year formal in October 2015.
“OK, so as I remember more of last night I’m really sorry for being a complete mess,” Perrottet said in a message to a friend read out in court today.
“I need to stop getting next level f***ed-up every time I go out,” he said in another message.
“Was I completely embarrassing myself?”
“F*** like I am trying to remember things but the only thing I can remember is having an argument about politics with a leftie,” he said in the series of messages also read out to the court.
The bottom line here, is that this young sprout of what is supposed to be a quite godly family has clearly demonstrated and admitted to a significant lacks of sobriety, self-control, and ethics – saved from what might have been a conviction by a smart lawyer.
However this may be, by 2021 young Jean Claude Perrottet is Secretary of the NSW Young Liberals.[78] He also began to make waves there.
The NSW Treasurer’s younger brother has rebelled against his sibling by co-signing a Young Liberal motion to oppose the state government’s mandatory vaccination policy for hotspot workers.
Jean Claude Perrottet, 24, seconded a motion at the youth wing’s Thursday meeting to oppose “calls for the introduction of mandatory or coerced vaccination”.
It was a rebuke of the position backed by his older brother and state Treasurer Dominic Perrottet to require that tradies from Sydney coronavirus hotspots get vaccinated before returning to work.
A youth wing source said the younger Perrottet, the secretary of the NSW Young Liberals, advocated strongly for the motion, which also included calls to oppose so-called “vaccine passports”.
Last week, a prominent member of the Liberals’ right faction, Tim James, snared the safe New South Wales state seat of Willoughby replacing the former Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian, a leading moderate, in the lower north shore Sydney seat.
…
[I]n NSW, at least on the surface, there appeared to be peace within the warring factions, of which there are three: the moderates, the hard right and the smaller centre right. The hard right is dominated by conservative Catholics with the premier, Dominic Perrottet, its poster boy.
The centre right, controlled by the federal immigration minister, Alex Hawke, is more closely aligned with Pentecostal and Protestant churches and boasts Scott Morrison as its high-profile member.
…
[A] decade in the wilderness a desperate Barry O’Farrell convinced the factions they should declare a detente in the interests of winning government.
The peace was cemented under Berejiklian. Hard-right leaders like Perrottet, who has been a central player in the factions since he was in the Young Liberals, and Damien Tudehope, who commands influence in the north-west of Sydney, prospered, becoming treasurer and finance minister. David Elliott, a leading figure of the centre right, has risen too. So did the leading moderates such as Kean.
At least in cabinet, the factions had checked their weapons at the door.
But there was always the question of who would succeed Berejiklian.
…
[H]as the deal emboldened the right and diminished the moderates?
“It’s been the best infiltration I have seen in my life,” says one disillusioned moderate. “Rather than beat us up, they got us to do what they want.”
How much Perrottet’s rise has strengthened the right is debated within the party – there have so far been no attempts to push a conservative social agenda.
“Perrottet is not offensive to most moderates – he mainly sticks to economic issues and he’s endorsed net zero by 2050,” says a senior moderate.
…
[T]he new rules for preselecting candidates have provided an avenue for increased influence and there are signs right operatives are active.
…
The NSW Liberal party said: “There were three outstanding candidates contesting the preselection, with Tim James selected by members to represent the party at the upcoming election, based on his vision for the community.”
James had a bloc of 11 Young Liberals from the right who were eligible to vote under party rules that allow Young Liberals to attend branches where they live or adjoining branches. They included Thomas Ryan, who is married to Francesca Perrottet , the premier’s sister; Anthony Swales, an electorate staffer for state minister Anthony Roberts; Pierre Okosdinossian, a graduate of Redfield College, the conservative Catholic school attended by Perrottet; and Benedict Kang,
In 2018 Kang wrote in the conservative Spectator: “At the heart of the political process is grassroots action … Something is astir in the air, and the winds of change, of reform, are blowing. This article may very well be prophetic, and I sincerely hope that it is. Join a party, be the conservative voice, change the tide of battle. Believe me, there has never been a better time to be young, restless, and right-wing.”
There is clear evidence elsewhere that conservatives have heeded the call and signed up to branches in anticipation of the Warringah rules.
Branches that had just five or 10 members have seen numbers swell to the 30s in the past two and half years.
Jean Claude Perrottet was “missing” when supposed to appear before a NSW Parliament upper house inquiry run by Greens and Labor on alleged links between NSW Liberal councilors on Hills Shire Council with a developer where senior members of his party had been “paid significant funds in order to arrange to put new councillors on The Hills Shire Council”; and branch stacking, where it was alleged that Jean Claude and former Liberal Party State Executive member, Christian Ellis, approached a Liberal Party member, Frits Mare to get $50,000 to fund a branch stacking operation to unseat Alex Hawke from his federal electorate.
As reported in the articles below, the Parlimentary inquiry initially focused on Hills Shire Council, that involved brother Charles, who mentioned several times above as one of David Clarke’s branch stacking operatives.
“Leave my family out of it…. Leave my family out of it…. I’m serious… No… I’m serious…. Leave my family out of it… I’m here elected to represent the people of NSW, these are unsubstantiated allegations. They are made in an inquiry established by the Labor Party a month out from an election…. I think the public can see exactly right through it.
Contrast this with his words when first elected to Parliament[82] (NSW Legislative Assembly Hansard and Papers Tuesday 31 May 2011): “I would like to particularly single out my brother Charles, who has worked alongside me in politics. We have been a team from the start and will be a team to the finish. … I would also like to thank the following people for their friendship, guidance and advice: … Kyle Kutasi, … Thomas Tudehope, Damien Tudehope, … Phillip Elias…“. All of these have been clearly identified in the excerpts above as operatives nurtured by David Clarke, and he is clearly adopting them here as his own.
And today as I try to finish off my unraveling of the spiders’ web, there is still more on the context of alleged/suggested involvement of Liberal Party members and the two Perrottet brothers in this shady affair:
Is Dominic Perrottet the right stuff to be Premier?
As the election looms, people may be questioning whether they really want the kind potentially absolutistic religiofascist government envisaged by the Urbanchich/Clarke/and Opus Dei nurtured cadres of Young Liberal storm troops and their followers. Dominic Perrottet’s teflon sheen seems to be tarnishing, as various issues of his high-handedness and ethical blindness begin bubbling to the surface at the same time.
In a Sydney Morning Herald story mainly focused on the current factional turbulence around gambling issues, and the fact that David Elliot failed to be preselected for any lower house seat or offered a winnable place on the upper house ticket in the forthcoming election because none of Perrottet’s faction backed it. Also, Elliot, a strong supporter of the gambling industry Perrottet is trying to regulate is also the person who warned Dominic Perrottet of the talk in his hard right faction about the ‘uniform fiasco’ at his 21st birthday party was likely to become public soon.
In the West Pennant Hills garage of the Perrottet family home, the third-oldest child Dominic celebrated his 21st birthday. It was 2003 and the future premier was marking his coming of age, surrounded by family, school and university friends and allies from the Young Liberals, which he would go on to lead two years later.
…
Among those at the party were right-wing warrior, now government whip and Member for Wollondilly Nathaniel Smith as well as federal MP Alex Hawke. But it was the birthday boy’s decision to wear a rented black, imitation Nazi uniform that would be the most memorable aspect of the night.
It would be 20 years before that detail re-emerged, when Perrottet was the most senior politician in NSW. He was also at war with his own faction and locked in battle with one of his senior ministers.
That minister is David Elliott, who is more than happy to be called the government’s resident bomb thrower. Elliott is retiring from Macquarie Street after he could not convince Perrottet’s conservative faction to back his preselection. Even hopes that Elliott could be added to the upper house ticket were dashed, ensuring his long – and colourful– political career will end in March.
Those close to Elliott acknowledged that the “born politician” is not ready to leave politics and is bitterly disappointed that he could not be thrown a lifeline. He often recounted the story of Perrottet begging him to stay in state parliament, and is undoubtedly angry that he was cut adrift.
The NSW government is accused of breaching ICAC rules over ‘repeated, exclusive dealings’ with the Sydney archdiocese over burial grounds.
The newly installed NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is moving quickly to rebadge himself as a man of the centre, but there remains the unexplained — and as yet unresolved — saga over how he, as state treasurer, has handled the demands of the Catholic Church.
The issue is Sydney’s cemeteries and who controls their management. It is also a story of power, influence and how the church fights for its interests.
The sharp end of the story is a claim that Perrottet as treasurer pushed the merits of proposals backed by the Catholic archdiocese of Sydney — despite an assessment by senior bureaucrats from two separate departments that the church’s business case did not measure up.
…
There is a parallel claim that Perottet and others in the government may have run close to breaching ICAC rules on direct dealing — rules which dictate how the government should deal with a prospective supplier of services to avoid corruption.
Yet another fishy thread in the web surrounding Perrottet involves graves… According to Callum Foote in Michael West Media, “key Catholic members of Parliament moved to hand control of the state’s cemeteries to the Catholic Church despite clear warnings from independent and government bodies that the move would see $5bn of excess capital controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese“. This would give the Church control of all NSW cemeteries for 200 years![85]
MWM has been told that initial expert analysis expects the new development would cost the state approximately $500 million, which would have to be spent immediately if the new cemetery space would be ready in time.
As a result, Option 6 would turn what could be a net financial benefit for NSW into a half-billion-dollar liability overnight. Over the next 50-years, Option 6 would hand control of more than $5 billion in excess capital to the Catholic Church.
Investment NSW provided advice on Friday, September 28, that Option 6 did not meet the NSW ICAC’s Direct Dealings Guidelines. The guidelines, instituted in 2018, are for “public sector agencies involved in direct negotiations with external parties to manage corruption risks, but recommends they avoid the practice if possible due to the high level of those risks.”
Then treasurer Dominic Perrottet was warned multiple times by ICAC that his meeting with senior Catholic lobbyists in 2017 also did not meet with the guidelines.
Since 2017, senior Catholic lobbyists have met Coalition ministers dozens of times to try to avoid amalgamation and ensure the church remains involved in the cemeteries sector, having previously tried to lease the whole sector for $1 billion in 2017 after forming a consortium.
When the ministers met on Monday, September 27, they were presented with the original five options developed by the public service along with the rushed-in Option 6.
Out of the lot, only Option 1 was supported by all government agencies and was in accordance with the ICAC Direct Dealing Guidelines.
Cabinet voted that Option 1 and the rushed Option 6 be referred to the Expenditure Review Committee for further consideration.
…
The ERC is now made up of Treasurer Matt Kean as chair, with Premier Perrottet, Finance Minister Tudehope, Nationals Leader Paul Toole and Minister for Customer Service Victor Dominello as members.
All five are avowed Catholics. The Expenditure Review Committee is expected to review Option 1 and Option 6 on November 11.
The similarities between Tudehope’s interference with the cemetery decision and Daryl Maguire’s interference with the $5.5 million shooting club grant are striking.
Then there are issues involved in Perrottet’s approval (as NSW Treasurer) of the gun club grant leading to Berejiklian’s resignation as Premier was illegal:
The $5.5 million grant NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet awarded to a regional NSW gun club was illegal, with the project failing to meet any of the funding requirements under the legislation, investigations reveal.
The grant to the Australian Clay Target Association (ACTA) in Wagga Wagga is at the heart of the scandal that saw Gladys Berejiklian resign as NSW Premier and is the focus of an ongoing probe by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).
The Klaxon previously exclusively revealed it was Perrottet – as NSW Treasurer – who personally approved the highly controversial $5.5m grant, which has been the central focus of the ICAC’s public hearings.
It can now be exclusively revealed that Perrottet approved the grant despite the gun club development failing to meet legal requirements.
Perrottet made the grant, for ACTA to build a new club house and function centre, from the Restart NSW Fund.
That was after earlier plans to have the funding come from the NSW Office of Sport were rejected by that department.
The Restart NSW Fund was created in 2011 to house funds from the NSW Government’s sale of “poles and wires” electricity infrastructure.
It is governed by the Restart NSW Fund Act 2011, which expressly stipulates the types of infrastructure projects that fund money can legally be used for.
Allowable projects include transport and roads infrastructure, health and public services infrastructure, infrastructure in areas “affected by mining operations” and infrastructure “required for the economic competitiveness of the State”.
The Australian Clay Targets Association’s “large clubhouse/ conference facility” development on the outskirts of Wagga Wagga NSW meets none of them.
Perrottet has not denied the $5.5m grant was illegal.
He has pointed The Klaxon to Infrastructure NSW for “recommending” he approve the grant.
Yet the law shows it was entirely Perrottet’s responsibility, as NSW Treasurer, for ensuring legislative requirements were met and that the grant was for a legally allowed purpose.
Berejiklian resigned in part because her secret lover, Daryl McGuire ‘organized’ this grant.
Did Dominic Perrottet resign? No, Dom was too busy trying to do the cemetery deal mentioned above for his Catholic brethren as he was inheriting the Premiership….
And there are still more sticky issues in Perrottet’s messy spiderweb.
In less than a month, the premier has had to issue an impassioned apology for wearing a Nazi uniform to his 21st birthday, and he was name-checked in an ABC Four Corners report on schools linked to the ultraconservative Catholic order Opus Dei. Former students alleged that the schools, including Perrottet’s alma mater Redfield College, where he was captain, attempted to recruit teenagers to Opus Dei. They also claimed its sister girls’ school, Tangara, discouraged students from getting the HPV cervical cancer vaccine. The program made for very uncomfortable viewing.
…
Perrottet had a charmed run in his early political career, as he rose to finance minister and then treasurer, until a political near-death experience gave him an almighty jolt for a young minister who was not lacking in self-belief. Revelations emerged of financial mismanagement and the underpayment of injured workers at the public insurer icare. The insurer was Perrottet’s baby – established when he was finance minister – and the problems plaguing icare made it all the way to his office. Perrottet’s trusted and long-term chief of staff was forced to resign and the minister confided to allies that he thought he would also need to quit.
…
After ricocheting from one crisis to the next as a new premier (Omicron, floods, risky byelections, a jobs-for-the-boys scandal and more floods), Perrottet finally had some clear air at the start of this year and gained momentum to prosecute his case for overhauling poker machines in NSW. That appeared to be at risk of ending as the focus turned to Perrottet and became personal.
And yet, he has weathered the storms. Rather than end him, they have humanised him. Politics is a popularity contest and Perrottet has managed to lift his profile and shake some preconceived views. A Labor strategist worried this week that Perrottet might “do a Lionel Messi” – Argentina’s World Cup hero – and drag his team over the line.
But Perrottet’s government is ageing, his team ill-disciplined. Little may have stuck to the Teflon premier, but the greater test for voters on March 25 may be how much has stuck to the team.
All of the above has not given me the time to explore the Perrottet Government’s record on climate action. On the surface it doesn’t look too bad. But the activities in the spiderweb cast a completely different picture of the Perrottet Liberal Government.
For example: Increased coal mining in NSW has a high potential to add still more greenhouse gas emissions to drive global temperatures higher yet:
Eight coal projects the New South Wales government will consider in 2023 would add at least 1.5bn tonnes to global greenhouse gas emissions if they all proceeded, according to analysis by Lock the Gate.
The anti-mining group said it was the largest proposed expansion of coalmining in the state since the Paris agreement on climate change was signed and showed a need for changes to planning laws to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The analysis considered eight proposed expansions of existing mines that could be assessed and determined in NSW in 2023.
…
Lock the Gate’s NSW coordinator, Nic Clyde, said the Perrottet government’s policy of allowing coal projects to continue was undermining its stated climate goals to cut emissions by 70% by 2035 and to reach net zero by 2050.
“Dangerous climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal has led to devastating extreme weather events all over NSW,” he said.
“[The planning minister] Anthony Roberts should have amended planning laws to put a safe climate before coal and gas mining, but he has failed to do so.
“Due to his failure to act, NSW is now staring down the barrel of the biggest climate bomb from coalmine expansions since the Paris agreement – putting our future at risk.”
The New South Wales government was open to investing in coalmines if companies couldn’t raise adequate capital themselves, the premier, Dominic Perrottet, told a gathering on Sydney’s southern outskirts late last year.
The comments, contained in a recording provided to Guardian Australia, raise questions about how far the government would go to support fossil fuels if re-elected, according to Labor, the Greens and teal independent candidate Jacqui Scruby.
Addressing a question about rising electricity prices at an “afternoon tea meeting” on 3 November at the Engadine Bowling Club, Perrottet said higher bills hurt individuals and small businesses, with “a substantive impact on employment” as increases get passed on.
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“[The government] is working very closely with the private sector in relation to securing the operations of coalmines because what we see is a substantive issue where private capital is not being invested in coal,” Perrottet said. “They don’t have the financial capacity to do it.
“Now we’re going to work very closely with them on that. We’re talking about what is absolutely … needed to secure society, being energy.
“There’s not just a profit obligation, there’s a moral obligation, a social obligation to the states. I’m engaged in those discussions. No doubt it’s a big challenge going ahead, but it’s not just the short term – it’s long-term thinking as well, because this problem is not going away.”
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Scruby, who is running for the seat of Pittwater at next month’s state election, said Perrottet’s consideration of investing in coalmines amounted to “gaslighting the Australian public by saying they’re leading on climate while promising taxpayer funds to the coal industry”.
Crikey has the last word on Perrottet (and by extension) on the religiofascist right wing dominated Liberal Party in power
The NSW premier has managed to shift perceptions of his core beliefs during his rise. On the eve of an election, will this pirouetting help him cling to power?
Dominic Perrottet has done quite a job of reinventing himself since becoming NSW premier 18 months ago, with his wife and seven young children in tow.
Perrottet has been forced to perform several pirouettes in a bid to cling to power at the coming election. The moves have meant jettisoning the closest of old friends and even his own core beliefs.
Crikey has counted the ways in which new Dom has taken shape. It all raises the question: what does he really stand for?
No more Nazi
New Dom was contrite when it was revealed last month that he had kitted himself out as a Nazi at his 21st birthday. (Phew, no photo yet.)
He could cite the ignorance of youth for his lack of judgment back then, but what about his late career adoration of Donald Trump?
Dumping Trump
Old Dom was all over Donald Trump when Trump won power at the end of 2016. Perrottet hailed Trump’s presidential win as a victory for those who have been taken for granted by the elites in the political establishment.
“There is a silent majority, a forgotten people, who feel like the values they hold dear are no longer being represented by the political class,” he posted to social media. “In fact these values and the people who hold them are looked upon with contempt.”
…
Dumping Tudehope
When finance minister Damien Tudehope resigned last week over undeclared shareholdings, Perrottet lost more than just a parliamentary colleague. In politics, ideology and values, Tudehope and Perrottet had been brothers to the end.
…
At the age of 66, Tudehope made way for the younger Perrottet to shift into his seat of Epping in Sydney’s north-west Bible belt. (The seat is the de facto property of conservative CatholIc politicians.) In return, Tudehope took a position in the NSW upper house. The family friendships also crept into public office, with Tudehope’s daughter Monica being employed as Perrottet’s chief of staff.
Conversion on gay conversion
The question of banning gay conversion therapy has been a tough one for Perrottet.
After days of media pressure he came to the party late last week with a promise to introduce legislation (joining several other states) if reelected. But he has already flagged religious exemptions.
“There is no place for harmful practices in our state. Since this issue was raised, people have raised with me examples of food deprivation, electroshock therapy. Well, those practices are wrong, and we will move to outlaw them,” the premier said at a multi-faith forum on Wednesday night, reported by the Nine mastheads.
“At the same time, we will not ban prayer, we will not ban preaching. That is fundamental to freedom of religion in this state and in this country. We can do both. We can ban harmful practices and we can protect freedom of religion in our state.”
… [But, conversion therapy is good as long as Hillsong Church does it!] …
Perrottet has also put distance between himself and the Catholic Church over laws enabling voluntary assisted dying (passed in NSW last year). He further antagonised the church by failing to attend the funeral of Cardinal George Pell.
Perrottet has at least bent to the secular will in important ways. The question for the Liberal Party must surely be: when will it secularise itself?
The messy redback spiderweb of fascist, religious, family and personal connections presented on my crime wall depicted herein, and wrapping up in Hardaker’s concluding comments above, raise my final question: ‘What is driving Dominic Perrottet’s desire to be state Premier and control the Liberal Party?
I found very little evidence that Perrottet is a genuine democrat working to govern in a way that best represents people’s needs and wants in his attitudes towards people with different priorities to his own (e.g., Perrottet’s callous and vindictive comments about Violet Coco and others risking jail to bring people’s attention to the existential dangers of global warming). The choices seem to be between a desire to mold the way people live and act according to the dogmas and doctrines of the Opus Dei version of Catholicism he has been immersed in for more than half of his life, or ultimately, his attraction to the kind fascist power represented by Nazi uniforms and control of a spider’s web of family, collaborators, agents and puppets. Hardaker’s demonstration of Perrottet’s willingness to apply political thuggery and sacrifice his catechistic doctrines to enhance/protect his control nx power points strongly to (a possibly subconscious) desire to work towards gaining Hitlerian/Trumpist/Putinist/Xi-ist fascism (defined as follows from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
Fascism
: a political philosophy, movement, or regime … that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
Voting
If you are intending to vote for major parties on the basis of leaders’ character. Chris Minns, Labor’s opposition leader shows Perrottet’s lack of compassion and support for the civil liberties of those using protest as a wat to bring attention to the dangers of climate change and other threats to society.[92] Consider these quotes from Chris Minns, NSW Labor’s opposition leader[93], also a right-wing Catholic[94]. who seems to be a Perrottet supporter, as sourced from the World Socialist Web Site[12]:
“Almost as soon as Perrottet had concluded his Thursday press conference admission [that he’d worn the Nazi uniform], his nominal opponent in the state election, NSW Labor leader Chris Minns, hailed the premier’s ‘sincere and heartfelt apology’.”
Both Minns and Albanese, together with the media, have accepted Perrottet’s explanation. Despite being the president of the Young Liberals at the University of Sydney in 2003, Perrottet has claimed that he was so historically ignorant as to have no idea whatsoever of the significance of identifying himself with the Nazis. It was all a youthful mistake.
“Minns outlined the bipartisanship on COVID and every other plank of ruling class policy. ‘From my first day as opposition leader, I have not hesitated to back good ideas from the NSW Liberal government,’ Minns wrote. ‘Whether it was dealing with COVID, or the national energy package, when they got it right, I backed them in. That’s the way I practice politics, and it’s the right thing to do’.”
We need to elect governments who focus on real-world issues, such as the realities of global warming, climate change, and the impacts of increasing numbers, extent and ferocity of climate disasters — not those simply looking for political power and perks for their own sakes. This can be best achieved by ensuring that no political power can govern as a majority in its own right (i.e., by replacing the fascists seeking power and their time-serving puppets with community independents (teal and other independents genuinely representing their electorates) and Greens (specifically focused on real-world issues). Parties can still lead, but if we are to have governments that can function in the face of climate catastrophes they fascist tendencies must be subject to veto and their fanciful ideas must be tested in debate with realists.
Those of us in Vote Climate One, looking at your electorates from a basis of accepting the scientific realities of climate and environmental change will do our best to assess which candidates can be trusted to base their voting on realities rather than faith in political and religious dogmas and or pure personal averice.
[4] IPCC Working Group II, (2022), Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. doi:10.1017/9781009325844.
[17a]. I don’t want to confuse what seems to be happening here (religiofascism) with fundamentalism, although the religiofascism may well include fundamentalist beliefs. What I define as religiofascism is fascism combined with a framework of dogma held by faith and faith alone. The dogma may be sourced from any religion or political ‘ism. When dogma is combined with the belief that the dogma should enforced by “centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy”, etc. it becomes religiofascism.
[18] Vigo, S., Bastidas, D,. (10/07/2022) Supernumeraries: In the Bloodstream of Society. Opus Dei / Christian Life. [As a biologist, I cannot help but thinking of the many kinds of parasites that live in human bloodstreams. “The supernumeraries should exemplify in a special way the mission of being salt and leaven that dissolves in the world so that, being the same thing as the dough, without being different from it in any way, they give flavor and consistency to it. Saint Josemaría saw Opus Dei as an ‘intravenous injection in the bloodstream of society.’ Thus, being the very blood of the world, their mission is to imbue social structures with the spirit of the Gospel, making this world a better place, each one from their own small or important position.” i.e. as a blood dwelling parasite that controls the mind to benefit the parasite rather than the person who is infected with it.)
[23] ABC Four Corners. (31/01/2023). Purity: An education in Opus Dei. [The Pared Foundation’s full responses to questions from Four Corners can be read here.Opus Dei Australia provided Four Corners with this statement]
[24] (05/02/2023). About Redfield [see About, Philosophy of Education, The mentoring system; see also Spirituality].
[31] Perrottet, A. (01/07/2021) Warrane College celebrates 50 years. Opus Dei / News [Note that the author is Alex Perrottet, one of Dominic’s brothers who is currently Dean of the College].
Climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, contributing to the Great Deluge, is consigning Australia to escalating climate disasters
Most of Australia’s East Coast from Cape York south to the Victorian border has had over a meter of rain by the end of October — with the rains still continuing. Some of these areas have had more than 2 meters, and a few more than 3 meters! Many rainfall records have been smashed in all of the eastern states: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania; leading to almost constant flooding through the whole area that is continuing today. The latest reports from the BOM tell us the rains will continue into summer.
This is clearly a function of global warming. Physical laws dictate that as air temperatures rise, the air can carry more water vapor before it begins to condense as rain. Higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation of water from soils and standing water – encouraging drought. Seemingly contradictory warmer air can precipitate more water in areas where it is raining. As the water condenses out as rain it also releases its ‘heat of fusion’ — and more heat is available to drive more extreme winds able to carry rain to high elevations before the rain freezes to fall back to Earth in devastating hail storms. Over larger areas there is also more energy available to fuel increasingly powerful cyclones.
Increased water means increased plant growth, increased temperature increases the rate at which soils and vegetation dry out — ensuring ever more catastrophic wildfires.
Ever more floods, fires and tempests cause increasing damage to infrastructure and people’s livelihoods and property until the catastrophes follow one another so closely that there are simply not physical or human resources left to repair the damage from one catastrophe before the next catastrophe causes even more damage. If the warming is not stopped this progression leads inevitably leads to social collapse (as we are already seeing in parts of the world), agricultural collapse (and famines as we are already beginning to see in Africa and the Middle East), ecological collapse (as we are already seeing in marine habitats with coral reef communities, kelp beds, sea grass meadows), and finally, population collapses when the land has literally been swept bare (areas in Africa are already on the edge of the cliff).
With the collapse of society, humans will quickly lose the scientific and engineering capabilities to fight further climate change already dialed into the system, such that there will be little hope of avoiding near-term global mass extinction. Continuing ‘business as usual’ support of the fossil fuel industry more-or-less ensures this grim outcome.
The Climate Council’s report, presented below, presents the facts and explains what they mean here in Australia, and some of the things we can to moderate and mitigate the expected damages. This is a good start, but I would be a silly liar if I said this was all we need to do in order to keep from utterly destroying our future.
Vote Climate One will continue to do whatever we can do to encourage serious government leadership and action to fight climate change. Please do what you can to pressure your representatives to counteract the self-serving special interests who consume our resources and return little or nothing from the super-profits they take overseas.
If we can help get climate savvy governments on the problems that really matter, they may be able to mobilize enough action so we can survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in….
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish
Featured Image: Rainfall and Flooding 2022 – Queensland to Tasmania. Current year data from 1 January to 2 November, sourced from Bureau of Meteorology, 2022. Graphic from Chapter 2, The Great Deluge: Climate Extremes in Action, in the featured article.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Victoria’s use of politically corrupt group voting tickets for Legislative Council elections fosters unethical parties and practices. In Corruption of ‘Above the Line Voting’ for the Victorian Parliament’s upper house I explained how Victoria’s group voting tickets (GVTs) gives political parties the unbridled power to allocate preferences from every single above-the-line vote they received to whatever other parties or individuals they wanted — irrespective of what the voter might have wished. These allocations were often made with or among minor and micro on the basis of back-room ‘preference deals’ – many of them brokered by Glen Druery, the well known “Preference Whisperer”. See also Malcolm McKerras’s Chapter 6: “The Preference Whisperer” from his unpublished book: UNREPRESENTATIVE SWILL – Australia’s Ugly Senate Voting System, introduced here and here. The following excerpt quoting Druery re the 2019 Federal Election, sourced from Kate Legge’s article from the 16 March 2019 issue of The Weekend Australian Magazine, says it all:
“Voters want disruption and that’s what I’ve given them. I’ve put the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the sex worker into parliament. . .I won’t say my cross bench, that wouldn’t be appropriate, but the cross benchers that are there, that I had a hand in putting them there, all of them except for Nick Xenophon, in one way or another they had my fingerprints.”
Druery did it for money and power. And he has found many takers wanting to be elected under their micro party logos willing to pay him for advice ….. and much more on getting elected.
Monday’s article in the Guardian by Benita Kolovos describes a beautifully just ‘sting’ by the Animal Justice Party that both gives Mr Druery a very black eye, and demonstrates the fundamental corruptness of Victoria’s election legislation still being supported by the major parties. The sting may also represent a win for pro climate-action in the Victorian Parliament. Please read the article:
Preference whisperer Glenn Druery says the Animal Justice party pulled off the ‘most elaborate sting in minor party history’ ahead of the Victoria state election. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian | from the article
Exclusive: Having successfully attracted the support of Druery’s clients, minor party switched its allegiances at last minute
It is, as victim Glenn Druery puts it, the “most elaborate sting in minor party history”. For months the Animal Justice party was “negotiating” with the so-called preference whisper to gain the support of other parties working with him – only to direct its own preferences to others at the last minute.
But for Ben Schultz, the state election manager for the Animal Justice party and its lead candidate in the southern metropolitan region, undermining Druery’s preference arrangements just minutes before group voting ticket registration closed on Sunday was a case of righting what he described as some “wrongs”.
“The Animal Justice party does not agree with the wheelings and dealings of a preference whisperer and the backroom deals of predominantly older, white males. That time has come to an end,” Schultz said.
“It’s time that we move Victoria to full proportional representation and abolish group voting tickets so that we don’t have people like Glenn Druery setting up people.”
Victoria’s Legislative Council is the only jurisdiction in Australia still using a group voting system that allows parties to allocate voters’ preferences [read this linked article too!] when they choose to vote above the line on the ballot paper.
In Victoria the politically corrupt major parties have no interest in reforming a system that helps them stay in power. In 2018 despite the Greens polling 9.25% of the Upper House first preferences Greens went from 5 seats to 1, losing all 5 seats they won in 2014 and winning only one new one. By contrast, micro parties won 10 seats, where Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party (where Druery was a paid staffer) won 3 seats with 3.75% of first preferences, Shooters, Fishers & Farmers Vic won 1 on 3.02%, Liberal Democrats won 2 on 2.50%, Animal Justice won 1 on 2.47%, and 3 other parties each won 1 seat with between 1.37% and 0.62%.
By arranging their group voting tickets to ensure that their residual preferences were distributed to a micro party ahead of Greens candidates, Druery’s cabal kept any of the incumbent Greens in the Upper House from being reelected, despite the fact that a fair proportional distribution of preferences would have seen them stay in place.
Many parties will discourage voting below the line, because the law grants each party voted [1] above the line the right to distribute that vote’s preferences as they see fit.
The susceptibility of the legal but politically corrupt voting practice to being gamed by backroom preference swaps gives fundamentally sleazy micro parties a real chance to win the fifth seat in one region in turn for helping backroom swap partners win a seat in another region. Almost any ratbag ego tripper with a burning passion who can con 500 people into signing a nomination petition can enter the race. If enough of ratbags make it to the cross bench in Parliament and hold the balance of power between the major parties, the rabble are then in a very strong position to trade their Parliamentary votes with whichever major party forms government for supporting their respective burning passions.
Although this is all quite legal within the current law, it certainly does not ethically represent the voters’ interests. Major parties have to give out promissory notes to ratbags in order to enact legislation. And, of course, the ratbags have to support whatever other legislation the major party may want to enact irrespective of what their electorate might want — and why should the ratbags care about the electorate? Hardly anyone voted for them in the first place. Any allegiance they owe is to the other ratbag parties in the back room and the preference ‘broker’ they paid and who organized the deal(s) that got them elected.
In our ranking of the minor parties, Vote Climate One does not hold any gains against them that the party may have received from preference swapping. In Victoria, to win you have to play the game. However, this underscores and emphasizes why we warn that if you care about your voting, you must vote below the line!
For the latest information on how the various parties will allocate THEIR “preferences” for distributing YOUR vote in their group voting tickets for the present election, see The Bludger article by William Bowe. Short circuit their dodgy deals by voting below the line!
Who are the ratbags
Vote Climate One has looked at the kind of game the major parties have organized. And, given the nature of the game, it is inevitable that whichever major party is in power will work to maintain the benefits it provides to the leading party. It is now time to look at the parties and candidates sucked into playing the game. Some are basically ethical and some aren’t. But all of them have to play the politically corrupt game if they are serious about getting elected (why else would you run for Parliament?).
I would argue that there are only four fully developed political parties with complete platforms in Victoria: two major parties (Labor, Liberals); and two middle sized parties (Greens – 88 Lower House candidates incl. 3 incumbents and 40 Upper House candidates incl. 1 incumbent; and Nationals – 10 Lower House candidates incl. 4 incumbents and 6 Upper House candidates with no incumbents).
And then, thanks to the possibilities group voting tickets give them for being elected, there are 20 minor and micro parties, including some working to become fully developed, a host of ratbags, and a few ‘community independents’ that cobbled some friends so they could be listed as a party for above-the-line, single choice voting.
Given my background in biology, I cannot help but try to group parties with common features to make them easier to discuss [the color of the bullet in the right hand column indicates Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light assessment of each party]:
Group name
Characteristics
Parties
“Don’t tread on me!”
Anarchic libertarians: anti-government, anti regulation, antivaxers, anti-Dan Andrews
“Put the family first”: Hard-line conservative values with tendencies towards theocratic enforcement (e.g., anti abortion, public health mandates/anti science, strong policing, militaristic
Pro development (especially fossil fuels, forestry & environment), remove & prevent public health regulations (support ‘alternative’ medicine’ practices)
The following section summarizes where I think each party (excepting the majors, Labor and Liberal) stands in relation to action on the global climate emergency — the only issue that really matters. These assessments are based on my scientific understanding of the crisis, assessment of the parties’ policies and the parliamentary performances of any elected representatives on climate and environmental issues. Finally, the views expressed here are mine, and do not necessary represent those of other Vote Climate One members.
Comments on all the parties
Green Light
Animal Justice Party: Going along with care and respect for the animals we share a planet with, Animal Justice has a strong policy of care, respect, and protection of our common environment. They also have the best voting record next to the Greens. This is backed up with a very strong policy on the climate emergency.
Victorian Greens. The Greens have strong, considered, and progressive policies on almost everything founded on humanistic and science-based deliberations. This is backed up with significant Parliamentary experience. Well qualified to inform and stimulate actions to deal with the climate emergency.
Sustainable Australia Party – Stop Overdevelopment / Corruption: They have initiated legislation in the Upper House to support and empower local government planning policies, which are often negated or overruled by the State Government, or completely disregarded in VCAT and legislation to insert environmental and native species protection into the planning scheme. Further, they have proposed legislation to force responsible authorities who issue permits for developments, large and small, to take into account mitigation and adaptation to climate change. All of these environmental issues have been resisted so far by the major parties. Finally, they have a strong progressive platform with a practical focus on science, technology, government operations including climate.
Victorian Socialists. The most urgent item on their policy agenda is to recognize the magnitude of the climate emergency and to respond to it in ways that are as fair as possible to those who are directly affected. Overall broad, humanistic, and well thought out policies on climate and many other areas.
Orange Light
Reason Australia. Focus on humanism and feminism. “Reason commits to backing any policy, from any government, of any political persuasion that will improve the health and wellbeing of women in Australia”. Strong policy on the climate emergency but state explicitly that will horse-trade anything for what they really want.
Red Light
Angry Victorians. Spinoff of Australian Values. Ego trip for Chris Burson? Victorians “focused on rebuilding the economic and social foundations of our State responsibly, with strong priorities on Mental Health, Small and Family Businesses and our Veteran Community”. Australian Values has reasonable climate & energy policies, but individual candidates seem to have their own independent agendas – especially in Victoria. Not to be trusted on climate.
Companions and Pets Party. Could equally be placed in the ‘Follow Mammon’ category. I can’t prove it, but it looks like CPP was formed by commercial interests specifically to counter the Animal Justice Party. Mirage News makes this very clear. Not to be trusted on climate.
Democratic Labor Party. Supports “traditional family values”. See policies: “Energy Affordability” – strongly pro fossil fuel generation and denigrates renewable energy; “Restoring Agriculture” – remove all government controls on land use and farming. Strongly anti controlling anything relating to human ‘freedom’, but for the strong enforcement of biblical sexuality well to the right of the Coalition parties. Would probably fight to stop action on the climate emergency.
Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party. Derryn Hinch’s policies to harden policing, courts, imprisonment, and tracking for sexual crimes and family violence. Anti-public health regulations relating to Covid. Not to be trusted on climate.
Family First. Fighting “against the radical anti-family attitudes and policies of modern politics”. Policy supports “family, life and faith” from “radical political correctness”: “Economic freedom for families” strongly and specifically promotes the fossil fuel industry. “Education” – “Centre the curriculum around the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Restore the primacy of Western Civilisation and the Australian achievement”. No mention anywhere of environmental concerns or issues. To Hell with climate science and climate action??
Freedom Party. The movement: “Freedom Party of Victoria is the result of three years of dedication towards building a credible and reliable alternative for Victorians who have suffered enormously under the watch of an incompetent and corrupt government that needs to be changed.” Policy: Energy – deregulate and promote fossil fuel industry; Pandemic Management – repeal all regulations; Timber Industry – protect timber production not the forests; Fire Arms – “gun ownership is a right not a privilege”, “hunting is a divine right” No mention anywhere of environmental concerns or issues. To Hell with climate science and climate action??
Health Australia Party (HAP). I’ve done a lot of research on this party, because they appear to have a good progressive health policy, but they gave us a slightly ambiguous response to our Climate Lens question as to whether they would “support a national declaration of an ecological and climate emergency.” The assessment committee took this to represent a somewhat ‘libertarian’ response, so I investigated further to reveal a real can of worms. Much more concerning is that HAP has many features of a personality cult around its leader, Isaac Golden: National Secretary, Victorian President of the party, and First Candidate for the Western Metropolitan Region. [Isaac’s daughter Leiah Golden is the second candidate for this Region]. Questions to HAP candidates in other regions and in the districts, seem to end up being answered by Isaac. According to several of his autobiographical profiles, after “an early career in finance and financial accounting, Isaac changed career paths to natural medicine and has been a practitioner of “Hannemannian homeopathy” since 1984, and teaching it since 1988. The only educational qualification he lists in his Linked-in profile is his “PhD” on “homeopathic immunizations” from 2000-2004 at Swinburne University. To be completely clear, homeopathy has been proven scientifically many times over to be fake or fraudulent medicine. The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, in its article in its 2006 article, A Brief History of Homeopathy, states: “If there was ever a medical system which cried out for a careful scientific trial it is homeopathy. One of the early trials, carried out in 1835, is astonishing because it was very close to a double-blind, randomized controlled trial, undertaken with great care long before the mid-twentieth century when most of us believed that such randomized trials were first devised and carried out. It showed, incidentally, that homeopathy was ineffective.” At best, homeopathic medicine is a placebo. Anyone practicing it is either a gullible fool or a total fraud. Isaac Golden has been in this kind of business for a long time and has exploited many different spin-offs (e.g., explore what he is claiming on his Homstudy and other web sites: Isaac Golden Education, Natural Immunization Research, Dr Isaac Golden – World Authority on Homeopathic Vaccination). I do not think Isaac Golden is a fool. He established the Health Australia Party in 2015 as a vehicle to help deny the science that shows homeopathy to be more than a placebo. See his paper, “A Political Response to Attacks on Homeopathy in Australia” that unequivocally describes his aims for the party. Beyond Isaac Golden’s practice and promotion of fake medicine, there are a variety of published allegations that Isaac Golden is not a person of good character that that he has not refuted in court. The most telling allegations are in Chris Johnston’s 21/12/1019 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, “Cult member, homeopath, Senate candidate: The bizarre past of Isaac Golden“. Johnston alleged that Golden was a “key member of of a bizarre quasi-religious cult whose leader [Ian Lowe, now deceased] was jailed for sex crimes against the children of cult members”…. “Corporate records show Lowe was a business partner of Dr Golden’s in a Victorian-based natural medicine business called Aurum at the time the child rapes were occurring”. The article provides a lot of additional detail on Lowe and the cult. Most of HAP’s other candidates I have checked are associated with various alternative medical practices or show some direct association with Golden. The fundamentally narcissistic nature of [Isaac Golden’s] Health Australia Party is also evident in his Official Statement to Party Members of 29/09/2022. The bottom line is that although Health Australia Party appears to have a good climate policy, nothing they say they will do should be trusted. We recommend that you do not vote forany of their candidates!
Legalise Cannabis Victoria. Other than decriminalizing the sale, possession, and all forms of Cannabis use, the bulk of policy seems to be focused on commercializing all aspects of the plant. The Victorian Party seems to be indifferent to climate issues. We recommend that you do not vote for them
Liberal Democratic Party. Policies to eliminate government restrictions – especially on fossil fuel development and use and land use. End gov’t support for renewable energy. Minimize uses of gov’t emergency powers. “Every candidate for the Liberal Democrats takes a public pledge to never vote for an increase in taxes or a reduction in liberty if elected.” LDP would probably work to inhibit government responses to the climate emergency. Do not vote for them.
National Party of Australia. Where Victoria is concerned in terms of their existing representation and 2022 contests, the Nationals for Victoria are clearly an average sized micro party seeking to maintain their representation of country electorates. They say nothing about climate, but surprisingly are offering households subsidies to take up renewable energy: “Our Power to the People Plan will provide 1 million households, including for at least 100,000 rental properties, with a rebate of up to $1,400 for solar panels and $3,000 for a home battery”. Nevertheless, given their affiliation with the Liberals and history in the Federal Parliament, we consider Nationals to be a dangerous choice if you are concerned to see action on the climate emergency.
New Democrats. This party fits quite well in three different categories. First, [Kaushaliya Vaghela’s] New Democrats has many signs of the “Follow the Leader” personality cult. She is the an incumbent member of the Legislative Council, elected as the third Labor Party MLC in the Western Metropolitan Region, apparently recruited into the party by Adem Somyurek and was caught in the crossfire following on from the IBAC hearings on “red shirts” and branch stacking. She resigned/was expelled from the Labor party, accusing Dan Andrews’ office of persistent bullying, and went on to establish the New Democrats on 28 July as the Party Secretary. Using her high profile in the widespread community of aspirational Indian and South Asian immigrants, she was able to find candidates for the party to run in all Victorian Upper House Regions and most of the Lower House Districts in the Western Metropolitan Region. As founder and Party Secretary she is the designated contact person for all candidates. As a Labor MP, Vaghela established herself as “the” representative for this extensive community throughout Victoria and seems to have done a very good job of this. Now, as an independent member of Parliament she with some justification presents herself as the Indian/South Asian community independent. However, there is little doubt that much of Vaghela’s core policy places the New Democrats firmly in the “Don’t Tread on Me” category of anti-Dan Andrews parties with a strong emphasis on libertarian values. I have found no mention anywhere that New Democrats have any policy relating to the climate emergency. Even if you are a member of Vaghela’s “Indian and south Asian community”, if you are concerned about the future of your family, we suggest that because of their angry libertarianism the New Democrats will be a dangerous option where effective climate is concerned, and that you put them near the last in your below-the-line preferences.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON). The Party is definitely Federal Senator Pauline Hanson’s angry, bigoted and racist personality cult that particularly appeals to the far right fraction of Queensland’s population. Additionally, PHON also provides a trumpet mouthpiece for Federal Senator Malcolm Roberts. I have had several personal exchanges with him over years. Roberts is a ‘retired’ coal mining engineer who is one of the most rabidly antiscientific climate science deniers in the whole Australian Population. PHON’s Climate and energy polices reflect this. Thanks to Roberts, PHON will likely fight climate action tooth and nail. Put them last!
Restore Democracy Sack Dan Andrews Party. Ex Labor Party staffers and whistleblowers totally focused on removing Dan Andrews. “The Restore Democracy Sack Dan Andrews Party intends to do what it says on the tin, and stands for:” No perceptible interest in climate and energy issues, so probably could not be trusted on climate issues. Put them near the bottom of your preferences.
Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party represents and promotes rural libertarians and could just as easily be placed in the “Don’t tread on me” category. Compared to the more measured Federal Policy, The Party’s Victorian policy wants no legal rights for animals, strong limits to councils’ abilities to manage land use and to declare climate emergencies, opposes pandemic related mandates and lockdowns, no limits to land use and forestry, absolutely minimize restrictions to hunting and shooting, promotion of fossil fuel extraction, etc., maximize farmers’ rights to exploit their lands. This Party will clearly try to prevent effective actions against the climate emergency. Put them close to the bottom of your preferences!
Transport Matters Party (TMP). This party fits clearly in my “Follow the Community” category, as its national policies and those expressed by the Party’s founder Rod Barton, a Victorian incumbent MLC, almost exclusively represent the broad community of transport workers. Unlike other red-light parties, TMP is not especially libertarian or anarchic, and it actually has a reasonable favorable climate and environment policy: federal / Barton. Vote Climate One has given TMP a red-light flag, because of Barton’s voting record in the Victorian Parliament. However, he offers an interesting justification for his support of the EV Road Tax that should be considered: “In May 2021, I negotiated with the government regarding the Electric Vehicle (EV) road user charge to ensure that there would be a substantial investment and subsidy package in place to encourage EV uptake in the short term. This became a $100 million package that provided 25,000 subsidies for EV buyers and investment in charging infrastructure. Subsidies do not need to be provided once price parity is reached, which is expected to occur anywhere between 2025 and 2030.“ Nevertheless, in other Parlamentary votes he has sided with measures to protect the fossil fuel industry, suggesting that TMP would not reliably support the kinds of climate action we need to save our species. Considering everything, we advise that TMP candidates should still be preferenced near the bottom of your list, but among the least worse of the red-light candidates.
[Clive Palmer’s] United Australia Party Victoria. Definitely multi-billionaire Clive Palmer’s personality cult. A con job financed to the hilt to support his passions: fossil fuel, anti-science (e.g., vaccination, Covid mandates, climate emergency), and general libertarian anarchy. None of his promises can believed. It is very likely that any one he elects will be obliged to fight climate science and any strong action against climate change. Put this party at or near the bottom of your preference list.
The insidious implications of Victoria’s electoral laws relating to Group Voting Tickets for so called ‘preferential’ voting in the Upper House led to the formation of an unusually large number of parties. We had to spend substantially more effort evaluating parties than we anticipated to understand the legal but highly unethical and secretive preference swapping that gives (and even encourages) microparties to apply the voter’s above-the-line [1] vote to apply THE PARTY’S preferences to elect 4 other candidates in the voter’s region.
Given the large number of micro parties, each of these parties then had the opportunity to endorse their own candidates in many or even all Lower House districts as well. Many of these micro party candidates will have strong anti-climate action biases due to their party affiliations. Also, it is likely some of the independents will be distractors encouraged to nominate by anti-climate major parties to draw votes away from pro-climate parties and independents. And then, there are a large number of genuine “community independents” encouraged to nominate by the success of the “teal” independents in the federal election, where Climate200 supported 23 independents and 10 were elected/reelected. Note that all these independent candidates were nominated by and worked to represent what their local communities wanted from government — Climate200 supported them because they had similar values.
The fact is that there other community independents running that deserve green-light ranking for their climate policies, but are not necessarily easy to identify because they lack Climate200 support.
The above is a long-winded way of saying the Vote Climate One has lacked the resources in time and effort to rigorously survey all independent candidates for their climate action credentials. Some of these may be flagged with our default red-lights in our Voting Guides simply because we not seen evidence to rank them any other way.
If you are an independent candidate and think you deserve better than we have marked you, please contact us immediately with your climate credentials, and we will reassess your ranking
Hopefully, before Election Day itself, we will be able to complete our assessment of all independents. As this assessment work progresses, rankings updated.
Why are we at Vote Climate One going to all this effort to try to help you?
If we don’t stop global warming soon, we’ll have fueled enough positive feedbacks that runaway warming to Earth’s ‘Hothouse Hell’ state will virtually guarantee human extinction.
However, if we can help get climate savvy governments in power soon enough, they may be able to mobilize enough action so we can survive our accidental disruption of Earth’s Climate System so our kids and grandkids inherit a world they can live in….
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
