Politics Archives - Page 13 of 13

Don’t look up — Captain Humbug (a.k.a. Scotty from Marketing) and his puppets and clowns obscure the climate emergency by playing the Djoker card

William P. Hall on January 16, 2022

Whether the media frenzy over the deportation of the world’s no. one tennis star and notorious anti-vaxer happened by good luck or was designed by the Australian COALition Government’s gang of fossil fuel puppets and clowns, it has and will serve for many days as a marvelous distraction to obscure the climate emergency from voters attention. The two-year long Government humbug and media blather about how we faced utterly horrible dangers from Covid has worked very well to divert attention from mobilizing any effective action against the genuinely existential climate emergency. Playing the Djoker Card only makes that more effective.

‘While the decision was almost a certainty, the government’s handling of the circumstances around it was not pretty.’ Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images

It was ugly and embarrassing, and the Djokovic saga only ever had one possible ending

Malcolm Farr – The Guardian – Sat 15 Jan 2022

After inexplicably failing to foresee the problem, Scott Morrison was left with only one solution: play the border security card.
Scott Morrison kept Novak Djokovic waiting nine days for the ultimate and inevitable decision to tear up his visa, no doubt ensuring the Serb suffered further for causing trouble the government struggled to handle.
The Djokovic visa snub was released in time for the main TV news bulletins on Friday and, they had hoped, late enough to limit the tennis champ’s lawyers chances of getting a judge to re-hear his case.
While that hope proved unfounded, the government believes a court could only examine the probity of immigration minister Alex Hawke’s use of his power to withdraw a visa, not whether Djokovic deserved to be punted.
However, the damage to Australian tourism and Australian sport caused by a single, stubborn tennis player and a hesitant federal government could require a formal inquiry to sort out.
The government might further explain how Djokovic obtained a visa in the first place, and Tennis Australia might tell sport fans why it welcomed a player – admittedly the best in the world – without insisting he comply with vaccination requirements, or without closely examining his claim for an exemption.
The long wait for Hawke’s announcement was an indication the government wanted to get the visa matter right, something it might have considered more rigorously several weeks ago when the Djokovic problem poked over the horizon.
Morrison has had to juggle complex factors involving big sport, inflamed diplomatic contacts, and his self-burnished record as being untiringly vigilant on Australian borders. [My emphasis]

Shades of Don’t Look Up! — – See the movie. Ignore the comet. (Part 1), and The phenomenon of ‘Don’t Look Up’ (Part 2)

Again, I ask the question, is this just the COALition’s cack-handed ineptitude or a Scotty crafted distraction to obscure the climate emergency to protect his fossil-fuel patrons?

As an evolutionary biologist, population and molecular biology (i.e., the basis of virology) are major components in my qualification. I am completely confident that at its worst, even with no quarantining and treatment, the Covid pandemic would have killed no more (and probably substantially less) than 5% of humanity, representing only a small blip in human history (comparable to the Spanish Flu 100 years ago). By contrast, global warming genuinely threatens mass extinction of most of Earth’s complex life, including humans. This is a truly existential emergency triggered by the greenhouse gas emissions from burning of hundreds of thousands to millions of years accumulation of fossil carbon that fueled the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago and continues today. Yet the continual emission of government blather and humbug over minor but titillating events and factoids as further amplified by fossil fuel friendly shock jocks consumes so much of the media’s available bandwidth that only the most extreme weather events ever come close to making headlines. There is almost total silence about how these events relate to the bigger picture.

For a hint of the bigger picture of the existentially real emergency we face see:

Last Year’s Overall Climate Was Shaped by Warming-Driven Heat Extremes Around the Globe

The evidence continues to pile up (e.g., “Portents for the future — 2020 wildfires on the Siberian permafrost“, “Australia ties Southern Hemisphere’s all-time heat record of 123°F; epic heat cooks Argentina“( that the greenhouse gas driven warming of the planet is accelerating. But the LNP COALition doesn’t want you to know and think about what it means for the futures of your families.

Take an objective look at the Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison led LNP COALition Governments’ years of denial, lies, fake news, misrepresentations and overall humbug in relation to global warming and the climate emergency it is causing…. Can there be any doubt that the principal interests they are serving are the special ones in the fossil fuel and related industries? The government puppets and clowns have never expressed major concerns relating to the horrific consequences Australian citizens have and are facing as a consequence of the accelerating increases in temperatures and climate extremes. If any concerns have been expressed, none have resulted in substantive actions to control and reduce the damages being caused by the industry’s carbon emissions and other activities. In fact, the puppets work hard impede and prevent action on climate change and to subsidize and protect the industry from citizen-led actions.

Re whether playing the Djoker card was cack-handed or in any way deliberate, it is clear that this saga was played for the longest possible time and the maximum likelihood that disgruntled punters will continue it for a long time yet. Get Up’s marvelous video summarizing Captain Humbug’s very similarly ambiguous cack-handed/deliberate responses to the Covid crisis raise exactly the same questions in my mind. Is he just a moron or is he actually a very crafty marketeer working for clients who are not the mass of the Australian people who voted for the COALition?

However, Australia still is a democratic country where it should be possible to vote the COALition out of power in the upcoming Federal Election. We should be able to replace every last puppet and fellow traveler of the special interests with people who if they are elected are committed to put mobilization and action to resolve the climate emergency as their first priority of business.

Vote Climate One doesn’t tell you how to vote, but our Traffic Light Voting Guide shows who not to vote for and provides practical assistance in ranking all the candidates in each electorate to ensure your preferences don’t flow to the puppets, but rather towards people committed to solving the climate emergency. Also, if you really want to help, we invite you to become a Climate Hero.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Why isn’t the Press tracking the existential crisis overwhelming us?

William P. Hall on January 7, 2022

The climate emergency is an existential crisis for humans. Bill McKibben explains why the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency even though we risk extinction by ignoring it.

We face an existential crisis of our own making. It threatens to exterminate the human species and most other complex life on our only planet. Yet, day after day, after day, …. the Australian daily press will print multiple pages with nothing but news about the ‘Covid crisis’. And this doesn’t include long articles on the travails of a multi-millionaire anti-vaxer tennis star not being allowed to play his usually tantrum punctuated game at the Australian Open.

At it’s worst, even if nothing is done to minimize its effects, Covid would only kill 1 to 5% of the population. The 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic (see Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics) killed about this many people. Similarly, 100 years later the Covid Pandemic would be hardly noticed as a minor ripple in human history. Even the Black Death around 1350 that may have killed 50% of all humans at the time had no particularly detrimental consequences on the success of our species.

Today, the ultra-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts utterly dire consequences for humanity and our biosphere if we don’t solve the climate crisis. If we fail here, there will be no human history at all, not just a minor blip! Yet the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency Surely, this is the crisis that the press should be covering every day.

Bill McKibben 05/01/2022 – Just a little too slow. From The Crucial Years.

Journalism is constructed around finding something new. (I think that’s why they’re called newspapers). Which is a problem when it comes to the climate crisis. In geological terms, we are speeding toward the abyss—we’re pouring carbon into the atmosphere hundreds and thousands of times faster than during the volcanic outpourings that marked the previous great extinction events in earth’s history. But in journalistic terms, it happens just a little too slowly to quite register—climate change today is pretty much the same as climate change yesterday and tomorrow. Over a decade or two it will profoundly change the planet, but a decade is not a unit that really registers for TV, much less Twitter. The climate crisis is at all times the most important thing happening on earth, by far, but there’s rarely a twenty-four-hour period when, by the standards we’re used to, it’s the most important thing happening that particular day. It is inexorable, and inexorability is hard for journalists to capture.
…
And so, even though there’s finally skilled and deep coverage of the issue in some corners of the press (I think over the last five years the Times and the Post have done a better job of covering global warming than any other subject, with one remarkable reporting job after another), its scale—the fact that it threatens everything we know and hold dear—hasn’t sunk in. It requires repetition, constant reiteration of the same small set of facts: the planet is heating rapidly, cheap solar and windpower can slow it down, these are being blocked by vested interest. But repetition and constant reiteration are precisely what reporters and editors don’t like doing, hence the constant search for a “new angle.” I follow, for instance, the Twitter feed of Terry Hughes, the Australian marine scientist who has done more than anyone to chart the ongoing realtime destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. If journalism worked better, that destruction—over the course of a very few years, of the largest living structure on the planet—would be a compelling story. But instead, to his constant and correct exasperation, absurd updates about, say, 3-D printers producing new corals help take the edge off the tragedy. They get attention simply because they’re new; the mass death of an enormous ecosystem is the same story as before.

McKibben nails the issues where the 4th Estate (journalism) is concerned, but says nothing (here) about how the press’s selective inattention helps serve the special interests of the patrons and puppet-masters of the 2nd Estate (our government) over the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, here in Australia (and in many other areas of the world) we are cursed by the fact that many of our governing politicians are more concerned to support the selfish short-term special interests of their multi-billionaire patrons rather than the life-time interests of the people who elect them. By default, the press’s easy distraction by trivia, humbug, fake news, misrepresentation, and misdirection so easily created by the special interests and their government lackeys works to hide the real crisis that threatens our survival.

Stopping human greenhouse gas emissions on its own, will probably not be enough. To initiate actual cooling we will probably also have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely sequester it somewhere that it will not simply return to the atmosphere, and increase Earth’s ability to reflect excess solar energy away from the planet.

One of the few ways I can think of to remedy this situation is to take charge of the electoral process to purge our Parliament of puppets working for special interests and replace them with people we have good reasons to think will understand the real dangers that face us, take the climate emergency seriously as a first priority, and begin the work to mobilize society to begin effective actions to reverse global warming. In every electorate, Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you direct your votes away from the puppets and towards people our research suggests will put climate action first where their parliamentary actions are concerned.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Scotty from Marketing sets the tone of truthfulness for the COALition Government he leads.

William P. Hall on January 5, 2022

Can we believe anything this crew of special interest puppets says on climate change?

The Crikey article presented here documents our Prime Minister’s deeeep respect for truth and honesty in government and shows how the COALition misrepresents reality. Can we afford to allow him or any of his fellow puppets stay in Parliament?

Peter Fray and Eric Beecher in Crikey, May 25, 2021 – “A dossier of lies and falsehoods – How Scott Morrison manipulates the truth”

A Dossier of Lies and Falsehoods identifies a litany of statements, interviews, speeches and comments over the past two years from Morrison that are demonstrably untrue. Some were clearly intended to mislead, and these are marked as “lies”. Other statements were untrue, or turned out to be so, and these are marked as “falsehoods”.
“There are a great many of both,” writes Crikey politics editor Bernard Keane, “and most of them have been uttered while Morrison occupied the highest office in the land.”
The PM “lies openly and frequently, about matters large and small — Australia’s carbon emissions, or an inquiry in relation to a sexual assault within the ministerial wing in Parliament House, or simply whether he spoke to someone who refused to shake his hand”, Keane writes.
“Most of his lies are about himself, or his government, and what it has done, or failed to do; often he has lied about things he himself has said or done, as if he wasn’t present when a woman refused to shake his hand and he turned his back on her, or he didn’t carefully explain to Parliament that the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet had given him no update about his report in relation to Brittany Higgins.”
Why have we made a distinction between “lies” and “falsehoods”? Because we appreciate that sometimes the PM might misspeak or be poorly briefed. We are not inside his head. We don’t always know his motive.
But when he repeats or fails to correct the same untruth, in the face of evidence to the contrary, we can only conclude that someone of his intelligence and high status objectively understands and knows what he is doing is lying.

As I have shown in many posts here and elsewhere there is a vast array of factual evidence that our we face an existential climate emergency from human caused global warming. Now that the warming is started it is further amplified by increased rates of ice melting, permafrost thawing, ocean warming, increasing aridity, increasing wildfires, weakening and wandering jet streams, etc.

If we cannot stop and reverse the warming process soon, the heating will continue to accelerate until our world literally becomes too hot for most living organisms to survive. Whole ecosystems will fail and collapse, including our agricultural ecosystems. If the heat doesn’t kill our species directly (e.g., death by heat stroke), crop failures, famine, social disorder, extreme weather, etc. will.

Given that we probably have not yet passed the point of no return — where nothing humans could do would be enough to stop the runaway warming process — there are many actions we can and should be making to mitigate and avoid the risk of extinction. Many of these would benefit from Government promotion and coordination: e.g., to immediately stop the production of greenhouse gases by stopping the burning of fossil fuels and methane gas producing agricultural practices. However, even the best science tends to understate the risks of inaction. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for our present COALition government to lie, misrepresent, obfuscate, distract, and humbug to hide any uncomfortable facts. And further, to actively work to prevent and delay any emergency actions that might in any way inconvenience their patrons and puppet masters in the from positive actions to control global warming.

To help you with your voting decisions we have reviewed all of the parties (even the microparties) and independent candidates to see who they are likely to pass their preferences to and where they stand on climate. Our conclusions inform our Stoplight Voting Guide. We don’t tell you who we think you should put at No.1 on your ballot, but using the Stop Light Guide, by putting our red-light candidates last you will ensure that your vote doesn’t helps to remove them from or keep them out of Parliament. Green-light candidates are those we think will put addressing the climate emergency at the top of their agenda in Parliament.

In terms of guaranteeing that our children and grand children have a viable future, stopping global warming is the only issue in the upcoming election that really matters. If we fail here, we might as well practice singing hymns as our house burns down around us, because nothing we might do will have any effect on the outcome.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

The Game of Mates… from Crickey

Mister Gec on October 1, 2021

Article By Kishor Napier-Raman First published on Sep 06, 2021

Lorraine Finlay has in the past asserted a number of positions that may place her at odds with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Yesterday the federal government quietly appointed Lorraine Finlay as the next human rights commissioner. She is a Murdoch University legal academic and human trafficking specialist with the Australian mission to ASEAN. Media releases from Attorney-General Michaelia Cash and the Australian Human Rights Commission both praised Finlay’s academic expertise and work in international human rights law. But they neglected to mention hers deep ties to the Liberal Party, as a former upper house candidate in Western Australia and president of the state’s Liberal women’s council. They also overlooked her years spent vocally taking positions that might put her at odds with the AHRC.

A Liberal stack

Finlay’s links to the WA Liberals go back a decade. Until 2018 she was president of the its women’s council, a position she’d held since at least 2011 when she was hosting twilight drinks with a then-shadow minister, Scott Morrison.As head of the council, Finlay worked hard to advance women’s representation in the party — by opposing gender-based quotas. She also helped stitch up preselection contests for older, male establishment figures over younger female candidates, even as senior figures such as Julie Bishop were crying out for better gender representation.Spend enough time as a party apparatchik, it seems, and you start getting touted as a possible candidate.

In 2015 there were rumours about her running for the federal seat of Canning (now held by Andrew Hastie). Two years later she ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals as an upper house candidate in the state election.More recently she’s popped up in reporting on the disastrous state of the WA party, as an enemy of “The Clan”, a group of influential Liberal power brokers with ties to former finance minister turned OECD supremo Mathias Cormann. Crikey asked Cash’s office whether Finlay’s Liberal links helped her land the appointment, and whether it was appropriate to pick someone so close to the party. We did not get a response.

The IPA’s pick in 2017, the Institute of Public Affairs, which has long called for a dramatic overhaul of the AHRC, listed Finlay as one of its favoured candidates for the commission. It cited Finlay’s co-authorship of No Offence Intended: Why 18C is Wrong, a book-length call to remove that section of the Racial Discrimination Act.Both the Abbott and Turnbull governments campaigned unsuccessfully to have the section — which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person based on their race, colour, ethnicity or nationality — repealed. It dragged the commission and its former president Gillian Triggs into a protracted culture war over freedom of speech. Finlay, meanwhile, has openly called — in her book and in articles — for 18C to be abolished. She has plenty of other views that put her at odds with the commission’s work.

The AHRC supports an Indigenous voice to Parliament. Finlay joined an IPA advertisement where she called that “political segregation”.The commission also does critical work on sexual harassment and sexual assault. On these, Finlay’s views are in line with the Sky News set. She believes moves to adopt an affirmative consent model on sexual assault laws — under way in NSW — would undermine due process and the presumption of innocence for alleged perpetrators. In fact, she’s been making this argument since 2018, when she appeared on a YouTube video with men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt. Finlay’s appointment is just the latest instance of the Coalition targeting and stacking the AHRC. In 2013, the Abbott government appointed former IPA policy director Tim Wilson, now a Liberal backbencher, as Human Rights Commissioner. Earlier that year, staff at the Institute had called for the Commission to be abolished. At the time, attorney-general George Brandis openly admitted ideology played a part in Wilson getting the gig. This time it hasn’t been quite so open.

Editors note: An earlier version of this article said Tim Wilson had called for the AHRC to be abolished during his time at the IPA. Wilson did not personally call for its abolition.

Kishor Napier-Raman from Crickey

Original Article on Crikey

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

How we need to transform our global society if we are to survive the 21st Century

William P. Hall on September 16, 2021

Absolutely everyone concerned in any way with our futures [humanity, ourselves, our families] on our fragile planet Earth must read Umair Haque’s latest essay linked below.

This man is a true spokesman for reason, science and politics. Here he explains what we need what we need to transform in order to continue living for long in this world. I also try to communicate these things, but Umair does it far better here than I have ever done.

Our civilisation needs a great transformation

We need three decades of transformation, but are we capable of it?

Read this article by Umair Haque at Eudaimonia & Co. Read more from Umair @Medium

Where Australia is concerned, the only area where I disagree with Umair’s sequence of priorities is that our first order of business must be to fix the political frameworks we live in that are specifically managed by Liberal/National party puppet governments that work across many levels to stop or delay us from doing anything that might inconvenience their masters representing special interests in the fossil fuel industry and their friends. Only then will we be able to devote our full interests to completing the moral and economic transformations that will see us progress towards solving the existential climate emergency. And there is very little time left (if any) to actually do that.

We all need to work together to achieve his prescription. Think seriously about what he says, and then lets get to work.

Our Vote Climate One guide provides a simple way for you to use our preferential voting system to vote for only those candidates who will support and work for immediate action on climate change. Our stoplight system doesn’t tell you who to vote for, but does flag those parties or individuals whose record suggests they are more likely to support the special interests and others trying to delay action than prioritize actions to deal with the existential climate emergency.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

We need to transform global society to survive the 21st Century

William P. Hall on September 16, 2021

Absolutely everyone concerned in any way with our futures [humanity, ourselves, our families] on our fragile planet Earth must read Umair Haque’s latest essay linked below.

Our civilisation needs a great transformation

We need three decades of transformation, but are we capable of it?

Read this article by Umair Haque at Eudaimonia & Co. Read more from Umair @Medium

Where Australia is concerned, the only area where I disagree with Umair’s sequence of priorities is that our first order of business must be to fix the political frameworks we live in that are specifically managed by Liberal/National party puppet governments who work across many levels to stop or delay us from doing anything that might inconvenience their masters representing special interests in the fossil fuel industry and their friends. Only then will we be able to devote our full interests to completing the moral and economic transformations that will see us progress towards solving the existential climate emergency. And there is very little time left (if any) to actually do that.

We all need to work together to achieve his prescription. Think seriously about what he says, and then lets get to work.

Our Vote Climate One Traffic Light Voting System provides a simple way for you to use our preferential voting system to vote for only those candidates who will support and work for immediate action on climate change. Our stoplight system doesn’t tell you who to vote for, but does flag those parties or individuals whose record suggests they are more likely to support the special interests and others trying to delay action than prioritize actions to deal with the existential climate emergency.

If we can get to work soon on the issues that really matter, perhaps we will be able to leave our offspring with a hopeful future.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.