Month: February 2011

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The bigger elephant

Gillard’s decision to introduce a carbon tax deserves credit. It is a brave move and it is the right idea, poorly executed. I say this as someone partial to a carbon tax over emissions trading. A carbon tax is a more direct economic strategy in the early stages of energy market transformation. To explain why, I need to give a bit of background. Forgive me if I put you to sleep.

Carbon trading works by putting environmental standards front and centre and letting the carbon price bob like a volley ball around it. This is potentially dangerous as it can create an enormous amount of instability in investment decisions. (When things are unstable, people tend to do nothing.) It only works when you have a flurry of commercially viable low carbon energy technologies at hand. In these cases, it only takes a slim carbon price to change energy behavior at the margins.

A carbon tax, by contrast, is geared directly at investment decisions. You can slowly and steadily increase the tax until the floodgates for technology are unleashed.

So what? Gillard would have been better off sticking to a carbon tax instead of locking in an ETS in 3-5 years time. Nonetheless there is a bigger elephant in the room: nuclear technology. Labour’s decision to embargo nuclear is like trying to solve a problem while hiding the answer. Technologies take decades to mature and nuclear is far more technically and commercially mature as a technology than wind or solar.

In my opinion, it is no longer credible in the modern age to be serious about de-risking climate change and be against nuclear energy in this country or anywhere else.

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The Spectator Australia essay: The agony and the ecstasy

For those in the market for some light entertainment, I recommend this week’s Spectator Australia.

$9 will buy you some very witty writing with the usual average diminished by my own contribution. Apparently it’s the top selling publication in the news agency in Chifley Tower, bang smack in the middle Sydney’s CBD.

I’m not quite sure what that says about the core readership…

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Lost for words

Words, not ideas, have got in the way of our latest political train wreck.  The Australian heartland, I would suggest, has the same generous idea about our nation’s future. Semantics, however, have gotten us into a terrible mess.

It was John Howard who first made the distinction between the words “multi-cultural” and “multi-ethnic”. His point was that a people are one, but their countries of origin are many. People as different as Cory Bernardi and Chris Bowen would agree with that statement. But it was a clumsy distinction. Chris Bowen’s speech this week was a deliberate attempt to revive this semantic ghost for political effect. It worked. Scott Morison has been tripping all over the place ever since.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to leave language to poets. Qantas has made famous the words of two of our great song-writers, Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton. It’s aired every time we step onto a Qantas aircraft because it expresses perfectly and beautifully what we all think.

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian

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When a bishop trumps an abbott

Rumour has it that there was a rather nasty stoush between a bishop and an abbott last week. Julie Bishop was cagey about what it was over. It is clear what it should have been over. Abbott’s decision to reallocate foreign aid funding to pay for the floods is an error of judgment.

In Battle Lines, Abbott acknowledged that the Liberal party has traditionally struggled with an image problem. The problem is that swing voters see the Liberals as cold-hearted. I say it’s an image problem because this doesn’t need to be the case. No party can claim a monopoly on a good heart. Political parties, you may be surprised to know, rarely disagree with purposes: better health care, better education, helping the down-and-out. What they disagree on is how to achieve these purposes.

Both sides want to help Queensland. But Abbott made himself the news story by axing foreign aid to pay for the floods. Instead he should have tried to cut bottom line spending deployed in unproductive projects under the $42 billion stimulus package. The message here is fiscal responsibility.

I have commented elsewhere why Gillard’s levies are fiscally imprudent. The flood bill should be paid for out of the national budget. It is a very serious problem if the Treasurer is running the economy on such a fine margin that it cannot pay for natural disasters. It’s like the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to see how far he can drive his car in the red zone of the fuel tank. Missing this point and being close to a policy suggested by Qld One Nation is a mistake.

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Changing the flag…

This week I have found myself driving around Burwood, Ashfield, Marickville, Strathfield, and Camperdown in Sydney’s western suburbs doing errands. These places are heartland Labor seats, held on margins upwards of 15% in most places. Seeing the campaign posters of incumbent members, though, you wouldn’t know it.

Take Strathfield for example. Virginia Judge has been a stable face amidst the NSW government’s storm. She has held Strathfield for Labor since 2003 and has a margin of 15.1%. But I didn’t know this about her until I looked it up. Her campaign posters suggest the opposite. They are swashed in green, don’t say the word ‘Labor’ or ‘ALP’ anywhere, the letters MP after her name are printed very small, and she even looks different!

Then there’s Five Dock. Angelo Tsirekas has been a great Mayor of Canada Bay and has excellent local clout. He has replaced Angela D’Amore after she was accused of inventing a fictitious staffer to charge expenses to. Angelo was pipped at pre-selection several years ago by the Labor heavies but now they can do with his local credentials. And Angelo knows it. His poster is yellow, the Labor logo is minuscule in the bottom left corner, and his tag line is ‘One of Us’.

When Simon McKeon’s was awarded Australian of the Year this year, one of his first announcements was that Australia should change its flag. I can’t see that ever happening. People fought under that flag and will defend it to the hilt. The Australian Labor Party flag, however, is another story. Is that what they mean when they say Labor needs to be re-branded?

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Keep the verity

If you’re in the habit of driving around Balmain of a mid summer’s day you”ll notice something different about the place. Someone has gone around and stuck up ‘Keep Verity’ posters on every second corner. You’ll be please to know these are not permanent installations to the heritage suburb. There is a state election coming up in NSW and Verity Firth is coming up for re-election.

Of course, you already knew that. Just not for the reasons Verity wants you to. These days, people pay good money for things to go viral on the internet. But there are still some ways to do it for free – like, for example, if you give a press conference similar to this one.

Click here.

It’s hard not to cringe hearing Verity speak. There are any number of reasons to have sympathy for her. It might outrage you that we place the personal lives of politicians under such scrutiny. Maybe we have unrealistically high moral standards for our politicians (I have been told everyone, just everyone in gen x was doing e). Or then again, there may just be the good old-fashion desire for the truth. Keep verity, indeed.