Dave's Archives

How did it come to this? The Greens, supposedly a party of the "far left" (whatever that means), are now the flag bearers for a market-based policy - carbon emissions trading.

Rudd along with three successive opponents - Howard, Nelson and Turnbull — all pledged to introduce or support an ETS. Now the Labor Party has well and truly capitulated. What crumbs Gillard has to offer in lieu of a price on carbon look as bizarre and pitiful as those sprinkled before us by Abbott. Crikey has a good summary of the situation.

The most positive thing you can say about Gillard's position is that it's sufficiently ambiguous to allow some sort of action in the future. That's what we're left with, just six months after both major parties successfully concluded negotiations to pass ETS legislation. I can only gape in astonishment at the magnitude of the bipartisan failure of leadership having occurred in the intervening time. Gillard has just propelled this failure to new hitherto unknown depths of farce by abdicating responsibility to, quite literally, a random assortment of laypeople.

On the merits of its policies (climate change, asylum seekers and Internet filtering), the Labor Party frankly deserves to lose this election, and lose it badly. So, of course, do the Liberals, for many of the same reasons. I'm still of the mind that the Liberals deserve to lose slightly more, mainly because I'd prefer Labor's incompetence over the Liberals' incompetence and poorly-disguised ideological mindset, but it's a close call.

The most positive election result I can imagine now is a hung parliament, with the Greens holding the balance of power in the House of Representatives (presumably as well as in the Senate). I don't care to guess how likely this is, considering the Greens have never won a single seat in the House of Reps before. However, I expect they'll be the beneficiaries of an electoral backlash. They deserve to do very well indeed, in my opinion, simply by holding to a broad policy that used to enjoy bipartisan support — the only climate change policy that even really deserves to be labeled as such. The prospect of a forced coalition with the Greens would surely help drag at least one of the major parties back to the negotiation table.

Gods, where's Malcolm Turnbull when you need him? This is turning out to be a stinker of an election.

I came home from a dinner with the rellies to find that the daylight savings referendum had been defeated, which was mildly disappointing but hardly surprising. There'll be another referendum in a while. At least I remembered to vote this time.

However, I am surprised and intrigued that the Greens candidate Adele Carles managed to pull off a convincing victory in the Fremantle by-election - 54% to Labor's 46% two-candidate-preferred vote (with 79% of votes counted). The Libs seem not to have bothered to field a candidate, but I suspect they'd be satisfied with a Labor defeat. Even though the Greens are even more ideologically opposed to the Libs than Labor, they might create complications for the formation of a future Labor government.

It appears that, in the coming weeks, most of us will be receiving $900 from The Man, with which we must do our patriotic duty as consumers and... well, consume. I suppose we should all be buying Australian goods and services as much as possible, though that line always sounds a little parochial to me. It's a global crisis, after all.

However, it's nice to have a Senate that isn't just a rubber stamp for the Government's every whim. The Greens managed to wrangle a few improvements to the package without appearing to play games, which is a neat trick in our consummately adversarial political system. On the other hand, Senator Nick Xenophon's brinkmanship over funding for the Murray-Darling probably isn't how the democratic process is supposed to work. When interviewed on Insiders, he reassured everyone that he would indeed have scuttled the whole thing had he not gotten his way. Malcolm Turnbull still isn't having any of it, of course, but I just can't get fired up over arguments concerning tax cuts vs. handouts, and he looks like he was just fishing around for some arbitrary way to differentiate Liberal policy from Labor policy.

For my own part, I am considering various options for disposing of $900. I'm so unused to spending that kind of money that it might take me a while to work out how to do it. Upgrading my computer and acquiring saddle bags for my bike could make a substantial dent. I could, of course, blow the whole lot on chocolate. For $900 I could get 300 250g blocks, amounting to slightly more than my (current) body weight. Hurrah for capitalism.