By Jo Nova
Democracy is the point isn’t it?
The Australian editors are trying to diagnose why the conservative side of politics is tearing itself apart, but they miss the elephant on the bus. Net Zero has crippled the conservatives but it’s not because they don’t believe in it, it’s because many of them do.
Half of the voters are fed up with the carbon dioxide propaganda and they have no major party to vote for. They don’t need PhD’s to know that the catastrophe hasn’t happened, the predictions were wrong and the experts all own beach houses. Anyone with an electricity bill knows that renewables are expensive, and China burns our coal, but we are not supposed to.
The Liberals and Nationals should be the natural voice to fight this Big Government creeping corruption and the sodding failure of our institutions, but where are they? AWOL.
Half the voters (at least) are skeptical of plans to mould the global climate with our power stations. These are the sensible half.
The Editors think Tony Abbott refused to accept “the Zeitgeist” and that was why he lost the leadership. Instead, it was why he won.
The Zeitgeist in 2013 (and every year) was to Axe The Tax — specifically, to get rid of the carbon tax and toss out the Emission trading Scheme. Abbott won the largest victory in three decades in the Australian parliament and the commentariat forgot that a day later.
Politics of net zero at the heart of Coalition Fightback
Editorial, The Australian
Net zero was the issue at the core of the troubles that dogged the Coalition government over three prime ministers, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, whose tenures have been forensically explored by editor-at-large Paul Kelly. Mr Abbott remains consistent in his refusal to accept the Zeitgeist view on the need for strong climate action.
Does a 90 seat majority mean nothing? It seems so…
His stand on the issue helped Mr Turnbull seize the prime ministership in Mr Abbott’s first term in 2015, fatally repeating the mistake of leadership instability that undermined Labor in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years from 2007 to 2013.
The fatal mistake wasn’t “leadership instability”. Australians don’t wake up in the morning saying “I need more leadership stability in my life”. The Liberals fatal mistake was to ignore half the voters, pander to stone age witchcraft and let foreign committees dictate Australian policy.
For years, polls have shown skeptics are an absolute majority, repeatedly, consistently, and across the West. Last year half of Australia didn’t want to pay a single red cent on Net Zero targets, 69% of Australians wanted to use coal and gas if it made electricity cheaper and 83% didn’t want higher emissions targets. That’s an election winning majority and the Liberals didn’t even try to capture this vote. Worse, Donald Trump had led the way for the last decade and proved it was an election winner, and Nigel Farage was storming in the UK. And it’s been like this for years: in 2015 54% of Australians were skeptics (a CSIRO estimate).
The Liberals have had ten years warning, and they still missed it.
The misdiagnosis continues:
Mr Turnbull failed to convince his colleagues and voters of his capacity to deliver and suffered at the ballot box.
Mr Turnbull didn’t “fail to convince his colleagues and voters of his capacity to deliver”, the problem was that he did deliver, but it was everything the voters didn’t want. Turnbull gave us the Emissions Trading Scheme that Kevin Rudd wanted and Australians hated.
The Liberal Party is fracturing because there are truths here, and the Liberals have picked the wrong side every time. They got it wrong on the science, wrong on the energy and wrong on voter desires. No wonder they face an existential crisis. They fell for the B-grade consensus and the junk modeling. They ran chicken from petty namecalling by teenage girls, and they ignored the millions of voters who kept telling them “We Don’t Want Carbon Taxes”.
Image by Eynoxart from Pixabay
The major problems are (a) the infestation of Labor sympathisers into the Liberal Party (Turnbull and Matt Kean being prime former examples), (b) the Liberals having no widespread understanding of what they, as a purported conservative party, are meant to believe in, (c) no real sceptical or scientific understanding of the whole anthropogenic global warming scam, (d) lack of leadership and (e) emulating the Labor party as a slightly less offensive, slightly less bad “Labor-lite” version.
They are mostly driven by opinion polls and not leadership (which they lack) but not even that as they are absolutely not prepared to drop the Paris Accords, whether they are legally enforceable or not. That itself a HUGE warning sign. Their energy policy should be a return to how Australia waa before John Howard initiated the destruction of Australia’s energy supply.
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True that the Libs don’t understand leadership.
Are they driven by opinion polls? Partly I guess but they have consistently ignored the polls that said their own voters don’t believe in Climate Change and don’t like net zero.
How do they explain that?
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I meant they follow opinion polls of ALL Australians, not just their own voters.
In regard to anthropogenic global warming, currently 49% of all Australian voters agree:
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Unfortunately Ingrained in the Young
Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs
Age 18–29 2026 68% – Was 81% in 2019
Age 30-44 2026 47% – Was 72% in 2019
Age 45-59 2026 43% – Was 56% in 2019
Age 60+ 2026 42% – Was 42% in 2010 but interestingly was 53% in 2022
Male 2026 45% – Was 59% in 2019
Female 2026 52% – Was 64% in 2019
NSW 2026 49% – Was 67% in 2019
ACT 2026 49% – Was 65% in 2019 but something strange between 2018 80% 2019 59% 2020 81%
VIC 2026 55% – Was 63% in 2019
QLD 2026 42% – Was 56% in 2019
SA 2026 48% – Was 57% in 2019 but was 2024 64%
WA 2026 42% – Was 51% in 2019 but was 2022 67%
TAS 2026 56% – Was 61% in 2019 but was 2018 80%
NT 2026 59% – Was 85% in 2019 but was 2022 100%
Urban Australia 2026 51% – Was 64% in 2019
Regional Australia 2026 44% – Was 57% in 2019
Greater Sydney 2026 49% – Was 70% in 2019
Rest of NSW 2026 48% – Was 62% in 2019
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And there in lies the problem – Australia for the Future is Screwed When you look at this!
More than half of all voters say Australia is weaker and poorer than 12 months ago, Sky News Pulse reveals
More than half of Australians have said the country has become weaker and poorer than it was just after Anthony Albanese secured Labor’s massive supermajority in 2025.
The latest Sky News Pulse / YouGov poll revealed a bleak view of Australia’s direction just over 12 months after the Albanese government won its historic second term.
Fifty-one per cent of Australians said Australia had become weaker and poorer compared with one year ago.
Only 15 per cent of people said the country was stronger and more prosperous while 34 per cent said there had been no change.
Despite the government’s emphatic electoral mandate, voters have increasingly expressed frustration over economic pressures and security concerns.
Younger people had a more positive outlook, with 28 per cent of Gen Z saying the country was stronger compared to 32 per cent saying weaker.
Just 3 per cent of the Silent Generation and 11 per cent of Boomers said the country was stronger and more prosperous – compared to 58 and 57 per cent saying the opposite.
The economy has slowed sharply, with the International Monetary Fund recently downgrading its 2026 growth forecast from 2 per cent to 1.9 per cent.
That result placed Australia 18th among the 30 major economies modelled by the financial institution.
Meanwhile, the Labor Party has regained its position as the most popular party in the country while One Nation lost support after Pauline Hanson’s push for a “monoculture”.
The Sky News Pulse, conducted from July 7-14, found Labor had returned to the top of the primary vote on 28 per cent, despite dropping one point.
While One Nation’s support dipped by four points to 26 per cent, it still has a comfortable lead over the Coalition on 20 per cent (up three points).
The Greens received 12 per cent of the vote while the new teal party, Community Strong Australia, recorded just 2 per cent of the vote in its first appearance in the poll.
Labor retained a 53-47 lead over the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis, and ahead of One Nation 56-44.
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An article in the Oz by Angela Shanahan two weeks ago said that it is now measurable that Gen Z is dumber than the previous generation. We are headed for disaster.
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And as I keep saying on this blog, most polls are junk. Like the Lowy Institute one.
Here’s the question:
“Now about global warming. There is a controversy over what the countries of the world, including Australia, should do about the problem of global warming. Please indicate which of the following three statements comes closest to your own point of view.”
Option 3: “Global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”
But significant costs to who exactly? The way the question is phrased, this means “the country”, or “the government”, but not them personally…
Ask instead How much are YOU prepared to pay, and the answer for half the population is “nothing”. So how concerned are most Australians? About zero dollars worth. They won’t even pay $2 to offset their flight.
When the Lowy Institute poll Australians it’s not to understand the voters — it’s to produce results that tell voters what to think. And every time we try to plan our strategy according to their results, they are happy we are being misdirected.
The Left use polls to influence people, not to study them.
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And are very professional and focused on deception.
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Even IF Angus Taylor believed that the Paris Accords should be dumped it’ll never happen. After all his deputy is a Labor Lite, the majority in the party room are dyed in the wool Labor Lite. The only reason (the real reason) Taylor is the leader is that the party room felt that a slightly “right” leader would be more likely to have more electoral appeal than “Dear Susssan”. Even Hastie is a dyed in the wool Climate nutters!!
So the electorate have correctly realised that if the party is not going to change, they the people will change parties!!
Climate is not the only policy challenge. Nobody’s forgotten immigration, the gender benders, the appalling state of our energy policies. No sense in listings more policy /planning problems, we all know what they are & the “ party “ wants the power to repackage ALP POLICIES serve them up to the electorate in a new wrapping!!!
Not on. It’s not going to happen!! LNP needs to know how cold it’ll be, watching from 3rd place for 2 or 3 terms!!😵💫😵💫😵💫
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Which is why they’re attacking the only real opposition for second place, One Nation.
They don’t mind losing to Labor while they still get the cushy, comfortable position pretending to be “opposition” , while raking in fat tax payer funded salaries, now that they see a threat to that position they’ve realised it’s easier to attack the new kids than attack the party that is dragging the country down to third world status.
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Ferrgoodnesssake Graham! Hastie is NOT “a dyed in the wool Climate nutters!!”
Hastie is the one Liberal who sacrificed his spot in the Shadow Cabinet because he disagreed with the Coalition Net Zero policy. That was last September.
Why conservatives eat their own best allies baffles me.
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Hastie will say & do what the party room wants him to say. It called survival & maybe a shot at the top job?
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Thank you Jo, there are too many misconceptions floating around
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I could tell it with less ink.
They fell for the scam!
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When you are born to rule you don’t have to worry about the plebs
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It would be interesting to ask the editor what definition he was using for Zeitgeist.
“Spirit of the times” is the usual definition. To pursue that would be awfully close to populism.
I’m guessing *his* definition is the spirit of the times only amongst non-plebs.
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Thomas Jefferson: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Richard Rumbold: “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”
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More than 50 years of brainwashing, the crushing of free speech and assembly, the 24 hour surveillance, ever-growing control of what we can and cannot do, what we can even think for Christs sake. It’s only going to end in a disaster. Will it be the dictatorship the Left want, or whether we can rebuild into a free country run on common sense, which at present appears to be mission impossible.
God help the grandkids
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I wrote enough about this yesterday. The Liberals are not Conservatives. Just professional politicians with their own ideas. And like all modern politicians, except Pauline Hanson, they just lie to the public to get elected. It’s a job. Beats having to work.
But on most issues like the VOICE are completely on the wrong side to the Australian public. Those dummies. People think politicians are elected to represent their views! What dills! What an absurd idea!
John Howard introduced the first utterly deceitful Carbon Tax (Renewable Energy(Electricity) 2001) which cleverly avoided two words, carbon and tax. It’s amusing to read the Act and see the somesaults used to avoid both. Coal, gas, oil are simply ‘not approved’. And it’s not a tax as the government enforces and overseas trades in ‘Certificates’, electronic coupons. Genius deceit. So successful and devious, it was copied in the UK!
This worship of the UN dictated agenda has not slowed. Gillard (There will not be a carbon tax in a Government I lead) introduced her Agricultural Carbon Credits, the building stone of Albanese’s Safeguard Mechanism, a 35% tax on CO2 produced by companies, unparalled in Western democracies. And they work hard to avoid any public knowledge and force victims to bury the tax in their prices without saying a thing.
Ultimately this is all illegal under the Westminster tradition since Magna Carta. These Carbon Taxes are not taxes but enforced payment to third parties, the illegal enrichment of friends of the King for nothing at all. People died for this principle and now successive Australian governments revel in their hidden taxes. Along with windmills owners (like the City of Canberra), solar farm owners and the carbon credit bankers.
As for a National Grid, we never needed one. But Canberra wants to control everything and the cost is comparable to Australia’s GDP. Meanwhile the Coalition says nothing. Because they agree.
Our only hope for sense is Pauline’s common sense approach. Which is likely representative of 66% of the electorate. Dummies according to the gnomes of Canberra and their puppet politicians.
I was cheered that after years of utter dictatorship in Victoria, One Nation is now polling higher than Labor. The people have had enough.
Conservative means principles, fairness, small government, low taxation, the common good, defence of the country, fair trade and not the enrichment of anyone, especially politicians. It’s been a generation since we have seen any of those ideas, apart from Pauline Hanson who has never changed her simple approch of simple honesty and practicality.
The list of damage which has to be undone, laws which must be repealed, is very long. If we removed all the laws written between 2000 and 2026, the departments created, the people hired, the mad agendas, the country would be far better off. And the universities have to return to being centres of learning, not money machines.
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And we could stop many things. Snowy II heading to $42Billion must stop. The National Grid must stop. The seizure of farming land. Paying people not to grow food. The closure of Coal power stations must stop (Hazelwood was at 98% when it was turned off). And all the welcome to country must stop. It’s not longer cute but insulting. And the whole aboriginal industry, $42Billion a year, separating people legally by race, must stop.
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“The closure of Coal power stations must stop (Hazelwood was at 98% when it was turned off)”
Hazelwood could have done with some proper fluegas cleanup equipment, it was a bit smoky being a ’64 model but still a perfectly good power station.
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I bet most Australians don’t even know about HELE coal power plants. If they did, it’s more than likely that the majority would embrace an energy source that runs more efficiently and produces less emissions than the remaining coal power stations. Not to mention that we have tonnes of the required fuel in our backyard.
If Peter Duddon had half a brain, he would have promoted the use of this technology in the last federal election.
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Most of the people would not know that you can’t see any “smoke” coming out of the stacks.
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We sold it, $2.35Billion. The ultimate owners Engie/Mitsui spent another $2.5Bn on it. And they expected a long productive return, killed off by the hidden Federal Government RET which made them the supplier of last resort and the Andrews State Government which tripled the prices of coal when the decision was being made. There was also the requirement to spend another $2.5Bn on cleanup of the site. Total ripoff by Victoria. The power plant can last forever, unlike windmills and solar farms and there was nothing to spend on transmission lines.
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Most of those things are part of the One Nation policy.
Pauline Hanson addressed them directly I. Her speech to the National Press Club.
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As usual TdeF, accurate, enlightening and strait to the point.
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“Canberra wants to control everything…”
Devolution is the way. Double the number of states, but do not increase the number of politicians. No ministers in the Senate, only representatives of the individual states. Return the Commonwealth to the responsibilities it had in 1901.
Return income taxing, centralised during WW II to serve the national emergency, to the states. GST and excise to fund the Commonwealth.
Just as starting points.
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Oh, and end horizontal fiscal equalisation.
That is a rort that allows some states to virtue signal on matters environmental, such as restricting mining, while demanding, and getting, subsidised by states that exploit their mineral reserves.
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Victoria is facing a state election in November this year.
I can pretty well guarantee that if you asked every individual member of the LNP opposition in this state about climate change, they will say emissions reduction is important so that this state can play its part in reducing its effects.
There’s no difference between the Libs and the Nats, by the way. Jess Wilson, present LNP leader is also just as clueless as her predecessors and the Nats are the same.
If One Nation can find a leader and other candidates who present well and can string a sentence together, they will win many votes.
If that sentence indicates any realism regarding climate and energy policy they will romp it in.
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The Voice and Climate Change are very similar. Both fake. Both supported by politicians, business types, Canberra, Universities but ultimately utter nonsense to 2/3 of the population.
Both demonstrate how democracy in Australia is fake when both major parties reject the view of the majority of the population. Identical to the situation in the US(prior to Donald Trump), UK(prior to Nigel Farage) and more.
And you get an absurd situation where a deeply unpopular Labor party and a deeply flawed PM in Albo Akhbar rule unapposed with only 32% popular support. That’s not representative democracy, but a farce, a conspiracy of politicians for which the collective name is now a Greed of politicians or even a Sneer of politicians.
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Ignore the Australian Voters at your Peril.
Bye, bye Libs/Nats. You don’t deserve to form Guv’ment.
Emissions Impossible
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I have a mate who is a “rusted on” Labor voter.
I used to hold my nose and vote for the Liberal party up until 10-15 years ago.
We had a discussion after the last election and surprisingly we both agreed that neither Labor nor the “conservative” coalition deserved to win that election.
The uniparty is on the nose and the polling is an indicator of that.
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While The Australian does frequently print articles criticising Net Zero – especially those of its Environment Editor, Graham Lloyd – it’s senior writer, Paul Kelly, has just published his new book, “The Twilight of Exceptionalism”, in which he criticises some Liberal leaders for pursuing an anti renewables policy. I suspect that this explains its divided and discordant policy.
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The Canberra Bubble! I agree.
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Just think what would happen if every Aussie voter completed the co2 Coalition’s FACTs ARCHIVE?
The entire loony nonsense would be as dead as the Dodo and we would have cheap, reliable BASELOAD energy again.
So what’s their problem?
https://co2coalition.org/facts/
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Just reading the headlines on the “archive” shows clearly that there are lots of starting points from which it is possible to push back strongly on the concept of human origin global warming.
It’s all advertising used to divert and direct the flow of money in our society.
One example of the use of the CAGW scare is in the significant number of Union linked Superannuation Funds which provide elitist workplaces for former union leaders.
The CAGW Myth must continue or else a lot of retirees would get very angry.
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They fell for the B-grade consensus and the junk modeling. They ran chicken from petty namecalling by teenage girls…
As TdeF notes above, politics is a
goodwell-paying job. Getting elected and staying elected is the A1 core objective. Then, every so often, you get to have a go at fiddling around the margins and spending large slabs of easy money with little, or no, accountability.Against this background, there is no personal return in questioning (far less, fighting) climate orthodoxy. Absolutely none. You are probably an Arts/Law graduate without the tools to properly understand (far less question) the dodgy science and terrible modelling so the political forces aligned against you by Big Climate are too great to contemplate. If you are anything else, your colleagues will shun you.
Career-wise, it’s a case of accept gravity, or do something else.
And also against this background, name-calling has real consequences. In the parliamentary sewer, sticks and stones are survivable, covering up is stock in trade. But names can really hurt you.
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More co2 means more GREENING of our world and we wouldn’t have to destroy thousands of klms of our environments and kill thousands of Koalas and other animals.
In fact we should join in the love for more co2 as do the co2 Coalition scientists. See their statement at the previous facts link.
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Willis Eschenbach’s “Where’s the Emergency” is a very long and accurate source for understanding the real historical CC data.
He still updates the data as required.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/
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What would the voters think if they understood that World GDP per capita had nearly doubled over the last 34 years? Up to 2024.
Of course over 80% of the world’s energy was generated by FFs since 1990 and toxic, unreliable W & S has been a disaster.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=line&country=USA~DEU~GBR~BRA~KOR~JPN~CHN~IND~ETH~RUS~OWID_WRL~AUS~CAN
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Take the incredible cost of the National Grid. In Australia 67% of people live in the state capitals. 80% in just 15 cities.
In America the only 10% of the total U.S. population in the 50 state capital cities, which contain a combined total of roughly 28 to 30 million residents out of a national population over 330 million.
An Australia grid makes as much sense as the mad scheme to sell solar to Singapore.
But like Snowy II, politicians don’t care. And call themselves Conservatives. The core problem is that it’s not their money. Their retirement is utterly secure and indexed. And lots of very lucrative board positions await, despite the fact that few have any real qualifications.
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Consider that Steve Bracks, Victorian Labor Premier for 7 years actually taught swimming at Primary School. Joan Kirner was also a Primary School teacher.
Nothing wrong with either, but for Bracks how do you explain..
Current Directorships & Chairmanships
Chancellor & Chair of Council: Victoria University
Chairman: Melbourne Cricket Ground Trust
Chairman: The Shannon Company
Non-Executive Director: Bank of Sydney
Honorary Positions & Past RolesAdviser:
Former Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Timor-LestePatron:
Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria (ECCV)
Seaworks Foundation
Previous Roles:
Chair of Cbus Super
Maurice Blackburn Lawyers
AFL SportsReady.
I suppose they all need advice on backstroke. Or sidestroke. Unusual skills.
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They have no useful qualifications. What they do have are connections – much more valuable in their world.
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And these political connections are clearly for sale. Despite generous retirement incomes.
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And we have no doubt that the selection process for Premier does not require superior mental skills. For me Steve Bracks’ most profound statement was that ‘dams don’t make water‘. How can you lose a debate with such amazing insight? Obviously why he was in such demand as director and chairman. And like Daniel Andrews, he walked away after many years in the job. The Labor party clearly has a large pool of such talented people.
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Most Aussie voters don’t have a clue about the lives saved today from the ravages of extreme weather events all around the world.
Dr Pielke jr showed that very few people die today compared to 1960 or 320 per million then, compared to just 0.8 per million in 2025.
But many years of terrible death rates were much worse than 1960 from 1900 to 1950.
Just look at the terrible death rates in the first half of the 20th century from OWI Data.
And 8.2 billion at risk today and only 1.6 billion in 1900 and 2.5 billion in 1950.
Again, just unbelievable but true.
https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260112-111535/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates.html?country=Flood~Extreme+weather~Wildfire~Drought~Extreme+temperature
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It stopped being about democracy so long ago I can’t remember. They are a uniparty. That is antithetical to democracy.
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Tony, I believe your analysis is totally correct. Australia has had no one but representatives of the Uniparty in parliament for many decades. Probably forever.
“Democracy is the point, isn’t it?”
No. Australian politics has nothing to do with democracy, as the climate debate in particular illustrates well.
It’s certainly nothing to do with ‘conservative’ versus ‘socialist’, since, whatever the issues, we keep moving gradually down the same path regardless of which side you vote for. And nothing’s improving.
A country can’t make this many mistakes (e.g. Snowy 2.0) by accident. A bunch of monkeys with rubber stamps would, by sheer chance, get 50% of their decisions right. We get well over 50% wrong, continually – no matter who’s at the helm.
I believe we haven’t had a meaningful (i.e.honest) election in this country for at least 60 years, probably much longer. As you put it: “It stopped being about democracy so long ago, I can’t remember.” An astute observation.
If I were pushed to criticise your conclusion, I would only say you don’t take it far enough.
The Uniparty isn’t just an Australian problem; it’s a global problem.
The political scene in every country is dictated by an international group high above politics. Parliaments, Senates, Houses of Congress, etc., are pure theatre – ‘bread and circuses’ to keep us distracted in the same way a shiny toy keeps a toddler amused while the adults go about running the household. The only difference, in my opinion, is that those shadowy figures in charge of our destiny do not have our best interests at heart – only their own.
And unfortunately, they’re not nice people!
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Andrew Hastie recently accused Australia’s top climate scientists of being “politically compromised” and “alarmist”.
He is our only hope of throwing the socialists out of power.
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“Democracy is the point isn’t it?”
“Democracy” is a PROCESS.
And, one would hope, a more refined process than two wolves and a sheep discussing what’s for lunch.
As pointed out by Lord Alexander Tytler in his work: “On the Fall of the Athenian Republic.”
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”
So, what is our current status? Somewhere between “Apathy” and “Bondage”, I suspect.
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Dr Rosling’s joy of stats video is just 5 minutes but easily proves that FFs generation have given us the safest, healthiest and wealthiest world in Human history.
Apparently most pollies, the MSM and so called Scientists etc can’t understand simple data over the last 210 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahp7QhbB8G4&t=58s
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Jo, If you look I think you will find a correlation between Liberal stuff-ups and public avowals of support for Carbon Issues.
I was there and I agree Abbott did win on it – BUT when he buckled on it, he failed and they all failed. I think you will find that there is a specific curse for saying ‘humans control the clouds’ – when God does. We can see also the Albanese Government squandering a majority on it… things just somehow land jam-and-butter down! This is how God works. He gives shame, but through their own way.
There are three issues of curse; morals (corruption), Man-control-Climate and Israel.
Ok, so here it is: Liberals in my observation are managers, not finder-outers and so they trust civil servants. I think Abbott, despite scholarship, was caught there. Now as we know civil servants for reasons not known, tend to lean Labour.
If anyone here hopes One Nation has a shot at getting Australian Science back, they need to be able to dismiss civil servants en-mass – or push them hard to make sure they do proper research on matters brought to the minister. It’s hard work pushing up hill.
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Abbotts mistake was in not pushing for a double dissolution election when Clive Palmer hugged Al Gore and refused to pass the legislation there was an overwhelming majority vote for.
That was the moment the courage of his convictions was tested.
Sadly Abbott was constantly pushing uphill against the left-leaning members in his own party. He only won the leadership by one vote in 2009 against Turnbull. So his position as leader was always on a knife edge. You would have thought that after his massive win the Liberals would have given him more support. Instead he became the anti-Christ to the bureaucrats who live off Big Government, and to the same bankers that threatened the nation in 2021. That, combined with the non-stop anti-Abbott media which punished him in the polls, meant The Blob was able to spook or nudge enough Liberal Party members to vote against Abbott. Then years later, big renewables money (Simon Homes a Court) would target Abbott’s safe seat to make sure he lost and could not return to the leadership.
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After many years of observation, it is my belief that Politicians exist to confuse the populace with nonsense whilst robbing the treasury and enslaving future generations to the results of their choices, and that, long enough to leave office enriched whilst leaving some new sod to hang for it.
It will continue until or unless the populace ignores the proffered illusions/excuses and holds sitting politicians responsible for the costs of their actions. Careers must end, prices must be paid, and someone must go to jail.
Absent some sternly enforced responsibility, things won’t change.
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Lance,
While agreeing with you, I would use stronger words.
We have a Constitution Act.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004Q00685/latest/text
This describes what the Commonwealth is there to do and what the States are charged with doing.
Yet, we find repeated violations of this fundamental Constitution Act. Lawyers argue on the heads of pins that everything now being done is done legally, but clearly many actions mock the plausible intent of the Constitution Act. Commonwealth activities in functions like Education and Health, to select a couple, do not align with the intent of that Act.
There are grounds for correcting various Federal and State roles, a move that would be beneficial at the least in reduction of duplication and its attendant conflict and economically, in reduction of the % of bureaucrats in the paid work force.
It is easy to write like this to demand beneficial action, but it is ever so hard to get that remedial action. Too many people who should go do something more productive are living high Off The Hog while doing things never intended for them. Geoff S
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The World of Renewables brought to Australia by Labor PM Albo & His Trusty Sidekick Labor Energy Minister “Blackout Bankrupting” Chris Bowen!
Two Sydney trams that caught fire on the weekend were fitted with replacement roof-mounted batteries as part of a program meant to fix a string of similar fires this year.
Light rail services between the CBD and the eastern suburbs were suspended for almost the whole day on Saturday and ran on a reduced timetable on Sunday after two separate fires broke out on the tram roofs.
The first fire occurred at 7.53am on Saturday, when onlookers observed smoke emerging from the top of a tram after the roof-mounted batteries caught alight.
At 10.22am, a second tram caught alight near Moore Park and passengers were evacuated.
There have been six fires in just four months – all stemming from the roof-mounted batteries.
A spokesperson for private operator Transdev, which is responsible for the service, said a “battery replacement program” was brought forward after three tram fires in February and March.
But last weekend’s fires were caused by a new batch of batteries – the very ones fast-tracked to fix the earlier fires,
“Light rail vehicles are not sent onto the network with any known safety defects,” the spokesperson said.
Acting co-ordinator-general Matt Longland said Transport for NSW was “disappointed by the ongoing battery-related issues affecting the light rail fleet and the impact on passenger services”.
Asked whether the department would reconsider its contract with Transdev, Longland said
Transport for NSW would “continue to hold our operators and suppliers accountable for meeting their contractual obligations and performance requirements”.
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The new batteries will probably be delivered by the new. fleet of government subsidised electric trucks to be built in Brisbane. If the picture that I saw of the truck that will revolutionise transport, it will be a dud. Picture was a single axel standard tray type truck carrying capacity about 12 tonnes. Not a semi, let alone a B double.
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Something weird happened on the website this morning. Did anyone else notice?
When I first read Jo’s post there was a picture of an elephant with trees in its back as the lead illustration. David Maddison had opened the discussion at #1, so I wrote a response to that and then glanced back up to the top of the post and the elephant picture had been replaced with distopian future. A few minutes later the elephant was back but my comment had disappeared and it wasn’t even referenced in the recent comments column.
Now distopian future is back and my comment has returned!
Preview wasn’t working either but it is now.
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The disappearing Elephant was me, searching for the right image. It almost worked, but not quite. I was having trouble on the site around that time too. Oddly, traffic at that point was higher from the USA, China, France and “Tor” than from Australia. There may have been a caching issue which served up the old version again for a moment…
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Was the elephant on a bus?
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No. And that was the problem. 🙂
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The Coalition are stuck in neural loop thinking. They see their main target as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON) but not Albanese’s Australia busting Labour Party. Labour love this kind of self destructive policy from the Coalition. Yet even Hitler had enough tactical smarts to form a temporary alliance with Stalin as part of his policy to achieve his political goals of world domination. But no, the likes of Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie bellyache repeadedly that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has no experience at government, no declared policy and are therefore not fit to govern. This is hypocritical. The Coalition has not even looked like been electable for two election cycles. Instead of forming an alliance with PHON to effectively oust Labour and save Australia, the Coalition would rather oust PHON, a valuable ally. Wallies all round to the Coalition!
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There are two paths to Net Zero, gradually or suddenly upon the collapse of human civilisation. Atmospheric temperature continues to rise until net greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to zero. Complete ecosystem collapse occurs before we burn all sources of fossil fuels. It’s called a mass extinction event, and it has occurred multiple times in the past due to runaway global warming.
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