Julia Gillard was more personable than I’d expected given that she seems so strained and wooden on TV. But she was amongst admirers, or at least amongst fellow travellers for a price on carbon. We were at an event organised by GetUp! In case you are living under a mushroom, GetUp! is Australia’s centre-left new-style online Web-generation political movement. It’s got a membership of several hundred thousand. Membership is not demanding, just receipt of a few emails each week, but you can take it further and be involved: attend demonstrations, write to pollies, do handouts, lump up some cash for whatever cause, even attend sessions with the PM. So there we were. The main speaker was Julia Gillard, with a retinue of press, taking questions for 30 minutes from GetUp!’s founder, Simon Sheikh. She was interesting and quite pleasant in person: not particularly au fait with the science, a little better on the economics, but her job is not the detail, it’s the politics and negotiations and persuasion. Certainly, her fellow speakers were on-side with the effectiveness of the plan (carbon tax moving rapidly to a market in carbon). Will Steffen, head of the ANU Climate Change Institute, gave a potted summary of climate change science and its implications, and it’s not a comfortable and relaxed story. Ben McNeil of UNSW spoke on the opportunities in the green economy. I was particularly impressed by Will S, but science and rationality are things I hold dearly. Ben M had me heartened and unexpectedly optimistic. His line was that the green revolution is as significant as the industrial revolution or our recent information revolution and there are great opportunities in it (and great dangers for countries that hold to the old path). This accords with what I’ve been thinking recently. Getting in early enough (perhaps not first and we’re not the first) is an advantage, although there are transition costs (and thus winners and noisy losers). Climate change is a big and difficult issue. We’ve known of the physics for over a century but we’ve only known of our own climate change for 25 years or so. It will take a mammoth change in our technologies and we have to make the change over only a few decades and in the context of the GFC, peak oil, Fukushima, crises with water and food and the rest. It’s never a good time to make massive change that will have an effect on entrenched wealth, but we gotta do it. Megan and I felt oddly positive when we left. As for the party politics, I do wonder what Abbott would do if he got in, and it’s possible he will in a few years. I can’t really believe the Liberal Party would allow him to dismantle carbon pricing. I guess he’d make some changes and claim he’d done what he promised, especially given that his market-free alternative goes against party philosophy and market economics (being essentially socialist: climate change paid for by the tax-payer through payments to industry). He’d have to believe the science is bunkum, which he may do and a few others (eg, Minchin, Pell) obviously do, but despite the polls, it’s clearly a losing bet that would take Australia’s economy with it and civilisation as we know it if the rest of the world followed suit. How would you like that on your conscience? Not to say anything of his negativity and Tea-Party-style emotionalism (but then the Labor Party is hardly politically angelic, either). Pricing carbon is the future; carbon as an economic externality is clearly the past. Accept that one and we have a chance of a liveable future. Good on ya, Julia: win or lose, your conscience is clear, and all else is forgiven if you pull this one off.
Julia Gillard was more personable than I’d expected given that she seems so strained and wooden on TV. But she was amongst admirers, or at least amongst fellow travellers for a price on carbon. We were at an event organised by GetUp! In case you are living under a mushroom, GetUp! is Australia’s centre-left new-style online Web-generation political movement. It’s got a membership of several hundred thousand. Membership is not demanding, just receipt of a few emails each week, but you can take it further and be involved: attend demonstrations, write to pollies, do handouts, lump up some cash for whatever cause, even attend sessions with the PM. So there we were. The main speaker was Julia Gillard, with a retinue of press, taking questions for 30 minutes from GetUp!’s founder, Simon Sheikh. She was interesting and quite pleasant in person: not particularly au fait with the science, a little better on the economics, but her job is not the detail, it’s the politics and negotiations and persuasion. Certainly, her fellow speakers were on-side with the effectiveness of the plan (carbon tax moving rapidly to a market in carbon). Will Steffen, head of the ANU Climate Change Institute, gave a potted summary of climate change science and its implications, and it’s not a comfortable and relaxed story. Ben McNeil of UNSW spoke on the opportunities in the green economy. I was particularly impressed by Will S, but science and rationality are things I hold dearly. Ben M had me heartened and unexpectedly optimistic. His line was that the green revolution is as significant as the industrial revolution or our recent information revolution and there are great opportunities in it (and great dangers for countries that hold to the old path). This accords with what I’ve been thinking recently. Getting in early enough (perhaps not first and we’re not the first) is an advantage, although there are transition costs (and thus winners and noisy losers). Climate change is a big and difficult issue. We’ve known of the physics for over a century but we’ve only known of our own climate change for 25 years or so. It will take a mammoth change in our technologies and we have to make the change over only a few decades and in the context of the GFC, peak oil, Fukushima, crises with water and food and the rest. It’s never a good time to make massive change that will have an effect on entrenched wealth, but we gotta do it. Megan and I felt oddly positive when we left. As for the party politics, I do wonder what Abbott would do if he got in, and it’s possible he will in a few years. I can’t really believe the Liberal Party would allow him to dismantle carbon pricing. I guess he’d make some changes and claim he’d done what he promised, especially given that his market-free alternative goes against party philosophy and market economics (being essentially socialist: climate change paid for by the tax-payer through payments to industry). He’d have to believe the science is bunkum, which he may do and a few others (eg, Minchin, Pell) obviously do, but despite the polls, it’s clearly a losing bet that would take Australia’s economy with it and civilisation as we know it if the rest of the world followed suit. How would you like that on your conscience? Not to say anything of his negativity and Tea-Party-style emotionalism (but then the Labor Party is hardly politically angelic, either). Pricing carbon is the future; carbon as an economic externality is clearly the past. Accept that one and we have a chance of a liveable future. Good on ya, Julia: win or lose, your conscience is clear, and all else is forgiven if you pull this one off.
Didn't see you there.
ReplyDeleteI was sitting over on the right, only physically, not politically :)
Like you I left the gathering feeling positive.
Pity not much of it made the regular press though!
All we seem to get is the negatives there.
There is so many positive things to come out of this current plan. cheers