Flailing about and failing

Australia’s politicians, as with their counterparts the world over, flail about announcing and promoting policies that they hope will win popular support, although many among us know their ideas are frequently fundamentally flawed.

Australia’s Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, is promising a 1.5 per cent cut in company tax rates.

He argues the change, to be introduced in 2015, will benefit workers and stimulate the economy.

Considered and seen through a prism not clouded by climate change, the continuing depletion of earth’s finite resources and a burgeoning population, Mr Abbott’s idea appears to make sense.

However, it doesn’t for we are facing catastrophic changes to the earth’s climate; we need to make an immediate start on the transition from fossil fuels to a renewable energy sources; and the demographics of the future are going to be substantially different from that we presently know and understand.

What Mr Abbott is suggesting might have been appropriate half a century ago, but today it is simply committing Australia, along with those sharing this home with us, to a rather different and difficult future.

Rather than making it cheaper, and easier, for corporations of operate and so make it even more difficult to mitigate climate change, we should be reining them in and making them more responsible for what it is they do.

Mr Abbott needs policies that are about helping Australians understand the emerging calamities and how they can they can build resilient communities that might have a chance of enduring the certain difficulties ahead.

Opposition leader, Tony Abbott.

Read about Abbott’s intentions in the ABC story: “Election blog August 7: Rudd in Sydney, Abbott in Adelaide as Coalition pledges to cut companytax”.

Interestingly, Mr Abbott’s announcement about this intention to reduce corporate tax coincided with the release of a report from the American Meteorological Society that warmed of continuing extreme weather events with warming temperatures being the new norm.

In a story headed: “Climate report warns extreme weather events are now the norm”, the American society said disastrous weather events like Hurricane Sandy in US and droughts and floods in Australia, South America and Africa will become more frequent.

The dichotomy between what Mr Abbott is proposing and what the US report is saying is stark.