Final leaders' debate: Shorten slams climate inaction as Morrison focuses on tax

Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten pitched competing visions for Australia in the decade ahead, as the two leaders faced off in the final debate of the election campaign.

Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten during the third and
final election debate at the National Press Club.

With just 10 days to go before the 18 May poll, which Labor is favoured to win, Morrison and Shorten locked horns on a range of policy areas, mostly focused on Labor’s tax reform agenda.

Outlining his vision for Australia in 10 years’ time, Morrison focused on jobs and infrastructure spending, while Shorten nominated climate change, equality and the pursuit of a “modern Australia”.

“I want us to be a nation which is more equal and, in becoming more equal, what we’ll actually deliver is a more prosperous and wealthy nation for my kids and, indeed, their kids after that,” Shorten told the National Press Club debate.

Read the story from The Guardian by Sarah Martin - “Final leaders' debate: Shorten slams climate inaction as Morrison focuses on tax."

Human construct stands between us and mitigating human-induced climate change

A human construct is what stands in the way of moving toward mitigating human-induced climate change.

Humans, bit by bit, piece by piece have built an economy that now straddles the globe and while it was to be our servant, it is has become our master.

The options -
 climate change
 or the economy.

The economy has been elevated to God-like status and to suggest anything likely to unseat it, borders on blasphemy and bring with it accusations of ignorance, naivety and even stupidity brought on by a gross misunderstanding of what it is that gives the world society sustenance.

Such allegations arise from an addiction to the paradigm in which the world economy is embedded and with most governments in the world, whether they be liberal democracies, communistic, despotic regimes, religion-based facades of democracy or something of any other flavour, bowing before the might of money, to suggest something different is not only decried, but considered grossly irresponsible.

Humanity, or at least some of it, has been fortunate to escape from the daily trepidations of the hunter and gatherer life, something that has been achieved in building an economy which has, in many ways served us well, but at the same time has ignored the subtle beauties of life that cannot be measured in the simplistic brutal reality that is money.

Growth, a code word for exploitation, has seen man excavate the world’s ancient sunlight, and in the past two or three centuries use the fossil fuels we discovered with a rude rush of exuberance that saw all the available environmental sinks on the earth filled to over-capacity, disrupting the earth’s atmosphere to create a disarray with the world’s climate to subsequently bring-on weather patterns with which humans are unfamiliar.

That unfamiliarity is of such a dimension that the future of humanity, along with most other species with which it shares the planet, is questionable.

The time is already a few decades past and certain weather related difficulties cannot be avoided, but it is time to bury our concerns about the world economy and change our rhetoric to align it with ideals that are about equality, philanthropy, altruism, sharing, kindness and an understanding of the other to ensure that life on earth can endure.

The economy has served a few on earth well, disadvantaged more and if we are unable to rein it in and return it to again being a servant, as opposed to a master, then climate change will continue its march to a rather gloomy conclusion.

- Robert McLean