South Australia shows up the federal government ... and rightwing commentary

Cast your mind back to 2016, when South Australia
suffered from major power outages.
The right took this as a propaganda
opportunity for the promotion of dirty power.’ 

The South Australian government announced on Tuesday that it would address market failure with the time-honoured measure of government intervention. In addition, the Weatherill government has chosen to continue to rely extensively on renewable energy. Together, these themes in the government’s announcement have provoked the kind of howling rightwing atavism that shows exactly why they are increasingly at odds with the Australian public on this issue.

Cast your mind back to 2016, when South Australia suffered from major power outages. The right took this as a propaganda opportunity for the promotion of dirty power. The problem, op-ed after op-ed from Einsteins like Chris Kenny proclaimed, was the reliance on wind. Magic words like “baseload” were relentlessly defecated into the pail of our energy debate. The verdicts of experts were roundly ignored, if not castigated. It was all of a piece with the madness that has produced Senate inquiries into imaginary ailments and the veneration of inanimate carbon in the parliament.

Read the opinion piece on The Guardian by Jason Wilson - “South Australia shows up the federal government ... and rightwing commentary.”

ACMA decision on Bolt 'beggars belief'

East Malvern’s Graeme Scarlett’s letter in today’s Melbourne Age.

Andrew Bolt - ACMA decision about
the columnist "beggars belief".

Bolt's propaganda

It beggars belief that the Australian Communications and Media Authority can argue that Andrew Bolt's statements on climate change are too hyperbolic to be factual (The Age, 8/8). So Bolt presents rubbish as facts; ACMA then deems that as they are not facts they must instead be opinions. Hence no one can ever be charged with not presenting facts correctly. Catch 22. ACMA, Bolt's statements are fictional propaganda. He is intelligent enough to know he is deliberately misleading people with rubbish. Climate change deniers specifically use the year 1998 to try to back up their arguments, while no respectable scientist or statistician would use this once-off extreme as a standard. The year 1998 is a statistical outlier that means nothing regarding long-term trends.

Graeme Scarlett, East Malvern.

Making the connection between ANZAC Day and climate change

-      by Robert McLean.

It seems appropriate on the eve of ANZAC Day to make some observation about its connection to climate change.

Many might argue that such a correlation is tenuous and to do so demands the “drawing of a long bow”.

Maybe there is no immediate or obvious link between ANZAC Day and the human-induced damage to Earth’s climate system, but the underlying philosophies of both have undeniable similarities.

Both exist because of unrestrained human wants; wants that ignore public needs and loaded with a perverse sense of right, people engage in war to control physical space and within that the lives of others, while in another form of exploitation man has applied its knowledge and intuition in an attempt to control nature.

Logically, neither can ever succeed.

War only ends when everyone is dead, or one subdues another and that, rather than a solution is little more than a hiatus allowing the beaten to recover, reaffirm their reason and return to the battle.

And nature never rests; subdue it in one place and it will simply rise up in another, probably in an unexpected fashion.

It has always been those unrestrained human wants or hegemonic desires, our hubris and arrogance, our misplaced and uninformed longings, and a simple misunderstanding of our environment that have led to war and beyond that, those same failings have taken us deep into the dilemma that is climate change.

Frequently, have underestimated those we were to call our enemies and equally frequently, we have underestimated and misunderstood  our dependence on nature and the environment it brings to keep us alive.

It was a tragedy that the men and women of Australia ever donned a uniform, took up arms and crossed the oceans to fight; equally, it has been and is, a tragedy that a century after the ANZAC experience propaganda has kept the myth alive and tomorrow Australians everywhere will lie prostrate (figuratively speaking) before a distorted memory.

Immense sums have been spent to keep the ANZAC myth alive in the populist mind and so keeping it at the forefront of national climate change, distracting the “responsible men” from actually doing anything about preparing Australia for climate change, a threat far greater than anything that confronted the nation a century ago.