Our return to the dark side

The so-called “Pacific Solution” to Australia’s refugee issue is a fraud and a national disgrace.

 The politicians on both sides may have deluded themselves into thinking that they really care about the refugees, but its crap.

Their objective has nothing to do with refugees – it’s all about getting re-elected. It’s all about opinion polls.

The whole issue hangs on two flawed assumptions:

1.  We are being inundated with boat people.
2.  The rest of the world wants to come and live in Australia.

Compared to refugees around the world, the boats coming to Australia are an issue only to the politicians and the journalists who feed on them. The numbers are just not significant that is la verita.

That the masses in Australia should be ignorant and parochial enough to think that “this is the best little bloody place on earth” and therefore we must protect it from being overrun by the hordes is only natural. For the politicians to join in this delusion and feed it is unforgivable.

Very few people in this world ever want to leave their home – that is la verita.  Australia is a great place, but so is Disneyland. They are great places to visit on holiday.  But if you ask people from anywhere on earth where they want to be, where they want to raise their children, you will soon realise “there’s no place like home”.

That’s where they were brought up, that’s where their parents were brought up and that’s where their grandparents were brought up.

So don’t worry Aussie’s, they are not all planning to come over here to steal your telly.

We have some of the most poverty stricken people on earth living just off our shores – almost within swimming distance – but they are not piling on to boats to get to “a better life” in Australia. They want to stay home.

Boat people do not come from our near neighbours, they come from war zones.

So, with respect, Mrs Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, here’s an idea – if you really want to stop “boat people” coming here, then why don’t you stop bombing their fuckin’ homes!

If you really want to stop refugees, focus your efforts and your resources on ending the wars, and achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Now really, why the hell do I have to write this stuff? What has happened to our journalists?

I’m really busy right now. I left newspapers 15 years ago. I am just recovering from the flu and I was looking forward to having a nice easy day on the couch playing my son’s Xbox.

Then this morning, as our politicians are debating their “Pacific Solution” legislation in Canberra, I hear Richard Towle, UNHCR Regional Representative for Australia, New Zealand, PNG and the Pacific, reveal to Fran Kelly that he hasn’t yet been consulted.

Talk about ruin my day! I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it! What the fuck is going on!

Now the legislation has just passed the House of Representatives – well hoo-fuckin-ray!

And protesters have come out in the streets to object – well God bless them, but they haven’t got a chance. They don’t understand the political forces, the levels of delusion they are fighting against.

With no leadership in Canberra, most journalists out to lunch or out of a job, and both major parties now singing to the choir of xenophobia. the poor refugees haven’t got a fuckin’ chance.

Let’s be clear here, former Defence Force Chief Angus Houston may be an expert at creating refugees but he is not an expert at dealing with them -- Richard Towle is.

As Richard told Fran this morning he had “some concerns” with the Gillard Government’s “Pacific Solution”. Which is diplomatic speak for “it stinks”.

His idea of a regional solution would involve raising the standards of treatment in the region, not lowing Australia’s standards. That’s why he wasn’t consulted.

The fact is torturing refugees is not the way to solve the problem. Nor is it the way to thwart the people smugglers. The way you do that is make it safe for people to stay home.

And as for Tony Abbott singing the praises of the Howard solutions – and calling on the Prime Minister to apologise for criticising them – I would like him to explain to me why those responsible for implementing the Howard policies should not be charged under The Crimes Act with child abuse.

As Richard mentioned in passing this morning we are still trying to deal with the mental illnesses caused by the Howard policies.

I still shudder when I remember a child being returned to Wimmera Detention Centre against the medical advice (and protests) from the government phychiatrist, back in those dark days. Torturing refugees maybe a vote winner in this country, particularly in some marginal electorates, but it is also a crime against humanity.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m frankly too busy to look it up right now, but I would like Tony to explain to me why members of the government can be exempt from child-abuse laws – particularly given that the Immigration Minister is the legal guardian of unaccompanied minors.

If this had happened in Bosnia in the ‘90s, we would be pursuing them to the ends of the earth. So why aren’t we charging all those who knowingly inflicted harm on refugees, and all those public servants who sadly “were only following orders”.

That’s enough, it’s time to start treating refugees like refugees. Don’t make me have to tell you again.

PM is right. We are being fed crap on climate change

The most effective way for me to reduce my domestic greenhouse gas emissions would be to kick my family out of the house and live alone. Then I could walk up and down the street waving my greatly reduced energy bills and proclaiming what a wonderful greenie I am.

It would be a fraud, of course, just like most of Australia’s attempts to tackle climate change.

Australia is shirking its responsibility in this global challenge because our policies are dominated be ignorant egotists who have deluded themselves into believing they are greenies.

We are not leading the world on climate change – far from it.

Ignorant, loud-mouthed, egotistical ‘greenies’ and deluded journalists and politicians are keeping this country splashing around in the kiddies paddling pool instead of assisting with the big issues in the deep end.

The climate change policies of both major parties are stuck in our domestic electorate. Climate change is a global problem. Australia is a minor energy consumer in this world, but we are a major energy producer and this is where our efforts should focus.

We are a major energy producer in the fastest growing region of the globe – Asia Pacific. There are hundreds of millions of people living in poverty across the Asia Pacific region.

I recently visited communities that have infant mortality rates that make even our worst Aboriginal communities seem like Shangri La. The reason is even remote Aboriginal communities have access to medical care when their children get really sick. In many communities in our region of the world there is no medical care, there is no Flying Doctor, no ambulance, no ‘intervention’. So parents regularly bury children, who die of routine illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhoea, or malaria.

But, the good news is things are improving. Countries are working hard to raise their living standards to levels we take for granted. The bad news is achieving this requires capital and energy – lots of it. As a result Asia’s energy demand is growing at roughly the equivalent of a new ‘Australia’ joining the region every 18 months.

Naturally these countries are going for the most affordable energy and that is coal. Australia, being the world’s largest coal exporter, is therefore doing OK out of all this humanitarian endeavour. It helped us dodge the GFC.

When I hear the Australian Government pledge to reducing our domestic greenhouse emissions by five per cent, I say ‘so what.’

We are going to increase the amount of renewable energy in our power generation to 20 per cent – big deal. We might as well pour money into Morris Dancing – at least it would create more jobs.

If we really believed that climate change was serious, if we really believed that it required urgent action, we would stop wasting money on mirrors and propellers and instead concentrate on trying to improve coal-fired power generation.

If we could develop a one percent improvement in the world’s future coal-fired power generation this would dwarf anything Australia did in our puny domestic market. Yet the Gillard Government’s latest climate-change policy had nothing in this area.

And when a company in Victoria, HRL, embarked on an ambitious project to build a pilot-plant to attempt to prove technology with the potential to reduce emissions from coal-fired power by 30 per cent, so-called “environmentalists” turned on them like rabid dogs. Where were our politicians or journalists who could have put this outrageous attack into perspective?

If this project has been killed, then it is not beyond credibility to say that those responsible have dealt a severe blow to the world’s efforts to combat climate change. They clearly believe that their own egotistical agenda is more important than truly tackling climate change. They have no awareness of the real challenge and are quite content to just ‘kick their family out of the house’.

Climate change exposes a fundamental flaw in our democratic system – policies are formed by egotists. However, tackling climate change requires technically sophisticated collaborators – engineers.

They are essentially excluded from the debate.

This is a multi-faceted, complex, technical problem -- we won’t get the answers from focus groups.

Greenhouse Myths and politicians

Twenty years from now we Australians will be getting 0.3 percent of our energy from solar power. Says who?

 Says the Government.

But they don’t say it out loud because the Greens might hear. Instead they talk about our bright green, renewable energy future and all the jobs that will be created as we “switch over” to “clean” energy.

Such energy myths have destroyed the world’s ability to make any credible attempt to deal with climate change.

We Australians have pledged to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Both major parties agree on this goal – yet it will not be met. Australia has no chance of reducing its GHG emissions at all in the next nine years.

If the Government seriously pursued this goal, we the people, would turf them out of office.

The only way we will meet this commitment is by buying credits from overseas. We will find a way to buy licences to continue business as usual.

Again, this is another fact you will not hear the Government – or the Opposition – saying out loud.

The Gillard Government has announced (ever so quietly) that we will be getting 13 percent of our electricity from wind and solar in 20 years – one percent of this will be solar.

But haven’t we got bi-partisan agreement on sourcing 20 percent of our electricity from renewables in just nine years time? Yes we have.  But this is just more myth and spin.

As the current Government, like those before it, make clear – if you ask quietly – wind and solar, geothermal, wave energy, these are all extras on the renewable energy set and will be for the foreseeable future. The stars are wood and hydro dams – but, again, don’t say that out loud or the Greens might hear and there will be hell to pay.

The Government’s carbon tax is, sadly, dead. It has drowned in this sea of myth and spin. The only question for Julia Gillard is how to get back to what Kevin Rudd has led us to believe was her original position without getting the blame.  If she cans the tax the Greens will throw a tantrum and her fragile Government will collapse.

However, if she lets the Greens have a big input into drafting the legislation it will become political poison for the other independents who will vote it down in the House. She will get away Scot free and will be able to claim the high moral ground going into the next election. Brilliant politics!

But, once again, a sad day for the future of the planet and our attempts to tackle climate change.

So let’s kill a few more persistent myths in the hope we can apply CPR to this “CPRS” and get the tax over the line.

Myth: Corporations are the “Big Polluters” and the tax will make them pay.

 Fact: We are the big polluters – we the “working families”.

Corporations have been working hard to become more energy efficient since the oil shocks of the ‘70s. That’s when there was a step change energy costs and so reducing their energy consumption has meant big bucks for big business.

The carbon tax is not designed to make big corporations pay – it’s designed to make us pay more for our energy in the hope we will use less. Any corporate costs will be passed on to us, the consumers, one way or another – just like the GST.

Making us more energy efficient will achieve a great deal more than our solar pipe dreams.

For example, if we can improve the efficiency of our car fleet by just one percent, that would be equivalent in terms of GHG reductions to our entire national solar power generation.

Running our cars with the right air pressure in our tyres would improve the fleet by about 3 percent. Improving our driving habits – that is less speeding and accelerating – can deliver improvements anywhere up to 33 percent.

Myth: The carbon tax will lead to a revolution in renewable energy.

Fact: The Government says that all renewable energy will account for only 8 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption in 20 years time. The other 92 percent will still be fossil fuels.

The tax will, however, tilt the scales back in favour of the planet so that over the next 100 years or so, we will improve the impact of our growing energy use a little sooner than might otherwise be the case.

We journalists, politicians, economists and academics will never produce the solutions to our energy challenges – these will have to come from our engineers and scientists.

The best we can do is work towards creating the political and fiscal environment that will support and assist our engineers and scientists. For starters we can certainly encourage more of our youth into the maths-science stream.  We desperately need more engineers – as opposed to more models and rock stars.

Now is the time to start getting real about this climate challenge.