Comment

Anthony Albanese’s official honeymoon ends this weekend, but his honeymoon with the electorate is continuing, according to the latest opinion polls, boosted by his opponents’ disarray and the government’s significant wins since the May election. Albanese has successfully kept the balance between China and the United States, Australia’s biggest trading partner and its most important strategic ally respectively. He has also succeeded in passing the biggest environmental reforms in three decades.

You can say this about Barnaby Joyce: it took him eating dinner in Pauline Hanson’s parliamentary office to realise how much he resembles a steak cooked on an open sandwich press. What the man lacks in integrity, he makes up for in shallow symbolism: the cow was reared by Gina Rinehart.

Two thoughts come rushing to mind as I attempt to follow the ridiculous and irresponsible machinations of the two opposition parties over Australia’s climate targets, especially net zero by 2050. The first is the scornful philosophy of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass … The second is that most people would like to go to heaven, but no one wants to die to get there.

It’s December 30, 2021. Life is good. Harri and I have had a fabulous family Christmas and we’re excited, loading our cars full of gardening and building equipment. We’re heading to our new home in a town and community we love just north of Merimbula, where we plan to retire.

Watt had put everything on the line politically, creating a deadline to finalise what was in fact a five-year journey to reach a destination everybody agreed was needed, namely the implementation of recommendations proposed by businessman Graeme Samuel after his review of a framework that had been in place for 25 years.

Based on the updated national climate pledges submitted ahead of COP30, it is clear that our politicians are still not showing the genuine leadership needed to transition rapidly away from fossil fuels, which are responsible for close to 90 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

The politics of climate and the environment is just as messy at the United Nations summit in Belém, Brazil, as it is in Canberra and the Australian states. The fate of the planet is running a poor second to vested interests and crude personal power plays.

Each child born should be a tabula rasa, a chance to write history anew. Instead their fate is foretold. Our historical blood feuds call us into battle. We are encouraged to live big, heroic lives, avenging ancestral crimes.

Sussan Ley says she’s not worried about upsetting “people in Paris”. It’s a neat way of explaining how little she understands the Paris Agreement, a failure of comprehension so great she seems to believe it’s a treaty with France. The misapprehension captures the cow-eyed stupidity of the Liberal Party’s position on climate change and of the people who argued for it.

With all the positioning and repositioning of political parties and movements in recent years, two key questions have emerged. What is a conservative? And how do we build an electable conservative movement?