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December 16, 2011
The media commentators are back to their favourite theme: a dysfunctional Gillard Government and the Rudd-Gillard leadership conflict tearing federal Labor apart. They see deficiencies everywhere, and a disunited government that is incapable of governing in a 24 hour news cycle.
That is their narrative and it is locked in:
Every momentary event is interpreted in order to foster this narrative of a hopeless Gillard Government continually shooting itself in the foot. And the argument for this position? We need an argument to distinguish it from personal opinion or herd group think. Let us turn to Paul Kelly in The Australian and his Beleaguered Labor caught in a perfect storm.
In this op-ed Kelly focuses in on energy politics- and he is referring to the recently released draft energy white paper:
Resources Minister Martin Ferguson put the issue on the line: household electricity prices had risen 40 per cent in the past three years and will continue to rise given the investment required.The point, Ferguson argued, was the imperative for a market-based approach to energy, greater efficiency, privatisation of assets and no pre-determined views about the best clean energy options. The politics are apparent: if Labor imposes unnecessarily high costs on households it will be penalised by a ballot box revolt.Ferguson knows that for too long Labor governments chose high-cost options in the cause of being green and assuming that Labor-voting low-income workers were too dumb to realise they were being played for mugs. That game is up.
So the reason for federal Labor's woes are being green. Australia's comparative advantage of cheap energy is eroding and Australia's locked-in $23 a tonne carbon price is "way out in front of the pack". Kelly adds:
With global action stalled for much of the decade this prompts the question: was Gillard's new passion for pricing carbon driven by Australia's national interest or Labor's political interest in making minority government work?
The answer for Kelly is obvious. It is Labor's political interest in making minority government work--staying in power--- not the national interest. The inference is that a damaged Labor government isn't capable of addressing the competitiveness and productivity hole into which Australia is sinking. They are incompetent.
It's the same old narrative of the 'carbon-tax-will-ruin-the-economy'. What lies beneath the surface here is energy politics. The conservative position is that the Gillard Government shouldn't make the transition to a low carbon economy the Greens are demanding, as it is obvious that Australia's future lays with coal: Australia will continue to be largely dependent on fossil fuels, it will need to embrace uranium and it needs to expand its existing deregulation and privatisation of energy markets (in Queensland and NSW).
The energy right policy is to phase out renewable energy targets because these are expensive and superfluous and not use public funds to pick technological winners (through the $10 billion clean energy investment fund). These green policies need to be removed as they are not the path to economic growth. The carbon pricing will slug Australian businesses at a time when the European economic crisis will hurt Australia's growth prospects. These are the standard talking points of the big energy industry (coal fired generators) who hate solar.
Therefore, as the AFR's weekend editorial puts it we don't have a clear -headed government with a commitment to bolstering Australia's economic defences and prosecuting reforms that increase the economy's flexibility and productiveness.
Yet coal-fired power stations will be retired over the next few years, the cost of solar power is rapidly decreasing, and Australia is well on track to reach its renewable energy target of having 20% of its national electricity generated from renewable sources (using wind and solar) by 2020.
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Same old, same old from him: false dichotomies, sado economics and the dread of a hiding when father gets home.
Do people still read the OZ, some thing from an organisation that has redefined the meaning of shooting one's self in the foot, over the last year?