By Jo Nova
Democracy is the point isn’t it?
The Australian editors are trying to diagnose why the conservative side of politics is tearing itself apart, but they miss the elephant on the bus. Net Zero has crippled the conservatives but it’s not because they don’t believe in it, it’s because many of them do.
Half of the voters are fed up with the carbon dioxide propaganda and they have no major party to vote for. They don’t need PhD’s to know that the catastrophe hasn’t happened, the predictions were wrong and the experts all own beach houses. Anyone with an electricity bill knows that renewables are expensive, and China burns our coal, but we are not supposed to.
The Liberals and Nationals should be the natural voice to fight this Big Government creeping corruption and the sodding failure of our institutions, but where are they? AWOL.
Half the voters (at least) are skeptical of plans to mould the global climate with our power stations. These are the sensible half.
The Editors think Tony Abbott refused to accept “the Zeitgeist” and that was why he lost the leadership. Instead, it was why he won.
The Zeitgeist in 2013 (and every year) was to Axe The Tax — specifically, to get rid of the carbon tax and toss out the Emission trading Scheme. Abbott won the largest victory in three decades in the Australian parliament and the commentariat forgot that a day later.
His stand on the issue helped Mr Turnbull seize the prime ministership in Mr Abbott’s first term in 2015, fatally repeating the mistake of leadership instability that undermined Labor in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years from 2007 to 2013.
The fatal mistake wasn’t “leadership instability”. Australians don’t wake up in the morning saying “I need more leadership stability in my life”. The Liberals fatal mistake was to ignore half the voters, pander to stone age witchcraft and let foreign committees dictate Australian policy.
For years, polls have shown skeptics are an absolute majority, repeatedly, consistently, and across the West. Last year half of Australia didn’t want to pay a single red cent on Net Zero targets, 69% of Australians wanted to use coal and gas if it made electricity cheaper and 83% didn’t want higher emissions targets. That’s an election winning majority and the Liberals didn’t even try to capture this vote. Worse, Donald Trump had led the way for the last decade and proved it was an election winner, and Nigel Farage was storming in the UK. And it’s been like this for years: in 2015 54% of Australians were skeptics (a CSIRO estimate).
The Liberals have had ten years warning, and they still missed it.
The misdiagnosis continues:
Mr Turnbull failed to convince his colleagues and voters of his capacity to deliver and suffered at the ballot box.
Mr Turnbull didn’t “fail to convince his colleagues and voters of his capacity to deliver”, the problem was that he did deliver, but it was everything the voters didn’t want. Turnbull gave us the Emissions Trading Scheme that Kevin Rudd wanted and Australians hated.
The Liberal Party is fracturing because there are truths here, and the Liberals have picked the wrong side every time. They got it wrong on the science, wrong on the energy and wrong on voter desires. No wonder they face an existential crisis. They fell for the B-grade consensus and the junk modeling. They ran chicken from petty namecalling by teenage girls, and they ignored the millions of voters who kept telling them “We Don’t Want Carbon Taxes”.
Image by Eynoxart from Pixabay
Politics of net zero at the heart of Coalition Fightback
Editorial, The Australian
Net zero was the issue at the core of the troubles that dogged the Coalition government over three prime ministers, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, whose tenures have been forensically explored by editor-at-large Paul Kelly. Mr Abbott remains consistent in his refusal to accept the Zeitgeist view on the need for strong climate action.
Does a 90 seat majority mean nothing? It seems so…