November 2, 2009 – , Australian opposition leader seals own doom by not bending knee to shock jock
On this day, November 2 in 2009,
Abbott had dropped his daughters at the bus stop and was driving back across Roseville Bridge at about 7.30am when he turned on 2GB and heard Malcolm Turnbull having a set-to with Alan Jones. If you listen to a tape of that 2 November 2009 exchange now, you hear Turnbull refusing to kowtow to Jones, who becomes hysterically agitated about the ‘hoax’ of global warming and a secret deal by world leaders which will bleed $50 billion from Australia and send it off to South America. Turnbull is sharp with Jones once or twice, asking to be heard, reminding him his heroes Margaret Thatcher and John Howard wanted action on global warming: ‘Don’t you think,’ asks the leader of the Opposition, ‘you sound like the old lady who says the whole world is mad except for thee and me, and I have my doubts about thee?’
Abbott thought Turnbull’s leadership was terminal at that moment. What he was hearing was bar-room brawl between his leader and the guru of a great swathe of the Liberal Party. This was no way to deal with Alan Jones. Turnbull wasn’t showing the necessary respect. It would cause immense damage.
(Marr, 2012:73)
[see also Paul Kelly “Triumph and Demise” on same period – Turnbull trying to get CPRS through with Rudd enjoying his pain too much to bother making a deal. You never hear the ALP talk about that – instead they like to bash the Greens…]
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 385ish ppm. At time of writing it was 41ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
John Howard had resisted any climate action for as long as possible, but finally in late 2006 had switched too a fallback of asking a civil servant to look at emissions trading – the Shergold Report, as much of a u-turn as you were going to get. He then got blown away in the November 2007 elections by Kevin “I’m from Queensland, I’m here to help” Rudd. Turnbull had overthrown first post-Howard Lib leader, Brendan Nelso, brought some Libs with him, not others….
Why this matters.
We should always be alert to “but for a nail the battle was lost” and just how mad-as-a-box-of-frogs-left-on-the-back-seat-of-a-Ute the internal dynamics of political parties can be.
What happened next?
The Climate Wars
One reply on “November 2, 2009 – , Australian opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull seals own doom by not bending knee to shock jock”
Mainstream media owned by wealthy private citizens control the messaging of what gets reported to their own ends. Political parties are self-interested in that their purpose is to win office and stay in office. They have tax power on so many levels, and the commoners are at their constant mercy regardless literacy levels. During those early years of climatology, I (he) was a child wondering many things as to his existence. Cognitively he was not able to comprehend the harm that was being caused by the prevailing theories and laws of capitalism. There is so much white noise with social media platforms and the internet in general that it is unlikely C02 admission increases will be simply understood by everyday citizens. Increasingly these concerns have become a political football for political parties and self-serving citizens. I proposed like-minded concerns demand climate history (no propaganda) be facilitated at appropriate cognitive levels from primary to grade 12. Chat GPT will not save this biosphere and life as we have known it.