“protesters besieged the Marrickville office of Labor MHR and minister, Anthony Albanese. News reports record that ‘angry’ demonstrators jeered and booed: one ‘female protester grabbed Mr Albanese by the tie and called him “gutless” and a “maggot”’ (AAP 2011). This was one of a series of anti-carbon tax protests held during 2011–12.”
(Ward, 2015: 225) See also – Lentini, R. 2011. Democracy-is-dead mob takes its anger to Anthony Albanese’s door. Daily Telegraph 2 September.
On this day the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 390.33ppm. Now it is 420ish- but see here for the latest.
Why this matters.
We need to remember that this happened, that there are people who will scream blue murder at the smallest effort to do anything about climate change
What happened next?
The legislation got through. Then it was repealed by the Liberal-National Party government. Albanese… dunno what he did next..
On May 16th, 2005, the Australian Senate inquiry into the 2004 Energy White Paper came out.
The 2004 Energy White Paper had – even by the spectacularly low standards of the Howard Government – been a blank cheque for the fossil fuel industry (they’d basically been invited to write it) and a kick in the teeth for the then-nascent renewables lobby.
So, the Senate inquiry
has concluded the Energy White Paper will delay critical action on climate change for another twenty years.
The Senate Inquiry report shines a light on John Howard’s failure to act on climate change. The report says the Energy White Paper:
• Is a blueprint for delay in reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and will be directly responsible for the high cost to future generations of Australians – environmentally and economically.
• Fails to accept climate change has already begun and therefore action to reduce emissions must be taken immediately.
• Lacks an effective plan to cut greenhouse pollution, a long term target to boost renewable energy or a long term plan to control the spiralling pollution from the energy or transport sectors.
Where does all this come from? From the website of an obscure Australian politician called Anthony Albanese, who, by the time some of you read this will either
a) be Prime Minister of Australia
or
b) have lost the unlosable election and be hiding in a caravan park in rural New South Wales.
Why this matters?
States still sometimes have the capacity to tell the truth about what the government is (not) doing. If you keep your eyes open, you can get a pretty adequate picture of what is going on. In the UK, for example, the National Audit Office still tells you more or less how things are failing.
What happened next
Howard’s end came in late 2007. Labour under Kevin Rudd comprehensively bollocksed its climate response. Gillard tidied up the mess as best she could. Then the wrecking ball known as Tony Abbott swept that thin legislation away. Prime Minister Turnbull did feck all, Scott Morrison has continued the rot…
On this day in 2005, Australian politician Anthony Albanese said the following in parliament.
At the beginning of this century, we are at a crossroad. The science is clear and compelling: ecological decline is accelerating and many of the world’s ecosystems are reaching dangerous thresholds. Overexploitation of our natural resources, habitat loss from urbanisation and the clearing of forests for farmland, competition from introduced animals and plants, and climate change induced by a 30 per cent increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are threatening the world’s diversity. The facts are these: since the industrial revolution average global surface temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius, the most dramatic rise for over 1,000 years; the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last seven years, the 10 hottest in the last 14; snow cover has decreased 10 per cent since the 1960s; and glaciers that have not retreated since the last ice age 12,000 years ago are now doing so.
The Howard government’s most significant failure is its decision to pursue an isolationist position on climate change….
You can read the full whack here.
The context is this – Australian civil society was still not up on its hindlegs about climate change, despite the country’s exquisite vulnerability, shameful international record and largely derisory domestic response. By the end of the following year, that would change….
What happened next
Well, “Albo” is now leader of the opposition. And there is an election coming. Watch this space.
On this day in 2006 Anthony Albanese MP (now leader of the Opposition and perhaps Australia’s next Prime Minister) and Federal Labor MP Bob Sercombe launched Our Drowning Neighbours, Labor’s Policy Discussion Paper on Climate Change in the Pacific.
This was part of the ALP’s use of climate as an ‘wedge’ issue to differentiate itself from the (seemingly-endless) government of John Howard (we will be coming back to him more than once in the course of this project). That use of climate as a wedge would accelerate markedly when, at the end of 2006, Kevin Rudd took over as opposition leader.
Why this matters. By the early 1980s, once the science and consequences of what was then called the “carbon dioxide problem” was basically settled, the sea level rise issue has been understood. And islands and low-lying states knew they had an existential (and not in the wanky Sartre sense) problem. And there have been endless declarations about this. And Australia, as the big beast in the South Pacific, and as the very big polluter (both domestically and via its coal – and more lately gas exports) is always going to be in the frame.
What happened next – The Labor Party formed a government in 2007, in the “first climate change election.” Refugee issues were on the agenda for Rudd and then Gillard, but not in the way that Albanese and Seccombe might have thought.. Australia is now fortress Australia, and you wouldn’t bet on a different set of policies any time soon. Meanwhile, the small island states know that they will simply not be there in another fifty years.
