My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Wednesday 27 March 2024

Palestine decisions both bad policy and bad politics

Since the attack by Hamas on October 7 and subsequently the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza, the Australian government’s response has been based on pleasing both the powerful established Israel lobby on one side, and the growing pro-Palestinian lobby and sympathisers on the other. While at the same time maintaining solidarity with American foreign policy, of course.

The result is nothing to be proud of, policy devoid of principle, not helping anyone, and bad politics to boot.

It was a prime example of Paul Keating’s maxim that “Good policy makes good politics”. The corollary is that politics without principle makes bad policy.

Of course, neither any Australian policy nor Keating’s pronouncements would make a scrap of difference to the Netanyahu’s disproportionate response to Hamas’ 7^th October attack. We are irrelevant to Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocidal response.

“Acting on principle rather than politics in the face of human tragedy should be for our own self-respect, how we hope our nation will be seen and not be embarrassed by it”, wrote Michael Pascoe in The New Daily.

Time and again, betraying principle has a way of coming back to bite us. Joining wars for political reasons, not principles, has killed Australians, made Australians killers and contributed to broader outrages. Iraq and Afghanistan are prime examples.

What I’m referring to here is the complete embarrassment of Australia withholding funding from UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), prevaricating about restoring it, and finally being shamed in the wake of other nations’ actions to “unpause” it, as Senator Wong put it, thereby mangling the English language in a way that is sadly not unusual in the Australian political lexicon.

The government deserves no credit for finally doing the right thing only when it had no other option.

Overlooked the will-we-won’t-we over resuming aid is the debt Australia owes the Palestinian people. It should not be forgotten that Australia played a role in creating the millions of Palestinian refugees.

For three-quarters of a century we have been told it is a proud role. As the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade notes, “Australia was the first country to vote in favour of the 1947 UN partition resolution, which ultimately led to the creation of Israel as a nation state”. We have continued our wholehearted support ever since, irrespective of the merits of the actions of its government.

The corollary of that, voting to give away land that wasn’t ours to give, remaining second only to the United States in supporting Israel ever after, is that we helped create the losers as well as the winners and have responsibilities to act with principles in our dealings with both.

In January, when Israel alleged a dozen of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff were involved in the October 7 terrorism, there was an instant reaction by some countries, including Australia, to cease funding the organisation trying to keep people alive in Gaza, despite the allegation being unproven.

Anyway, our funding of UNRWA is not funding for Hamas. Instead, it is feeding people who are being starved and killed and maimed by a government Australia continues to support and dares not censure.

The tragedy for us is that this little saga has nothing to do with whether some Australian dollars might find their way into a Hamas member’s pocket – it’s because of domestic politics.

The same fear of being wedged by the Coalition that drove the Labor leadership to adopt AUKUS overnight on the strength of a verbal briefing had the government scared of doing what it knew was right on UNRWA.

The opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Simon Birmingham, has said “If UNRWA funding from Australia was to be restored, it should be done only in concert with a key partner like the United States”. Cap in hand, presumably, as he groveled.

That’s it. In the Coalition’s servile world, Australia should only do what the United States tells us to do. Forget the rest of the world and certainly don’t think for ourselves, just wait until Washington decides for us. However disappointing Labor’s performance has been, you can rely on Birmingham/Dutton/Paterson to be worse.

The ‘Trumpification’ of the LNP proceeds at a brisk pace. This is Australian domestic politics: a principle-free zone that leads to bad policy.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Wednesday 20 March 2024

Now Dutton is pushing the madness of large scale nuclear reactors

Recently Opposition leader Peter Dutton has changed his mind about small modular nuclear reactors, which he had previously supported. Now he is championing large scale models. These are the traditional ones that while supplying electric power in some countries have also caused so much grief. Think of Three Mile Island in the USA and Chernobyl in the USSR. Writing in The Saturday Paper Paul Bongiorno described this as “Dutton’s nuclear implosion”.

“Critics of Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party’s nuclear policy have called it an attempt to slow-walk renewable adoption and protect vested fossil fuel interests, who regularly donate to the opposition leader and his party” wrote Peter McKenzie in The New Daily. In other words, as well as being a potentially dangerous proposition it is also a front to protect traditional fossil fuelled electricity – in other words, coal and gas suppliers.

Australia legislated a country-wide ban on nuclear power in 1998 under the Howard government, but Dutton has signalled that his party will take a nuclear first policy into the next federal election.

Economists, renewable energy advocates and politicians across the aisle have called out the policy as  both unviable and an excuse to protect fossil fuel consumption. Peter Dutton’s Coalition ally, Nationals leader David Littleproud, gave the game away in a morning TV interview when he linked the Opposition’s rekindled fervour for nuclear energy to the survival of the coal industry.

Professor John Quiggin, from the University of Queensland’s School of Economics, said it is clear the policy has been adopted as opposition to renewable energy, instead of because of sound economic factors. Let’s first of all demolish the case for small modular reactors.

“If they continue talking about small modular reactors, you can say it’s just window dressing because there are none and there aren’t going to be any anytime soon,” he said.

“Nothing has improved for nuclear since the Labor government was elected, let alone since (the Liberal Party) were first elected in 2013.”

Only China and Russia have successfully built small modular reactors, a type of reactor built in a factory and shipped to the site of the power plant and attempts to commodify and mass produce SMRs have so far failed. 

Now to large scale reactors. A report into the viability of nuclear energy late last year found that adoption would be too slow and expensive in Australia, with the average nuclear power station taking over nine years to build, compared to between one and three years for major wind or solar projects.

Steve Blume, a renewable energy advocate and chair of Smart Voting, said Dutton and the Liberal Party are supporting nuclear energy to slow the adoption of wind, solar and other renewable sources.

“It’s bizarre that they are proposing nuclear, it’s the slowest to deploy and highest cost technology in the world,” he said. “It’s all a distraction and a delay.”

Dutton has voted consistently against adopting net-zero emission targets, serious climate action and acknowledging climate change throughout his time in Parliament.

In the lead-up to the 2022 federal election, fossil fuel companies donated $2 million to major parties.

Fossil fuel giants Santos, Woodside and Whitehaven Coal donated $193,950 to the Liberal Party in the 2022-23 financial year, while paying just $30 in federal income tax during the same period.

Bluescope Steel, the Minerals Council of Australia, Hancock Prospecting and the GFG Alliance are also regular donors to the Liberal Party, according to the Australian Electoral Commission’s transparency register.

Of course, the push for nuclear power is also designed to damage renewables. Members of Dutton’s shadow ministry, and his potential deputy premier, appeared at an anti-renewable energy rally earlier this year in Canberra.

When Dutton finally surfaced three days after the Dunkley by-election loss he ducked questions on who would pay for his nuclear “fantasy”, as Albanese calls it, and kept talking about a cheaper, firmer option. His spiel could only be viewed as unbelievable.

The GenCost report from the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator estimates by 2030 the cost of power from an SMR would be between $200 and $350 per megawatt hour, compared with between $60 and $100 per megawatt hour for wind and solar.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Dutton “is always on the hunt for cheap politics, not cheap electricity”.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Wednesday 6 March 2024

Taxing fossil fuels is the way to go

In a welcome contrast to the disinformation spread by Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan & Co, Professor Rod Sims and Professor Ross Garnaut have unveiled a plan to raise $100 billion annually to help deal with the costs of climate change. 

“Everyone’s a winner, except the fossil fuel industry.”

“That’s the nexus of an ambitious pitch by former consumer watchdog chair Rod Sims and economist Ross Garnaut at the National Press Club (NPC) last week for reform centred on climate action” reported Parker McKenzie in The New Daily.

Their suggested “carbon solution levy” would involve taxing fossil fuels at the point of export to compensate for the rising costs of climate change.

Garnaut said that the changes might seem radical, but the levy would affect only about 100 businesses, such as BHP Group, Fortescue Metals and Woodside Petroleum, while raising more than $100 billion each year.

“We know that a general requirement for polluters to pay for the cost they impose on others is impossible in contemporary Australia,” he said.

“But not as impossible politically as accepting continued stagnation and decline in living standards.”

Garnaut said investing 5 per cent or more of national income – a similar amount to what was injected into mining during the “China resources boom” from 2002 to 2012 – into zero-carbon industries would help turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower.

Alongside the levy, Garnaut and Sims pair put forward 15 policy recommendations   that ranged from ensuring Australian industries meet European regulations for tariff-free trade to creating publicly funded hydrogen storage and transport.

Sims said failing to reduce emissions would damage Australians’ prosperity and quality of living.

“Basic economics means that you must price the damage that fossil carbon imposes on us all,” he said.

“Today, we are putting a market mechanism to deal with climate change back on Australia’s agenda.”

Sims, a former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, now chairs The Superpower Institute (TSI).

It is an organisation founded by Garnaut to “change the narrative on the economy and climate change” in Australia and place climate policy at the centre of economic reform.

During questions after the speech, Sims beat back accusations that TSI was a “teal think tank”, due to Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes a Court being one of its directors.

“Any time anyone mentions any increase in any tax whatsoever, they get jumped on,” he said.

“It’s nothing so much about the proposals put forward, it’s just the dynamics of political debate.”

And jumped on it was, with the Minerals Council of Australia, representing the interests of the mining industry, quickly claiming additional taxes would “seriously undermine international competitiveness and result in job losses across the country”.

A survey by the Australia Institute, concurrently released during the NPC speech, found that 52 per cent of people support a tax on fossil fuel exports regardless of size.

Only 21 per cent oppose such a measure.

Garnaut said the transition to net-zero emissions was “Australia’s opportunity”.

“Other countries do not share our natural endowments of wind and solar energy resources, land to deploy them, as well as load to grow biomass sustainably,” he said.

“Our main message today is that export of zero-carbon goods can underpin a long period of high investment, rising productivity, full employment and rising incomes in Australia.”

Garnaut touched on political and community opposition to renewables and said those uninterested in hosting infrastructure would not be forced to.

“No one needs to cover good farmland with solar panels, no one needs to have wind turbines or solar panels on their land if they don’t want to,” he said.

“Most of the superpower industries will be located well away from the current electricity grid.”

Since then Billionaire miner Andrew ‘Twiggy” Forrest has also backed the call for a fossil fuel tax, the Daily Advertiser reported.

No doubt Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and the Liberal/Nationals (LNP) bandwagon will nonetheless be out and about whipping up opposition to this sensible proposal. They and their followers will ignore all the facts and persuasive arguments put forward by Messrs Sims and Garnaut. How to combat the nonsense spouted by Joyce, Canavan & Co is one of the biggest problems we face.