Sean Kelly used to be an advisor to prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, and he is now a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. In…
“Accepting the science” no longer means believing in climate change, it means accepting that catastrophic events are on their way unless we act pretty much immediately. We can ignore this if we like, go on deluding ourselves that politics can be discussed the way it used to be. But if we do, there will be consequences, and nobody will be able to protect us from them.
In Tasmania, the Liberal government intends to legislate sentences of up to 21 years – more than many get for murder – for environmental protest, legislation typical of the new climate of authoritarianism that has flourished under Morrison. As Australia burns, what we are witnessing nationally is no more or less than the criminalisation of democracy in defence of the coal and gas industries.
I went to a geoscience conference a while ago, which Ian Plimer, the darling of the climate change deniers, also attended. While some people were quite happy to be seen…
Many political commentators tend to view Morrison as some political genius, the winner of the unwinnable election. But history may judge him differently: a Brezhnevian figure; the last of the dinosaurs, presiding over an era of stagnation at the head of a dying political class imprisoned within and believing its own vast raft of lies as the world lived a fundamentally different reality of economic decay, environmental pillage and social breakdown.
Rarely have I seen an article in which the point is so widely missed, as in the essay from Craig Emerson. He starts off with the statement that ‘tribalism is…
When the Labor Party announced their policy of having 50% of all new car sales being electric vehicles by 2030, the galloping stupidity of members of the Coalition front bench…