The global conservative stratagem is founded on an appeal to the mediocrity of lazy members of our nations. Their message to the predominantly white voters is that you are just fine the way you are and the changing world is wrong. The conservative playbook: Dutton’s political strategy. On energy in Australia the LNP messaging to the populace is that climate change is too complex to worry about and not an Australian problem at its core. Therefore, they embrace property owners who don’t want their view besmirched by wind farms and value their minority concerns over the value to the community of renewable energy solutions to global warming. Instead, they champion nuclear power as an alternative to the safe and free power offered by wind and solar. This is despite Australia having no existing nuclear industry and the reality that it would take a decade or more to establish a viable reactor and the infrastructure around the sector at enormous cost (hundreds of billions of dollars).
LNP Promises No Nasty Wind Farms For Those Upset About Them
The Coalition’s message to a largely ignorant electorate is – “don’t worry we’ll take care of it for you.” Most Australians have no idea about the transition taking place in our energy sector and the power grid. They hear plenty of negative stuff from the Murdoch owned media group controlling our newspapers and radio networks (The Australian, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, Herald Sun, and 99 radio stations across AM, FM & DAB+). Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp are an organisation with a rabid right wing bias. See Fox News and Sky News Australia as clear examples of this non-objective op/ed fest in action on our airwaves and screens. Fossil fuel interests curry favour via the campaign donations made to both main political parties in Australia. Their advertising budgets fuel News Corp’s survival as a media organisation. Australia has long been overly influenced by a duopoly of corporate media interests to the detriment of ordinary Australians. The media is now completely dominated by PR, as real investigative journalism disappears.
You will never hear any positive messaging regarding renewable energy out of the LNP or the Murdoch press. Despite this Australian home owners have embraced solar power on their rooves in record numbers.
Dutton’s Nuclear Option Pie In The Sky For Short Term Political Favour
The reality is that the old baseload power requirements of the energy grid are no longer relevant in the 21C. The demise of coal powered stations will not be replaced by a like for like type of energy generation. Gas powered stations are a short term gap filler. Renewable energy generated power is fast taking over the demands of our needs. We need to invest in more large scale batteries and storage technologies for all the free renewable power we generate. Nuclear powered energy is not something that will work with in concert with all of our free renewable generated electricity because it needs to be on all the time. You cannot switch nuclear on and off when the need arises like gas in the short term. Therefore, we would be wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on a type of energy generation not compatible with the transition already well underway. Peter Dutton is putting forward something completely outside of what we require. The business community and the energy sector does not support the nuclear option because they understand what is going on to some degree. The Coalition claims they will build these reactors themselves – this is laughable. Politicians cannot build anything and have been out of the game of actually running businesses and projects for decades. Remember neoliberalism and small government, Peter? Snowy 2.0 is an LNP fast tracked special project and that is literally bogged down in billion dollar delays. It is a good example of a government infrastructure project rushed and stuffed up. Dutton doing the same with nuclear reactor projects could be disastrous.
Dutton Telling Australia It Can Stick Its Head In The Sand
It is all part of the conservative playbook: Dutton’s political strategy of telling voters what they want to hear in the short term. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend global warming isn’t real. You can keep your unblemished view to keep your property prices tickety-boo. No need for any nasty wind turbines on the horizon. The solution? We will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear power, an unsuitable and incredibly expensive technology with never ending safety dangers. Australians are not the sharpest tools in the shed. I mean, we end up with asbestos products in the mulch around our parks and in our school yards.
‘She’ll be right mate’ wont cut it when things go Fukushima. But you will have a nice view as long as they didn’t build that reactor in your neighbourhood. They will probably locate them all in Labor electorates, however, just to be on the safe side.
LNP Courting Intolerance & Racism
Similarly, the LNP has shifted to the far right to rub affectionately up against the intolerant members of our communities. Those condemning anybody different. Telling the racists and white supremacists its okay to hold onto their toxic beliefs. Dutton is dog whistling up intolerance toward immigrants, indigenous Australians, and the LGBTQI community. The strategy promotes divisiveness over acceptance. Gender identity politics sees a growing split between how men and women view issues within our society. Transgender members of our community are being made lightning rods by conservative forces in their cultural wars. Sky News Australia click baits on the back of inflammatory headlines about trans members seeking equality within our society. Christian fundamentalists want to maintain their Bronze Age dictated ideologies which promote the persecution and shunning of LGBTQI human beings from their schools, businesses, and organisations. The transgender debate is a media beat up, like the youth crime beat up at the state level. The numbers do not add up on either of these topics when multi million populations are taken into consideration. These are designed to inflame and enrage voters disproportionately to the actual statistical facts of what is occurring. The conservative playbook: Dutton’s political strategy.
The Inaction Of Coalition Governments
The LNP blame everything on Albo despite the fact that they had more than 9 years in office to oversee the economy we have right now. This is par for the course when it comes to Oppositions within the Westminster system. Apportioning blame rightly or wrongly is the name of the game. In reality, the housing crisis comes on the back of inaction by both LNP and Labor in this space for decades. Social housing what is that? That is a state problem. Neoliberalism and the credo – ‘the market is always right!’ This small government economic approach has been with us since Reagan and Thatcher influenced Australia in this direction back in the 1980s.
The LNP message is that it is OK that we have the lowest fuel standards among the Western nations. You can keep your diesel beast poisoning our air quality. No worries. The Coalition actually achieve little when in government, they just roll over for their mates in the corporate sphere. Gutting the public service to direct billions of tax payer dollars to their mates in the consultancy sector. Lowering tax rates for the wealthy and looking after their friends is a constant theme underpinning their economic policies. Funny that we get bugger all tax from the gas and mining sectors in comparison to other resource rich nations, like Norway and Qatar. I wonder what that is all about? Jobs for the boys after a stint in parliament, perhaps. The big end of town hardly pays any tax at all, as they leave that to the poor schmucks who pay income tax. Family trusts and tax minimisation schemes are very popular in Oz.
We do not tax wealth in this country, in fact we make it much easier for the rich to become exponentially much richer.
Robodebt & The Coalition
Robodebt was an ideological attack upon the poorest and most vulnerable members of our population. Many of these ideas come from America, where making poverty an individual failing has been a stratagem for years. Rich equals good, poor equates with bad. This simple credo allows the very wealthy end of town to avoid any responsibility for those suffering from the effects of poverty within our communities. Lowering and flattening tax rates for corporations and billionaires comes on the back of this. Making society into a game of winners and losers is the outcome of this political stratagem. Demonising welfare recipients is the next logical step in this game. Robodebt falsely accused 500, 000 Australians of owing large amounts of money to Centrelink and forced them to pay these funds back. Scott Morrison, Marise Payne, Stuart Robert and Alan Tudge were directly involved in this illegal government program. Some victims of Robodebt killed themselves in despair over being wrongly accused of owing large amounts of money. PwC was involved in the creation of Robodebt via its consultancy work. Kathryn Campbell was the senior bureaucrat running Robodebt for many years. A Royal Commission later found the program to be illegal and knowingly founded on dubious grounds by those at the very top. However, despite this and Robodebt costing tax payers $800 million in a settled class action brought by some of the victims nobody has been criminally prosecuted.
This is the way things work in Australia, as hardly any politician or civil servant has been prosecuted for crimes associated with the misuse of their office. Many more pollies have been gaoled for sex crimes committed upon children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_politicians_convicted_of_crimes
Campaign Donations Distorting Australian Democracy
The allure of power takes careerists into amoral territory where they cross the line. The ridiculous system, we currently have, where influence can be bought via campaign donations to political parties sets us up for corruption and minority control of our democracy. The wealthy and corporate players have much louder voices within our democratic system of government. Why don’t we do something about this? We could end these donations tomorrow and replace it with tax payer funded electioneering. The two main political parties enjoy their close contact with power via the wealthy and will not willingly give it up. The lobbying by big business and vested interests increases day by day to the detriment of the majority of Australians.
Your voice and mine are made much smaller as a result of the private funding of the political process in Australia.
Conservative Smoke Screens & Identity Politics
The continuing promotion of identity politics by conservative forces here and globally will see greater division between populations. Dutton beats the drum over the Voice and ensures its failure to achieve constitutional recognition. Racism rises in Australia during this period and since the vote. Dutton makes a disproportionate hoo-ha about a tiny number of refugees who had completed their prison sentences for crimes being released into the community via a High Court ruling. Another beat up designed to make ordinary Australians feel unsafe. The Coalition has been dragging its feet over Australia’s response to climate change and the energy transition for decades. Dutton’s championing of property owner’s impacted by new power line pathways for the energy grid and potential wind farms is more head in the sand stuff. Further to this is the pie in the sky idea about Oz going nuclear – this is already adversely impacting investment for renewables by creating uncertainty about future government energy policies. Dutton is a wrecker for his short term political ambitions. The LNP either do not understand the energy transition happening in terms of its technical requirements for the mix or are wilfully delaying it for their own interests and that of the fossil fuel industry. Gas has been embraced by both political parties as a transitional energy source but the question remains how long our dependency on it will last. The gas sector continues to pay bugger all tax despite the massive exports they sell internationally from mining our resources. Multinational corporations derive hundreds of billions and we get a few paltry million from dysfunctional taxes like the PRRT.
“Australians will have often heard how our gas industry has been booming over the past 10 years, generating great wealth and supposedly leading our economy. Remember former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison calling for a “gas-led recovery”.
Australians might be less aware of just how little gas companies – who are making massive profits off the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – pay in tax.”
Who Are You Going To Believe?
Too many Australians do not question the agenda behind those media outlets feeding them news. We have been victims of duopolies for too long. A lack of real choice, apart from the ABC, means corporate media in Australia singing from the same song sheet. Even the ABC has become cowed of late, after many years of false accusations of bias by the LNP. Many journalists will not criticise News Corp’s newspapers and programs because they may want a well paid job with that major organisation in the near future. Recently, the ABC has been parroting News Corp slants on stories and so we get a Greek chorus of amplified and repetitive voices all saying the same thing.
Everything has moved to the right in Australia and Dutton’s federal Liberals are ever closer to the far right. Telling lies to the Australian people and beating up social anxieties for political favour is the new order of the day.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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