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Tag Archives: #climate crisis

Chalmers’ babies and Dutton’s migrants: Australia’s population debate

What kind of population does Australia need? Jim Chalmers recently informed us that Australian citizens ought to have more babies. Commentators on various blogs and fora have returned to dwelling on Australia’s “carrying capacity” as though this is a farm and we are grazing cattle. Peter Dutton, in his Budget Reply, stated his intent to cut immigration.

All these questions tease at a tricky problem: Western nations are struggling to find people to do the low-paying jobs that the citizenry won’t undertake, at least at such paltry wages.

In Australia, we face skill shortages in critical areas. Without immigrants we cannot fill the roles.

Jobs we refer to as “low-skilled” are crucial for the wellbeing of our nation and their absence has a material impact on citizens’ standard of living – or even lifespan.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the 8th of May that the elderly of West Virginia are learning to their cost what it means when there is nobody available to care for them, dying younger than they might have if their state wasn’t so racist. Virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy means that they have far too few to care for them as they age.

Britain is facing a similar crisis. Bigotry drove much of the Brexit vote that sent so many low-paid workers back to central Europe. The jobs are still being done, but many more of the immigrants filling those roles are coming from the Indian subcontinent. It is ironic that the Brexiteers must now choose to age unsupported in their unchanged diapers or accept help from the Brown people that they voted, so unsuccessfully, to exclude

Peter Dutton appeared to be pandering to the Australian equivalents of those Brexit voters when he claimed last week that Australian immigration must be cut. Apparently now he is in opposition, he cares about Australians’ standard of living, and Dutton blamed the discomforts of inadequate infrastructure investment over decades on the existence of migrants in the country.

Of course, Dutton’s speech included a cut to Australia’s humanitarian visa numbers that he labelled “generous.” Australia’s humanitarian intake is only “generous” in that we have somewhat higher numbers than other countries of people cherry-picked from the hundreds of millions trapped in indefinite “warehousing” in refugee camps around the world. In fact, most countries count their substantially higher humanitarian intakes from people who arrive irregularly, seeking asylum.

The Albanese government had merely returned our stingy intake of refugees closer to what it had been pre-Abbott. We remain one of the international laggards in doing our share in accommodating the displaced, as with so many of our international responsibilities.

The number of displaced around the world is, of course, only set to multiply as Australia helps industrialised nations to continue to depend on our fossil fuel exports. Every 1/10th of a degree of warming means that an additional 140 million people will live enduring “dangerous heat” – or die, or flee.

By the end of the century, 2 billion people are projected to dwell in the unsustainable zones created by 2.7 degrees warming. Almost half of climate scientists recently surveyed believe that our global failure to cooperate means we are more likely to hit 3 degrees.

When even nighttime temperatures remain over human body temperature at 38 degrees or more, our bodies struggle to function. As science writer Gaia Vince explained, “This extreme heat literally cooks your body. We’re made of animal cells. It starts to denature the proteins of our cell membranes. It’s a horrible way to die.”

So it is not only in the context of our failing infrastructure (and prohibitive cost of living) that Treasurer Chalmers’ exhortation to have more babies is foolish. Plagiarising Peter Costello’s “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country” is a recipe for additional burden on climate systems that are beginning to fail.

Not only does population in industrialised nations add disproportionately to carbon emissions, but each additional child will create financial stress on families as food shortages and resultant price hikes become the norm rather than the exception.

Right-wing parties in Western nations are becoming ever more nativist. Some of these politicians are blatantly ethnonationalist. Others speak the bigotry in dogwhistle codes. “Sustainability” is one of the codes used by such figures. “Carrying capacity” is another. Both mask the bigotry in this greenwashed cypher. The fortress-mentality policies that result have been labelled “border fascism.”

One of Donald Trump’s primary goals is to deport 11 million non-White people from America. His team has just announced a group of “Gun-owners for Trump” who need their guns because “no American is safe from a [mythical] violent migrant crime-wave” provoking the shooting of non-White people.

Australians have seen the difference in Peter Dutton’s attitude to White au pairs compared to people from non-White backgrounds. His success in targeting First Peoples through the dirty referendum campaign, it appears, has emboldened him to begin once again targeting (non-White) migrants as the supposed cause of our discomforts.

The actual cause has long been the tax-strike being executed by the richest. The neoliberal project driving it has stripped our countries of the resources needed for infrastructure. Indeed the taxed common wealth of the masses is being funnelled into the pockets of the rich through sector subsidies and gifts such as shrugging off the repayment of Jobkeeper by highly profitably corporations.

It is crucial that governments and thought leaders begin the big discussions that scientists and policy researchers are demanding. We need transparency from politicians that claim to act in our interests. They must explain our workforce requirements in realistic terms. They must address the policies that keep “low-skilled” jobs an intolerable prospect.

They must discuss what continuing to foster fossil fuel industry demands means for Australians and for the world. Governments need to inform the public clearly what climate heating will look like here and in the zones that will be decimated by the climate catastrophe.

They must explain the codes the “border fascists” use to distract the electorate from the true culprits for our discomforts, fighting the inherent bigotry.

They must discuss the impact of influence networks which work to promote continued fossil fuel consumption, growing inequality, and ethnonationalist goals.

Allowing the bigotry of the Right to dictate policy, for example by calling on Australians to have more unaffordable children, destroys our chances to discuss the shape of our nation. It is only in having honest discussions that our politicians and journalists can enable the nation to address our needs and responsibilities.

If the Albanese government wants to be re-elected, it must become more honest.

 

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Climate change deniers, theocrats and neoliberals meet in London for the scariest Halloween Party

It was helpful of Greg Sheridan to advertise in The Australian (27/10) the new ultraconservative conference that he is attending in London. While his column is no doubt intended to recruit, it is useful in shining a spotlight on a traditionally shadowy architecture of influence.

Apparently 1,500 citizens from around the world are gathering at the O2 venue over Halloween in London to talk about how to save the world from the “elites” at a cost of AUD2870 per head. The new body promoting conservative activism is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). The body’s tagline is that the “The ARC of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” The “ark” wordplay to denote them as saviours of Western Civilisation is no doubt intentional.

One of the key figures organising this event is John Anderson, former National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister. He recently appeared at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Australia conference which was a Trumpist rallying cry against the Voice to Parliament and LGBTQIA+ rights. He also spoke at the reactionary Family First NZ conference. More significantly, Anderson, according to the ARC site, runs “Australia’s pre-eminent politico-cultural video podcast,” an “enterprise” that has 400,000 subscribers.

On his program, Anderson interviewed the unbearable Jordan Peterson; now they are at the helm of this nascent body. Peterson is one of the stars of the internet manosphere where he makes his money selling sexism, Western chauvinism and climate denial. Joining these two as founder is Baroness Philippa Stroud, formerly of the Legatum Institute, an influence body whose “lead sponsor” is the Legatum Group, representing a Dubai-based private hedge-fund billionaire. This is the “think” tank that fought for the strictest Brexit with no tariffs, and drones to cope with the Irish border issue. The economic conditions created by “think” tanks such as this have one million British children living in “destitution,” more than doubling the figure over the last five years.

The pretext for forging this alliance is that climate action is going to destroy the ability to provide food for humanity, pushing us into poverty. Recent scientific findings that point to evidence that all “life on Earth is imperilled” by the climate crisis are not accepted. Desmog has described the ARC conference as a key event in the “climate crisis denial movement.”

Of the international crowd, 150 are Australian. Anderson and Sheridan are to be joined by former Prime Ministers John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. Anti-abortion activist Amanda Stoker is on the advisory panel alongside Howard, Abbott and Andrew Hastie. Angus Taylor, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Ted O’Brien and James Paterson are attending, as is Barnaby Joyce. Mark Latham is too. The only political surprise is Julian Leeser who was a more moderate actor in the Voice debate.

Most delegates are coming from the UK and the US. Sheridan counts 300 as deriving from Europe. One of the most noteworthy American attendees is new House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is a fully-fledged theocrat. He has been described by a colleague as a “despicable bigot of the highest order.” The list of figures on the advisory board alone features notables representing climate denial, Western chauvinism and ultraconservative religious beliefs from around the world. It also has what Sheridan characterises as “serious business backers.”

Anderson explained to Sheridan that, “Citizens in the West feel marginalised, treated with contempt by the elites.” The Voice was apparently a project of the “expertocracy” that patronised the voter. We need elites, but “the right elites.” This reflects a trend in the National Conservative (Nat Con) movement that, while pitched at actual elites, demonises the intellectual “elites” as the crisis in society. It feigns populism while aiming to control all the behaviours and beliefs in the populace that are not “traditional.” It is simultaneously statist in its disdain for the individual’s choices and libertarian for the “conservative” business world.

This is an important moment to read prize winning journalist and historical researcher Anne Nelson’s “Shadow Network” book, recounting the history of the Council for National Policy in the US. It illustrates the strategies at work in this body as well as the global Atlas Network. The “think” tanks and organisations formulated in this model unite disparate actors in cutting edge strategies led by a multitude of misleadingly-named bodies to foster ultra-free market policy and ultraconservative social goals. Many of the plutocrat funders are fossil fuel billionaires.

The game-plan of the Atlas Network was rolled out for the Voice to Parliament referendum, as UTS lecturer Jeremy Walker examined. The 500 Atlas affiliates around the world have consistently worked to break the union of Indigenous populations and environmental action impeding resource extraction. Their ploys include depicting climate activists and environmentalists as terrorists or extremists. This has been the case for Indigenous environmental protectors around the world. They have also worked to co-opt some First People with mining profits to break unity and fight the resource extractors’ opponents for them. ARC Advisor Magatte Wade heads Atlas affiliate “Center for African Prosperity” where she argues climate activism is the new colonialism, intended to impoverish Africans.

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), an Australian Atlas affiliate, has strong personnel connections to the Advance body that led the No campaign through its Fair Australia brand. Advance shares personnel and an address with sites that that promoted a range of disruptive and contradictory positions against the Voice, including a Christian one (not least because spiritual connections to country are a pagan threat). The cluster includes an anti-climate action offshoot called “Not Zero.” Advance has personnel and logistical connections with Whitestone Strategic consulting, a shadowy company that also has links with the Pentecostal movement’s peak body, the Australian Christian Lobby, and with Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party. It’s uncertain how much damage to the referendum was achieved by Advance and friends: they seem a clumsy attempt at the Atlas model.

Nelson illustrates how the possible American political collapse into fossil fuel-embracing, theocratic authoritarianism was created over 50 years with the kind of networking reflected in the ARC conference. The O2 event trumpets the spread of the fossil fuel-promoting, ultraconservative movement internationally, work that Atlas has been carrying out in secret.

This might be 2023’s scariest Halloween party.

 

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as An ultraconservative shadow network is forming, designed to influence you

 

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Dutton reminds us of Abbott, but not in a good way

Reading Nikki Savva’s The Road to Ruin is a depressing read, because it validates what many of us believed before Tony Abbott became Prime Minister.

Tony Abbott and his road to irrelevance

Many believed he was unelectable. He lacked seriousness. He lacked grace. He, like so many other ‘Rhodes Scholars’, appeared to have gotten his degrees out of a Wheaties box. He believed that he understood the country and its people. He was dangerously over-confident, and heedless of consequences.

The mistakes flowed thick and fast, and the photos of him being coddled by his Chief of Staff, the cleaning of crumbs from his clothes, the solicitous looks bestowed on the ‘warrior prince’, reminded us of how our mothers prepared us for those ‘moments of truth’, like going to school on your first day.

His greatest mistakes were that he did not listen, not to his parliamentary colleagues, and not to the public mood.

Never a policy specialist, he imported what he needed from the IPA’s shopping list, and then failed to understand that Australia had changed.

He excelled in saying “No”. Loudly. As Opposition Leader he was never a believer in climate change, and he capitalised on the Labor Party’s convoluted and tortured responses to it. He can be squarely blamed for the current existential catastrophe, by sowing doubt where there was no room for any.

He also undermined, and removed the Liberal Party’s only hope for a successful future, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull is the acceptable face of liberalism, and the embodiment of the sensible centre.

Abbott played to the backward-looking members of the community, who put climate change, same sex marriage, Indigenous rights and multiculturalism into the too-hard basket. He thought he could rule without the cities, and frankly, without the young.

Peter Dutton has no idea of the damage he is unleashing

We are now watching a dreadful remake of the same movie. Peter Dutton is reprising the role of Abbott, down to the same faux seriousness, the same appeal to those who look backward, the same dog whistling to the chronically angry.

They want us to return to the golden days of fortress Australia, where we will choose the types who come to our shores, we will choose the low road, and we will bring the country to a position halfway between the cheerful nihilism of Boris Johnson’s Brexit, and Donald Trump’s failing state.

For a man of such limited intellectual resources, Dutton has managed to confect a formidable coalition of nay-sayers.

Of course, he didn’t have to work very hard getting the National Party on-side. They decided on a No vote before the ink was dry on the proposition.

Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine, who represent possibly the most potent symbols of the No side, are incomprehensibly voting against their own interests. Their power to split the vote, and hence the country, is immense. Lidia Thorpe, who seems to be sacrificing ‘the good’, for the sake of ‘the perfect’, is similarly powerful. And wrong.

Dutton’s reasons are purely self-serving

Dutton has continued with his paper-thin repudiation of the Voice referendum with a typically threadbare slogan worthy of Tony Abbott: “If you don’t know, Vote No.”

Anyone with a shred of intelligence would substitute the words “Find Out”, instead of “Vote No”. The No side is not interested in sharing enlightenment, they much prefer doubt and fear.

He has never bothered to calculate the cost, to his party’s standing into the future, or to the social cohesion of Australia.

His recent statement that he thinks the Coalition can win government in 2025 is pure fantasy. But therein lies his reason for going hard against the Voice.

He sees it as a one-on-one contest against Albanese, and in some ways he is correct. Albanese has allowed this to degenerate from a contest of ideas to a personal political battle.

As many have noted the Voice is an advisory body only and placing it within the Constitution merely stops it from being abolished, like ATSIC was, by John Howard.

The Voice, whether enshrined within the Constitution or not, can be ignored. That is the salient point of the whole issue. The fact of Constitutional recognition is nice, but it does not help ‘close the gap’.

That objective lies with us, as to whether we demand that governments listen, and having listened, act to redress wrongs, and build a reasonable future for our fellow citizens. It is the least we can do.

 

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Prison hulks and river blades: fortress building in the climate-catastrophe era

Britain has commissioned a prison hulk to house immigrants, in a cruel re-enactment of history. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has implemented two strategies to stop immigrants crossing the Rio Grande into America: one is a floating barrier with razor wire and rolling motion that pulls people under the water; the other is an apparent order to push people into the river, including mothers holding small children.

One horrifying aspect for an Australian audience reading these developments is that we have been part of the inspiration for their increasingly horrifying treatment of the displaced.

Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have both been consulting with the British about the best way to “deter” asylum seekers arriving by boat. The UK parliament has enough grotesque bigoted figures of its own to blame for the new Illegal Migration bill and ship “solution” to deterrence for us to blame Abbott and Downer for this idea. Both Abbott and Downer have also been participating in Western chauvinist Orban’s speaking circuit which fosters anti-immigrant extremism.

Our approach to migration is complex. Big Business supports it and wants high migration. Australia’s Coalition immigration regime barely fought slave labour conditions for temporary workers while turning all aggression against asylum seekers as political theatre.

America has always counted on a transitory population from over its southern border to keep labour and food prices low. The decision to aim to make the border impenetrable has had the predictable effect of causing people to try to stay on the American side of the border to send money home to family struggling to survive. Numbers approaching the border for safety have also been increasing with violence – much caused by American policy – and climate crisis desperation forcing people from Central America out of their home countries.

President Trump’s early telephone call with then PM Malcolm Turnbull was a shameful one. Trump exclaimed with admiration that “You are worse than I am,” when it came to treatment of those legally claiming asylum. Trump’s administration, led on this front by the white supremacist figure of Steven Miller, took our example and intensified the misery. Children around America remain lost to their parents after the brutal years when babies were literally snatched from their mothers’ arms to punish them for the “crime” of seeking safe haven. Now a Trump advisor on strategy is working for the Texas Governor, implementing cruelties that the federal administrative state blocked him from deploying.

Australia’s persecution of the few of the world’s displaced who reach us by irregular means continues in a less overt fashion. The nightmare we created in PNG continues. Our immigration department is stripped of institutional knowledge because the nation-building public servants left during the grim reign of the customs official incompetents and bullies. The new appointments under Minister Andrew Giles are slow to acquire expertise and perhaps still harnessed by a departmental leadership that shared the Coalition’s Western chauvinism. The reunion with vulnerable families will move at glacial pace for that percentage eventually being granted visas.

The surge in Middle Eastern and African displacement reached crescendo in 2015. Part of this was created by Western and allegedly Russian military interventions, recent and past. This was also the year that Trump announced his presidential campaign, launching it with demonisation of immigrants.

Part of the surge in numbers was the beginning of the climate crisis’s mass displacement. Syria’s internal crisis, for example, was in part fuelled by young people flooding to the city for opportunity after crippling climatic conditions killed the crops.

The resultant paranoia in Western nations drove a surge in white supremacist and Neo Nazi support. Disinformation made people in distant villages of Wales who’d not seen a refugee themselves believe they were about to be flooded with new and unfamiliar people. The same disinformation, allegedly promoted by Russian propaganda, led people to believe that these asylum seekers were a threat to Western safety, as terrorists or rapists.

Former conservative governments were already being radicalised by “think tanks” and a new generation of politician who had been honed by Dark Money’s strategies into an anti-democratic force.

Some Right-Wing politicians still genuinely believe that the climate catastrophe is a hoax, just as asylum seekers must be country shopping grifters and that our nations must be White. Others believe that both problems are insoluble, particularly by a party that doesn’t believe in government.

This problem is compounded by the fact that those displaced by the climate catastrophe are still denied refugee status.

Our Centrist parties speak the language of climate action, but as we see in Australia and America, their will to make functional change does not match the rhetoric. This defeatism is paired with state Labor governments joining in the war against protesters rather than polluters.

The prison hulks for asylum seekers in Britain together with Texas at the vanguard of American cruelty are the other face of that defeatism.

Any data-based government knows that millions will be displaced by the climate crisis in the coming decades. Beyond that, the numbers seeking safety will be far greater. Most will be internally displaced or move into their poor neighbour states. Some will make it to the wealthier world for rescue.

Rather than act in unity to work to cap the temperature rise and limit the catastrophes of famine, drought, floods, war and disease, governments are turning their states into fortresses at monumental expense. India and Eastern Europe are building literal fences against threatened regions. Australia has coast guard and naval vessels poised to chase off any making the attempt.

Britain and Texas are modelling the next grotesque step as the numbers rise: the cruelty shatters every claim we have to be ethical nations. We fail in the duty to stop our overwhelming contribution to the world’s carbon overload, and we turn brutal in our efforts to punish those displaced, substantially, by our acts.

Australia forged the cruel path of refugee torture combined with laughter at the fate of our climate-threatened neighbours. We must decide now if that is who we continue to be.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations

 

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New coal mines and protests crushed: is Labor resigned to doom?

It is more shocking watching Labor governments implement draconian anti-protest measures than it is the right-wing parties. The latter are by definition opposed to Labor’s efforts to achieve a less-exploited life for the average citizen.

The workers that the labour parties nominally represent won a fairer life by the protests that the leaders are now banning. No wage labourer would have a 40-hour week, or a weekend, if the workers’ interventions had been forced to avoid “intentionally or recklessly” obstructing the “free passage of a public place.”

This wording from South Australian Premier Malinauskas’s rushed anti-protest bill is consonant with the work of governments around the anglosphere. In the hours leading up to the coronation in London for example, republican protesters were rounded up and arrested to avoid the spectacle of people in yellow t-shirts peacefully holding yellow signs along the procession route. The new measures were described as unnecessary and “deeply troubling” by the UN. King Charles III signed the anti-protest bill into law in the days before his coronation.

In America, Republican politicians are promoting the ability to shoot or drive into protesters.

For us, it is more often climate protests that promote this kind of overweening law that would hide protesters in dark alleyways where their message will not be seen.

Protests must disrupt.

The most important rights and protections are usually gained by highly inconvenient measures to disturb the thinking of those who accept the status quo. Women’s right to vote was won only after a number of troublesome and painful protests forced male politicians to cease withholding that civic engagement from half the population.

Conservative governments are by definition less likely to accede to change or to civil rights protests. Right wing politics that have supplanted the old conservatism are more authoritarian: reminders of the suffering of the masses are an inconvenience to executing the wishes of the powerful. It is only the bravest who continue to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine after the brutal crackdown on early protesters. Alexei Navalny’s fate shows what awaits those who contest kleptocrats’ extreme corruption.

Governments that represent the more progressive or labour movements seem at the surface level to be less compatible with protest-crushing legislation or draconian police intervention. They also mouth their acceptance of the fact that climate change is a dire threat to our continued survival.

It was a climate protest that provoked the South Australian rushed change to the law. This came just after an obsequious statement from the South Australian Labor minister for energy and mining made the rounds: “We are thankful you are here. We are happy to a be recipient of APPEA’s [Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association] largesse in the form of coming here more often…The South Australian government is at your disposal, we are here to help and we are here to offer you a pathway to the future,” Tony Koutsantonis said.

Why relatively progressive governments continue to introduce new coal mines, or waste time and money with the carbon capture and storage distraction is difficult to know for sure. There is certainly the pressure from donors to consider. Whether they also feel pressure from unions to slow the shift from fossil fuel extraction is worth asking. Australia’s Labor parties have no doubt learnt, if not over-learnt, the lesson from the mining sector which spent $22 million on antagonistic advertising to punish PM Kevin Rudd for his attempt to introduce a mining tax.

It is also possible to argue that Australia’s government remains an outreach division of the fossil fuel sector. All the tens of billions of profit made by fossil fuel companies netted Australia almost no tax. In one example, they paid $30 dollars in tax in 2020-21 on $164 billion in profits. In return, the taxpayer gifts these same companies, currently, $11 billion a year in subsidies. And the Albanese government’s continuation of the carbon credit program, barely changed from the Coalition’s scam model, is the only way that these companies are promising to cut emissions. The carbon trading program is, as Nick Feik describes it, a “frictionless profit machine” pervaded with senior fossil fuel figures, based on “phantom” credits as well as dubious-quality offset actions. The program is “state-sponsored greenwashing.”

It is possible that centrist political parties have also foreclosed the possibility that humanity can check the race to our destruction. It is easy to see why. The idea that Russian silovarchs and Saudi princes can work together with the corporatocracy of the (dis)United States seems a slim hope sinking into the rising seas. Competition for resources threatens climate-harming war. India and Pakistan, for example, depend on the meltwater of Himalayan glaciers for the survival of a billion people; the droughts that will supersede floods portend further conflict. Those battles, like the Ukraine invasion, will cost tonnes of carbon as well as human misery.

Our government might feel trapped in a politics shaped by short-term problems and solutions, and that economies and energy supplies secured in old-school ways are the price to be paid for reelection. Despair at the prospect of a world that looks to be fracturing rather than uniting to limit the crisis might reinforce this short-term thinking.

If that is a factor driving the centre/left parties, we are in deep trouble.

We expect the radicalising right to have abandoned the well-being of the masses now, let alone into the future. Their military-industrial complex will sell nations and individuals weapons to protect resources from those desperate for survival. Late stage capitalism’s winners are buying their bolt-holes and calculating which people they’ll take to their luxury escape or doomsday bunker.

If the parties that claim to represent the people have given up in despair at the thought of doing better than mouthing platitudes and performative gestures, we have no chance of limiting the climb of temperatures in the decades to come. This matters: it is increasingly clear that every fraction of a degree we can prevent the temperature rising is a whole swathe of crises prevented.

Already our children are suffering. Black Summer babies were born premature, some with blackened placentas. Young children who breathed the worst that summer have damaged lungs and require constant medication. Children from flood and bushfire zones continue to live in emergency accommodation, with the all the disturbance that means. Trauma impacts are expected to require help for five years.

This abdication of ambition would make a likely motivation for Labor governments to join right wing parties in cracking down on protest. As the crisis worsens, so will public distress. Failure to act on pain over months of bushfire smoke in city air or rising food prices will push people onto the streets as the Black Summer bushfires did. Catastrophe-driven demands on our nations’ budgets will eat away at the services that governments provide.

Police are ill-equipped to manage the stresses they already face: increasingly we leave them to deal with the misery, distress and violence that is the end result of inadequate infrastructure and services. Police are militarising making them even less appropriate to deal with social crises and the public’s distress. These problems raise the threat from forces that have had little tolerance for those who dissent in an inconvenient fashion.

Labor parties must remember that the threat of community independent candidates will increase for ALP candidates if they continue to stonewall the majority of their voters. We voters need to be on the streets – and inconveniently so – to make sure the government knows this.

It is your children and grandchildren who will face the full catastrophe – and the crackdown if they protest the nightmare that looms.

 

A briefer version of this was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Centrist parties crush dissent, foreclose on race to avoid extinction

 

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The Right Wing disinfosphere and the King

There is set to be some anxiety in monarchist groups in the community as they reconcile the ascent of King Charles III to the throne with their fear. Even in educated hard right circles like The Spectator Australia’s readership, conspiracy theories about him are evident.

In the “Flat White” online part of The Spectator Australia in July, an anonymous column was posted about “Prince Charles’ ‘Great Reset.’

The Great Reset is conspiracy theory that argues that the World Economic Forum Davos set are billionaires planning a Green totalitarian takeover. The name is derived from a WEF plan (repackaging the standard Davos message) released in June 2020 promoting sustainable development in the economic reset provoked by the pandemic. It encouraged “green growth, smarter growth and fairer growth.” The then Prince Charles was used as the face of it in the promotional video at its launch.

The Spectator column argues that the Climate Emergency is an “excuse” created “as a non-negotiable reason to dismantle the free market and democratic governance.” The author posits that governments are using Net Zero to destroy the agricultural sector and rip wealth from the middle and working classes who will then be forced to depend on handouts.

The core of the author’s vitriol is saved for “stakeholder capitalism,” a concept that is a key to the Great Reset and sustainable economics. It is the (flawed) model where businesses are pressured towards cleaner practice by ESG scores. Environmental, Social and Governance metrics are intended to balance Milton Friedman’s impact on shareholder capitalism that dictates profit is the only responsibility. These ideas are, according to the column, socialism.

The new King was, by this account, not just enacting a “betrayal of the ordinary citizen,” but of the system and his role: “to protect the constitutional monarchy from rising climate fascism and globalism (also known as international socialism).”

The author believes capitalists and entrepreneurs can solve any problems without government “climate cult” interference. The widespread failure to help Australian regions beset by bushfires and floods over the pandemic moment has been superseded by the image of 1/3 of Pakistan under water and over 30 million people homeless and without food. America’s West Coast is in dire water peril with cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix existentially threatened. The facts would seem to contradict the author’s contention. No plucky entrepreneur is likely to fix this.

The comments beneath the column are filled with more overt conspiracy theory rhetoric of this kind: “the mainstream media is owned and controlled by these same WEF loving globalists” and the “takeover agenda” of the WEF. According to these posts, the Number of the Beast was apparent in Great Reset materials. There are many reasons to disdain the self-satisfied posturing of the WEF set, but the label “fascist totalitarians” is a stretch, and the belief that they are satanic is ludicrous.

The adjective “globalist” signifies part of the association of the Great Reset conspiracy. As with so much of the “conspiracy smoothie” that has suppurated out from QAnon over the pandemic era, this term denotes the antisemitism at work. Globalists and lizard people terminology (also in play about the Royal Family) are coded antisemitism. Toxic ideas about “elites” (more antisemitism) creating a pandemic and using mandates and vaccines to destroy society in a number of different ways are at the heart of the narrative. Elite-controlled paedophilia, the QAnon central panic, is also implicit in some versions of the conspiracy.

On the swamps of social media, the “elites” are weather-engineering the floods on Australia’s east coast to displace the residents and build “smart cities” as part of the WEF “high-tech dictatorship.” A number of ugly responses to the Queen’s demise in these spaces illustrate that they placed her in the evil “elite” category.

The Great Reset conspiracy, depicting climate action as socialism linked to the WEF, emerged from the Heartland Institute. This “thinktank” at the core of the climate denial industry is a feeder of ideas into the right wing disinfosphere. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has been a major amplifier of the fear mongering about the Great Reset and its looming socialism to be imposed by Green “elites.”

Naturally what Fox mainstreams, so too does Sky News Australia. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has used Great Reset conspiracy theories as a case study on disinformation in 2022 Australian politics. They highlight the absurd rhetoric on Sky, where billionaires are Marxists aiming to destroy capitalism. Sky After Dark echoed Tucker Carlson and other Fox talking heads in aiming to foment hysteria about this threat to freedom. Rowan Dean described the WEF as “a hardcore leftist eco-horror show replete with quasi fascism” and the Great Reset as an end to democratic rights with a society ruled by the elite.

Pauline Hanson then introduced the Great Reset to Parliament. Ralph Babet, Clive Palmer’s $100 million dollar senator, touted reading Glenn Beck’s 2022 book The Great Reset on Facebook on the 3rd of September. (Beck apologised in 2014 for ‘helping tear the country apart” in his time fearmongering on Fox News and talkback radio. In 2021, he retracted the apology on Fox, returning to the grift.)

So social media spreads pictures of King Charles being poked in the chest by a Rothschild to convey a more blatantly anti-Semitic form of this conspiracy being promoted by Sky. The Spectator Australia funnels it into the educated right they are radicalising. All seem happy to portray the Davos billionaires, who are prinking up their free market capitalism with decorative furbelows of social justice posturing, as agents of capitalism-destroying totalitarianism.

Any attempt to create climate action that might mitigate the horrors of the worst version of the climate crisis is thus immediately discredited as a form of Great Reset oppression. Right wing Americans are taught to fear the Green New Deal as a communist threat that would rob them of all their rights. Disasters in Australia that could provoke the public to pressure for action are remodelled as the work of the elites or pretexts for totalitarianism.

This battle between the billionaires who want no action taken and the billionaires who would like to appear to be doing something without doing anything is thus transformed into an existential struggle between freedom-loving battlers and a totalitarian progressive elite.

And so King Charles’s history of support for environmental projects and sustainable development has drawn the many conspiracies about his family into the Great Reset horror. The very people most keen to display their respect for the crown are torn by their climate denial loathing of anyone promoting policy to address the crisis. It will be interesting to see how they reconcile their ambivalence.

This was originally published at Pearls and Irritations as Murdoch, the Prince/King and conspiracy theories

 

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6 million humans say “no” to climate crisis and “yes” to life

As a writer and human being this one continues to reflect upon what all lies behind the climate crisis protests of the past and what all will be involved in the future if the intent is to truly tackle “the forces crushing the planet.” Especially when it comes down to just how hopelessly out-of-touch many of the politicians of the world still are today, in 2019, about the climate crisis and the expressed will of the millions of youth and adults today, as there were back in 2003 when this writer, and millions more like him, also protested the then threatened war in Iraq. But all to no avail.

In the long run, will the minions marching now to “Save The World” also have so little avail upon the politicians as those of us in our day when we protested so vociferously, with all the passion, strength and might we could muster, against yet another senseless war and against WOW, GUESS WHAT? THE SAME THINGS: OIL PIPELINES, HUMAN GREED AND MALE AGGRESSION! It’s like that old saying, “What goes around keeps coming around until things finally change!”

Reflecting upon the similarities of 2003 and 2019 one image in particular, like a flashback to some long ago distant time, reminds this one of what motivated him back then to become both an activist and lifelong teacher of youth that, to this day, still possesses the same intensity and poignancy that ever since has been his raison d’etre.

The flashback is that of a wandering, itinerant king: with a weather-beaten yet kindly beaming, wrinkled face; his tussled white hair supporting a tarnished gold crown; his once luxurious raiments now threadbare, holey and patched like his also, once regal, now time-worn bejewelled slippers. Slung over his shoulder, he carries his bedding and all his worldly possessions in a bundle, tied to the end of a stick, like some old Aussie swagman. Standing innocently before the old king on the rough road he trod, wondrously looking up at him with a beaming face, full of so much hope and expectancy, is one tiny, girl around age two, with curly blond hair, wearing a delicate white lace dress. The king is bent over, to the point where their faces are almost touching, as he stares intently at her so his failing eyes and ears can see and hear her with greater clarity. The caption of the image reads “The Philosopher-King is Beholden to Ask the Child Which Way Next to Go!”

So when one compares which road the world has taken since 2003, and what the choice of roads still are in 2019, one wonders if there exists, in the real world, anything like that philosopher-king who, in the end, will intuitively know from the youth standing before him which road ultimately to take? Will it be “the high road, or the low road,” as in the lyrics of that old Scottish song The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomand? Will the road chosen again be the high road of the rich and mighty or the low road of the common people? Only time will tell!

Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American activist-writer who, for decades, has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by excessive mega-development and the host of related environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey”, a spiritual sojurn among the native peoples of North America, and has produced numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel and U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine and Siege of Gaza, as well as; innumerable accounts of the violations constantly waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul.

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