Demonstrable Casualties of Climate Change
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/demonstrable-casualties-of-climate-change/
Malcolm Turnbull began this glorious trend. “I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am,” he declared in 2009, and pretty soon he wasn’t, being replaced as opposition leader by Tony Abbott.
Kevin Rudd’s climate change obsession so consumed him that his focus on the Copenhagen Summit obscured growing hostility within his Labor government. “Kevin stood up to those who wanted to say ‘no’ on climate change,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the summit, but Labor in 2010 subsequently said “no” to Rudd in Canberra.
Julia Gillard’s method of climate-induced self-removal was characteristically hilarious. A few days before the 2010 election, Rudd’s usurper announced: ‘‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.” Then she introduced a carbon tax, from which point Gillard was a shot duck.
So by 2013 we had two prime ministers and one opposition leader cut down by their climate change worship. It’d take a damn stupid politician to repeat this strategy, especially if they’d previously fallen victim, but Malcolm Turnbull went for it. On August 14 last year, the Daily Telegraph reported: “Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will today vow to lock in as law a climate change emissions reduction target of 26 per cent—sparking a rebellion among colleagues who want him to focus on lowering household bills instead of legislating a ‘tax on electricity’.”
“Nine years ago, members of the Liberal Party threw Malcolm Turnbull out like a plate of boiled feet after he tried to become Kevin Rudd’s carbon tax love monkey,” I wrote at the time. “They might consider doing the same thing in 2018.” Roger Franklin, Quadrant’s online editor, thought Turnbull would be gone within a week—and he’d have been right on the money had Turnbull not done his utmost to delay departure. He eventually resigned on August 24.
That’s four out of four for climate change, by this point proving itself the greatest statistical overachiever since Don Bradman. Surely nobody would ever attempt that kamikaze move again. Why, it would take someone even less alert than Turnbull himself to imagine he might convert climate change alarmism into an election victory.
Step forward, Bill Shorten.
Evidently believing his long run of Newspoll victories offered him a form of immunity, Shorten not only went into this year’s election vowing to spend enormously on climate change, he also declined to offer any estimate of the cost. In fact, Shorten dismissed questions about climate change costings as “dumb”. This went beyond anything ever proposed by Rudd, Turnbull and Gillard. It was political suicide by policy.
Climate change is now 5–0,