{"id":722,"date":"2019-11-02T16:18:01","date_gmt":"2019-11-02T05:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/?p=722"},"modified":"2019-11-02T16:18:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-02T05:18:01","slug":"demonstrable-casualties-of-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/?p=722","title":{"rendered":"Demonstrable Casualties of Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/quadrant.org.au\/magazine\/2019\/10\/demonstrable-casualties-of-climate-change\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Malcolm Turnbull began this glorious trend.\u00a0\u201cI will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am,\u201d he declared in 2009, and pretty soon he wasn\u2019t, being replaced as opposition leader by Tony Abbott.<\/p>\n

Kevin Rudd\u2019s climate change obsession so consumed him that his focus on the Copenhagen Summit obscured growing hostility within his Labor government. \u201cKevin stood up to those who wanted to say \u2018no\u2019 on climate change,\u201d British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the summit, but Labor in 2010 subsequently said \u201cno\u201d to Rudd in Canberra.<\/p>\n

Julia Gillard\u2019s method of climate-induced self-removal was characteristically hilarious. A few days before the 2010 election, Rudd\u2019s usurper announced: \u2018\u2018There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.\u201d Then she introduced a carbon tax, from which point Gillard was a shot duck.<\/p>\n

So by 2013 we had two prime ministers and one opposition leader cut down by their climate change worship. It\u2019d take a damn stupid politician to repeat this strategy, especially if they\u2019d previously fallen victim, but Malcolm Turnbull went for it. On August 14 last year, the Daily Telegraph<\/em> reported: \u201cPrime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will today vow to lock in as law\u00a0a climate change\u00a0emissions\u00a0reduction target of 26 per cent\u2014sparking a rebellion among colleagues who want him to focus on lowering household bills instead of legislating a \u2018tax on electricity\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNine years ago, members of the Liberal Party threw Malcolm Turnbull out like a plate of boiled feet\u00a0after he tried to become Kevin Rudd\u2019s carbon tax love monkey,\u201d I wrote at the time. \u201cThey might consider doing the same thing in 2018.\u201d Roger Franklin, Quadrant<\/em>\u2019s online editor, thought Turnbull would be gone within a week\u2014and he\u2019d have been right on the money had Turnbull not done his utmost to delay departure. He eventually resigned on August 24.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s four out of four for climate change, by this point proving itself the greatest statistical over\u00adachiever 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.<\/p>\n

Step forward, Bill Shorten.<\/p>\n

Evidently believing his long run of Newspoll victories offered him a form of immunity, Shorten not only went into this year\u2019s 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 \u201cdumb\u201d. This went beyond anything ever proposed by Rudd, Turnbull and Gillard. It was political suicide by policy.<\/p>\n

Climate change is now 5\u20130,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/quadrant.org.au\/magazine\/2019\/10\/demonstrable-casualties-of-climate-change\/ Malcolm Turnbull began this glorious trend.\u00a0\u201cI will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[421,706,127,27,709,708,707,710],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}