You lot are paying

You lot are paying. It was three years ago to the day that I wrote of the wisdom tabloid newspaper editors often show in understanding the prejudices of ordinary voters. The occasion was the elevation of Malcolm Turnbull into John Howard’s Cabinet as Environment Minister and the editor in question was the London Sun‘s who greeted the Stern Report on climate change with the page one picture of Tony Blair under the headline “I’m saving the world…YOU lot are paying.”

Malcolm Turnbull had just made his first ministerial speech and I drew attention to how his message was very much tailored to those cynics identified by the tabloid editor. “Self-inflicted restraint”, Turnbull told the Parliament, “will have no effect at all on global warming unless it is matched by a similar reduction around the world.” Australia would do what it could but there would be no futile gestures that made some people feel good while putting others out of work for no good reason.

This week the former Environment Minister, who with the passage of the three years has risen to Opposition Leader and fallen to a backbencher again, will deliver a quite different message with a spirited advocacy of direct action to combat climate change even at the price of considerable cost.

Meanwhile Turnbull’s successor as Liberal Leader, Tony Abbott, will get on with repeating his message that the proposal of Kevin Rudd that Turnbull supports is nothing more than a big new tax that would be imposed on the working people of Australia. It is a nice role reversal.

The policy is working. No wonder Tony Abbott keeps defending Barnaby Joyce. The Queensland Senator is the man who single-handedly got the “big tax” argument going and now it is apparently responsible for a revival in support for the Coalition. When it comes to a few slips of the tongue about millions and billions, well don’t you worry about that. Barnaby’s importance is far greater than stumbles that most voters will never even known were made. The last thing the Opposition should want is to start worrying about what journalists write. In the big scheme of things we don’t count.

Thankful for a small mercy. Perhaps we should be thankful we are in the Southern Hemisphere. The updated figures on world temperatures show that up north things are getting warmer far quicker than they are down south.

Graphs from NASA’s Goddard Institute

I do so love fearless predictions. Like this one reported by Richard Webb in the Melbourne Sunday Age. Hold your nerve, it’s time to jump in said the headline before advising readers that “Shares are now 9 per cent off their January highs, but stock experts say the good times are not far away.” Journalists to me are a bit like the mob who give a signal when they start buying shares that everyone else should start selling.

More Afghans in France. I note there is a relative absence of hysteria this time about the minor influx of asylum seekers into Australia. Public opinion is more relaxed about the issue these days than when it was deliberately inflamed by a Government desperately searching for an election issue.

In truth this country is getting off very lightly from the exodus of refugees of the real and economic variety from countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Iraq. It is in Europe that the real problem is emerging.

Figures from the UNHCR