Opinion

Australia’s Special Pleading on Climate: Kyoto deja vu

When the Climate Change Authority – of which I’m a member – concluded that Australia should reduce its carbon emissions by 40-60% below 2000 levels in 2030, and by 30% in 2025, it did not pick the numbers out of the air. Those target levels are the minimum necessary for Australia to

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When Racism Masquerades as “Equality”: The Adam Goodes Furore

Throughout most of Australia’s modern history white society has worked hard to make Indigenous Australians disappear. In the early days it took the brutal forms of ‘dispersion’ and taking children from their families. But a people can be made invisible in subtler ways. Aborigines were declared a dying race, written

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‘There is such confusion in my powers’: Is an ETS a tax?

Here is a definition in search of a term: what do we call a calculated political strategy to confuse the citizenry in order to gain an electoral advantage? For anyone who thinks clearly, and wants to minimise ambiguity in their communication, definitions matter. In political discourse certain terms have diverse

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Australia’s Kyoto Escape Hatch Now Exploited

In the saga of mendacity that is the climate policy debate, no claim has been more audacious than the one now being told by the federal government about Australia’s “success” in meeting its Kyoto emissions target. Environment minister Greg Hunt now routinely makes statements like this: We are one of

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