It’s the biggest story of the day. Huge. Filling talkback, leading the news bulletins, dominating the public conversation. Kevin Rudd’s muted attempt to forge an Australian response to cataclysmic climate change? No. The future of troubled AFL star Ben Cousins. And there in a bad-hair nutshell is the Rudd Government’s real failure in this national discussion of how to salvage a liveable planet from a suddenly hostile, carbon-addled climate.
What happened yesterday was an inevitable act of pragmatic politics. The hypocrisy and abject failure lies in the gap between Rudd’s aggressive climate rhetoric and his meek, pusillanimous policy, a gap that could have been filled by active leadership from our Prime Minister and his party. If they truly believe that climate change is the elephant in all our rooms, then they had an obligation to provide the sort of national discussion and understanding that might have made the dramatic action required to save our planet and our children’s skins politically palatable. They didn’t. Kevin 07 failed to deliver climate change we can believe in. The unravelling environment became nothing more than just another what’s-in-it for me issue of personal pain or gain. The destructive individualism refined through a decade of the previous administration plays on, fuelled by a populist press and pandered to by a nervous government too eager to please, too anxious to take a risk.
2 Comments
Jonathan: I think we are all too stuf-ed to keep on. (until tomorrow, of course.) What with Crikey growing to such an extent, so many ghastly decisions being made by the Rudd government, me taking too much of the content to heart. And my inability to be anything more than a touch-typist, reduces my speed. Next year I am taking a pledge to delete the major part of my comments in the pursuit of brevity.
Having read Alan Kohler’s article, ‘At least you and I will be dead’. I have to say we are all having un-neccessary hysterics. There is nothing any of us can do to rectify the Global Warming issue. Everything is pre-ordained. We are stuffed, as is every other country in the world.
For those of you who drink Grange. Buy a few good ones. I’m going to settle for a few bottles of chardonnay and some excellent French (is there any other sort?) Champagne.
Then I’m off to find the most effective poison I can find. So it’s goodnight from me and good night from him.
PS: The general public have, as usual, got it right, Ben Cousins is far more important than the end of this miserable world.