On Jonathan Moylan and the Whitehaven coal hoax

The latest in a long line of Aussie hoaxes was perpetrated to great effect this week though its creator might yet pay a penalty of ten years and half a million bucks. Anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan is in the wars for putting out a press release in the name of ANZ Bank on Tuesday. The release said the bank was divesting its $1.2b loan to Whitehaven Coal for its Maules Creek Coal Project. It was an important announcement. In Whitehaven’s own words, Maules Creek is “one of only a few remaining tier 1 undeveloped coal assets in Australia. It is also one of the largest coal deposits in Australia with 362 Mt of recoverable reserves.”

Photo credit: ABC TV News

Before it could be exposed as a hoax, it triggered a stock market collapse for the coal company. While almost all of the losses were subsequently recovered before the day was out, Moylan’s actions raises serious political as well as ethical and legal issues. Using dubious means, he focussed attention on the important question about whether we should be investing in major coal projects in a time when fossil fuel emission is the biggest issue we face as a species.

Maules Creek is in the heart of the rich Gunnedah Basin in NSW. That state and Queensland produce 97 percent of Australia’s black coal. It is an industry in decline with Australia producing 405 million tonnes of raw black coal in 2010-11 down from 471 Mt. in 2009-10. Yet Australia remains the world’s fourth largest coal producer and the world’s leading exporter with markets in Japan, South Korea, China, India and Europe. Coal fired generators are leading contributors (20 percent) to a greenhouse effect as heavy-grade emitters of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

The Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions acknowledges fixing the coal issue will be difficult. Coal is cheap, is important for meeting energy needs in the developing countries, and has good lobby groups in countries like the US, which is the “Saudi Arabia of coal.”  Coal-fired generators could still play a role if carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology ever takes off, possibly 10-15 years away.  There would also be a need for a carbon market, priced at around $30 a ton of CO2 and a way of retrofitting CCS into existing technology.  An ANZ that truly considered its customers interests, would ensure such boxes were being ticked. But it has no plans to do so and there is no scrutiny of whether such interests are considered.

Instead, the argument focussed on Moylan with those dividing into two sides on whether his hoax ends justified the means. Those that supported him like Bob Brown identified Moylan’s action as a necessary civil disobedience that brought out in the open ANZ’s investment in coal.  That brought out the coalition’s Eric Abetz saying the ends did not justify the means. He turned it into an attack on Lee Rhiannon and the Greens’ “extreme political tendencies.”

Whoever is right, there is one thing for certain - Moylan planned his attack well. He put together a fake ANZ press template, a website and dummy email inbox online. The press release was a remarkable use of managerial language to frame an argument that would be quite unusual and brave in an Australian business context. Moylan used the voice of ANZ Corporate Communications to announce the bank would not support the project. Toby Kent, “Group head of corporate sustainability” was quoted to say the company wouldn’t invest in coal projects that cause “significant dislocation of farmers, unacceptable damage to the environment, or social conflict." The decision was made after “a careful analysis of reputational risks and analysis of the returns on this mine in the current climate of high volatility in the coal export market.”  The released concluded with the statement ANZ was undertaking “a review of coal and gas investments on productive agricultural lands and areas of high biodiversity.”

Moylan’s fake ANZ release was quickly picked up by AAP Newswire who failed to conduct any of the basic identity checks that would have exposed the hoax. At the bottom of the emails are phone numbers for Toby Kent and Joanne McCulloch “Media Relations Advisor” which if anyone had bothering phoning would have quickly exposed this email as a hoax.  Either that or a quick check of ANZ’s database of media releases would have been enough to dispel, or at least doubt, the information.

Instead AAP swallowed the news whole and provided it directly to the markets. When traders in the Australian Stock Exchange saw the newswires shortly after midday Tuesday, they went ballistic. Whitehaven bore the brunt as 85% owners of Maules Creek Coal. Maules Creek is 18km north-east of Boggabri on the Kamilaroi Highway between Narrabri and Gunndah. It is also just 16km from the railway line servicing the coal terminals at the Port of Newcastle, 360km to the south-east. Maules Creek’s current resources are expected to support a large open cut mining operation for 30 years at an average saleable coal production rate of 10.8 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa). Subject to approvals, the first coal production will commence in mid 2013, with saleable production exceeding 10Mtpa from 2016 onwards.

But it was a dead duck without ANZ’s investment, and within minutes Whitehaven shares plunged almost 10 percent from $3.52 to $3.21. Whitehaven Coal lost more than $276 million in market value. It capped off a bad year for the company since it merged with Nathan Tinkler’s Aston last April giving him 19.4 percent ownership. The share price has lost over half its value since then with CEO Tony Haggarty and the board blaming it on uncertainty due to Tinkler’s financial woes  - they want him to divest to institutions. Tinkler was quick to return fire on Haggarty and the board saying he wanted to increase his holding not decrease it.

That plan may be in tatters after Tuesday. The price did not recover until the real ANZ responded with a media release (pdf) entitled “Fraudulent media release regarding Whitehaven Coal”. This release (which looked remarkably like the fraudulent one) said ANZ remained “fully supportive of Whitehaven Coal.”
At the end of trading, Whitehaven was just 2c down on the day reflecting the fact there were other issues with the project. The damage done to Tinkler, was variously estimated to be anywhere between $50m and $180m (assuming it wasn’t him who picked up the shares when they were on the rebound).

Whatever the damage to Tinkler or Whitehaven, Moylan will suffer significant collateral damage. There is a strong prima facie case his actions were illegal according to Section 1041E of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth).  That act states it is an offence if a person makes a knowingly false statement that is likely to make people dispose of shares. The maximum jail term for individuals is 10 years, with fines of up to $495,000. Organisations face fines of up to $4.6 million.

The Australian Securities Investment Commission said it would be investigating whether there had been a breach of Corporations Act rules on false or misleading statements. According to dean of law at the University of Western Sydney Michael Adams the legislation that deals with corporate fraud imposes a high penalty on false or misleading statements about traded securities on the ASX. Adams believes a successful prosecution will hang on the difference between a public nuisance and civil disobedience. “A protest normally provides publicity for a cause and brings the matter to the general public’s attention, but causes little harm to the community,” Adams said. “A fraud – and in particular one that impacts on the share market – has huge consequences”.

Research fellow on ethics Edward Spence picked up on Abetz’s argument about the ends and the means. Spence said Moylan’s ethical failings were harmful to the “integrity of the digital informational environment”. This is the environment whose trustworthiness, Spence said “we all rely on to conduct our legitimate informational transactions.” We are not only biological beings, he said but also and increasingly informational beings. “When the informational environment is harmed we are also harmed.”

Spence may be exaggerating the harm here as it ignores the fact that checks and balances such as AAP did not do its job properly. Nor did any of the rest of the media use the hoax to expose ANZ's dealings with the coal industry. Why didn't anyone ask the bank if they would do "a review of coal and gas investments on productive agricultural lands and areas of high biodiversity".Why is it acceptable for the bank to continue to invest in projects that cause "significant dislocation of farmers, unacceptable damage to the environment, or social conflict?"

We're waiting.

A new start it ain't: Jenny Macklin and unemployment

The new Australian political (and election) year did not get off to an auspicious start with the Macklin affair though some good might yet come of it. The affair has seen a government minister tied up in knots about a nonsensical hypothesis, the media whipped up in frenzies of righteous wrath, and the leader of another party now wanting to live out the nonsense.

The problem occur on New Year’s Day. Families Minister Jenny Macklin held a door-stop media conference at a Melbourne hospital to promote the government’s Dad and Partner Pay scheme introduced on January 1. The scheme brings in government-funded paternity leave for two weeks so it should have been a good news story for Macklin to deliver.

However the journalists there were not interested in the good news, they were more interested in a bad news change that came in on January 1. This change was a follow on from a change John Howard made in 2006 which was to end the supporting parent allowance when the child turned eight. Howard exempted those already receiving the parenting payment before July 2006 who were able to keep it until their youngest turned 16. This meant there would be exemptions until 2014. However the Gillard Government has now ended that immediately, saving $728 million over four years.

This change shifts 80,000 single parents from the parenting payment to the Newstart allowance when their youngest child turns eight.  Some parents will be up to $110 a week worse off with the new arrangements and it was this issue that journalists turned to when one asked Macklin if she could live on the dole on $246 a week. Macklin could have done many things at this point, including refusing to answer on the grounds it was a very stupid question. Fellow Minister Tanya Plibersek would later answer the question “properly” by saying "I don't think anyone thinks it's easy."

But no such luck for Macklin, who gave the worst possible answer. “Yes I could”.  Macklin then made matters worse by omitting her answer from the transcript issued by her office. Macklin tried to push on by telling journalists they had simply applied existing rules to people who had on the payment since 2006. “What’s important for people who are unemployed is that we do everything possible to do everything we can to help people get into work and that’s what we’ll be doing with these single parents as well,” she said.

But it was too late. The damage was done by the killer quote. TV cameras captured that answer which immediately provided the headline for broadcast and print media and the subsequent non-appearance in the transcript merely fuelled speculation of a cover-up. Susie O’Brien in the Herald Sun went so far as to call it “obscene”.  Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie also took Macklin to task, but ridiculed calls for the minister to try surviving on the Newstart allowance. “You can't replicate that experience if you are a senior member of government,” she said.

Goldie’s comment came as Greens’ leader Adam Bandt  repeated tragedy as farce by announcing he would live on the $246 allowance for one week, challenging Macklin to do the same. "Once you take into account your rent your bills, your food, there's not much change left over from $35 a day,” he told reporters in Melbourne, but didn’t elaborate how much of his modern lifestyle and well-tailored suits would be pushed to one side to make ends meet in that week.

Bandt’s stunt had little to do with the Newstart Allowance and everything to do with his struggle to retain Melbourne at the next election. But the whole affair does highlight issues with the low benefit rate when there are systemic problems of under-employment Australia has not solved. While the current rate of unemployment is low at 5.2 per cent by historic and international standards there is a high degree of volatility within this rate. In March 2012 the unemployment rate in Tasmania was 7.0 per cent, nearly twice the 3.7 per cent rate in the Northern Territory. Similarly, in March 2012 the unemployment rate for those aged 15-19 is 18 per cent, more than three times the national average.

There are “dole cheats” but for the vast majority, the dole queue remains a humiliating experience  for most people. Economist John Quiggan said that instead of completing the Howard agenda, the Gillard government ought to be looking at increasing the real value of benefits, “allowing the unemployed to share in some of the growth in incomes for the community as a whole”.  Even thinking about the absurdity of living on $246 a week, reminds us that many people have to do exactly that and some parents of those aged eight and over will now pay the price for the Government’s budget balance obsession.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Julia Gillard preferred to focus on solving the inequities of employment in the “patchwork economy” rather than increasing dole payments. “Some today see a problem, they offer blame”, Gillard told the Sydney Institute last year. “I see a person, a person who can work. I offer only opportunity, I ask only responsibility in return.”  If Gillard gets the public space to tackle that agenda, she might yet be grateful for Macklin’s mistake.

Room for renewal: Bob Brown quits

In another move that has caught the Canberra hive mind off guard, Greens leader Bob Brown has stood down in favour of his deputy and fellow Tasmanian Christine Milne. Adam Bandt has been elected the new deputy. Brown steps down after 18 years in the job and 16 years in parliament since election in 1996. In his media conference announcing the decision, he said there needed to be “room for renewal”. The timing was related to the need for the Tasmanian Greens to decide on their Senate candidates for the next election before July. Aged 67, Brown did not want to commit to another six years in parliament.

Bernard Keane called Brown’s career a third party triumph. Keane said Brown went from being the only Green in parliament between 1998 to 2001 to the leader of nine senators in 2010 with a vote of 13 per cent. “At a time when politics is increasingly professionalised and parties are pushing younger, less experienced people into senior positions, Brown was a traditional conviction politician, forthright in attacking the most sacred of cows in Australian public policy on economics, the media and foreign policy,” Keane said.

Brown trained as a doctor and gained political prominence as the head of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society during the campaign to save the Franklin Dam. He was elected to the Tasmanian Parliament in 1983. In his book Bob Brown: Gentle Revolutionary James Norman called Brown the stalwart who has made the Greens the only unambiguously left-wing opposition party in Australia with enormous personal respect. “This gently spoken, bespectacled gay doctor has become something of a national hero of almost pop star status,” Norman wrote in 2005. “Respected even by those who diametrically oppose his politics.”

Some seven years later, not all his enemies were prepared to give him respect. News Ltd’s David Penberthy has been a strong critic for some time. In July 2010 he suggested Brown should be replaced as leader and last month he ridiculed Brown’s third annual Green Oration which opened with the salutation “fellow Earthians” as a “batty speech” and a “deep ecologist ramble” which demonstrated Brown’s “dippy enviro-spiritualism”.

Such attacks from News Ltd are not new to Brown. The Australian infamously editorialised in 2010 that Brown and his Green colleagues “are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.” In 2011 Brown called News “hate media” for their misrepresentations of him and the climate debate. The biggest selling daily in Australia, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun implored its readers to “Stop this man ruining the nation”.

In the end it wasn’t Murdoch’s papers that forced Brown out; it was his own sense of the need for party renewal. It is not quite generational change. New leader Christine Milne will be 59 next month. Milne has followed in the footsteps of Brown into the Tasmanian Green movement, then the State Parliament, then Canberra and now the leadership. She is determined to put a new stamp on the party, talking today of the need to appeal to ““progressive business”. With her rural background, she said the Greens must also appeal to rural and regional voters.

As someone who now lives in a rural area, I can safely say this will be a mighty challenge despite obvious synergies. Both rural people and the Greens claim to love the land, but see stewardship of it in different ways. Most rural people are suspicious of the Greens as a city-based organisation with little knowledge or empathy about how country folk live their lives. The Greens don’t have any organisation or presence in the bush. They also treat country voters with contempt by placing people in elections that don’t live in or even visit the constituency or cannot be bothered to talk to local media, such as Greens Warrego candidate Graeme Maizey in the recent Queensland election who was rewarded for his lack of engagement with just 2% of the vote.

Perhaps Milne can draw on the work of another Queensland template. Former Queensland Green senate candidate Drew Hutton is now working closely with Queensland farmers as president of the Lock the Gate Alliance against the coal seam gas industry. The Alliance says it is a national group of over 120 community, industry and environmental groups and over 1000 supporters concerned with “the devastating impact that certain inadequately assessed and inadequately-regulated fossil fuel extraction industries are having on our short and long term physical, social, environmental and economic wellbeing.”

The Alliance is likely to appeal to Milne as she seeks to grow the party towards its next stage of evolution. Brown has achieved much since starting the Greens from the ashes of the United Tasmania Party culminating with the election of Adam Bandt and the Coalition agreement with Labor in 2010. But as he said today “we don’t just want to keep the so-and-sos honest, we want to replace them.” Outright power is still a long way away for a party that polls in the low teens. Their biggest vote is among young people but as Pollytics analysed in 2009, it is a volatile demographic. If Milne can somehow reach across the suspicious divide, there may well be room for renewal.

Disturbing Durban: The world starts to act on climate change

The tag line for the Durban Conference was "Climate Change in balanced fashion". That these corporate wankwords hide as much as they reveal was shown in the angry environmentalists' respone to the conference. Those who can see we are in a spot of bother are spitting chips over the Durban agreement. We cannot afford no action until 2020, they said.

The consequences to the planet of a “gaping 8 year hole” are potentially catastrophic, particularly as the likely outcome is a further increase in carbon emissions in the short term. But while they are right, the Greens are showing their usual tendency to forget realpolitik: this latest deal is as good as the governments of the world were willing to give at the time, giving their widely differing places at the table. This is not no action and the agreement builds on the small steps taken at Bali, Copenhagen and Cancun agreements to give a roadmap towards worldwide reductions in 2020 and that is mostly a good thing.

There are things the Greens are right to be angry about. Sea level rises caused by warmer temperatures will continue long after the oven is turned down in 2020. There is also the prospect of mass species extinction. Current best estimates have atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration expecting to exceed 500 parts per million and global temperatures to rise by at least 2°C by 2050 to 2100. These values significantly exceed anything in the least the past 420,000 years during which most of our marine organisms evolved.

Earth relies on the greenhouse effect to sustain life. But CO2, methane and nitrous oxide all absorb infrared energy and keep heat energy on Earth and all are on the increase. The effects are varied: the North West Passage is becoming seaworthy again, the 3250 sq km Larsen B ice shelf disappeared in a month in 2002, glaciers in Argentina and Chile are melting at double the rate of 1975 while sea temperature rises are threatening coral reefs across the world.

Even modest increases in sea levels could cause major flooding in many of the world’s low lying megalopolises. If there is a rise in sea levels of 0.5m, the Majuro Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands would mostly disappear. If the sea level rises by 1m, one fifth of Bangladesh goes under as would 13 of the world’s 15 largest cities. If the unstable West Antarctic Ice Shelf replicated the behaviour of Larsen B, sea levels could rise 3m. If Greenland once again resembled its name it would add 7m to water levels.

This picture is a New York with a 5m rise, not beyond the bounds of possibility though the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report worst case scenario only allows for a maximum of 0.6m to 2100. The report also acknowledges global emissions will grow despite mitigation measures. Even at the likeliest levels of 0.3m in 2100, that rise is enough to obliterate many island nations. Without the power to influence conferences except by emotion, the islanders' biggest challenge will be to preserve their nationality without a territory. Believing such a loss ia temporary has lawyers rushing to the Law of the Sea and the UN Convention to see how such states could survive “in exile”.

Despite the depression that starts this kind of thinking, this is profoundly optimistic in the long term. It speaks to the unending human belief we can fix any problem, including ones caused by our own actions. The annual Climate Change Conference is like a large ship with a slow turning circle. But it is slowly taking effect. The year 1990 is used as the benchmark year for all emissions as this was around the time science realised there was a major problem. It was also the year UN-steered climate change negotiations started. No-one cared at first. In the 5 years after 1990, carbon emissions worldwide increased from 1 billion tons to 7 billion tons.

20 years down the track, the scientists still have difficulty selling their message, if some sections of the right and the media are to be believed while on the other side, the Greens thinks we are not moving fast enough. Yet recent International Energy Agency data shows global action is beginning to work. Countries who participated in the Kyoto Protocol were 15% below their 1990 levels two decades later. The problem is the Kyoto non binding countries led by China and the Middle East have greatly expanded their emissions in that time.

This is why a global agreement iis so important. The developing countries have a good point the West has caused more emissions. But they have learned quickly from Western technology and China is now the world’s biggest emitter. An agreement of “annex” and “non annex” countries no longer makes sense.

This is why China and India ultimately signed the agreement. Let no one underestimate what was achieved.It is the first global deal that scales back our fossil fuel economy. 2020 is a long way away and there will be more eight more meetings and eight more frenetic all-night negotiations as nations and economic blocs jostle for position in the brave new world of a post-carbon economy. But the decision offers a clear signal the ship is turning and passengers need to look the other way. The markets will now do their bit by promoting investment in industries that best fit the new model.

If the Greens are impatient we are not turning fast enough, then rightwing groups such as the Australian Coalition are determined to steer straight ahead regardless. Abbott’s claim the carbon tax is an “international orphan” is wrong on at least three counts: Australia is not the only country to price carbon, it will be a necessary requirement to send the right market signals to move to renewables, and its overgenerous compensation will mean that it will have little genuine effect on the nation’s massive fossil fuel industry in the short term. By 2020, the world will still be warming to dangerous levels. But an agreement is now in place to deal with the problem. And Australia has an enforcing mechanism. Whether that is all too little too late is for our grandchildren to judge.

Australian election 2010 (End of Part 1)

The people of Australia have spoken and delivered a very bloody nose to Julia Gillard’s Labor Government today. Whether the blow is enough to knock it out remains to be seen. With three seats out of 150 still in doubt at the time of writing the likely make-up of Australia’s next parliament has the Coalition with 74 seats and Labor with 71 seats. As well there are 3 ex-Nationals independents, a Green and ex-Green. Voting purely along a likely left-right axis, that makes it 77-73 to Tony Abbott's Coalition and in theory enough to rule, especially if he can convince one of the independents to be the Speaker.

But his party falls short of an outright majority so Abbott cannot yet stake his claim to be Prime Minister. Australia is governed by the Westminster Convention even if these conventions can sometimes prove tenuous just as when it was stretched to breaking point in 1975. In his post-election speech Abbott offered “the Australian people” his team as an alternative “stable government”. But as Abbott well knows, it’s out of their hands right now. Gillard refused to concede tonight and remains Prime Minister. The Governor General Quentin Bryce (a Labor appointee) will have to offer her the first right of refusal to gain "the confidence" of the Lower House.

Gillard will probably accept and attempt to manage a minority government. This will be at best a short-term manoeuvre to gain time to fight another election. She might be able to rule for a while with the tacit support of the Independents if she puts forward legislation that will get what they want for their constituents. After all, this dull election campaign has proven one thing. With the exception of the NBN and the ETS (neither of which will exist much before 2013) there is little differentiation between the parties. Yet a change of government is a big thing and it might be easiest to get what you want from the party already in power. As Tony Windsor said tonight "the most important issue here is stability of governance”. They may find the acceleration of the NBN in their areas an acceptable price of support.

Gillard can rule with the independents and Greens if she can manage the difficult balancing of rural interests with environment concerns. The ETS delay may yet prove convenient. She has no major agenda that she needs to push through in the next few months. A few anodyne bills while the parties squabble through to February may be what she needs. And then with Latham and Rudd just a bad memory they get back the six or so seats they need to form outright government.

But if the independents decide to play a bigger game then Gillard is in trouble. If they publicly come out and say they will support Tony Abbott for three years as the next prime minister than she will have to resign.

If that happens, Labor has no one to blame but itself. For two and a half years of government Kevin Rudd and his party enjoyed stratospheric polls as people enjoyed the change from Howards End and the impressive weathering of the global financial crisis. Meanwhile the Liberals recycled their leaders until it found one with the stomach to take the fight to the Government.

When the polls finally levelled as they normally do closer to an election, Labor panicked and sacked the boss. Australians didn’t like being told their Prime Minister was being removed without their say so and Queensland particularly resented losing their man. The hope that Gillard as a woman would affect the female vote was possibly countered by many men voting Abbott. If people weren’t sure the “mad monk” should be Prime Minister, there was a lot who didn’t like one being an “atheist antichrist” either.

The make-up of the Senate is more assured at this stage. The Greens had a great result electing senators in all six seats. With the Coalition on 34 and Labor on 31, the Greens now have a clear balance of power with 9 seats. Allied to Bandt’s stunning and historic lower house victory in Melbourne, and former Green Andrew Wilkie’s likely win in Denison this is a watershed election for the environmental movement who must now move deeply inside the tent.

A jaded electorate won’t take kindly to be sent back to the polls in the next few months. Who they blame for that will be whoever is seen as the most obstructionist in the negotiations to come. The animus of the party leaders remains crucial. Abbott is assured and now very confident as Liberal leader but still has obvious flaws and a fractured power base. Turnbull is still waiting in the wings to pounce again.

The Labor Government has no obvious candidate out there to replace Gillard (other than Rudd) and our first female Prime Minister may yet grow in the role that Rudd squandered. But the next few months are critical. If she can learn to negotiate with the Greens without needling Oakeshott, Windsor and Katter, a saner long-term Australian policy to the overwhelming problem of climate change may yet emerge from the chaos of representative democracy. Otherwise Gillard's bloody nose will be the least of our problems.

Let Bartlett be Bartlett: The Greens candidate for Brisbane

The conservative and contrarian state of Queensland remains the toughest parliamentary challenge for the Australian Greens though they are starting to make some inroads. Ronan Lee was briefly a Greens State MP after he defected from Labor in 2008 - though he was turfed out of office by the voters a year later. Larissa Waters (who went up against fellow Senate candidate Barnaby Joyce on Q&A last night) is taking her second tilt at a Senate seat in 2010 hoping to improve on her 7.3 percent in 2007 which saw her defeated on the final count for the last Queensland seat. Labor won that 27th count with the help of Pauline’s United Australia preferences but with La Hanson now firmly out of the political scene, the Greens may finally have a sniff of a Queensland Senate seat.

Meanwhile an ex-Queensland Senator is making the Greens’ most serious fight yet for a Lower House seat. Former Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett is the most high profile recruit to the Greens north of the Tweed since Lee. Bartlett was a casually elected Senator for the Democrats in 1997 after the Labor defection of Cheryl Kernot. He successfully defended his seat in 2001, was party leader as they began to unravel in 2004 before being defeated as the Democrats disintegrated in 2007. In November 2009 he announced he would be standing for the seat of Brisbane held by Labor’s Arch Bevis.

I interviewed Bartlett during his unsuccessful 2007 campaign and as he is now a candidate in my electorate I have repeated the exercise three years on. Brisbane is an inner city seat covering the CBD and surrounding suburbs north of the river. Bevis has held the seat for two decades and won comfortably in 2007 with a 2PP vote of 57 to 43. In that election the relatively unknown Elizabeth Guthrie took 11.8 percent for the Greens and it is safe to predict Bartlett’s name recognition value will add substantially to their vote this time round. In the only polling done so far in the seat, a Galaxy poll for WWF, Bartlett said he is polling between 18 to 20 percent.

Liberals are also putting up a strong candidate in Brisbane, former Redcliffe MP Teresa Gambaro. Bartlett will have his work cut out in a tough contest between three candidates who have 40 years of legislative experience between them. 20 percent of the vote is unlikely to beat either Bevis or Gambaro. But the WWF polling is another solid indicator the Greens have a base that is slowly and steadily growing.

Bartlett said they were in government in Tasmania, held the balance of power in SA’s upper house and had 20 MPs and a 100 councillors including a mayor in Byron Bay and three mayors in Melbourne councils. Bartlett said this bottom-up approach was a key difference between the Democrats and the Greens. “The Democrats were in power federally almost from the start - we had the balance of power within a year of being formed,” he said. “But the Greens have a more sustainable foundation.”

Bartlett blames the upheaval over the GST deal the Democrats struck with the Howard Government in 1999 for its ultimate demise. “When a party’s ethics is based on honesty, [the change of direction] led to a massive hole in its core,” he said. He said the Greens now remind how the Democrats used to be and said he wants to be a part of their parliamentary push. “I felt I still have something to contribute,” he said. “Ever since 1989 I felt very strongly the two party system was not capable of delivering enough”.

He enjoyed serving on parliamentary committees across many areas of governance during the years when the Democrats had the balance of power though he concedes they may have spread themselves too thinly in the end. After Howard won control of the Senate in 2004, Bartlett had more opportunity to study the Greens which were growing as the Democrats contracted. He said the Greens broadened their focus from being a pure environmental lobby group and their willingness to negotiate meant he was seeing more common ground with the party.

Bartlett defended the Greens decision to reject the Labor Government’s CPRS last year though he acknowledges it would have been a politically easier decision to support it. “You should explore every avenue to negotiate as you go but in the end you must decided whether it is worse than doing nothing,” he said. “It’s like designing a bridge – if the direction and trajectory are wrong, you don’t say build it anyway and we’ll fix it up later.”

Climate change remains the biggest challenge. “If we accept the science, its ‘past urgent’,” he said. He said the Greens were on the cusp of giving people a viable alternative to the two major parties. Bartlett said he wanted to use his campaign to remind people of the importance of the Senate. “I was the last person in the Senate from Queensland who wasn’t Labor or the Coalition,” he said. Bartlett believed Waters stood a good chance of being elected.

He also understood the need for the Greens to move beyond the environmental fringe. “We need to become more literate in other areas,” he said. “If we do become the balance of power we can’t just have an opposing role - we’ll have to tackle issues like taxation and superannuation.” In the event Bartlett is not returned to parliament, he will surely find a role in the background poring over documents to help the Greens turn those next policy corners.

Bartlett should accept McKim's Tasmanian Coalition offer

A Tasmanian Green media release today confirmed what most people understood as the Green position in the Apple Isle: they would prefer a coalition government but in the meantime won’t support a no confidence motion against the Labor Government. In the absence of a negotiated settlement or outright malfeasance by Labor, David Bartlett will be able to serve out a second term as Tasmanian Premier. Yet Greens leader Nick McKim continued to offer to negotiate with either party and said they would still hold all of their pre-election policies including opposition to the proposed Gunns pulp mill, fighting to save Tasmania’s high conservation value forests, and rolling back the government’s education reform program “Tasmania Tomorrow”.

These latter three policies are likely to be major sticking points and make Bartlett’s long-term survival hopes appear tenuous. Bartlett could strengthen that position by sitting down with McKim but he has shown little sign of wanting to negotiate what would appear on face value to be an obvious centre-left coalition between Labor and the Greens. But in the poisonous world of Tasmanian politics, Labor might have been better served seeking a Coalition with the Liberals. Prior to the election, Bartlett said he had no level of trust in McKim.

The election under the Hare-Clark rules on 20 March left Tasmania with a lower house of 10 Labor seats, 10 Liberal and 5 Greens. While such a result is common in Europe and leads to perfectly workable coalitions, here the result was greeted with consternation. Both the major parties stuck their collective heads in the sand and said working with the Greens was impossible – working with each other was simply the beyond the realm of thought.

Because the Liberals took 39 percent of the vote compared to Labor’s 37, Bartlett initially held to his campaign promise that he would have over power to the Liberals in the event they outvoted them. Bartlett began to pull back from that promise in the weeks following the election as it became obvious it was dubious from the standpoint of constitutional conventions. He was also bolstered by McKim’s offer of support despite having making no efforts to woo the Greens. On 9 April, Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood made the correct call and offered the Premiership back to Bartlett. Underwood still retains the possibility of offering the job to the Liberals’ Will Hodgman in the event it doesn’t work out. Only then would Tasmanians face another election.

Hodgman bitterly protested the decision and slammed Bartlett for going back on his promise. But this was never Bartlett’s decision to make. As Tasmanian lawyer Greg Barns said, “Underwood correctly applied constitutional convention, which is to say he asked himself which party could provide stability and saw that the answer was clearly the ALP. End of story.”

Of course, it is very far from the end of this particularly story. However, ABC election analyst Antony Green believes Bartlett and McKim are finally discussing the possibility of coalition government with the possibility that McKim and fellow Greens MP Tim Morris may be offered ministries. Former Premier Paul Lennon is also pushing for Bartlett to offer McKim a ministry. How they deal with the looming decision on Gunn’s Tamar Vale pulp mill will be an early test of such an alliance, nevertheless it is good they are talking and the Greens may find it harder to oppose from inside the tent. Australian politicians don’t take easy to compromise but it is the mark of mature governance and often the only way things get done in a democracy.

An Australian apology: Why the Greens should vote for the CPRS

With the world still not quite ready yet for climate peace, there is only one reason to sign the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme into law before Copenhagen. That reason is not about the “good faith” of an expedient political bargain that will be just as valid in February. Nor is not about being good for the environment because that is unproven. It is certainly not about the soul of the Liberal Party (though the extraordinary public immolation of Malcolm Turnbull is quickly burning all its bridges). Nor for that matter is a CPRS about making Kevin Rudd look good on the world stage - he doesn’t need any more help with that.

No, the only thing a Senate agreement this week will be good for is to do something Rudd is quite good at: apologising.

The CPRS is a statement of intent for an emissions trading scheme. For twenty years or more the world’s nations have known climate change is a serious issue. For the last ten the world has been on an irreversible path towards an ETS as a solution. The Kyoto Protocol was the first imperfect draft. Like any multi-lateral compromise it was a botched beast to begin with. It was fatally undermined by the lack of inclusion of the BRIC countries and then destroyed when the Bush 43 administration reneged on the US’s promise to take part.

Of the developed nations, only Australia also opted out. Australia knew the climate science but as a country highly addicted to carbon was reluctant to accept the long-term diagnosis. It decided the survival of Australia’s carbon industries was too important to risk to a global treaty and opted out. It wasn’t until 2007 and defeat staring him in the face that John Howard bowed to the inevitable and made an ETS Government policy. As Alan Koehler noted today, it is mostly his scheme that is before parliament.

But whether it is Howard's or Rudd's or Turnbull's is immaterial. What matter is that Australia will eventually have an ETS of sorts. It will pay dearly for the unnecessary years of delay and for this will have no one to blame but itself. But others too may want to apportion blame at the price of Australia’s prevarication. The country is the most serious per capita carbon emitter in the world and has thumbed its nose at collective action for 12 years. Why should Bangladesh or Malaysia rein in its emissions when rich Australia won’t?

Australia relied on the US to get away with its unilateralism. But as a country reliant on what it digs out of the country to survive, this is dangerous behaviour. Many nations and would-be trading partners have not forgotten Australia’s selfishness over Kyoto.Therefore it is important Australia goes to Copenhagen with an attitude more in keeping with its supposed reputation for mateship. An ETS signed in law would be a good apology for inaction in the past.

For sure, Labor’s CPRS is seriously flawed. The plan is a dog’s breakfast that will initially reward the polluters and pass the problem on to other nations to solve. The bill's various carrots will probably add to emissions in the short term. But it is the only proposal on the table at the moment that is likely to pass parliament. And passing it would make it a defining statement about Australia’s sense of responsibility as a good citizen to the rest of the world.

It is not like we don't know the consequences. There have been 13 enquiries on Climate change since the last election all of them pointing towards an emissions trading regime. By signing a CPRS into law prior to Copenhagen, Australia is telling the world we are serious about addressing climate change. The Greens should support this position. There is nothing in the legislation that cannot be fixed when the Greens get the balance of power.

Greens Senator Christine Milne probably knows more about climate change than anyone else in the parliament but she must surely know there are no other realistic proposals on the table. She also knows Australia’s responsibility to the wider world as part of the developed nations that actually use all the energy. On Thursday she told parliament that one of the frustrations in the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen is getting the West to agree on an ETS financial mechanism that favours developing countries.

Milne's frustration is understandable. This is undoubtedly a problem and one that Australia can play a much bigger part in resolving. But developing nations won’t hear the Senator pious wishes. If they think of the Australian Greens at all it will be that they voted against the CPRS. The party is playing Greener than Thou politics but it means they end up taking sides with the denialists. They may want a perfect ETS but that is not on the table. What is on offer is an apology. They should vote for that.

Greens pressure Government to implement Garnaut recommendations

Greens’ climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne has said Australia cannot wait for the final Garnaut report in September to take action to reduce carbon emissions. Milne says the interim report released yesterday calls for urgent action and the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should respond with a climate-focused budget in May. Her call was “The razor-gang should be targeting the $9 billion in subsidies the fossil fuel industries receive annually, instead of public service jobs," she said. "Every month the Rudd government delays action to reduce Australia's emissions will cost the environment and taxpayers more in the long run.”

In his interim report (pdf), the Government’s climate change adviser Ross Garnaut warns that climate change is occurring faster than previously thought due to strong economic growth in China and India. He says the Federal Government should consider going beyond its stated 60 per cent reduction target by 2050 in a global agreement that includes developing nations. The Report also favours bilateral and regional agreements to accelerate domestic and international action. “Steady, long-term policies are what Australia needs,” he said, “in order to provide the market certainty for making appropriately large reductions in emissions at the lowest possible costs to Australians’ standards of living”.

The report’s executive summary stresses it represents “genuinely interim judgements”. However it also states that the world is moving towards high risks of dangerous climate change quicker than most people have expected. This makes mitigation more urgent and costly. The report says Australia should follow the lead of the EU and make firm commitments this year to 2020 and 2050 emissions targets with a similar adjustment cost to that accepted by other developed countries. It says an emissions trading scheme (ETS) needs to be the centre-piece of a domestic mitigation strategy.

So far, the government is refusing to budge from its stated 60 per cent target from 2000 levels. Climate change minister Senator Penny Wong told a Senate committee said Labor set that target on basis of known information last year. She said these included European studies, The Stern Review, and those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Wong refused to answer Greens’ questions about how the government's target related to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or predicted average temperature rises. Wong said the Garnaut Review and Treasury modelling were the two primary inputs to formulating climate change policy; however, it was up to the government to decide on targets. "You don't contract out decisions as significant to the Australian environment, community and economy to a single individual," she said.

In his final article for Crikey before he joins The Australian next week, Christian Kerr says Garnaut’s report underlies an inconvenient truth for the government. It was handy to delay the publication of the report until after the election but now the government must do something about it. Kerr says there will be higher petrol prices and higher energy costs involved in tackling greenhouse and it will be up to the government to sell the benefits of the strategy to the electorate. “Governments don’t just have to make hard decisions,” he said. “If they want to survive, they have to carry voters with them.”

Meanwhile the Greens have produced their own report “Reenergising Australia” to address climate change issues. In her preface to the report Senator Milne says “we have only ten to fifteen years to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.” She says only political will is stopping Australia from making the necessary transition to a low carbon economy.

But they recognise it won’t be easy. Australia has the highest per capita level of greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world due a reliance on coal power, a large agricultural sector, low levels of public transport use, energy-intensive metal manufacturing and a high population growth. The Greens demand greenhouse gas reduction to 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. They also demand institutions need to be reformed to support a low carbon economy and say governments should create economic incentives to move from high to low carbon energy sources. As Milne concludes, the aim of their report is nothing less than fundamental change to the consciousness on which Australia’s unsustainable economy is based. Garnaut has simply reiterated this need.

Brisbane council elections: Tristan Peach, Greens candidate Hamilton Ward

Brisbane is getting ready to vote again just four months after the federal election. This time it is the Brisbane city council elections which are scheduled for Saturday 15 March. Brisbane currently has a Labor dominated council in its 26 wards but has a Liberal mayor. I live in the eastern ward of Hamilton which has 27,000 registered voters. With the ward containing blue-rinse suburbs of Ascot, Clayfield and the eponymous Hamilton, it has long been considered a safe Liberal seat.

Although the last election was held in March 2004, there was a by-election for the Hamilton ward in October 2006 when Tim Nicholls moved to state parliament. David McLachlan retained the seat for the Libs in the by-election with 58 per cent of the vote ahead of Labor’s Anna Herzog (who is contesting again this year) and the Green’s Sam Clifford. Today, I caught up with the 2008 Greens candidate for Hamilton, Tristan Peach.

Born in 1980, Tristan Peach is a native of north Brisbane. He holds a bachelors and master’s degree in town planning. Peach is a committed activist and has been involved in many local projects including the Samford Transport Group, Cedar Creek Bushcare Group and the Nundah Positive Housing Project which looked at the affects of gentrification on the homeless in that suburb. He spent 4 years part time tutoring and lecturing at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) amd a year working as a development assessor for planning submissions. He is now devoted full time to sustainable transport submissions.

Peach was also the media spokesperson for the Communities against the Tunnel forum which fights against the controversial multi-billion dollar Transapex network of five tunnels across Brisbane. Peach is now treasurer of a new group called Community Action for Sustainable Transport which works in collaboration with the likes of Stop the Hale Street Bridge Campaign and the Queensland Conservation Council. Peach is also a guest lecturer in urban planning at QUT.

He has been a member of the Queensland Greens for one year but has been a supporter since 2003. He says they are the most progressive party in Australia and are community based rather than corporate funded. He said he was keen to work on local issues which matched his interests in urban planning. I ask him what was the mood of the people he had met while out canvassing and whether there was any sign of election fatigue just four months after the federal election. He said he didn’t see any signs of fatigue. The sense he got was that most people were relieved that John Howard was no longer in power. However he did acknowledge that most people were unaware that the election was happening.

The most popular local issue in the New Farm / Teneriffe area was the need for a local Citycat stop. Currently users need to take a cross-river ferry to Bulimba ferry stop which Peach says is a deterrent to use. He has set up a petition for Citycat services to stop at Teneriffe. He said there were many other local issues that people were concerned about. These included the removal of a river structure that was the roosting ground of white-faced herons and the growing problems of midges and mosquitoes faced by residents who live near the Enoggera Creek in the Windsor area of the ward. Some people believed that this problem has been worsened by the earthworks at the nearby North-South tunnel digging site. Peach said he enjoyed the challenge posed by local issues such as tree-trimming and keeping streets tidy. These he said “were issues you wouldn’t know about unless you talked to local people”.

Peach said his aim in this election was to build up the Green support base. This means building on the 3 percent swing which garnered a 15 per cent result in 2006. I asked him how the Greens could overcome the problem where the Brisbane council was entirely made up of Labor and Liberal members. He also saw a role for local decision-making groups and neighbourhood reps who would have a meaningful say and voting rights on ward issues. Peach said the people in Hamilton are intelligent and influential. He said putting a Green in council would mark a new era for the ward and would also be an exciting new era for the council. Otherwise, he said, all we could expect is more of the same from Liberal and Labour. “Electing a Green would be an exciting development,” he said. Even if you are not passionate about the environment, it would bring more accountability.”