The Liberal Party in Australia’s parliament has a new leader.
Herald Sun Blogger and Columnist, Andrew bolt writes to me in an email:
Anthony,
This may be a first: a major political party has dumped a global warming believer as leader and replaced him with sceptic who last month called AGW “crap”. Tony Abbott has tempered his public pronouncements since, but has today become the new Liberal leader, toppling warmist Malcolm Turnbull, specifically because he was the only one of the three contenders today to promise to delay the Government’s emissions trading scheme.
Bolt adds some background:
Following up with excerpts from new Liberal leader Tony Abbott’s memoir Battlelines, released in July.
On page 171 he quotes, with approval, Bjorn Lomborg:
“Natural science has undeniably shown us that global warming is man-made and real. But just as undeniable is the economic science, which makes it clear that a narrow focus on reducing carbon emissions could leave future generations lumbered with major costs, without major cuts in temperatures.”
Abbott then adds:
“Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia (on emissions trading) could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions…. Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes. Australia accounts for about 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. At recent rates of growth, China’s increase in emissions in about a year could match Australia’s entire carbon dioxide output. Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.”
He also questions what climate alarmists truly want:
“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously, though, when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”
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Lest you think that Climategate had nothing to do with this political shift, please read what Bolt had to say about its impact in my previous post:
The Australian ETS vote: a political litmus test for cap and trade
Several MPs have indeed mentioned the emails in their party room speeches, and your correspondents miss the way MPs actually pick up things.
Andrew Bolt has one of the most read blogs and columns in Australia and is helping to educate both people and politicians alike on the true costs of climatic induced cap and trade, please visit his blog to show some support. – Anthony
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
“Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia (on emissions trading) could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.… Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes. Australia accounts for about 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. At recent rates of growth, China’s increase in emissions in about a year could match Australia’s entire carbon dioxide output. Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.”
He also questions what climate alarmists truly want:
“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously, though, when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”
Spot On Steve – there has been next to nothing on Climategate here in the MSM. Abbott’s election has zero to do with Climategate. Let us hope that the demise of the Aussie ETS and Abbott’s survival does.
But it does reflect a growing awareness of the need for an effective opposition that is not just a rubber stamp for a government scheme that sends the country into hoc unless this is thoroughly examined and the public fully understands its implications.
The US can learn something from this. Partly thanks to lone voice Andrew Bolt there was a mass Email protest to the Opposition’s elected members stating that some-one has to stand up for the Party’s principles no matter that their political careers were on the line. See here for one of these Senator’s outstanding replies to her constituents which was also her response in the Senate to the proposed bill (some of your Republican Senators would do well to read this thoroughly and take note):
http://www.judithadams.com.au/news/default.asp?action=article&ID=214
At the seventh hour the majority of the party listened and voted for Abbott albeit by a hair’s breadth. I am sure that WUWT could inspire something similar.
You will hear a lot more about Abbott, he is a fighter and he will need to be. It took 5 minutes for the MSM to begin their character assassination. But do not worry he can handle himself and has a refreshing candour that has been lacking in this country for some time.
Australian Opposition Leader is Tony Abbott.
Deputy Leader is Julie Bishop.
An Abbott and a Bishop…..
While it is true that the CRU emails did not play a major part in the change of leadership, they were mentioned by some key players, including the leading dissident, Senate Opposition Leader Nick Minchin, so they were known. While the leadership was decided by a single vote, the rejection of the Emissions Trading Scheme was rejected by a 54-29 margin in a secret ballot – quite a significant margin, which indicates why Turnbull was in trouble for trying to force it through the party meeting without a vote. I gave an interview on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint yesterday afternoon (recorded last Friday), which can heard at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2009/2757619.htm
I doubt, however, whether its was heard by any MPs, let alone influencing them!
This vote was not all anti-ETS. Remember that in the first round of voting, only 35 of the 84 opposition parliamentarians voted for Abbott. The third candidate, Hockey, was not opposed to the ETS. The fact that the remaining votes shifted to Abbott in the second round was anti-Turnbull, not anti-ETS.
The opposition will need to vote nearly unanimously to block ETS in the Senate,
Fwiw, it’s 9:53 am Uk time and have had BBC 24 on for the last hour and a half.
Not one word about this, not one, unlike the exposure it got when the news broke (in the wee small hours)
Guess that having a sceptical politician leading a major political party is less newsworthy than Tiger Woods scratching!
Not Climategate but a very revealing column in The Weekend Australian November28-29 by Terry McCrann
Well worth a read
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/emissions-trading-scheme-attacks-australias-national-foundations/story-e6frg9if-1225804745331
I think climate realism and Barnaby Joyce, Steve Fielding, Andrew Bolt, Joanne Nova, Alan Jones etc had a huge amount to do with it as politicians said they had never seen such intense avalanche of public reaction to climate skepticism as their emails went into overload and phones rang off the hook. Blogs also went off online in the MSM. The grassroots of people getting off their backsides and demanding political representatives do the right thing and ignore the alarmist lies is what changed politics here and they had the likes of WUWT, Christopher Monkton, Climate Audit, CLimategate etc as backup proof. This has only just begun! Senators now know the public has an opinion, has the facts and must be listened to.
“Steve Schapel :This is very exciting news from Australia. However, I doubt that
Climategate had much to do with it.”
I disagree Steve, and Professor Kellow is being much too modest. ( Aynsley Kellow (01:31:49))
Senator Simon Birmingham said that he and his fellow senators had been inundated with phone calls and emails over the weekend from party members demanding opposition to the ETS. Activists like the Climate Sceptics Party were spreading the Climategate news together with a mailing list of warmenist senators. The link to Professor Kellows’ interview was widely disseminated. Although the MSM ignored it, I’m sure Climategate was significant in the whole episode, showing the political power of the internet in counteracting media bias.
The effects of the hacked CRU emails on the Australian Liberal Party leadership spill must bot be underestimated. The defeated leader, Malcolm Turnbull, put his leadership on the line months ago saying words to the effect that if his leadership meant anything then the Liberal Party would vote for the government’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). The new leader, Tony Abbott, however, fell out with Turnbull and expressed his objections to the ETS openly on the national TV. Here is an excerpt:
“TONY JONES: …Let me ask you this, do you agree with [Senator] Nick Minchin when he says “the whole climate change issue is a left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the western world”.
TONY ABBOTT: Well, you’ve got to understand just how far reaching an emissions trading scheme will ultimately be. It was Ken Henry himself who said that this was the biggest piece of financial restructuring that we have ever seen. I mean, what the advocates, what the Government wants to do, over time, is basically change the whole way we generate power – the whole way we transport ourselves. I mean this is a massive sweeping change that will affect the very way people live. It’s not just like the GST. It’s much bigger than that.
TONY JONES: Is it a left-wing conspiracy? The climate change debate, the linking of climate change and global warming – is it a left wing conspiracy as Nick Minchin says to deindustrialise the western world?
TONY ABBOTT: I think certainly there are some people whose agenda is not just environmental who’ve leapt on this particular bandwagon, and I don’t like the theological tone that so often creeps into this debate.
I particularly dislike the way Kevin Rudd in Parliament was running around like Torquemada, looking for heresy, trying to create his own version of the Salem witch hunts against people that don’t share his particular view on this.
TONY JONES: Senator Minchin also says since the collapse of communism, the left has embraced environmentalism as their new religion. You seem to be hinting you think something similar – you’ve talked already about the evangelical fervour of scientists. You’ve warned this whole thing might be just a fad.
You’ve also poked fun at the idea of sea-level rises – you’ve suggested the world is cooling, not warming. You don’t sound that far away from the Minchin brand of scepticism.
TONY ABBOTT: Well Tony, I’m on the record on all of these things and I refuse to be terrified of the future. I think that humankind has been pretty good at coping with the challenges that we’ve been given.
If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian’s Wall – medieval times they grew crops in Greenland. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames. So the world has been significantly hotter, significantly colder than it is now. We’ve coped.
I don’t say there aren’t problems, haven’t been problems, might not be problems, but I refuse to be terrified of the court.
TONY JONES: Do you think it’s a conspiracy.
TONY ABBOTT: I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that I refuse to be terrified of the future.”
The transcript of the entire interview can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2748161.htm
It is worth mentioning that the interview took place on November 19, at approx 10:30 PM Sydney time. This puts it just before the CRU hack was made it to the news.
As the climategate scandal grew in the blogosphere (Aussie mainstream media has been deafeneningly quiet about the issue), the problems regarding the ETS legislation also grew within the Liberal Party with the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull began attracting questions. Late last week, Tony Abbott and the lead ETS opponents resigned from their positions in the opposition front bench, and this morning “the Mad Monk” Abbott won the leadership spill with the smallest of the margins, 42-41.
Tonight, the new Liberal Party was interviewed again on the 7.30 Report and most of the interview was about the ETS legislation. The transcript is not available yet, but I remember him quoting someone who said, “In politics, one vote is a landslide”. You can watch the interview on this page: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2759022.htm
or download it here:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/vodcast.htm
Tony Abbott is a true right-wing intellectual. He is very intelligent and can be quite funny too. Now that he is the leader of the opposition in Australia, the pressure is on him to moderate his normally very conservative political views. If he manages to move towards the centre, -something he won’t do on the particular issue of AGW and policy responses. Hell, he became the leader on this issue!-, then he will be a real threat to the Labor Party government.
Much that I like the guy on the basis of his intelligence and sense of humour, I have a particular grudge against him since he led the No campaign on the constitutional referandum on whether Australia should become a republic, in 1999. On the issue of AGW theory, I am fully in agreement with him. But as an Australian Greens voter for the last decade, and a Labor supporter prior to that, I simply cannot bring myself to vote for the Liberal Party. Should the AGW ever become an election issue next year, I will be voting “Informal” with a message scribbled on my vote paper. My loyalty to scientific method and ethics trumps my loyalty to the Left politics. I urge every left-wing Aussie AGW sceptic to vote ‘Informal” also. It is better than voting for the Liberals.
Tony Hansen (01:26:33) :
Australian Opposition Leader is Tony Abbott.
Deputy Leader is Julie Bishop.
An Abbott and a Bishop…..
could be the start of a new religion!!!!
aoosie (00:58:34)
I think your mathematics/arguments need some (adjustments ? ) when 3 people vote the result will be 2 to 1 pray tell me what is the difference, winning is about winning, to contest this is political, be it by 1 or 1million it is still winning.
“History will record December 1, 2009 as the day of the first major political damage to the momentum of the Global Warming Scam.
For the first time anywhere in a major western democracy, a mainstream party is ready to face an election on “climate change” and face the bullies. The Australian Liberal Party have elected a new leader, held a secret ballot and voted 55 : 29 to defer the Emissions Trading Legislation.
Abbott said: “he was not afraid to fight an election on climate change policy. And I am not frightened of an election on this issue.”
This will reverberate around the world in the lead up to Copenhagen.
The finale of one of the hottest weeks in Australian politics came down to a nail-biting 42:41 finish, but the earlier three-way split had Abbott a clear winner, and the secret ballot leaves no doubt the party doesn’t want to rush into this massive emissions trading legislation. The recent galaxy poll showed 80% of coalition voters don’t want it either.”
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/the-global-gravy-train-takes-a-major-political-hit/#more-4852
Please excuse my verbose comment above as it had also a number spelling and grammatical errors. I have a habit of not reading the whole message before clicking the submit button.
Briefly, what I was trying to say is that if it hadn’t been for climategate Tony “the Mad Monk” Abbott would never have landed on the Liberal Party leadership. Similarly, had the Climategate scandal broken out months earlier, then Malcolm Turnbull would never have put his leadership on the line on the ETS legislation.
But I guess I was clear enough calling for Aussie voters to vote “Informal” instead of voting for the Liberals. 🙂
I wish we could do the same in the UK, unfortunately on this, our darkest day, the day that the Lisbon Treaty finally becomes EU law, this day when an unelected federalist and committed climate alarmist is appointed as President of the whole EU, we are faced with the three main parliamentary parties in complete agreement that we should remain IN the EU to “tackle climate change” (why don’t they tackle sun-spots, or the direction of the earth’s orbit whilst they are at it?), They are all committed alarmists.
Note that tackling climate change involves the privatisation of social provision, as in the bureaucracy makes the rules and private corporations are employed (and subsidised by the tax-payer) to enforce those rules. This merger of corporation and state to control and provide for the people to a high degree of specificity, under a state bureaucracy that is run by unelected appointees has a name. This kind of control can also be described as fascism.
As our ancient sovereignty is treasonously erased further than ever today, we appear to be stuck with this thieving and lying bunch of charlatans in power, with the total and complete complicity of the mainstream media who push the warmist agenda with untiring zeal.
This same media still ridicules people who warn of a new world order, as tin-hat conspiracy theorists and kooks, even as the newly unelected President himself states that we NOW have global government established under G20, and that we are requiring more global management through what should be agreed at Copenhagen.
All I can say is come back David Icke! If you actually read Icke’s books, more and more of what he was predicting, in terms of global governance, is coming true all the time.
“Tony Hansen (01:26:33) :
Australian Opposition Leader is Tony Abbott.
Deputy Leader is Julie Bishop.
An Abbott and a Bishop…..”
Ha ha! I knew that Julie Bishop remained as the deputy leader of the opposition but didn’t catch what the duo meant until now.
A few years back, everyone thought Tony Abbott would be the deputy to the next Liberal leader whose name was Peter Costello.
Aussie cartoonists had already sharpened their pencils but the Abbott and Costello show never eventuated after Peter Costello quit politics 🙂
well done Tony Abbott
At last some sense in Australian politics.
The only thing that worries me is that Tony Abbot looks too much like Tony Blair!
As an LP member I have been calling various members and agitating for a more vigorous response to Climategate. All I can say is the people I spoke to didn’t have a bloody clue as to what I was on about. They couldn’t see the opportunity to drag KRudd & Wong into the glare of media questioning. pathetic.
Most of you would not know that Mal was the Member for Goldman Sachs.
Look him up in Google. No wonder he was on board the fraud.
regards
For me, Climategate was the straw that broke the camel’s back. For the last few months, if you tried to contact Turnbull to complain about the ETS, he would brush you off. Turnbull was utterly uninterested in listening to anyone with an opinion different to his own.
I contacted a couple of Senators, and whilst I didn’t mention Climategate, I probably wouldn’t have contacted them if not for the scandal. I think you could say that they know about it now.
Abbott is a breathe of fresh air and a bare knuckle fighter. I hope he kicks the cr*p out of the ETS.
Great news. Other politicians around the world will certainly take note.
New PM Abbott faces an uphill battle in educating the media on climate issues. Abbott at a press conference was bombarded by media questions about ‘denying climate change’. Aside from the overtones of holocaust denial, ‘climate change’ happens naturally all the time. Greenhousers have to demonstrate not only climate change, but human agency and severe consequences from it. The journalists obviously did not know that global temperature had not risen for a dozen years. They asked no questions on the expense of an ETS or its poor performance in the EU or the cautions of its creators about trying to use it in a complex global economy with an emission in carbon dioxide whose harmfulness is not settled, making it hard to set the cap. The journalists also failed to address the recent attempts by the UN to exploit the greenhouse issue to gain control of economies on a global basis. And of course the media generally failed to ask questions on Climategate. However, some media outlets like Melbourne-based journalist Andrew Bolt have kept us informed on these matters, and talkback radio often gives them better coverage than the regular media.
The problem with David Icke is that he said he was Christ on live TV – for a man who started life as a snooker commentator that’s one helluva promotion.
Meanwhile back at beeb it’s business as usual – “Sea levels are likely to rise by about 1.4m (4ft 6in) globally by 2100 as polar ice melts, according to a major review of climate change in Antarctica.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8387137.stm
“Conducted by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), it says that warming seas are accelerating melting in the west of the continent. Ozone loss has cooled the region, it says, shielding it from global warming.”
Do they do science in the same way as the CRU??
It’s not just the beeb, commercial TV is at it as well
http://news.itn.co.uk/f13eebb9e03ecda06d4241cb0fe1f78a.html
And Rupert Murdoch’s Sky is in the Himalayas
http://video.news.sky.com/skynews/video?videoSourceID=2121338&flashURL=feeds/skynews/latest/flash/ACT-BB-TU-P20281-GLACIER-011209.flv
Apart from a few articles hidden away in the depths of our news papers, climategate is yesterdays news as far as the UK’s MSM is concerned.
I very much afraid that this is anything but good news for the Australian people. Abbott may think the right way about CC but he’s a critically unlovable fellow. He’s not all that bright and has a horrible tendency to put his foot in his mouth. He’s very religious which doesn’t go over all that well in Aus and for some reason it seems a large percentage of our female population find him instantly loathsome. I’ve heard wives of senior liberal party members stating openly that they won’t vote for an Abbott lead liberal party.
Add to that his unfortunate persistent support for a failed industrial relations policy that lost the liberal party the last election and you end up with a perfect storm. The liberal party was doing badly in the poles all ready but this is going shatter them. I would bet my last cent that they will be massively defeated in the next election reducing the party to a near powerless rump and handing the senate balance of power to the greens on a plate. Take one guess what their climate change policy is like!
Trust me , this is not good news.