Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Aussie climate skeptic Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been defeated in a snap party ballot. The new Australian Prime Minister will be Malcolm Turnbull, who supports carbon pricing and emissions trading
According to the Sydney Morning Herald;
Malcolm Turnbull will become Australia’s 29th prime minister after beating Tony Abbott in a dramatic leadership ballot in Canberra on Monday night.
Mr Turnbull’s victory is reminiscent of the coup former prime minister Julia Gillard staged against Kevin Rudd in 2010 and makes the former communications minister Australia’s fifth prime minister in just over five years.
Liberal MPs gathered at Parliament House at 9.15pm to decide whether Mr Abbott or Mr Turnbull would lead them to the next election.
The challenge has plunged the Coalition government into crisis. Ahead of the ballot, both camps were confident of having the numbers but chief whip Scott Buccholz announced Mr Turnbull had prevailed over Mr Abbott 54-44. One Liberal voted informally and another was absent.
The crisis has provoked significant turmoil in Australian politics. Abbott defeated Turnbull while the Liberal Party was still in opposition, in 2009, over Turnbull’s support for a bi-partisan carbon deal. Malcolm Turnbull’s challenge seems to have re-awakened many of the old internal divisions within the party.
Turnbull is deeply unpopular with some factions of his own political party – some senior members of the party making no secret about how they feel about the new leader. Given the circumstances of the challenge, and the accusations of disloyalty leading up to the challenge, uniting the party under the new leadership is likely to prove a significant challenge.
UPDATE – We now have footage from the Liberal Party meeting which ousted Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Having suffered the awful TV politics of this country for almost 40 years now, I can only say that I found Abbott a repulsive idiot, and likewise his two predecessors, Gillard and Rudd. Well, perhaps not quite as repulsive as Gillard, with that dreadful voice like an emptying drain, and perhaps not as mealy-mouthed and creepy as Rudd, but pretty awful nonetheless. Good riddance to the three of them!
As to how much better or worse Turnbull may be, that remains to be seen. Politicians rarely fail to disappoint. But at least he has had some previous experience in the real world, firstly as a journalist, then as a barrister, then as an ‘investment banker’ and finally as a successful entrepreneur (having founded an early and successful IT business in the 1990s). Those investment bankers do sometimes leave me wondering whether they would actually kill their mothers to get the last dollar on the table, but still he’s not a complete fool, so he may actually be able to do a half-decent job of it, the side-issue of climate change politics being of trifling importance compared to any ability to run a government creatively and effectively.
I personally would have preferred to have the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop replace Tony Abbott. She might have shown the world what a real female Australian Prime Minister looked like. A former law partner, she is as sharp as a knife, has vicious tongue, and is completely and utterly committed to her role as a politician and a government minister. Entertainingly devastating to anybody who crosses her in a TV panel discussion, as Foreign Minister she was admirable as in her words to Vladimir Putin following the killing of innocent airline passengers over Ukraine.
And politics is after all supposed to be entertaining. Not the miserable, mediocre, televised drear that we have suffered here for the past eight years. So now let’s see what Turnbull has got for us. Surely he couldn’t be worse than the previous three acts?
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On a side note re carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, has anybody read the recent book “Life’s Engines” by the American Paul G. Falkowski?
One of the more interesting things we geologists live with here in Australia is the blatant change in atmospheric composition from one dominated by methane and carbon dioxide to one (rather unusually) dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, during the Proterozoic period. You can hardly miss it, because it oxidised all the previously dissolved ferrous iron in the oceans and then precipitated it out as thick beds of lucratively high grade iron ore, which we happily ship off to China and Japan, so that they can turn it into cars and power tools and sell it back to us.
Falkowski makes the point that whilst the catalyst for the oxygenation of the atmosphere was the evolution of photosynthetic life, the actual mechanism whereby oxygen came to dominate as one of the two major atmospheric gases was the consequent removal and burial of carbon. Atmospheric carbon (CO2) was fixed by photosynthetic microbial marine lif,e to form cellulose and other organic substances, and as these then died, it was precipitated out to form ocean floor carbonaceous sediment (black shales) or calcareous sediments (calcium carbonate limestones), and then be buried in vast quantities beneath the ocean floors.
Thus over many millennia much of the ‘C’ from atmospheric CO2 was fixed, sedimented out and permanently removed from the system by burial, eventually therefore (after the oxidation of dissolved iron and other reduced compounds in the oceans) leaving a surfeit of oxygen behind, to form the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we now enjoy and breath.
This casts a whole new light on the wisdom or otherwise of digging up much of this buried carbon’ and re-combining it with oxygen by burning, to reverse the process and convert oxygen in the atmosphere back to CO2. As a geologist, a miner and a shareholder in coal mining, oil and gas companies, I am all for digging up fossil fuels and burning them to keep us warm and make us rich. And I really don’t mind if the world gets a little warmer and wetter, greener and more tropically lush. But I must admit I do like breathing oxygen, so I wouldn’t want to take things too far down that particular track. It bears thinking about.
(And if anyone should pick up Falkowski’s book and thoroughly enjoy it, as I did, I can totally recommend as an even better, deeper and more revelatory read on the same subject matter: “The Vital Question” by the British evolutionary biologist Nick Lane. Lane leads you effortlessly to the cutting edge of biological science )