Monday, November 16, 2009

I'm sick of the CPRS

Crikey  

Date: Sun Nov 15, 2009 6:52 pm ((PST))

Keane: I'm sick of the CPRS. To hell with you all.

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Welcome back to Parliament for the final time this year. Two more weeks 
of this stuff and then we're finished for a summer that already feels 
like it's been going a month. That's assuming Anthony Albanese doesn't 
keep his colleagues confined here at the end of next week, or even 
brings them back for another spell in December.

Wouldn't want all those end-of-year "let's all be best mates" speeches 
to get in the way of proper legislative business eh?

The job of a political journalist -- not of course that I would know, 
since according to the national broadsheet I'm not a "real journalist", 
and strangely proud of it -- is somewhere between theatre critic and 
sports commentator. The main tasks of sports commentators are to tell 
you who's winning and pretend something exciting is happening when it 
isn't. That's where it is closest to political journalism. Media 
coverage of politics is always about who's winning and who's losing, 
naturally, but the trivial and meaningless are routinely built up into 
events of monumental importance simply for the sake of pretending 
something significant is happening.

But you also need to appraise the performances of the principal actors 
(not to mention the ambitious walk-on players), assessing the 
conviction or otherwise with which they utter their lines, paying close 
attention to the effect not on professional observers such as oneself, 
who to use the immortal phrase "don't know jack", but the hoi polloi in 
the cheap seats at the back, from which vantage point scenery-chewing 
hammery or mindless repetition may look like the stuff of the Great 
Tragedians.

Once in a while, we're reminded that this isn't a show or a game that 
we're watching. This morning the Prime Minister made an apology to the 
"Forgotten Generation" in the Great Hall in Parliament House. He was 
followed by Malcolm Turnbull. Both made heart-felt and emotional 
speeches, without political polish, the sort of speeches we can point 
to when people lament the lack of Australian political oratory. The 
tears and smiles and applause of those present who as children were 
abused in institutional care show how significant the actions of 
government can be, even in simply acknowledging those whose pain was 
ignored for so long.

This fortnight also sees some sort of climax in the emissions trading 
debate, another issue of more-than-usual gravity.

I don't know about you (no, really, I don't) but I'm utterly over the 
CPRS debate. It's been a long road since early last year, when Penny 
Wong blithely called the Garnaut Review "one input" into the 
Government's consideration, in effect spilling the beans, or giving the 
game away, or belling the cat, or whatever cliché takes your fancy. I'm 
now sick of emissions trading. Sick of Wong's tedious droning, of Kevin 
Rudd's sanctimony, of the Coalition climate denialists who make a 
virtue out of their own intellectual and emotional disabilities.

I'm sick of Barnaby Joyce and the National Party, so plum-stupid that 
they can't even understand when the National Farmers' Federation tells 
them it'd be a good idea to back the scheme. I'm sick of the 
rentseekers, the whingers, the sooks and Hookes, who preach the virtues 
of the market when it suits them but whose natural posture is of a hand 
stuck out, demanding assistance, and assistance in ever greater 
quantities, like blackmailers who just keep coming back for more.

And I'm sick of the media and their inability to understand what's 
going on or their blatant support of denialists as part of an infantile 
ideological game. I'm fed up with ever more iterations of the CPRS that 
seek to obliterate, like an artillery shell aimed at an ant, any 
skerrick of carbon price signal, which is the only damn point of the 
entire exercise beyond the political gamesmanship of Kevin Rudd and 
Nick Minchin.

I'm sick, above all, of the vast gap between the farce being played out 
before our eyes and the real human and economic consequences of failing 
to stop the planet cooking, consequences I probably won't see the worst 
of, but which my kids will.

Fortunately they and all the future generations who'll really enjoy the 
fruits of our stupidity don't get to vote now.

So I'm giving this elaborate production, this whole, interminable, 
mind-numbingly banal show, zero.

Let us hope that decades hence, the descendants of our current MPs -- I 
mean their political descendants, not their actual kids, assuming the 
major parties don't adopt preselection by hereditary right -- will not 
have to stand up in the Great Hall and apologise for it. Apologise to 
the people who died of dengue fever or in bushfires, apologise to the 
families of the elderly who succumbed to heatwaves. Apologise to the 
tourism employees who lost their jobs when our great reefs died. 
Apologise to the farmers forced off the land as the Murray-Darling 
dried up. Sorry, dried up even more.

Apologise to the whole community because of all the economic 
opportunities we missed by locking our economy into some sort of 
carbon-era cryogenic freeze when we could have started the transition 
to the low-carbon economy that we will need to be in the future, now.

Hell, they may even apologise to all those foreigners who will die in 
far greater numbers than Australians because of the actions of 
developed countries like ours, one of the world's premier carbon 
dealers on a planet unable to kick its addiction to the stuff.

Hysterical? Alarmist? Green religionist? If only. I'd give anything to 
see the Andrew Bolts and Barnaby Joyces of the world proved correct, to 
be shown that the whole thing is a left-wing con, the ultimate scam 
cooked up (ha!) by some lazy academics and watermelon greenies who 
accomplished what millennia of Illuminati and weird hand-shaking Masons 
and sinister religious orders failed to do -- fool the world with a 
global conspiracy.

Because that's the only basis on which our international position and 
the CPRS make any sense.

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