Friday, May 24, 2019

A climate change election, just not in the intended way ...

Based on a comment I made here.

In its dynamics, the 2019 Australian federal election was 1993 re-run: an Opposition expected to win pre-releases an extensive policy manifesto which a "small target" "devil you know" Government is able to run a scare campaign on the awkward bits.

But it also seems to have turned out to be the climate change election, just not the way the fashionable folk thought. The regional/provincial working class is beginning to not only realise that the inner city elites want to sacrifice regional/provincial working class jobs on the altar of climate change, but to also vote accordingly.

Nothing Australia could do on climate change can make a lick of difference (at about 1% of world GDP, we are not a big enough economy and no one pays attention to what we do[, beyond the odd headline grab]) so the politics of "climate emergency" is sin-and-salvation politics, not practical trade-off politics.

The sacking of a star (Pacific Islander origins) rugby league player (Israel Folau) for quoting a biblical verse on social media probably did not help either. When the diversity totalitarians start coming for sporting heroes, folk you would not otherwise expect are likely to take notice.

4 comments:

  1. "at about 1% of world GDP, we are not a big enough economy and no one pays attention to what we do"

    Pretty sure the world's right-wing authoritarians do.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Australian_federal_election#International_reactions

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Headline grabs do not count. In policy matters, we are largely invisible. Australia has not had a technical recession since 1991, a striking fact that policy makers and commentators in the Northern Hemisphere pay remarkably little attention to. We successfully manage much higher levels of immigration than most Western countries, and that also attracts remarkably little attention. And so on.

      Delete
  2. If the sporting hero had been a Muslim who had been sacked for quoting the Quran saying that Jews are pigs and queers are abominations and infidels better watch it because God's judgment is coming, I wonder if folks like you would care to come to his defense, too?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, as I am gay and not Jewish, hope so. But likely he wouldn't have been sacked, as that would have been "culturally insensitive". Possibly, it would not even have been commented on, especially if he had done it in Arabic.

      Delete