It’s probably best for most people’s mental health that they are not forced to consider the hypocritical and ever-shifting grasping positions of Australian politics.

For the most part, politics has the power to do good. Also for the most part, the way politics in Australia is played is very, very stupid.

It may surprise some readers to learn that, in most of the world, climate is not considered a “left” issue. It’s not a “right” issue. It just is.

Margaret Thatcher was not a leftie and yet understood the economic benefits of an energy transition (with the added bonus of crushing workers’ unions in the mining sector, of course). Angela Merkel was by no means a leftie either, and pursued climate transition for the EU and Germany not out of an ideological drive, but a rational one.

Boris Johnson, before the culture war brain worm fully took hold, was also supportive of climate transition. And until George W Bush and the now infamous Luntz memo, which advised the Republican party to treat climate as emotions over fact, even if they were wrong, America wasn’t as obstructionist on the climate.

John Howard came along and built on the work of the Keating government for Australia to be treated as a special carbon-emitting unicorn on the global stage. He took it further from Keating’s “we’ll just plant trees” to offset our rocks and crops economy to “not sure I even believe in this anyway”, launching the climate wars we still see today.

And that we are still seeing them........

© The New Daily