Conversion on the road to Glasgow

HOW much change can we weather in just one week? The political climate of climate change has turned out as volatile as the scariest modelled projections of climate change itself.

It has been a climactic week with the Business Council of Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia (publisher of the Mercury), Twiggy Forrest, the Federal Liberals, various state premiers and our own Peter Gutwein all singing from the same green songbook.

All of them are now supporting dramatic C02 reduction targets while apparently expecting to turn a profit at the same time.

At the very moment of writing, it looks like ScoMo’s Liberals are set to adopt a net zero emissions target by 2050.

But things are changing so quickly there might be an advance on that before I finish the page.

It’s a fair bet for instance, that Barnaby Joyce will come around to ScoMo’s thinking because it is bleedingly obvious that not to do so will get us beaten up by our trading partners. Worse, it will happen on Barnaby’s patch.

Trading sanctions against Australian industry, particularly our rural and mining industries (do we have any other?) will be our punishment for not signing up in Glasgow. We have somehow weathered being bullied and beaten up by China, but we cannot risk another bashing, this time from our friends and allies.

ScoMo will have to carry the Coalition on zero emissions, taking not a lump of coal to Glasgow but an Esky full of melting Antarctic ice.

And if he returns as the beaming, born-again Green Lantern of Australian ecopolitics he might garner enough votes to be around long enough to put solar panels on the Lodge, should he ever choose to spend time out of the shire.

The loser of course is Albo. When he says “The Gummint ought to do something,” he doesn’t mean they ought to steal his climate policies, which the polls reckon 60 per cent of voters favour even if they don’t much favour Albo himself.

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery but not in politics. An embittered Kevin Rudd has denounced the PM’s change of heart as greenwash.

Road to Damascus (or Glasgow) conversions are not to be trusted, apparently.

With Barnaby on the handbrake, if ScoMo can still drive the Coalition jalopy to Glasgow then he might go to the next election without having to believe in miracles.

I’ve spent a bit of time with Barnaby Joyce. He can be his own worst enemy, but quite clever and clearly a survivor. He will protest just enough to mollify the sectional selfinterest of what still remains of the old unreconstructed Country Party.

It must be odds on that Barnaby will back ScoMo and not give Labor a free kick nor risk international sanctions.

But I’m not taking bets because I had a serious birthday this week and mightn’t be around in 2050 to collect. Still, there are plenty of climate scientists who suggest that if we don’t get cracking on climate now, all bets will be off anyway.

Which has to be one of the reasons why so many minds are suddenly changing.

Paul Keating used to quote his mentor Jack Lang: “Always back the horse named Selfinterest, son. It will be the only one trying.”

Let’s start with the Business Council of Australia. Back at the 2019, when the ALP suggested big emission cuts of the order now canvassed, the BCA said it would be “economy wrecking” and the sky would fall in. Now they say the sky might still fall but only if we fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 50 per cent.

“The cost of inaction on unchecked climate change is high and damaging to economic growth and jobs. In contrast co-ordinated and early action will generate net economic growth and jobs,” the BCA now says.

Describing the sudden belief in a new net-zero energy economy Josh Frydenberg described the new deal as “a long-term shift and not a short-term shock”.

Yet readers of News Corp Australia newspapers, including the Mercury, must have been at least a little surprised this week when the company published 16-page pro-climate-action wrap arounds in every tabloid.

The ongoing editorial project Mission Zero advocates that there will be up to a $2 trillion benefit from cutting emissions now. A sharp contrast to the previous warnings of a $600 billion dollar downside cost of doing precisely the same thing.

Things have been moving quickly and possibly it is like the famous economist who reasonably said, “When the facts change, I change my mind”.

Fortunately, this newspaper has always been something of a broad church on climate change, and no one should be feeling more comfortable today than the Mercury’s indefatigable environment writer Peter Boyer. He must be buoyed to be no longer a voice

in the wilderness. Peter is now in the company of the Prime Minister along with a broad alliance of bankers, media moguls, mining magnates and all the state premiers, including his own.

No doubt Boyer’s job now will be to ensure they are all fair dinkum and how much is just greenwash.

For now, the Business Council of Australia’s blueprint for change this week read like pure Boyerism: “The momentum for moving towards net zero by 2050 is unstoppable. The power of the global financial community has been mobilised in pursuit of the new zero emissions goal underpinned by an acceptance of the climate change science.”

If Malcolm Turnbull had enjoyed that kind of support when he advocated the same climate action, he would still be Prime Minister.

My old friend and colleague, the legendary political journalist Laurie Oakes, sequestered on a beach somewhere, must have been tempted by the current ironies of politics to come out of retirement. He quit Canberra a few years back and moved to a quiet seaside town to read detective novels.

Laurie always loved the genre and said it was a great diversion from the skulduggery of politics.

So, this week down Dodge City way, I emulated the master and read a detective novel. Oakes was right. I binged on the book and even missed the television news.

I have been reading John Tully’s “On Shipstern Bluff”.

This is Tully’s second outing with his antihero Tasmanian detective, the somewhat bedraggled and doleful Jack Martin. His previous adventure was “Dark Clouds on the Mountain” and again this Jack Martin yarn embodies local geography with the discovery of a decomposing child’s body on a remote and wild Tasmanian coastal cliff. I won’t spoil the plot, but the murder is related to nefarious activities at the Van Diemen Club, an exclusive and elite Hobart institution which has a dark secret.

Well don’t they all?

In this brooding Tassie-noir thriller, evil lurks everywhere and all the more ominously, if you know the locations.

In a certain gloomy wintry light, a Hobart reader might feel Tully has intuited a grimness that might have actually happened here.

The pleasure of reading locally is to recognise the places and the characters. Writers shamelessly steal characters and stories from real life. I’ve discovered myself as a young reporter in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and under my own name as a fly-fishing journo in Terry Aulich’s Clapperland.

In John Tully’s book I get a dishonourable mention.

“Alderman Audrey Amos speculated that communists had done it, and celebrity journalist Chuck Laineaux lambasted ‘police incompetence’.”

You might hazard a guess who Audrey Amos is, but Laineaux of course is French for “woolly”.

There are so many murders in this book I couldn’t put it down until I was assured that the author hadn’t cruelly disposed of my francophone soundalike.

But he wouldn’t dare. Tully and I shared a bohemian student residence in Nixon St back in the seventies, so I know where the bodies are buried.

If reporter Chuck Laineaux doesn’t feature in a more positive light in another Jack Martin mystery, my next review might not be so discreet.

On Shipstern Bluff: a Jack Martin Mystery, by John Tully Ashwood Publishing, 2021, $26.40