The composition of the US High Court, especially on the issue of abortion has had more publicity in Australia than our own stacking of the judiciary and major government bodies.  Where are the records of all this? Has it just continued quietly under the radar with George Brandis and Christian Porter?

The Liberals have been masters of putting conservative people and ?mates in the judiciary and on bodies such as Clean Energy, which they did not manage to abolish. This will naturally make it very hard for the country to move on when they are voted out. The judiciary are appointed for life- about the only people in the country left in that position, and these major Government bodies have appointments with quite long tenure, so that change will be both hard and delayed.   Years ago these problems would have been in the hands of relatively unsackable career public servants. 

We presume that Matthias Cormann had a miraculous change toward clean energy once he got to the OECD and did not have to toe the Morrison government line.  But people who have spent their working life in an industry are unlikely to do the same.  Once again it is the Liberals standing in the way of progress for as long as they can.

One of the more absurd ideas of neo-liberalism was to privatise ownership of all the water in the Murray-Darling and then rely on ‘the Market’ to allocate the water optimally. All that happened was that water was another commodity to be traded with its price more related to its possible future price than any physical or environmental constraint.

I learned a bit about this many years ago from my grandparents. One of my grandfathers was a retired metallurgist who would tell me about world trends in metal demands and buy shares accordingly. His wife, my grandmother, knew nothing about this but would buy shares based on what the market was doing and tell me separately about how she despaired of my grandfather’s share investments. After a few years, she was much richer than he from a much lower base. The moral was that the share price had little to do with reality.

Why anyone would think that turning water into a speculative commodity would optimise its use is beyond understanding. But that was what happened. Joh Bjelke-Peterson built Cubby dam on the Queensland border and used the water to irrigate cotton, so NSW was behind the 8 ball from the start. NSW cotton farmers used surface water and took water from aquifers with no supervision of their meters. Brokers with mobile phones bought and sold water entitlements, and famously recently a Singapore-based company sold a lot of water rights to a Canadian superannuation fund, who felt that growing almonds (which are heavy water users) would be a good thing to do. (SMH 3/12/19) Hey, the price of almonds is good at present and you cannot smell rotting fish from Canada.

The idea that if you fix the money, everything else will come right seems to permeate every aspect of our neo-liberal, managerial society. I think of it as a religion, that ‘the market knows best and will allocate optimally with the unseen hand’. It also seems that religious folk are more prone to believe this, happier to believe that an unseen force can magically fix things and that it morally worthy to suffer now for some future redemption.

But in politics, we do not even have to debate these things; there is another option, ‘kick the can down the road’. Having the CSIRO produce a report in 2008, ‘Water Availability in the Murray Darling Basin’, led to an inappropriate Murray-Darling Basin Authority report in 2009. The CSIRO’s scientific response in 2011 was ignored. There was a Royal Commission inquiry by Bret Walker which found that the Authority has shown ‘gross negligence’. So they had another ‘Summit’, just last month.

All this is not to mention that Angus Taylor spent $80 million in taxpayer money to buy back water rights from a company called Eastern Australian Agriculture registered in the Cayman Islands and run by an ex-rowing mate, with the deal signed off by Barnaby Joyce. (The Guardian 19/5/19)

It is a worry, when the senior counsel assisting Walker inquiry writes a book called ‘Dead in the Water’ and still comes back with an opinion piece like this.

www.smh.com.au/national/murray-darling-basin-summit-a-laughable-response-to-finding-of-gross-negligence-20210318-p57brq.html

Angus Taylor, our Energy Minister says we cannot be carbon neutral by 2050- 30 years away! Why not? Well we cannot have a target without a plan. And since we have chosen to have no plan, we cannot have a target.

This sort of circular semantic nonsense is what Angus Taylor is all about. He is now taking the Clean Energy Fund and using for that hoax, carbon capture and storage. The man should be sacked for his rorting and corruption, and his actions as a Minister are totally in the wrong direction for Australia.

Carbon capture is just a fossil industry bad joke. A lot of carbon dioxide comes out with natural gas, and is already separated, because of course it would stop the gas burning as well if it went in the gas pipes. So if it is already separated from natural gas. What happens then? It is released to the atmosphere; Obviously- the cheapest solution! Privatise the profits and externalise the costs. So there is lots of carbon dioxide to store or sequester. Is this possible? Perhaps at great cost. If so, it should be part of the cost of selling gas. How economic would gas be then?

But it goes on. Coal is concentrated carbon. When it combines with oxygen it releases a lot of energy in a process commonly known as burning. And instead of a compact little bit of carbon that can be passed around a Parliament there is huge amount of gas that has to be captured from the atmosphere, and stored somewhere, presumably under a lot of pressure and presumably forever. This is quite a problem, will be difficult to do and will cost a lot of energy, perhaps as much as burning it released. You could call it it a difficult scientific problem. Or you could call it a very silly thing to do. Create a problem, then spend a lot of money and time to try to find a way to fix it.

But the fossil fuel lobby wants to get at the clean energy money to try. This has two advantages. One is called ‘opportunity cost’, which the economists’ way of saying that if you have spent your money on A, you do not have that money to spend on B. You spend your clean energy money researching an unlikely solution to a problem that you have created by burning, and you do not have that money to spend on something like pumped hydro, which would allow the problem of energy storage of renewables to be addressed. So real progress towards renewable energy can be slowed. Also you can pretend that capturing the huge amounts of carbon dioxide is a scientifically feasible option with just a bit more government funded research. All this suits the fossils fuel industry who can continue to burn as usual. The parallels with the tobacco industry denying the obvious health effects and profiting from delayed definitive action is striking.

Angus Taylor came from a grazing family, went to Kings School, St Andrew’s College at Sydney Uni and Oxford. He studied Economics and Law and worked with investment bankers and was in a group that tried to buy Cubbie Station.

He may or may not know any science, but his track record of using taxpayers money for the interests of his connections are already the stuff of scandal and have led to calls for his resignation. This last lot of nonsense simply adds to that imperative.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/19/angus-taylor-says-it-is-not-australian-government-policy-to-achieve-net-zero-emissions-by-2050?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_News_Feed

4 May 2020

Angus Taylor, the Energy Minister has announced a $300 million new hydrogen project, but has not specified that it be powered by renewable energy and he wants to use gas to produce the hydrogen.

There is fine rhetoric about trying to get the cost of hydrogen to $2 a kg, but the bottom line is that the fossil fuel industry will get monies from the Clean Energy Fund.  And there at the head of it is Angus Taylor, looking after his mates again.

Scott Morrison has learned from his disastrous showing in the Bushfires, and only slightly belatedly and helped by horrendous examples fr om the northern hemisphere has taken the advice of experts and done quite well in the COVID-19 crisis. But now he is riding a wave, with people still preoccupied with the virus.  He has $130 billion to spend to stimulate the economy, and as all stimulus will be seen as good stimulus, he can probably look after his favourites with far less scrutiny than normal.  The $13 billion to keep private schools open (SMH 29/4/20) did not rate a ripple of protest.  Now Angus Taylor gives $300 million to the Clean Energy Fund for hydrogen. Recently a $70 million project was announced for Green hydrogen. Does this mean that the other $230 million is fossil fuel hydrogen?  And where does this gas come from? Fracking? Elsewhere in today’s paper , ‘Santos hopes for Narrabri gas verdict ‘no later than August’’ (SMH 4/5/20 p 24).

People might want to think that the strength of the public health system, the relative uselessness of the private health system, the government actually doing fiscal stimulus and paying some unemployed people a reasonable dole might have led to a new spirit of cooperation and public spiritedness in this government.  Don’t be fooled, be vigilant.

www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/300m-clean-energy-fund-to-back-fossil-fuel-hydrogen-projects-20200503-p54pdr.html

He has been caught before buying water rights with large amounts of government money from a mate who was in a tight spot financially.  He ‘toughed it out’ then clearly wants to do so again. Hey, he’s ‘entitled to’.

This sort of loose with the truth venality is completely unacceptable in MPs and especially Ministers.  He must go now. We cannot people with this level of integrity running our country.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/30/nearly-beyond-belief-clover-moore-demands-angus-taylor-explain-doctored-document

We see Trump not impeached on Party lines with only Mitt Romney crossing the floor.  Sure he may have bent US foreign policy to attack a political rival, but hey, he is on our side and we want to win the election[1]. 

Meanwhile over in Oz, the Auditor-General finds that the Deputy Leader of the National Party Bridget Mc[2]Kenzie is rorting the Sports Grants[3] to win the election, so the Prime Minister gets his ex-minder, who is now the country’s most senior public servant to see if she broke a Ministerial code of conduct, which is quite a different and much less stringent test, so that he can show she only broke a technicality.  The underlying hope and delay seemed to have been to let her tough it out[4].  Principles?  Forget it. We have the power.

The Federal Police have dropped their investigation into where the information came from that Angus Taylor used to attack Sydney Mayor, Clover Moore accusing her of spending $15.9 million on travel when she had spent $6000[5].  There were rumours that someone in his office had done a stunt like this before.  Angus also spent $80 million of government money to buy water rights from a struggling rowing mate’s farm[6]– (Guardian 17/12/19)

You might ask why Morrison still wants Angus Taylor there and why the AFP have backed off what looks very suspicious, but it seems that there is one law for the powerful, and one for little people and if it wasn’t obvious before, it sure is now. 

Some years ago I lost all interest in TV cop shows and whodunnits.  I thought it must be me getting old and grumpy and generally watching less TV.  But when I analysed it, the idea that the goodies always won made me think that I had seen enough fairy tales and I had better go and do something useful.

[1] https://time.com/5779360/romneys-wisdom-impeaching-trump/

[2] https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/01/28/vip-flight-bridget-mckenzie-cost/?fbclid=IwAR060JcI8ExkFipqG7fSDEmcLdOGF8Dq8U9rU8SY9GIKAalFCWQqqjpD3Rs

[3] www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-28/sport-australia-complained-pre-election-government-grants/11905250?pfmredir=sm&fbclid=IwAR1vLFpEAIs6-jbH0nFLTVR19GtYRaM0s-YgLGp6hKz8iiSKcma1-LET2GA

[4] www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-02/bridget-mckenzie-quits-over-ministerial-standards-breach/11896610

[5] www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/conspiracy-theory-taylor-accused-of-relying-on-fake-documents-to-attack-moore-20191024-p533pk.html

[6] www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/17/cotton-water-and-angus-taylor-how-ministers-firm-struggled-to-make-farms-pay

This perceptive article by Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper (11-17/4/20) details what disaster capitalists are doing to get mining under dams, fracking and revamps for coal-fired power up while Parliaments are closed and the world is distracted by the COVID epidemic.

At the head of it all is the inimitable rorter, Angus Taylor, busy looking after his Lib donors mates in the coal lobby, managing an unmonitored and possibly illegal slush fund and pressuring State governments to lower their standards or have Federal money withheld.  And that is not to mention his buying Australia emergency oil storage in the USA!

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2020/04/11/angus-taylors-energy-projects-push/15865272009679