After nearly three years of almost helpless rage at the ideologically Gothic antics of the Federal Government in its dealings particularly in relation to the environment, as represented by our local Bass member and quaintly inappropriately named ‘environment minister’, it suddenly dissipated on Wednesday 10th, when Tony Windsor decided to take on Barnaby Joyce in his old electorate.
Tony is one of the very few politicians I have ever come across for whom I have much respect. He is a practical and conservative (perhaps a bit too liberal for my taste) man who has a capacity to cut through baloney and articulate issues clearly with an eye for not just now, but our children.
Although his view is very much focussed on the New England electorate, his candidacy speech identified four major issues for regional Australia.
Firstly, high speed fiber optic cabling to the premises (FTTP) is not just an essential world competitive bottom line for a new economy that has a guzzling need for speed and data. It is particularly good for regional Australia because that new digital economy can go anywhere and gain the benefits of lower costs offered by regional and rural communities. The current Fiber To The Node (FTTN) roll out was great technology back in 2005, but it is already obsolescent and being replaced as we speak by economies that already have fiber to the node (FTTN).
Secondly, the Gonski Report was put out by a well regarded businessman who can see that a knowledge based economy is a hand-in-glove partner of the digital one and that to perform well it must be able to efficiently garner its human capital as broadly as possible. No economy in the twenty-first century can afford to hemorrhage its talent, because that is largely its competitive edge.
Rural and regional Australia needs the Gonski funding model to pull its weight to get maximum leverage out of that new economy, if it is to avoid becoming a permanent high unemployment zone. And rural and regional Australia needs it so that educationally marginal urban populations don’t end up being dumped in cheap rural and regional housing, because they cannot survive in an education intensive economy. It wants quality Gonski educated urban migrants who are innovators in the new economy, who will add value and stimulate more quality migration out of our overcrowded large cities.
Gonski is the only realistic education funding plan we have for the future and it needs to be properly funded because it is a critical infrastructure investment for ALL our children, because we cannot afford to lose any of them to our already overburdened welfare system.
Third, there is a really big problem with coal mining and gas fracking in areas where there are agricultural communities dependant on ground aquifers whose quality of supply has to be guaranteed forever. And while we here in Bass are not threatened by coal mining like New England is, we have plenty to worry about with gas fracking.
Fourthly and finally, he talked about climate change and that it was time we started to behave as if there was some urgency in dealing with it by moving into renewable energy and energy efficiency as if our lives and those of our children depend on it, which they do.
Tony noted that agriculture and water minister Barnaby Joyce’s white paper on Agriculture barely mentioned the subject. Our so called environment minister’s tax payer funded minimal ‘Direct Action’ carbon abatement plan has been equally obtuse in abandoning a perfectly good private enterprise commercial trading solution.
The only reason that I can see why a private enterprise/small government oriented government would abandon a commercial solution to any problem in favor of taxpayer based one, is that they didn’t want absolutely necessary and rapid economic change so badly they were prepared to compromise their traditionally anti-‘socialist’ principles.
When one takes that on board with the systematic attack on climate warming abatement institutions and research, plus the reduction of carbon abatement targets and its attacks on alternative energy solutions, it is obvious that Greg Hunt and his ministerial cronies belong in the pocket of the hydrocarbon industries; the modern equivalent of rent seeking canal owners trying to kybosh early rail competition.
And that is not in our rural and regional interests, because if CSIRO and every other climate research institution on the planet is right, failure to deal with already anticipated and modeled climate change trends are going to put enormous pressure on water, soil and plant systems. And if we are unprepared and done insufficient work to both abate the problem and adapt to new climate vectors, we may at some point start to run short of food.
Just as Tony Windsor thinks Barnaby Joyce has let down his rural constituency on key issues, the same applies here to ‘environment minister’ Hunt, for exactly the same reasons. We need to move towards sustainable and smart, lean and green capitalism but it is being blocked by two things.
The first block are the not-so-free market steam driven choo choo stokers that have coalesced around Tony Abbott and who continue to block reform within the Turnbull government. And they obviously think that with the support of the Murdoch press and the IPA et al, they can make the Abbott ouster a mere ‘temporary embarrassment’.
The second block is that until now, the climate issue has been carried mainly by The Greens, which is run by ‘progressive’ refugees from the ALP and what remains of the old Marxist left. There are a lot of us in rural and regional Australia who might vote for radical climate action, but not if it means voting for the human rightsie-fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden crowd.
The problem with each of those blocks is that they both carry a significant contingent of people who are off with the ideological faires, only in different parts of the garden…and when taken together, it is very difficult to get a supermassive piece of agenda like rational climate change policy past them.
Tony Windsor’s move against Barnaby Joyce maybe a start for a paradigm shift that might get us out of the currently choked political discourse and into more productive and pragmatic debate and action to save our country, as its old manufacturing industries continue to decline and the climate starts to move against us.
Tony brings us a sensible way forward not just for New England, or us in Bass, but around the country, to becoming a leading regionalized knowledge and information economy, to getting down and dirty to reduce our ecological footprint to a sustainable level and to start preparing local agriculture for the consequences of not getting started on this immensely important agenda forty years ago.
I do not agree with everything he says, but Tony represents a start for making a more conservative politic sensitive to the really pressing needs of our times. He could be a bit more conservative for my taste, but one can’t have everything.
In the end it isn’t about left and right, or traditionalist v ‘progressive’ or conservative v radical. These terms are dissolving in front of journey that beckons us whether we like it or not.
We owe it to our children to make the tough choices now, before events force our hand and the options become really grim. So I am going to toss Tony some money and collaborate with Getup, not because I agree with all its causes, but because they will help give our wretched Greg Hunt a slightly less party partisan flea in his ear on issues that are critical to rural and regional Australia, and our common future.
Get up is a flexible vehicle where people with very divergent social views can collaborate on the issues they agree about. It isn’t perhaps as good as having a Tony Windsor to carry the flag, but it is a start.
• Tony Windsor’s crowdfunding campaign HERE
• Bob Hawkins in Comments: #5 So true: Windsor’s decision to support Gillard resulted in an avalanche of substantial, if not always popular, legislation that gave Australia a chance to look forward to an organised approach to many issues, climate change, education and care for the disabled among them. Thanks to our moron media, especially that of News Ltd, the populace seem convinced that the Gillard years were a fiasco. One day, we will look back on her prime ministership as one of the more creative and constructive governments since Federation. Why cannot Australians understand that Gillard worked with the Senate and got things done while, throughout her time in office, she had to simultaneously fight on a second front to fend off the misogynous, mindless, ugly, deranged attacks of a man who was a disgrace both as an opposition leader and as a prime minister …
