By all accounts, Tony Abbott’s appearance on the 7:30 Report was a disaster. While many people saw it as a failure of Abbott to understand technomancy, I saw it more as a failure of communication. It seems to be a repeated problem for the last few years.
The ETS died a horrible death because few people bothered to explain it in terms which engaged the public. This caused two problems ripe for exploitation by the vandals of the upper house.
1) There was space for the argument that the world wasn’t warming, thus change was unnecessary.
2) There was space for the argument that the ETS would have been ineffective.
After the various mutinies of the parties, the Coalition exploited (1) and the Greens exploited (2). Neither, by the way, were true. The ETS was designed not to shock the system (the ‘It pays big polluters’ argument) and was designed to give the government a lever with regard to emissions (because (1) is obviously false). (more…)
Only The Sangfroid 