Too little, too late, not enough

Faced with a possible and imminent challenge from Peter Dutton, a limping Malcolm Turnbull has done the barest minimum just to stay in power. He won’t mandate the Paris agreement through law, but he still wants to meet the Paris agreement. If he had pushed it through Parliament he would have faced a leadership challenge for sure, and still may. Will liberal lemmings still allow him to lead and give up the easiest, well trodden and winning election strategy?

Tony Abbott is leading the nation from the back bench.

When will the Liberals grow a spine and dump the Paris agreement completely?

Most of the party is too afraid to even talk about how much warming humans may be causing lest they be called a “denier” for doubting that it is not exactly the same as an unaudited, unelected and unaccountable foreign committee says.

As Andrew Bolt says Turnbulls leadership is now terminal. His clumsy gambit to present the NEG as a done deal too early shows how non-consultative he is, how bad his judgement is, and makes those that defended it look like fools.

The new “Ministerial Agreement” arrangement may be worse. Decisions about whether to proceed will be done by unelected committees using models based on a bunch of assumptions about “the cost”. Turnbull has led the party for three years while electricity costs have jumped seismically and now he just wants to keep prices at this obscene level?

The Australian:

Instead [of being legislated in the NEG] the 2015 climate change commitment will be mandated through Ministerial order and only after advice from the competition regulator that it wouldn’t increase power prices.

A condition of the order would be that the advice would have to be tabled in Parliament.

 ABC viewers blind-sided by reality again

On Tuesday The ABC news audience heard what a unified success it was for Turnbull to get the NEG through the party meeting. It turns out this was a complete bluff — most of the party didn’t even know what was in the plan (the Labor Party got a copy before them). The ABC didn’t point out the obvious — that speaking up against it, or threatening to cross the floor was a major risk, so Turnbull’s gambit was that he might get the illusion of support and unity by railroading it past the party in a high stakes situation. Instead it took other journalists at The Australian and on radio — Ray Hadley — to ask the right questions and expose how deep the resentment was and how fragile the “unity”. So fragile that three days after his big win Turnbull’s head was almost on a block. We pay a billion dollars for blind propaganda.

h/t Beowulf, Graeme Campbell.

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