On the "Christian Values Checklist"

Each Australian election, a coalition of Christian groups promote a resource called the "Christian Values Checklist" from the Australian Christian Values Institute, comprised of a list of twenty-odd "issues of concern to Christians", with the major three parties and a few right-wing minor/micro-parties evaluated. For each issue, each party gets a green tick or a red cross (or sometimes a question mark). The list has varied only slightly each time, but the contents are dominated by a relatively narrow set of issues in sexual and bioethics, along with certain privileges associated with the maintenance of a "Christian heritage".

The results mean that parties identifying as Christian typically get all green ticks, the two majors get a mix (with the Coalition faring much better than ALP) and the Greens get all red crosses except for the very last line, which is a generic environment question where every party gets the same green tick. The overall effect is far more important than the specifics. At a glance, readers are confronted visually by the idea that the more right-wing the party, the more "Christian" it is.

Each election cycle, I've posted some critical observations on this document. If they wanted to call it "our opinions on some issues we care about", that would be one thing. But they claim to be addressing issues "affect[ing] the very foundation of our society" and implicitly, the most important issues Christians care about, which is not true either empirically or (I would argue) theologically.

So, to limit myself to two brief comments:

1. What is left out? Heaps! A brief list off the top of my head: corruption, military spending and priorities, health spending and policies, education spending and policies, taxation, welfare, homelessness, Indigenous justice, DV, banking regulations, freedom of the press, economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, surveillance, foreign aid, foreign policy, industrial relations, agricultural policy, water policy, negative gearing, ABC/SBS funding, disability policy and more and more and more.

On some of these, one small(ish) aspect is singled out as the "Christian" bit: that wealthy private schools get "equitable" funding, that abortion funding be removed from foreign aid, that gender-selective abortion be removed from Medicare (interesting double standard there: if you're opposed to abortion overseas, why not make the abolition of all Medicare funding the issue?), and so on.

2. What is put in? Many issues where Christians disagree in good faith. Some direct contradictions (support free speech but want default internet censorship). And much that is oversimplified and thoroughly misleading. For instance, if the Coalition get a tick for their support "legitimate orderly immigration", then this means abuse and illegality are considered legitimate.

Yet the bit that makes me laugh the hardest every time is the final line.

As though the entirety of environmental policy can be handled with a tick or a cross, and then every party gets a tick! This is such a crass way of giving the most curt of nods to the near universal support amongst Christians for creation care (NCLS says that over 80% of churchgoers affirm it as part of Christian discipleship), while defusing it as an issue by saying that we're all greenies now and the differences between preserving a habitable planet and the thinnest veneer of greenwash are irrelevant.

So, as a document revealing one strand of Christian political beliefs and priorities, it is illuminating. As a document intended to guide Christians' electoral discernment, it is not.

Three missing numbers: climate in the 2013 Australian federal election

"These are the three crucial numbers missing from the climate debate in Australia. Neither major party is likely to mention them. These three bipartisan agreements are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of either justice or prudence, let alone the love for neighbour at the heart of Christian ethics, a tradition from which both Rudd and Abbott claim to draw inspiration."

The ABC Religion and Ethics site has published a piece I wrote for CPX outlining some of the missing numbers in this federal election. Between writing the piece and its being posted, Abbott indicated he is not, after all, committed to even the paltry 0.5% emissions reduction target that he had previously (repeatedly) promised. Also, if I'd wanted to pick five, rather than three, numbers, I would have included these two as well.

• One twelfth: the share of global carbon reserves Australia controls.

• Eighty billion: the number of dollars in the Australian Future Fund, which ought to divest from fossil fuels, given that it is a future fund after all.

"There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead"

It is refreshing to find a journalist who has done a little bit of homework prior to an interview and is ready to question spin, half-truths, strategic inexactitudes and "misstatements" from political leaders.

Rather than contribute another dissection of this particular interview, instead I thought I'd gather a few thoughts on the Australian carbon price and its place in contemporary Australian politics.

As Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott is so fond of reminding us (especially when facing an interviewer turning the screws on his own truthfulness), Australian PM Julia Gillard did indeed say during the 2010 election campaign, "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead". Yet one of the signature pieces of legislation from this minority government has been the introduction a price on carbon coupled with income tax reform.

A straightforward broken promise? Yes and no.

It is axiomatic that a minority government will need to compromise its electoral platform in order to get the support of other parties or independents required to govern. If a party could gain the support of enough MPs without altering its policies, then the extra MPs would just join the party. It is abundantly clear in this case that the price on carbon was the top item on the Greens agenda (and also on the radar of the independents) and so compromise was necessary. Once the election results were known, that such legislation would be the price of Greens support (needed by either party to govern) was entirely predictable.

As far as I can see, there were really only four other alternatives: (a) for the Greens to have dropped this demand, which was considerably more core for them than a promise made once on the campaign trail (did Gillard make this claim more than once? If so, I am not aware of it), (b) for the Greens to have negotiated an agreement with the Coalition, which would have faced the same sticking point (along with likely even more disagreements on other policies), (c) for the two parties who were against a carbon price (Labor and the Coalition) to have made this the sine qua non of their respective positions and so come to a power-sharing agreement between them in order to prevent the Greens from introducing such an idea, or (d) for no agreements to be reached and a new election called.

As I've said before, too much is usually made of campaign promises. Governments exist to execute wise political authority, not merely to implement the majority will.

While it is a minor point, it's worth noting that the carbon price is not a tax. The current system is based on carbon credits that are sold to the five hundred or so largest polluting companies in a market mechanism that spends the first few years with a fixed price and unlimited credits in order to give business certainty and then shifts to a fixed number of credits (declining each year) and a moving price (with a floor and ceiling imposed). It may well have been better as a direct tax at the point of extraction with proceeds distributed equally to all Australian citizens (tax and dividend), but that is not the system that was chosen. Now it is quite arguable that most Australians do not understand the difference, but that is because there has been such an effective effort by the Opposition to muddy the waters and no effort on the part of the government to explain it. Public ignorance is assumed and reinforced by both sides.

More importantly, the current legislation is way too unambitious, with tiny targets that put Australia towards the back of industrial counties in its level of ambition and which, if adopted by all advanced economies, would most likely see us sail past two, three and four degrees. Furthermore, current legislation does not including our massive coal exports, which are already the largest in the world and are planned to double in the next decade (blowing any domestic reductions out of the water), nor the embodied carbon in imported goods, nor international aviation or shipping. It provides extremely generous free credits to many industries to soften the initial burden. And it includes international offsets, so that we can continue to emit locally while paying someone else to make changes elsewhere that Treasury does not actually expect domestic emissions to decline very much, if at all.

Yet perhaps the greatest failure by the government regarding this legislation has been the failure to make use of its introduction to keep raising climate literacy, explaining the basics of climate science (which are still widely misunderstood), why serious action of carbon emissions are morally justified (getting beyond short-term cost-benefit analyses) and necessary at every level (personal, local, national, international), why Australia must do its bit (which is considerably more than most other nations, not less) and why this battle is worth fighting, even if it looks like we're currently losing.

So be assured that I am no particular fan of the present legislation or government, but repeating Gillard's broken promise - while it may be a satisfying way of expressing anger at a government that has had its fair share of controversies while being surprisingly effective at getting more than an average amount of legislative work done - is doubly misguided.

When history was made and other stories

The Economist: When history of made, a graph in which the historical novelty of the last six decades or so is made breathtakingly clear. H/T Michael Tobis, who offers his own reflections upon it.

SMH: Bob Brown, the most ______ man in Australia. Fill in your own adjective to complete the title of an interesting profile of a fascinating man.

Naomi Klein: Climate change, capitalism and the transformation of cultural values. Klein suggests that perhaps the insistence of the deniers that climate change implies the necessity of a left-wing cultural transformation ought to be taken with more seriousness.

Slavoj Žižek: Occupy First. Demands come later. Žižek answers the critics of the movement who claim it is a gathering of un-American violent dreamers. Speaking of Occupy (which surely deserves its own post or three at some stage), I found this summary (from a NZ perspective) useful, these images illuminating of protesters' motives and this warning (from an American in London) quite salient.

ABC: Anti-consumerism is the new democracy.

John Dickson: Art of persuasion not so simple. Dickson turns to Aristotle to gain some basic insights into how to be convincing: logos, pathos and, crucially, ethos.

Orion: The Consolations of Extinction. A reflection on how deep time affects our perception of the ongoing sixth extinction event and of our own mortality as a species.

The price of carbon

"The good news is that the modest carbon price announced yesterday will neither impoverish Australians nor bankrupt our economy. The bad news is that the modest carbon price announced yesterday won’t save the planet either."

- The Australia Institute, Has the PM "knocked the brick wall down"?

The minority Labor government in Australia has announced the details of a long-awaited scheme to put a price on carbon. The basic outline is quite helpfully explained in the animation above, and summarised in greater detail here.
I speak of a carbon price, because it is not a tax, but an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for three years. This is not simply a matter of playing with words, as explained here.

The scheme is modest in ambition, with only a 5% reduction in emissions by 2020,* despite Australians having the highest per capita emissions of all advanced economies and the 10th largest aggregate emissions overall (it would be interesting to see figures on aggregate per capita emissions, but I haven't been able to find them anywhere). However, unlike Kevin Rudd's defeated ETS, this target is not locked in, but can be raised by an independent Climate Commission anytime from 2015 when the carbon price shifts from being directly set by the government to being dependent upon the auction of a set number of emissions permits. Furthermore, the target for 2050 has been raised from 60% to 80%.
*From a 2000 baseline, which Australia continues to use, despite a global agreement to use 1990 as the benchmark. Therefore, Australian targets cannot be directly compared to those of most other countries. The later baseline makes them less ambitious than a similar figure from a 1990 baseline.

The price for tradable permits will start at a set price of $23 per tonne, rising slightly until 2015, when the number of permits will be capped and the price determined by the market. Only the largest five hundred or so companies will be involved, who together emit the vast majority of Australian emissions. Agriculture and petrol are excluded from the scheme. The former because monitoring of agricultural emissions are too complex; the latter because petrol prices are too politically sensitive (despite this weakening the social, economic and ecological benefits of the scheme). Most households will receive compensation in the form of tax rebates and a raising of the minimum tax threshold will simplify matters for the tax office and for about a million Australians who will no longer need to lodge a return. Only the wealthiest households will be worse off (or rather, only the most carbon-intensive wealthy households).

Many experts see the scheme as representing a decent first step of what was politically possible with a few regrettable compromises. This piece gets into more of the details than I have time or inclination to do at the moment.

A few brief thoughts: with the vast majority of Australian households projected to be better off and the administrative burden falling on about five hundred major companies, the threat of bureaucratic and economic armageddon waved around by Tony Abbott will hopefully be quickly rejected.

Yet with all the focus (by both sides of politics) on what it will mean for the average household budget, most people don't seem to understand that the point of the system is encourage behavioural change. If you don't want to pay more for your energy bills, then switch to renewable power and implement some basic energy efficiency and conservation measures. If you don't want to pay more for your food, then switch to eating local and organic produce. If you don't want your small business to pay more for its inputs, then consider lower-carbon alternatives for your business model. Whether the price will remain too low to encourage these changes directly through the hip pocket remains to be seen. It may be that the primary benefit of the system in the short term will be to provide some needed stability to the renewables market.

From a political perspective, the claim that the Greens are not interested in environmental issues ought to be put decisively to rest, given the political costs Gillard has borne over the last few months during negotiations. What these demonstrate is that without the Greens pushing her, she would not be here of her own free will. This was the price the Greens and independents demanded of Gillard after the hung parliament, and it is clear that this is therefore at the heart of what the Greens hoped to achieve with their new-found political influence. Whether they were right to block Rudd's proposed scheme back in 2009 (which was superior in a couple of ways to the current proposal, though clearly inferior in many others) is a more difficult question. Hindsight offers a perspective of the enormous fallout of that earlier decision (change of leadership in both parties, an early election, a protracted chance for the opposition to pursue large swings in popular support for a carbon price), little of which was obvious at the time.

The Greens' shift from principled opposition to pragmatic support of a least worst viable option represents a difficult yet crucial debate. The proposed scheme may represent the best that was actually available, that is, politically palatable, under current conditions (and so requiring plenty of sweeteners for some of the worst polluters), yet it is important to admit and repeat that it falls far short of what is necessary to avoid some very bad outcomes. Under such circumstances, is a small step better than nothing? Does this represent the strategic establishment of a system that can be scaled up as the political will builds over time? Or can much ado about very little ultimately prove a distraction from or substitute for more radical change, locking in assumptions about the viability of the status quo without addressing the root causes of the problem in our consumerist idolatry and myopic pursuit of further economic growth?

UPDATE: Ethos have kindly published a version of this post on their site, and there has been further discussion over there.

Eco-parables for children: Where is the Green Sheep?

A while back I suggested that many nursery rhymes could be read as coded eco-parables, offering a reading of Sing a Song of Sixpence and sketching out a few more. As father to a toddler, these keep jumping out at me in all kinds of places. Does anyone else see the award-winning children's book Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek as a lament for the relative absence of an effective green social movement? Starting with the obvious presence of the red and blue sheep (the traditional colours of the mainstream parties in many nations), and all kinds of other sheep (the car sheep has broken down while the train sheep travels happily, even sun, rain, wind and wave sheep have showed up - renewable energy sources), finally the green sheep is discovered to be sleeping under a bush.

Wake up green sheep!

Famous last words: David Suzuki's Legacy

This is one delivery of the final address of one of the great public communicators of our age, hosted recently in Perth (the Australian version).

Suzuki mentions many themes I've discussed at various times: the spiritual sources of ecological failure, the cancerous nature of endless growth, the dependence of economy (management of the household) on ecology (the principles of the household), the staggering novelty of scale that human impacts on the biosphere have reached in recent decades and the necessity of political, not merely personal, responses to our present path of ecological self-destruction.

I found his reflections on air and breathing particularly fascinating. We all share the breath of life, a community of living beings sustained by God's Spirit.

And some readers may be delighted to hear that he told Bob Brown that the Australian Greens ought not to exist.
Suzuki starts at 4:15 into the video. More information on the talk can be found on the ABC site as well as a four minute highlights video.

What is the real agenda of the Australian Greens?

A while back I prompted some vigorous debate when I asked whether the Australian Greens were anti-Christian. Many Christians are attracted to the Greens' emphasis on ecological responsibility (which stands head and shoulders over the other parties). This concern resonates with many strands of scriptural thought such as the goodness of the created order, the community of creation, care for animals, justice for the poor and vulnerable, human humility and the full choir of God.

Recently, I have had a couple of Christian friends contact me to say that they are deeply worried about the real priorities of the Greens. There is a perception that the ecological concerns are the bait used to lure in potential voters, who are then unwittingly signing up to a radical social agenda. Now the Greens do indeed have a radical social agenda and make no secret of it. Some parts of it I like; others I don't. Many Christians are concerned about Greens' policies on social issues such as abortion, euthanasia, drug decriminalisation, same-sex marriage or access to public schools for Scripture classes.

In any case, an email from the Greens today (pointing to this article) gave me an idea of one way to test the Greens' political priorities. I receive semi-regular emails from four or five different political parties and perhaps a few dozen NGOs and advocacy groups. I usually just skim headlines as there is far too much to read all of it. I thought I'd trawl back through a few years' worth of correspondence from the Australian Greens making a note of each time a topic came up and see if any patterns emerged.

Of course, this is not the only way to measure priorities. One could also look at official policy documents, public statements, voting records, Hansard, membership surveys and various other things. But I thought it might still be worth doing nonetheless. And I may have missed some references, so this was not a highly rigorous investigation.

Below are the results arranged in alphabetical order. See if you can pick any trends or possible priorities expressed by the Greens to their support base (and interested onlookers):

• Abortion 0
• Climate change 23
• Deforestation/wilderness protection 5
• Decriminalising drugs 0
• Dental care 4
• Donate 4
• Education 2
• Energy future/Renewable energy 5
• Enroll/volunteer/vote/election 5
• Euthanasia 0
• Green jobs 1
• Indigenous reconciliation 2
• Mental health 1
• Paid parental leave 1
• Parliamentary process 2
• Pollution 1
• Refugees 6
• Same sex-marriage 3
• Scripture in schools 0
• Taxation 2
• Tibet 2
• War in Afghanistan 1
• Water management 1
• Whaling 1
• Workers' rights 2

Total references: 74
References to same sex marriage: 3
References to abortion, drugs, euthanasia or scripture in schools: 0
Total references to ecological/energy issues (including climate): 37 (=50%).

The conclusion seems clear enough: the Greens' priorities are, well, green. Some emails mentioned more than one topic. If I'd been giving weighing to the numbers of words, then I suspect the results would have been even clearer.

I am not saying that only ecological issues matter, or that Christians ought to vote for the Greens (or that voting is the heart of political responsibility). Like all parties, the relative weight of various attractive and repulsive policies and principles needs to be considered. But this ought to be done soberly and without caricature. I hope this little exercise might contribute in some small way to that task.
Image by ALS.

PS A little more research has revealed the Greens' true agenda, based on the parliamentary record of Adam Bandt MP. Bandt has so far proposed two amendments to existing legislation: one stopping banks from changing exorbitant fees and one requiring parliamentary approval for any overseas service by the ADF (i.e. shifting the decision to conduct overseas military operations from the executive to the parliament). See ##3&4 here. Since they target the ease of war-making and the unrestrained profiteering of huge oligarchies, the Australian Greens are clearly antithetical to evangelical Christianity.

Gittins on Australia's hung parliament

Ross Gittins once again talks sense in his latest SMH article on why the Greens did so well. Here's a taste:

"So unattractive was the choice the main parties offered that I'm sure people voted Greens for various reasons. But no doubt concern about lack of ''real action'' on climate change was the most prominent. Consider the way people concerned about global warming - still a majority of voters - were dudded by the two main parties. Both went to the last election promising to introduce (similar) emissions trading schemes; both went to this election promising not to introduce such schemes. [...]

"The Libs describe their approach as 'direct action' - which translates as support for the regulation and government intervention once primarily associated with Labor. Labor's major contribution to the climate change policy debate during the campaign was its proposal for a 'citizens' assembly', which sounds reminiscent of the Greens' historical preference for 'consensus-based' decision-making. The Greens, on the other hand, have been pushing for the economic rationalist approach of relying on a carbon tax and price signals."

Gittins mentions a new paper put out by the Australia Institute that includes six principles for policy design on climate change.

I've also just caught up with two slightly older pieces by Gittins: Gillard's failure of leadership and why the pursuit of green jobs is a distraction from climate action.

Hung parliament: not so bad?

Random thoughts on the Australian federal election result

"This is clearly the closest election result we've seen in Australian history."

- Antony Green, ABC's election analyst during an interview on Lateline.

I am not entirely disappointed with a hung parliament in Australia after Saturday's election. At the very least, it means that neither side can claim victory. They both lost. There was indeed a swing against the ALP (-5.4%) and towards the Coalition (+1.9%), but elections are not won on swings. And indeed, if they were, then the Greens received a much larger positive swing (+3.7%). One significant factor in this was likely to be disgruntled ALP supporters registering their disapproval of the Rudd/Gillard failure of nerve on climate. It may have also been punishment for Gillard's move to the the right on asylum seekers, but Rudd's popularity started its precipitous decline when he announced the shelving of his carbon trading scheme.

In the Senate, before below the line and postal votes are counted (and below the line postal votes, like mine!), it looks like both major parties faced negative swings (Coalition -1.3%; ALP -4.6%) while the Greens are highly likely to have secured balance of power (+3.9%) and the most Senate seats of a minor party in Australian history. The DLP may have followed Family First's success in 2007 by gaining a Victorian seat with only 2.23% of the primary vote.

Earlier this year in the UK election, when it became clear that the parliament was going to be hung, there was a lot of misinformation peddled by politicians, pundits and certain sections of the media about what it was going to mean. Due to a busy weekend, I haven't been following enough Australian media to know if a similar pattern has been emerging there. So to clarify some issues that were muddied here and may be there, by constitutional convention, Gillard remains caretaker PM until the result becomes clear, the incumbent PM has first right to form a coalition or minority government, and there is no necessity for either side to have a formal coalition to govern. Having more seats (yet not a majority), having more primary votes, having more two party preferred votes: none of these are really relevant in determining who forms government (except insofar as they can be spun to provide some kind of moral weight).

That a hung parliament doesn't necessarily mean instability can be seen from a wide range of nations who regularly manage to get along with one. That they have been rare in the UK and Australia has led to a little hysteria (from what I've seen, not quite as much in Oz as there was here a few months back) about the dangers of no party having a majority. However, it ought to be remembered that neither the ALP nor the Coalition (!) are really a single party (the internal divisions within the ALP are famous, and were on display in paradoxical ways with the recent leadership spill) and so Australia has never really had a majority government. We've pretty much always had to get along with a cobbled together kind of political power, and that's not all bad. Yes, this might be a little more pronounced than usual, but I think that it could turn out to be healthy if it means some negotiations and compromises, with each issue needing to be argued on its merits and weighed against other priorities. That's how the system works. As long as one side can guarantee a majority who will pledge to avoid frivolous votes of no confidence and won't block supply, then a minority government is quite feasible.

To get there, both sides are now wooing the support of the three independents (Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter) who have pledged to work as a bloc. Although they are all former National Party members, it has quickly become obvious that they can not simply be assumed to belong naturally to the Coalition. They have affirmed their desire to (a) stay independent, avoiding a formal coalition and (b) provide enough stability for a full three year term, enabling one or other side to form a minority government with some stability. I found this quote from Oakeshott interesting. Along with a single Greens member, there is likely to be a fourth independent, Andrew Wilke, a former Greens member, who was also a whistle-blowing intelligence analyst under the Howard government.

In addition to these five, it is also important to note (and few media outlets seem to have mentioned it) that the sprawling WA electorate of O'Connor (which covers a greater area that NSW), saw not simply a surprise defeat by the outspoken and controversial Liberal veteran Wilson Tuckey, but a victory by a member of the National Party of WA, who are affiliated with the national National Party, but maintain a distinct party structure from them. In particular, they do not recognise a formal Coalition with the Liberal Party and so just as the Greens member is likely to side with Labor yet not enter a formal coalition, so Tony Crook of O'Connor is likely to side with the Coalition, but not be a formal member for the Coalition. There is no love lost in WA between the Nationals and the Coalition and Crook has indicated he is willing to negotiate with the ALP.

Speaking of the National Party (and for a moment lumping the WA Nationals in with the rest), that they can gain seven seats with 3.87% of the national vote, while the Greens gained just one lower house seat with 11.39% does make one wonder about the relative merits of arguments for proportional representation. Of course, Australia already has PR in the Senate and so the Greens' balance of power there is an indication of their current popularity. Whether it is a short term punishment of the ALP or indicative of longer term trends towards a greater consciousness of ecological issues remains to be seen.

Whatever happens, despite (or perhaps because of) a deeply disappointing and cynical campaign in which both major parties ran very negative campaigns almost entirely devoid of any global or long term vision, Australian politics just got more interesting.

Mainly bad news

A few things our new government largely ignores*

Total disaster: "Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. [...] The loss of biodiversity compounds poverty. Destroy your nature and you increase poverty and insecurity."

Big coal gets bigger: a bet that there will be no serious cost placed on carbon emissions.

Mangrove losses worse than thought. Less than 7% of remaining mangroves are protected.

Antarctica ought to be World Heritage listed.

Conservative conservation in the UK: a false dawn?

Mackerel wars: and Mackerel are often considered something a "success story" in the prevention of overfishing.

Scientists claim almost 80% of Gulf spill is still in the water, contradicting the government claim that most has been skimmed, burned, collected, evaporated or digested by microbes. See also here.

Corals dying: coral reefs are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Rising ocean temperatures, falling oxygen levels, rising acidity, falling fisheries, rising plastics - the bad news is pretty bad for corals.

Consumerism means "Earth Overshoot Day" arrives earlier every year. This year, the date on which we use all the resources that can be replenished in a year will be 27th September.

Desertification: "An area the size of Greece, or of Nepal, is lost every year to desertification and soil erosion, the world body said, equivalent to $42-billion in annual income."

The wake-up call: when my alarm goes, I usually hit snooze and roll over.

Now here's one biofuel I can get behind: made from whisky byproducts, it reduces the ecological footprint of water of life by reusing waste materials.

A small piece of "good" news: plummeting levels of phytoplankton might inhibit hurricane formation.

Priceless collection of crop biodiversity "saved" by Twitter. I'm not entirely sure whether this is good news (Russians are considering a halt to gross stupidity) or bad news (it took Twitter to achieve this).
*This post was scheduled a few days ago and this claim is more or less true on either outcome.

Are the Greens anti-Christian?

Is it possible for a Christian to vote for the Greens in good conscience?

Frank Brennan, Professor of Law at ACU, argues at Online Opinion that it is "unbecoming and unhelpful" for Christian leaders to single out the Greens as anti-Christian.

"If all the Greens' policies were truly classifiable as “anti-Christian”, I would have no problem with church leaders urging people to vote for another party. But given that some of their policies, and on issues which will be legislated in the next three years, are arguably more Christian than those of the major parties, I think it best that Church leaders maintain a discreet reticence about urging a vote for or against any particular political party."

All parties have positions unpalatable to a thoughtful Christian (though which ones are most repugnant may vary depending on a range of factors). It is only possible to vote while holding one's nose. One consideration in selecting the least worst is to weigh the relative importance of the various policies that one doesn't like; another is to estimate the likelihood of particular distasteful policies ever being implemented. Prof Brennan makes a good point: from a Christian perspective and taking the current political landscape and functioning of the Senate into account, the more objectionable Greens policies are far less likely to come up over the next six years than some of their more attractive positions.

How green are the parties?

In a comment on a recent post, I was asked "which party [do] you think people should vote for if they really care about environmental issues?"

You can read my response, or better, you can listen to one of Australia's oldest and largest environmental organisations. The Australian Conservation Foundation, a non-profit non-partisan non-government organisation founded in 1966 and with about 40,000 members, has put out a 2010 election scorecard comparing the three major parties across twenty four tests. The ranking may not be a surprise, but the gaps are larger than I expected. You can download the full scorecard (including a discussion of method) here, but the summary table looks like this:

	ALP	Coalition	Greens
Reduce pollution	37%	13%	90%
Clean energy	47%	27%	100%
Sustainable cities	67%	20%	80%
Healthy environment	55%	23%	88%
Overall	50%	20%	89%

Despite claims of some Christians that they all "support greater care of God's environment", the parties are far from equal on this front.

Many readers may also be interested to compare the parties' commitments to international poverty reduction. The Make Poverty History website has published a 2010 election scorecard (or as a pdf). The differences between the parties are again quite significant.

Or if you're concerned about social justice within Australia, UnitingCare has this scorecard (Anglicare's election contribution is here). Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) have also put together this scorecard comparing the parties on indigenous affairs, and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre have put out this one.

Of course, these are not the only issues, but they are a few of issues that are (to different degrees) quite likely to come up in the next parliament (and, in the case of Senate elections, the next two Parliaments), and which Christians may find particularly interesting, especially since they are not always adequately covered by the mainstream media.

The ideal PM: half Brown, half Turnbull

Elizabeth Farrally argues that what we're really looking in a national leader is someone with intelligence and integrity. Why are such people pushed to the margins while we allow poll-puppets who put sound bites over sound policy to run the show?

Gillard and the girls

"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult."

-Charlotte Whitton

Australia has a new Prime Minister. RIP Kevin Rudd. Long live Julia Gillard.

There are all kinds of interesting things to say about this transition, from Rudd's inability to trust, to whether Gillard's move was its result or justification, from his record popularity earlier this year, to the hundred million dollars spent by the mining industry on undermining him, and from the single Liberal vote that ousted Turnbull and sank the ETS (with the help of the Greens), to Rudd's failure to use his double dissolution trigger. We can talk about a figure from Labor left taking the reins, the role of Labor right in bringing it about, of the likely timing of an election, of Gillard's chances against Abbott and of likely shifts in emphasis. Will the mining tax be dropped? Will the ETS be revived? We can even note the milestone that Gillard will be Elizabeth II's 150th prime minister.

However, just for a moment, can we notice something really novel? Not only is Julia Gillard Australia's first female prime minister, a notable landmark in itself (and on her first half-birthday crushing my daughter's possibility of being the same), but look around a little more and notice that this isn't an isolated phenomenon. For the first time, I am represented by women at all three levels of government: local, state and national. But it even goes beyond that. Can anyone beat this?

• Queen of Australia: Elizabeth II
• Governor General of Australia: Quentin Bryce
• Governor of NSW: Marie Bashir

• Prime Minister of Australia: Julia Gillard
• Premier of NSW: Kristina Keneally
• Lord Mayor of Sydney: Clover Moore

• Federal Member for Sydney: Tanya Plibersek
• NSW Member for Marrickville (and Deputy Premier of NSW): Carmel Tebbutt

"Women really do rule the world. They just haven't figured it out yet. When they do, and they will, we're all in big big trouble."

- Doctor Leon

Deforestation in Australia

The destruction of ancient forests is one of the most polluting, harmful and unnecessary things we do. Ancient forests typically store many times the biodiversity and carbon content of regrowth or plantation forests, as well as generally being more difficult to harvest for timber than plantations. In Australia, with the growth of overseas and local timber plantations, there is an ever decreasing market for the logging of old growth regions.

A national poll commissioned by The Greens and conducted by Galaxy this week discovered that there is strong public support for ending logging in native forests.

• 90% of Australians are in favour of protecting remaining high conservation value forests in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales in national parks.
• 77% agree that the Rudd Government should stop the logging of native forests, which contain large amounts of carbon that would be stored by ending forest clearance
• 72% are in favour of the Federal Government assisting logging contractors to take redundancies, retrain or move permanently to a plantation based industry.

What do you think: are there any good reasons to continue logging of old growth forests in Australia?
Image by Celia Carroll.

Sick of weak politicians? Safe Climate Bills

Are you sick of politicians diluting and compromising on climate action, putting short term political and economic gains ahead of long-term social and ecological investment? If you are an Australian, are you disappointed with Rudd's half-hearted climate suggestions and feel (like Professor Garnaut) that he has significantly lowered his sights? Are you even more disappointed in Coalition politicians who still can't make up their mind and would even risk a double dissolution election over making the bill even weaker?

Have a look at the Safe Climate Bills recently released by the Australian Greens. Aimed to stimulate debate about what is really needed, the series of twelve bills have been warmly welcomed by Friends of the Earth, the Green Building Council Australia and many others.

The current proposed government solution is considered by some to be "better than nothing", but by giving the illusion of action while simply continuing business as usual (with a few slight tweaks), it may actually be worse than idleness. Have a read of the summary (with links to the complete bills) and see if you think this might be worth making a fuss about.
PS Although large corporations are often among the worst ecological offenders and corporate regulation is one area requiring the largest shake-up (for all kinds of reasons), sometimes, it's a little bit nicer to be writing these kinds of posts on an Apple. Smug, moi? No. But if they too are greenwashing, then at least they do it with more style than the competition.

PPS I've only just realised that I unintentionally contributed to this. Ha.

A new political landscape?

I've never read any of his four million psychology/child-raising books, but Steve Biddulph has written a very interesting article in today's SMH suggesting that climate change, peak oil and growing awareness of ecological crisis will shift the political landscape over the next two federal terms to a two-party contest between Labor and the Greens, with the Liberals reduced to a minor party. I think he is right to suggest that we will only hear more about climate change (if that is possible) and peak oil (easy to hear more than almost zero) in coming years, however, I wonder whether both major parties will continue to shift to the ecological 'left', bringing into the mainstream environmental policies once viewed as extreme. I suspect that there is enough poll-driven pragmatism in Australian politics to keep the major parties alive for some time to come.

Two pet peeves

Two denials that make me sad:

(1) When people in positions of responsibility and influence (or potentially so) stick their head in the sand over the existence and significance (economic, environmental, social) of climate change.

(2) When Christians unnecessarily turn their disagreements (especially political) into exercises in excommunication.

Unfortunately, Dave Lankshear records a public instance of both in one open letter from Ewan McDonald, CDP Senate candidate from Victoria.

Dear Gordon, I would like to respectfully disagree with your correspondents Ron and Christine Lankshear whose letter criticising the CDP climate-change policy appeared in the feedback section of November 15 CVIP. They mention that their son, a Greens supporter, was dismissive of the CDP environment policy that questions the prevailing paradigm of anthropogenic global warming. Even if one believes the claims of the cult-like prophets of doom about the causes and effects of global-warming, there is no way any Christian should prefer the overtly anti-Christian and pro-death policies of the Greens over the pro-life and pro-Christian policies of the CDP. I am assuming the Lankshears are a Christian family so it distresses me to think that their son could have adopted such pagan views. I fear this is indicative of the wider church and Christian community who have generally failed to pass on their faith to the next generation and our society is suffering because of that. GK Chesterton famously said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything." Perhaps this is the reason why so many people today have unquestioningly adopted the new Green 'faith' - is it because they have first rejected the Christian faith? Regards, Ewan McDonald

Many Christians I know and respect vote for the CDP (Christian Democratic Party), and I have done so in the past. In particular, I respect their efforts to call attention to the human cost of the tens of thousands of voluntary abortions performed every year in Australia. However, this letter doesn't make them very attractive and I am not a fan of many of their policies. There is no party with a monopoly on 'Christian' issues, because there is no subset of issues that can be labelled 'Christian' or 'moral', as though Christ were only interested in part of our lives.

The irony is that the two main issues raised in the letter (climate change and abortion, which I presume is what is being referred to by calling the Greens "pro-death") are both about caring for future generations presently unable to speak for themselves.

State Election Forum reminder

Tonight is the State Election Forum at All Souls, Leichhardt (cnr Norton and Marion Sts). See you there at 7 for 7.30-9.30. More details back here.

UPDATE: Well I thought the night was quite a success. At the last minute, the Labor candidate decided to show up after all (earlier, her office had said that she would send a representative). All three candidates behaved themselves (more or less...). There were a few visitors who walked in off the street and had a great time and many visitors from around the traps. Look out for a bigger, better organised and even more exciting Federal version of the same event later in the year. I might post my intro talk on 'why politics?' sometime in the next couple of days. Thanks to all those who came.

UPDATE #2: It was interesting that the final question of the night was about Scripture in schools* and whether the Greens would get rid of it if elected. So far off their agenda was the issue that for the only time in the entire event, the candidate didn't know what to say because she wasn't aware of her party's position on the matter (which can be read here - and doesn't involve the abolition of Scripture). Tim (the MC) had to jump in and help her by telling her what her own party thought on the matter. And this is the Greens candidate with the best chance of making it into the Lower House.
*For those outside NSW, this is an issue that has a lot of traction in Christian circles. Many Christians have been given the impression that the 'pagan' Greens are set on revoking this privilege as soon as possible. It is simply not true.