Amid all the sound and fury last night, let’s not overlook that Malcolm Turnbull has achieved a truly remarkable feat: drag his party kicking and screaming to actually support the Government’s CPRS, in an amended form.  It is an impressive achievement.

And forget about Wilson Tuckey and Dennis Jensen and the denialist bloc within the Liberal Party calling a spill against Turnbull on Thursday.  If the spill motion gets up, Turnbull will likely have the numbers, and for that matter won’t even need them in the event Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey don’t stand.  I mean, seriously – Kevin Andrews? A man whose ministerial career was marked by both incompetence and malice?  He’d be lucky to get his own vote let alone anyone else’s.

But Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership is terminal after yesterday for two reasons: he now has a formidable array of conservative figures aligned against him, and he has confirmed yet again that he is unable to control his high-handed and aggressive style of leadership.

Andrews Robb’s decision to join the “no” camp was the bombshell of the day, but one quickly overtaken by talk of spills and numbers.  It remains a critical development.  Robb is the most substantial figure in the party apart from Turnbull.  He is more widely-respected than Abbott, he is far, far smarter than Joe Hockey, he has supporters amongst both conservatives – his instinctive political home – and moderates (he is a republican).  Above all, he was Turnbull’s trusted point man on the ETS before he was felled by illness.  His decision to oppose Turnbull would not have been taken lightly.  It would have been taken in the full knowledge that he was turning his back on the man whom he strongly supported for the leadership in November 2007 and September 2008.

It also means that there is now a solid bloc of Nick Minchin, Robb and Tony Abbott, amongst the senior leadership, who opposed Turnbull.  This is a far more formidable grouping than a clutch of denialists like Corey Bernardi.

A key feature of the partyroom meeting yesterday was always going to be how Turnbull handled it.  There has been a growing chorus – from senior Liberals down – in recent months that Turnbull is unable to control his aggression, unable to rein in his tendency to go for the jugular.  It was bad enough when he bit off more than he could chew against Kevin Rudd over the faked email affair.  But when directed at his colleagues, at it increasingly has been over the CPRS, it makes enemies where it is unnecessary to do so.

And Turnbull has tried to rein it in.  He was extraordinarily patient in getting the party slowly but surely to move to a point where it would at least consider a deal – remarkable  given it voted against the CPRS point blank earlier in the year.  But he always seemed a brain explosion away from undoing all the hard work – like when he labelled opponents smartarses and reckless and irresponsible, and visibly and deliberately put his leadership on the line over the CPRS.

Yesterday, again, he tried hard – insisting that everyone who wanted to be heard should speak their piece.  Hour after hour it went.  Denialists, legitimate sceptics, climate change believers who didn’t like the CPRS, supporters – all had their say.

And then, as if he could restrain himself no more, he declared victory while senators were out of the room, saying he had a majority.

There was no hint of sharp practice in doing it while senators were absent – or at least that’s what Warren Truss and Barnaby Joyce said.  Both said that wasn’t an issue – people had been going in and out of the partyroom all day.  But very quickly, Turnbull’s opponents began saying that he had misrepresented the partyroom position.  Kevin Andrews in effect accused Turnbull of lying, saying “40 or 41″ backbenchers had opposed the CPRS package, and only 33 had supported it. Tuckey said 40 were against the package.  Another counted it 47-47 after including shadow Cabinet members.

The same words were again used – high-handed.  Arrogant.  Bullying.  Sentiments unlikely to have been curtailed by his repeated, Muhammad Ali-like claim at the ensuing press conference “I am the leader”.

Turnbull has achieved an astonishing feat in getting his party to back the Government’s CPRS, particularly given just how alien he is to many conservatives in his party and how relatively politically inexperienced he is.  But regardless of what happens later this week, he has confirmed the suspicion many hold that he simply cannot control himself.  Worse, there are serious, substantial party figures who are now alienated from him.

For a party as deeply divided as the Liberals, Turnbull’s style simply can’t work.  Frankly it’s doubtful whether anyone’s style could work given how badly they are fractured. But Turnbull risks exacerbating their divisions with his approach – and that is exactly what appears to have happened this evening.

What had looked for Malcolm Turnbull like a tough but doable task of getting his partyroom on side for a CPRS deal with the Government has become a nightmare with former Turnbull supporter Andrew Robb declaring he’s opposed to the deal.

Robb was Turnbull’s original choice to lead the CPRS process, but had to bow out when he was felled by an illness earlier in the year.  He was replaced by Ian Macfarlane, who has negotiated the package released today with Penny Wong.

Robb’s opposition to the deal will lend respectability to those opposing a deal, who are primarily climate denialists.  While initially a climate sceptic, Robb immersed himself in the detail of emissions trading and visited the US for discussions with carbon markets analysts there.  After Turnbull, Macfarlane and Greg Hunt, Robb is the Liberal figure who understands the detail of the CPRS and emissions trading best.

He is also the most substantial senior Liberal after Turnbull himself, respected in Parliament and in the Press Gallery.

Robb will be fully aware of what his opposition will do to both the chances of a deal and to Turnbull’s leadership.  It is, quite literally, a gamechanger, and leaves Turnbull in serious trouble.  This could be the end of Turnbull’s leadership.

The partyroom meeting resumes at 4.00pm after a break for Question Time.

Three community consultations in detail versus 500 plus, well spun? Who to believe? Yesterday a group of well qualified commentators released a report called “Will they be heard?” which involved a detailed analysis of over nine hours of consultations between FaHCSIA and Aboriginal communities at Bagot, Utopia and Ampilatwatja plus government summaries of all consultations held.

They concluded the consultation process was designed to gain support from Aboriginal communities to preserve the special measures introduced in the Intervention, thought to be good for communities, and therefore failed to record appropriately strong objections and concerns expressed about the whole intervention. The report therefore questions the validity of the process and expresses concerns that it could be used to justify retaining current discriminatory measures.

The response of Minister Macklin was swiftly dismissive. Despite, the high status of people involved, eg Malcolm Fraser, Alastair Nicholson and Larissa Behrendt, she dismissed it as it covered only 3 meetings out 500 plus, claiming also her process was validated by independent consultants CIRCA (hired by FAHCSIA). Her media release was triumphalist in structure, starting with the following ‘fndings’ that entirely backed the government’s views!

• Overall, people said that children, women and the elderly were now safer, better fed and clothed; they were getting a better night’s sleep; and there was a reduction in humbugging for money for alcohol, drugs and gambling. This was attributed to a combination of NTER measures, in particular income management, alcohol restrictions, community store licensing and the increased police presence;

• People identified income management was delivering benefits, particularly to children, women and the elderly. The benefits included more money being spent on food, clothing and school-related expenses, and assisting with saving for large purchases, such as fridges and washing machines.

I have read the three transcripts of meetings in Bagot, Ampilatwatja. and Arlparra/Utopia which presumably were not very different to the rest in the issues raised and process deficiencies. None of the above issues were raised spontaneously by locals at any of these meetings, despite being told of their presumed benefits. When prompted, one or two comments were made but most of the discussion on Income management  was about resentment, shaming, being subject to compulsion and surveillance of spending and the many practical difficulties the processes imposed on them in managing bills and spending. Similarly, the public servants pushed hard to get responses on the shops’ improvements, and fended off complaints about why they didn’t control prices as they controlled so much else.

It seems incredible to me, as a long term researcher, that the responses of these quite substantial communities would be so very different in their priorities and concerns to the other 70 communities. The design of the process, by both stating the government position up front and then asking for feedback on specific parts of the program, made it more difficult for people to raise wider questions and be critical of the wider policy and processes. Despite this attempt to direct discussion, the reports suggested that meetings wanted to, and did, move beyond the constraints. The question then becomes how much weight was given to the discussions that were not on the official preferred topics.

The CIRCA report, which is also on the website, offers evidence of how such differences in the reporting has happened. They confirm that the consultations they attended did comply with the brief they were given by FAHCSIA, ie they were run by public servants who explained to all what the Intervention had done for them and then invited comments on a defined list of topics they wanted feedback on. However, the CIRCA report notes some tensions and states, for instance:

For example, in some Tier 2 community meetings the two proposed options for income management were not discussed, as participants spoke very passionately about not wanting income management to stay, and given this response, it was not relevant to then ask people to discuss the two options proposed in the discussion paper

then later the report states:

The summary of the income management section identifies the level of opposition to the two income management options included in the discussion paper. However, the summary identifies the voluntary model with triggers for those not managing their money as the preferred model. We believe this over-simplifies the level of discussion and responses to some extent, as many said income management should be stopped, and the trigger model was acceptable as an alternative solution, rather than the preferred solution.

This can hardly be seen as an endorsement of the process from FAHCSIA’s own consultants. If we combine these doubts with the concerned citizens reporting on the transcripts, filmed meetings and other reports, and the acknowledgement later in the government report of some concerns, the intentions of the Government to maintain very unpopular programs is ridiculous .

The government report itself states

• the need for and desire of Aboriginal people to take greater ownership of solutions to the problems that the NTER is seeking to address;
• that Aboriginal people valued the opportunity for genuine consultation and involvement in the development of policy and programs to address these complex problems, and considered this to be central to achieving successful, long-term outcomes

Macklin appears to be using this process to retain aspects of control and shaming that are inherent, for instance, in income quaranting by claiming these can be justified as special measures under a reinstated Race Discrimination Act. She must not ignore views that are widely held in the NT that aspects of the Intervention have damaged potential good relationships with Governments and undermined the capacity of local communities to take control of local issues. Small gains in practical areas do not balance out major insults to dignity and respect.

“Will they be heard?” illustrates clearly that at these consultations Aboriginal people showed strong concern about the continuation of such special measures and discomfort at the impact that the measures have had on their lives to date. These concerns included:

- Concern about the discriminatory application of the Intervention

- Concern about compulsory income management

- Resentment about the implication the Aboriginal people use pornography

- Concerns about the prominent signs relating to alcohol and pornography bans erected at the entrances to their communities

- Concern that little has been delivered in services and infrastructure since the Intervention.

Eva Cox

Leaving aside the fact that this is the second time the legislation has been before the Parliament, and that the amendments being negotiated between government and Opposition were those being forward by the Opposition, the collective short-term memory loss amongst Coalition people is remarkable.

This is the mob who when in government less than three years ago were pushing entire pieces of legislation through the Senate in the space of a week, sometimes without even the pretence of a brief Senate Inquiry (or sometimes with the pretence of a brief Inquiry, whilst making it blatantly obvious it was just a pretence).

Major amendments to workplace relations laws were foisted on the Senate with at best a few hours to assess. The entire package of Northern Territory Intervention legislation was given a week, eventually including a begrudging one day Committee Inquiry which refused point blank to take evidence from the authors of the Little Children are Sacred report which allegedly underpinned the whole thing.

If Coalition people are going to vote against the CPRS, they should against it – I would because I think it’s far too weak and would lock inadequate action which will cost even more in compensation to fix down the track.

If they want to defer it until Copenhagen to have a better idea of the international landscape, they should do that – it’s a defensible position ( or would have been if they’d collectively adopted it and stuck to it)  - rather than waste the entire final week of Senate sittings filibustering and bullshitting.  There is plenty of other important legislation that needs to be debated. 

But complaining about having amendments foisted on them with insufficient time for consideration – particularly when it’s a variant of their own amendments – is both hypocritical and nonsense.

As things stand, even if Malcolm Turnbull gets majority agreement from his party room to do a deal with the government it will be easy for a small number of committed Coalition climate change deniers to talk the CPRS Bills out for the rest of the week.  The government will not have the numbers for a guillotine unless the Coalition agrees to guillotine its own rebels, which would be a significant action. So even if Turnbull ‘wins’, he could easily lose if some of those who believe in doing nothing about climate change dig their heels in regardless. Mind you, if there is a guillotine agreed on, any squeals from the Coalition side would be hypocrisy squared, given the regularity with which gags and guillotines were voted for by the same people when in government.

I know hypocrisy is standard parlance in political debate, particularly when you compare what is said when people are in government to when they are in Opposition, but the regularity of it shouldn’t make us dismissive of it.

In Patriotism Reclaimed, Tim Soutphommasane described the ways in which patriotism can come to be expressed in things like the taste of VB, the beach, cricket etc as ‘sentimental mush’. I took that as the starting point for an argument about his book, suggesting that it showed a curiously abstract and disembodied idea of what patriotism, or countrylove or whatever, might be. In his in today’s Crikey, Tim has given an Ettomagh pub souvenir tea-towels’ worth of Australian references, but his argument simply reinforces my point – that his approach is elitist and divorced from the real swirling positive and negative feelings which revolve around….

country. His inability to understand that this is not something constructed from on high is revealed in this paragraph:

But I also argue that patriotism must involve an emotional dimension. It is just that I think any patriotic affection must ultimately be tied to a national historical tradition rather than to things such as a beach lifestyle. I make no apologies for believing that a sense of an Australian democratic achievement and an egalitarian public culture should be a central part of an Australian national identity

In other words, let’s us bunch of intellectuals get-together and design something people can believe in. Given that patriotism, for most of Australia’s history, has turned on whiteness and a highly limited egalitarianism – male , white, anglo – this is simply a reconstruction of the country’s past in terms of its approved present.

My point is that when people do things which could be described as patriotic – die in combat, go the extra mile for an Australian in a foreign country, risk their life as a CFA volunteer – they’re not thinking of the ‘Australian ballot’ when they do so. They are overwhelmingly motivated by the concrete web of people and things they love – and often despite a country’s best or worst historical traditions. What could be a more compromised, constructed affiliation than finding a strand of your own beliefs within a country’s complex history, and then nominating it as the ‘true Australia’?

After all it is Tim, not I, who wrote a 200 page book on love of country while barely evoking a single sight, smell, memory or image of the place – save for state functions such as nationalization ceremonies, which are part of his approved patriotism. If he has deep associations that’s good meIt’s a pity that it took a forthright critique of the book to bring out what should have been in it in the first place – an actual expression of what he felt about the place, rather than what he thought people should be engineered to feel about it.

Tim’s reaction to my criticism of designing a new Australia from Oxford is an obvious misunderstanding of my argument. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being abroad – though spending five of your eight years of adulthood away is a funny way to show your love, the ultimate ‘I’ll call you’. But global intellectuals who don’t sufficiently reflect on how their practice shapes their thought come up with silly stuff – like a patriotism built off a civic blueprint, without any thought of actually finding out what people feel about their country, and going from there. It’s why Tim can’t see the obvious howlers he makes – that the Australian beach and its culture, is just like the Californian version. It bloody isn’t, but it probably looks that way from the 747.

Watching the relatively minor mediatised spectacle of Cronulla from Oxford, Tim concluded that the left dropped the ball. It didn’t, it just didn’t run with it in the way  that he wanted – by trying to grapple over who had the right to wear the flag. The fight against mandatory detention, for David Hicks and others, and against wars were not conducted by some gimcrack reversal of the ‘un-Australian’ tag, as if every negative strand in our history was some detraction from its good essence. The fight was made on humanist grounds, but in the Australian context – as in, we do not want to be the sort of country that does this. The particular fight for Hicks, rather than for all of the Guantanamo prisoners is social solidarity at its best – you take up his case because of a real historical connection, but on the grounds of injustice to a fellow human being. Tim thinks I’m getting into a pissing competition over who’s more patriotic – which is pretty rich, given that most of his book is about the alleged ‘defeatism’ of the Left.  I don’t like the ‘p’ word much at all but if we’re going to use it, yeah staying and fighting to shape what your land will become sure as shit beats captaining the Balliol college first XI in the love of country stakes.

Even at the end Tim still can’t get it, damning my ‘cultural nostalgia’ – nostalgia, the ultimate insult of the cultural technocrat, the inconvenient attachment people have to what they grew up with, and made them who they are. My point was that real countrylove can’t be enrolled into a political programme – it is inchoate, sometimes regressive, sometimes appalling. Tim has misread what was more by way of being a confessional than a programmatic statement.

Like everyone in a society built from waves of migration I feel a loss at what has passed in the process of global change – a world of milk bars and 3XY, the VFL, and the W class tram. When I say Tim wasn’t part of that, I don’t mean he isn’t an equal citizen of modern Australia – I mean that it was an earlier stage of multicultural Australia, and that he literally wasn’t part of it. Those further waves – that substantially changed the feel and nature of the country, often for the better – hadn’t happened yet.

But I know for certain that those attachments are real in a way that Tim’s empty official patriotism is not, and that defining them as ‘nostalgia’ or ‘mush’ is not only a profound error about what countrylove is, it’s also likely to have a political blowback. In a society like ours, whatever forms social unity takes – and there is no reason to value it above conflict, in any given situation – a conscious and rational commitment to shared life within a pluralist polity is preferable to an engineered abstract patriotism. What I express as a contingent and reflected-upon set of emotions, a lot of Australians will still assert as anglo nativism, and they ain’t going to be policy wonked out of it.

If Tim has his own attachments to growing up in Australia, great. It’s a pity he didn’t put more of them in the book. As it is, the few lines about attending Hurlstone Agricultural High School have the  air of the detached outsider about them, and it was from that that I took my cue.  The only other evoked situations in the book are a state occasion, the citizenship ceremony – and a grand final in a pub at Oxford, which captures the way in which nationalism is made externally and projected back, rather better than I could.  It would certainly have been better than appeals to people to surrender their processes of rational reflection to the ‘ecstatic myth’ of Gallipoli.

Tim has had a lot of support from sections of the left – though I wonder how many have actually read his book carefully – but his proposals are clearly of the right. His work is reminiscent of the interbellum elitists – Pareto, Gasset, Coudenhove-Kalergi – who saw the values of the ‘masses’ as something to be managed and programmed, insofar as that were possible. Soutphommasane adds a new twist –  tilting towards neoliberal economics, and ‘progressive patriotism’ as a way of compensating for its fraying effects. Were have we heard that before? Oh yeah. He has invented that most interesting of things, multicultural Howardism – which jettisons the man’s actual attachments (Bradman is mush) – and preserves its aridity. That is an achievement worthy of a monument in our country’s ‘Big’ series. I would suggest a galah. In Balliol.

The Government’s willingness to cut a deal would, perversely, have been strengthened last week by yet another display of disunity and division from Nick Minchin, which would have narrowed the space within which Malcolm Turnbull can agree to a deal that won’t tear his party apart.  The Government will be aware that it can offer a generous deal that meets much of the Coalition’s wishlist and still be rejected because the Liberals are at sixes and sevens.  The result is that the Government looks like it bent over backwards to accommodate the climate denialists in the Coalition and was still rebuffed.  Manna from electoral heaven.

Bear in mind that compromises that further diminish the effectiveness of the CPRS aren’t a policy problem for the Government.  They know full well the CPRS in its current form will do virtually nothing to curb Australian emissions or establish a carbon price in the Australian economy.  But the CPRS is primarily a political tool to convince voters the Government is doing something about climate change and cause hell within Coalition ranks.  It doesn’t need to actually do anything in the real world to achieve that.

If you want a comparison, think of the Howard Government’s Temporary Protection Visas, which actually led to an increase in arrivals of asylum seekers.  The point of the policy – and why it was maintained for so long – was to convince voters the Government was tough on refugees, and to wedge Labor, and it worked.

The key to a deal will be if the Government is willing to stump up yet more compensation for big polluters who are already getting more than 94% of their permits free, and the electricity generators, foreign multinationals and the Labor Govts of NSW and Qld who are already getting billions over the next five years.

Possible compensation sources before the Government has to hit the Budget start with the fuel excise offset, which starts at around $2.2b in 2012-13 and steadily increases year in, year out.  That could be re-deployed to big polluters or electricity.  This is my tip for a compromise – if the Government can get the Coalition to sign off on it, it has the added virtue of neutering the political effect of any petrol price rises from the CPRS.  Both sides of politicis would have agreed to remove the offset, so the Government would be immune from a campaign based on the cost to motorists.

It would also be an oasis of sound policy in what is otherwise a complete dog of a scheme.

Next is the compensation to households.  It’s possible the modellers from Treasury have been called in to show how much less compensation for poor and middle-income families would be needed if more compensation went to polluters and electricity generators (who will cause the biggest impact on households via power prices).  It should be something approaching a zero-sum game – the more the generators get, the less they’ll need to increase prices, so the less need there is for compensation.  The cost of household compensation starts at $5b, lurches up to $6b in the third year of the scheme, and increases thereafter.  It’s over $7b a year by the end of the decade.  It should, therefore, have some capacity to fund more compensation.

And if that fails, there’s the Budget, particularly in the years beyond 2015, which has the status of Monopoly money for everyone except Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.  If there’s a deal, watch out for the five-year electricity generators’ compensation being extended to ten years (the Coalition proposed 15, but the generators didn’t like that, on the basis that cash flow in 2025 won’t help them renegotiate billion-dollar debt rollover now.

See, if you take away the need to actually have an effective scheme, the CPRS simply becomes lumps of money to be moved around the chessboard to meet your political needs.

Now it’s simply down to the politics, mainly the internal politics of the Liberal Party.

Update: A thought occurs about another possible compromise – given the complexity of the amendments required to implement likely deal options, and the fact that a lot may be implemented via the CPRS regulation, rather than primary legislation (the bulk of the CPRS is implemented by the relevant regulations, not the the legislation), don’t rule out the Government and most of the Liberals agreeing on a package in principle with the actual vote to actually occur early next year.  Rudd gets to go to Copenhagen with a deal (similar to the bipartisan support for the emissions reductions targets), Liberal honour is satisfied because they have not been forced to vote before Copenhagen, complex drafting doesn’t have to be rushed by harried Office of Parliamentary Counsel (legislative drafting) and Office of Legislative Drafting and Publishing (drafting of regulations) staff before Thursday when the Senate rises for the year.

Still, that involves a considerable degree of goodwill, and there hasn’t been too much of that on this issue.

In amongst all the media and political frenzy regarding the Tamil asylum seekers  refusing to get off some boats in Indonesia, a much greater and more problematic stand-off has been occurring in Thailand.

160 Hmong people, originally from Laos, have been kept in a detention centre in Thailand for the past three years.  Despite the UNHCR saying the people have been recognised as refugees, and four countries – Australia, Canada, the USA and the Netherlands – offering to resettle them, the Thai government considers them to be “economic migrants” and proposes returning them to Laos.

This report from a year ago provides a bigger picture of the sort of long running abuses in Thailand. It details thousands of Hmong refugees who have been locked up for years, agreements being signed between the Thai and Laos governments to return the “economic migrants” and refusals by Thai authorities to allow the UNHCR to enter the detention centres to make refugee assessments and determinations.

It is necessary for the Australian government to continue to work with Indonesia and other countries in our region to find workable compassionate approaches to the large number of asylum seekers in the area.

But Australia must not be complicit in facilitating human rights violations or mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees (or unauthorised migrants for that matter). We should also get out of the habit of turning a blind eye to what other governments in our region are doing.

The more we know about what happens elsewhere in our region, the more obvious it becomes why refugees would risk their lives and rack up large debts to try to find safety in Australia.

Last night he rose to speak on the package of CPRS bills and gave a speech that any climate sceptics – should they be genuine sceptics rather than outright denialists – ought to read and ponder.  Birmingham supports his party’s position on the bills and recognises the Government’s cynical timing.

It is sad that this government has sought to force upon the parliament very cynical timing in the consideration of their legislation relating to an ETS … bringing it back to this place for these last two sitting weeks of the year, exactly three months later, smacks of exactly what it is: rank political opportunism.

Nevertheless, he wants to see a deal reached to pass the CPRS.  “I hope that our sensible, sound amendments to fix this legislation are accepted because, ultimately, I hope to be voting for this legislation.”

But it is Birmingham’s broader rationale for taking action that serves as an effective and clear articulation of why even sceptics should endorse taking action to mitigate climate change.

…I do not know whether climate change is real.  I do not know whether human impact on climate change is real.  I am not a climate scientist.  I have never pretended to be.  I also note that, so far as I am aware, nobody in this place or the other place pretends to be a climate scientist or qualified in such fields.  I note that many come to this debate with opinions that are doubtful of the veracity of climate science… I hope that they are right, because if they are right then the future for the planet looks much rosier than it does for those who take a far dimmer view of what climate science and climate change could possibly mean.

… with the exponentially increasing global population of people around the world, all of whom quite rightly aspire to have ever-improved lifestyles, we must be aware that this growth of populace and growth of consumption with it will of course have some impact on the environment in which we live.  I am reminded of Newton’s old law of motion: that for every action that is always an opposite and equal reaction.  In my mind, continually emitting ever increasing volumes of any one chemical compound into the atmosphere must ultimately have some impact.

For these reasons I believe, as I have said in my previous contributions on these bills, that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt and opt for action ahead of inaction when it comes to climate change mitigation.  It is, however, a case of making sure that we get that action right.

The conservative position on climate change must surely be one of risk management – the risk of not taking action is far greater than the risk of taking action in the event the climate change hypothesis proves flawed.  Like conservation, which had its historical roots in the conservative side of politics, climate change action should be as much at home on Right as on the Left.

It now seems likely that a reportfrom Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) into the way police dealt with that death in custody will be finished by the end of the year.  Precisely what is made public and what happens from there is still unknown, but the CMC’s credibility will be stake almost as much as that of the Queensland Police service. 

There have been growing criticisms of a perceived ineffectiveness of the CMC, as well as allegations that elements within the CMC may be too close to the government and the police.  A report today in The Australian that the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Commissioner, Alan MacSporran, has “accepted a brief to represent the Queensland Police Service at the second coronial inquest into Doomadgee’s death, to be held in February” will do little to quell those concerns.

It is hard not to perceive a justice system operating on double standards when Aboriginal people accused of being involved in a riot on Palm Island, after an initial official announcement that Mulrunji’s death was accidental, were quickly arrested and charged, while so little has happened in response to the death itself and the clear indications of malpractice in the way police investigated it. 

There has been more than sufficient evidence provided to the first inquest, as well as at the trials of some of the accused rioters, to warrant a major investigation. The people of Palm Island, and the many people of Queensland and beyond who support them, are still waiting. Let’s see what the CMC delivers.

At least she kept her teeth in.

Friday update:

Feel the power people. Feel the power.