Vikki Campion: Climate 200 elites are out of touch with real Australia
It’s easy to bang on about vehicle emissions when everything you need is on your doorstep. What about people whose school or doctor is hours from home, asks Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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If a nanny cares for your children, a maid cleans your clothes, a chauffeur drives your car, or a cleaner fixes the house, you are better off than most. Tick all, and congratulations, you have a brilliant resume representing Climate 200.
Harbourside heirs and heiresses will never know what it is to choose between the $8/500g mince and a $1.75 can of lentils because of budget instead of any moral ideal.
The dilemma is not what restaurant to go to, but which bill to pay.
Wealthy circles become smaller, as more of those around them become staff. Time for coffee to talk politics is easier to find when others are doing the housework.
With skyrocketing power prices from the closure of coal-fired power stations, people who could not change a tyre are apparently changing the climate.
I would never expect Wentworth’s so-called independent teal candidate Allegra Spender, who went to the $34,000-a-year private girls school Ascham and then Cambridge, to understand. Nor would I expect Warringah’s Olympic skier Zali Steggall, who grew up in the French Alps.
The galling thing is that apart from the beautiful luck of the life that fell in their lap, they believe they have the right to purchase politics as well.
Put it on the shelf between the macadamias and the Veuve.
But from North Sydney’s independent Kylea Tink, originally from Coonabarabran, I expect more.
Ms Tink backed a road user tax “charging on the odometer” in a Sky candidates forum on Thursday, claiming the biggest death rate is due to vehicle emissions, compared to “only 1200 of road accidents”.
Please, Kylea, go home to Parkes, to your old neighbouring town of Baradine where the “daycare” is a neighbour’s place and the people with the oldest, most fuel-inefficient cars, most likely to break down, live the furthest from town in the cheapest houses.
Tell Baradine, with a median household income of $771 a week, who get one X-ray day per week — otherwise, they have a four-hour return trip to Dubbo — that they need to buy an electric car, and that they will have to pay a road user tax “on the odometer”.
You patronise them by saying rural and regional communities “are incredibly resilient”, like a person thrown out of a boat by necessity is a good swimmer or drowns.
At the Baradine shop yesterday, the shearer paid $3.95 for two litres of milk and $3.95 for a no-name basic loaf of white bread. In North Sydney, the bread equivalent was $1.70 at Woolworths, while the same 2L milk was $2.60.
People in Baradine are paying Harris Farm prices for home brand.
Surely Ms Tink, a publicly-educated rural high school student, knows deep down how a policy like that would be taken at home.
A policy that works for the inner-city rich with light rail on their doorstep leaves us in the dust.
Regionalisation Minister Bridget McKenzie tried explaining this at the national Press Club this week and, perhaps proving her point, all questions from the media focused on climate change in Canberra instead of the bush.
Charging by the odometer, kids won’t go to school, doctors’ appointments will be put off, conditions allowed to worsen, and the poor become impoverished.
We can see the 100 per cent increase in wholesale power prices now, directly attributable to the closure of coal-fired power stations and the jagged road to renewables. Wasn’t all power going to become cheaper?
Shortly after a joint press conference with two Climate 200 candidates, Ms Tink denied being supported by Simon Holmes a Court, even though his website discloses he does.
The price of her support in a hung parliament, she said, would be vehicle emissions standards.
Go home to Baradine and tell that to the people whose median weekly household income is one-third of North Sydney’s. Who, between tyres, rego and third party insurance, can barely afford the car they have now, let alone buy an EV. Who put off car services in the same way they stretch out haircuts. The Climate 200 Cafe has hairdressers all the way to
the ferry.
If you are a dad who goes to work every day and has three kids at home, do you think Ms Spender or Mr Holmes a Court understands your stress? Who can take a couple of years off? Others can’t take a gap year followed by a sabbatical on paying power bills because someone else will cover for them.
If you fight with your partner about using the dryer because of the electricity bill, then welcome to the world of the rest of us.
What power you should use, what car you drive, what views you should hold and, oh, which school your child is booked into.
Welcome to Climate 200.
What separates the major parties from the independents is their life experience.
The LNP have Phil Thompson and Jim Molan, wounded veterans; Llew O’Brien, Peter Dutton, Jason Wood, Pat Conaghan, all former cops, and doctors, teachers, graziers, farmers, small-business owners — people whose life has not been cushioned by generational wealth.
Most importantly, they have people out of sight of the Harbour Bridge.
Why does no one think we are getting a carbon tax with a new focus-grouped name? The independent issues will become policies for people who hear little about the broader circumstances of life.
Labor is not getting 76 seats on its own — a vote for them is for putting the elites into power. And the elites don’t think about household problems.
Climate is only a big issue when money isn’t.
And the Bandt just keeps on braying
Adam Bandt publicly asking the Labor Party to share power with the Greens is making all of the right’s Christmas dreams – Peter Dutton as next PM – come true, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Parliament like a football team without skilled players
If you were picking our parliament like a football team, most would not have their job, as we’d be picking players who have never played the football of life before, writes Vikki Campion.