ABC and Guardian lobby for failed rich ex-PMs over jobs for workers

Former prime ministers Kevin Rudd, left, and Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: Kym Smith

Each worth several hundred million dollars, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are among the richest people to have served in the Australian federal parliament. Both are calling for a royal commission into media diversity, in effect because News Corp journalists report on widely held concerns that government climate change plans could cost jobs in manufacturing and mining.

This column last Monday argued the lower-than-expected Democrats’ vote at the US election should make it clear that parties of labour — including the ALP here and Labour in Britain — need to stop backing policies that kill jobs in the name of climate action. The next morning, Joel Fitzgibbon, the ALP member for the NSW coalmining seat of Hunter, quit the shadow cabinet to allow him to more freely argue for the protection of jobs in the coal industry. Former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty and president Jenny George shared Fitzgibbon’s concerns in this newspaper.

Most journalists today would rather advocate for rich former PMs than for workers. But most journalists have little real understanding of climate change or the costs of its mitigation: they are on a mission to save the planet. Such moral posturing leaves little time to read the science and economics.

ABC TV’s Insiders on Sunday, November 8, gave Rudd and Turnbull a free kick at Rupert Murdoch. The pair claimed News was a political machine spreading climate misinformation. The ABC even invited Turnbull back for another go on Q&A the following night.

The ABC, the Nine newspapers, Guardian Australia, The New Daily, Crikey, the Ten network, The Conversation and Schwartz Media went in to overdrive supporting the Rudd petition which has been signed by 500,000 people who take issue with the Murdoch papers being out of step with all those other news outlets.

Yes, there are plenty of alternative news sources to Mr Murdoch’s papers. And the internet gives Australians access to hundreds of international newspapers. Yet in Rudd’s world, News Corp is a monopoly. What utter tosh.

Perhaps if Rudd and Turnbull knew their voters as well as most editors know their readers they might have lasted more than the two years they each served as PM before being rolled by their own party rooms. Both seem to have little regard for the intelligence of Australians. They imply voters who keep rejecting expensive action on climate are so dumb they just vote the way News Corp says. Never mind circulations of physical print versions of these papers have been falling for a decade.

The truth is most senior editors and columnists at News accept the climate is changing. Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Paul Kelly and dozens of others have said so publicly. It’s just they don’t take the next step that the Guardian and the ABC do: demand immediate action at any price. News’s journalists understand what posturing nations in the EU and China are really doing rather than what they say they are doing.

As this newspaper argued way back in 2007 when both Rudd and Coalition PM John Howard took emissions trading systems to the November election, there is no point shutting an industry here just to export it to China, which has much lower emissions standards than we do. It’s the reason the ALP carved the aluminium industry out of its last climate policy: Bill Shorten knew at the 2019 election that ever-higher energy prices would shut alumina and aluminium smelting here only to relocate to places where much dirtier coal is used.

It’s time more people understood the facts.

The latest obsession of media critics of the Morrison government is “net zero emissions by 2050”. As Energy Minister Angus Taylor explained to Kieran Gilbert on Sky News last Wednesday and Radio National’s Fran Kelly on Thursday, Australia is committed to net zero by definition as part of its Paris Climate Accord commitments, first agreed to by Tony Abbott as PM in 2015 and later ratified by Turnbull.

Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull faces then PM Kevin Rudd in Question Time in 2008.

Australia is just not prepared to commit to a date until its reduction pathway is certain. The ALP and the EU get applause from the media’s cheap seats for making commitments without detailed plans to meet them.

Even without the nuclear and woodchip-fired power generation used across Europe, Australia has a higher penetration of renewables (21 per cent) than the EU (19 per cent) and the US (11 per cent). We have exceeded our Kyoto targets despite the fastest growing population in the developed world and will meet our Paris 2030 target. The fastest rising emissions are in China, despite its 2060 net zero emissions promise. The Paris deal allows China to keep increasing emissions until 2030.

The ABC and the Guardian won’t report any of that. Nor will they report what the words “net zero” actually mean. This commitment requires emissions to be offset to produce a “net” effect of carbon neutrality. The EU makes clear some emissions will remain and says “in order to offset these, an equivalent amount of CO2 needs to be taken out of the atmosphere — negative emissions”. Largely this is done via tree planting and bio-energy.

Nor do the green left media, Rudd and Turnbull admit something the News Corp newspapers are honest about. Renewables are intermittent. They don’t work when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. Hence large scale blackouts in California this year and concerns about wind failures in Britain.

Turnbull’s answer was the Snowy 2.0 hydro project. The Guardian and ABC pretend battery storage can fix the problem.

Not yet it can’t. This is why Morrison is moving to gas, which is easier than coal to ramp up and down depending on the renewables power flow at a given time. South Australia’s $500m Tesla battery could run the state for only a couple of minutes. It is there to harmonise power dependent on the interconnector with Victoria and prevent a repeat of the October 2016 statewide blackout. As Chris Uhlmann pointed out to the horror of his then colleagues during his time at the ABC, this is the science of power generation and distribution. Battery storage works at the home, but is still enormously expensive. It will eventually work at grid-scale but that could be decades away.

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull and PM Kevin Rudd walk back to their offices after attending an event for White Ribbon Day in 2009.

Another lie about climate action? Coal is not being phased out. Demand slowed this year because of the global recession. Even the deeply green Australia Institute — so loved by the left media — says 154 coal-fired power stations were under construction globally in 2017, and “200 coal projects (are) under construction in China”.

And the biggest climate lie? The false Extinction Rebellion claims of doom by 2030, based on the IPCC’s bogus RCP8.5 scenario that projects increasing CO2 emissions until the end of the century. Why does the ABC report such nonsense?

And why do two former PMs think the facts should not be reported? Why do they say nothing about the political campaigning of the ABC and Guardian?

The Guardian proudly boasted last year, “We believe that the escalating climate crisis is the defining issue of our lifetimes and the planet is in the grip of an emergency. We want the Guardian to play a leading role in reporting on the climate catastrophe.” What catastrophe is that? Does Turnbull, whose book boasts of helping to set up Guardian Australia, really believe this?

And what of revelations by this newspaper last year that the ABC’s staff were planning their own “ABC-staff climate crisis advisory group” to advise the national broadcaster on using climate change “solutions journalism”?

Now those two are media political machines. But Sarah Hanson-Young’s Senate inquiry next year won’t look at their side of the media ledger.