The Sh*thouse Effect

It is such a shame that Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme didn’t get through the Senate. For seventeen years, Australia has done nothing to address climate change. Finally we had the chance to do 5 per cent more than nothing, but we let it slip through our fingers.

The CPRS was our last best hope. If only the Liberals had supported it, the legislation could have been printed out, sticky-taped together, and floated in space to block out the sun.

So badly imbalanced and ineffective was it, this would be about the only way that it would make any difference to global warming’s impacts on Australia. And let’s face it – if you’re turning to the party of Nick Minchin, Andrew Robb, Eric Abetz, Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott for support on environmental action, you’re already stuffed.

Like an iconic bushfire-fighting koala dead from chlamydia.

Maybe Sam the bushfire koala (R.I.P.) should become the government’s official climate change mascot. Why even fight environmental disaster when you’re just going to die because of the animals you sleep with. . . BHP, Alcoa, the CFMEU, etc.

Or is this, like Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong claim, somehow Malcolm Turnbull’s fault? Surely he’s too busy never having meetings with Godwin Grech to properly shaft the environment. When he’s not dictating his biography to Annabel Crabb, that is.

Or perhaps the Labor Party is just really regretting all those preferences they gave Stephen Fielding – the ones which made him the most powerful complete burke in Australia. If only they’d preferenced the Greens instead, they could be ignoring an even larger and more effective group of senators than they are ignoring right now.

Let’s face it, Kevin Rudd’s practical priorities have disappeared so far up his arse he’ll need more than the headlights from the new Prius to find them. How is it that nine tourists dead in a plane crash is an unending national tragedy, while an entire continent’s future doomed by thumb-twiddling is simply frustrating?

Letting a tragic marsupial with crotch rot take up residence in every Australian’s underpants would do more to fight climate change than the CPRS.

And it’s still the best that Canberra has to offer.

We’re that stuffed.