Don't come between an Aussie and his gas-guzzling ute

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. You get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contributing to the climate cause in a market where the specifics are totally different from, say, in tiny Norway or tiny Finland. Australia is a vast continent without charging infrastructure and the debate must be completely different here from how it’s conducted in Scandinavia. 

I don’t envy Albo the task but probably it has to be done before policy frameworks can be committed to. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in pure-electric EV (PEEV) sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s very hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from the way they look in minuscule European markets but the job has to be tackled if Australia doesn’t want to find itself penalised by trade commissioners.

I wrote this post mainly in April this year and since then nothing has been said to cement a carbon-emissions target for passenger vehicles in place. We see moves by state governments to bring in hydrogen-powered buses, and we see sales of EVs increase. Toyota has even announced in an ad that it’s selling a PEEV Lexus in Australia. But still no move from the government to do something concrete about car emissions. We know that the most popular cars in the country are both large utes, so we see the population sticking to its gas-guzzling guns. The government knows better than to come between an Aussie and his ute.

Albo tests the waters on EV sales

Labor’s “announcement” of an EV standard is interesting in what it says about the party’s relationship with the public. In fact there was no announcement, just an announcement that an announcement would be made in the future. Instead of jumping into the water you stick your toe in and test the temperature. So you get a cold toe instead of a shock to the system.

In 2019 it was different under Bill Shorten. The change reflects the differences in the leaders, with Albo more likely to take a cautious approach while Shorten believed everything he read on Twitter, equating the opinions of the most vocal Left supporters with the average Aussie.

They learned their lesson because we got Morrison for three years.

In 2023 instead of saying “we’re going to set the fleet emissions per kilometre travelled to 105g of carbon” like they did in 2019 (which would require all new cars purchased to be pure-electric EVs) they’re saying, “hey look we’re in the future going to set an emissions target for new vehicles”.

Chalk and cheese.

This new announcement is Albo doing a bit of market research. I imagine that he’s got the boffins organised doing surveys of ordinary Australians roped into contribute to the climate cause in a market where the operating specifics are totally different from, say, Norway or Finland. I don’t envy him the task but it probably has to be done. The optics don’t look good where the recent surge in PEEV sales only brings the PEEV share of new car sales to 3 percent. It’s hard to talk with your European counterparts about climate change when the realities on the ground in Coonabarabran or Cooma are so different from in Scandinavia.

Ceremony has meaning and should be recognised

Watching the opening of Parliament I was quite shocked when Andrew Probyn in his rundown of the events dismissed much of what had happened over the course of the day as mere ceremony, as though the only thing that counted was numbers of representatives and their votes on individual Bills. 

This kind of short-sighted attitude allows “expert” like Probyn to ignore the content of the Indigenous contribution to the day’s proceedings, where Paul House exhorted representatives to respect all living things, a clarion call of momentous proportions especially given the appalling rate of mammal extinctions experienced by the continent of Australia.

In fact, the nightly news followed the ABC’s coverage (which included the entirety of the governor-general’s address) by focusing on a few words spoken by the prime minister in respect of outcomes. Albanese said that when you’re old you have only two options looking back over your life: to be proud or to regret. I personally don’t think this is strictly true (I’ll be happy if I feel a mild sense of contentment about what’s happened over the course of my eventful life) but I am not going to quibble with the PM’s advance gloss for his period of leadership at this point in time.

What I want to concentrate on is the double standard in play when it comes to ceremony. For some nationalities (eg the Japanese) form is just as important as substance, and rightly so. We are immensely proud of some aspects of our legacy of peaceful democratic transitions, and we endlessly go on about the past when it comes to sport, but for some reason we won’t admit this to even exist or else we think that relying on the comfort of formalism is a weakness or something to be ashamed about.

Form is tremendously powerful, and not obeying it can have radical ramifications, just think of the process of ordering and paying for food. If something “seems” wrong at one point then you worry that the meal will be spoiled. Not responding in the correct way might also see you accused of trying to get out of the restaurant without paying, which could ruin more than your evening. Driving a car is also a highly formalised routine, with a specified sequence of actions involved in, say, turning a corner safely so that nobody gets hurt and so that you arrive in time at your destination.

But when it comes to politics “form” is a nasty word. We even want to get rid of the Queen for some reason, as if the horrors of US politics had never happened (since 2016 at least) because why you’d want to mix your ceremonial head of state with your executive – in the same person – is beyond me, and we have seen how people become irrationally destructive and even criminal when this is allowed to take place.

In fact we need form just as much as the Japanese. We desperately want to feel like things are going on in the correct fashion even though the world changes so fast that it’s hard to keep up. We want to feel close to people around us even though sometimes we feel the need to get away to some remote location and commune with naked nature. We crave peace yet we get bored if we’re not amused and flattered by some stupid Netflix drama we can switch off at a whim. We relish the companionship of dogs, whose routines come to dominate our lives because they keep us sane.

Yet Andrew Probyn can talk about “mere” form and the next day watch State of Origin: a series (established only in the 1980s) that it’s been talked about expanding because Melbourne feels left out. If NRL isn’t all form, I don’t know how to whip tea.

Keeping the bastards honest – Rudd and his crusades

There was something different about Kevin Rudd from the beginning. I remember being at an election night party in 2007 when Rudd led the Labor Party to victory. We all stood out on the balcony of a cute suburban home in Marrickville – veges on the boarder and chooks on the grass – and talked about social media and petrol prices. Rudd’d got our attention with his “greatest moral challenge” address to the National Climate Summit that year. 

But once in power, in 2010 Rudd postponed the introduction of an emissions trading scheme.  It was a stunning backflip that served – at one stroke – to erode the Labor Party leader’s credibility. It signalled a temporary pause on Rudd’s brand of politics, though Bill Shorten flirted with Rudd’s inimitable tendency to engage in virtue signalling. Bill’s EV policy in 2019 had something of Rudd’s messianic zeal about it but it, too, was not a winner and the electorate failed to embrace him. 

I think that part of the reason they did so is because of Rudd’s abiding awfulness. Not only was he a spineless coward – the electorate mused – but he was also a bully, verbally lashing out at subordinates in the most craven manner. From the front: smooth and deliberate. Behind the scenes: a chaos of unreconciled aggressions.

Anthony Albanese is shaping up to be a different kind of leader. Unlike Shorten with his ambitious EV policy – reducing to 105g/km the entire fleet of light vehicles (which would’ve required a total shift to pure-electric EVs for new car purchases) – Albanese is playing a more moderate game of waiting until the Liberal-National Coalition makes a mistake, then statesmanlike fronting the press to give Scott Morrison – the prime minister – a tongue lashing. Not the most effective speaker (like Joe Biden), Albanese sounds a bit diffident, a bit not-quite-there. 

Just like an Opposition’s pre-election policies. Albanese’s method has a lot in common with Barry O’Farrell’s. The Liberal Party leader in New South Wales ran a small-target campaign in the lead-up to the 2011 election and waited for the other side to make mistakes, then took the prize in the end. The Liberal-National Coalition has been in power in the state ever since.

Rudd, meanwhile, is on a new crusade: defanging the Murdoch press. This is a losing battle as nobody will be even remotely interested in repeating Julia Gillard’s loss of face in 2013 – when such reform of media laws was last attempted – a failure that was followed by Labor losing the election to the detestable Tony Abbott. 

The media for its part should be highlighting where Rudd is weakest, and deflect any criticism of Labor onto his shoulders. Doing so’d make it easier for Albanese – the anointed one – to shine, and to beat the L/N Coalition he’ll pretty much need to shine bright. The one good thing that can come of the unpleasant Rudd’s recent visibility is that it can serve as an opportunity to show how decent and electable Albanese is.