Unless my stunned and tired ears misheard, he didn’t mention climate change in his press conference last night. He had a unique opportunity to reinforce the message Obama sent out the day before. The US will undertake a massive investment and effort to at least adapt to the train wreck that experts now agree is coming our way.

That would have implied a greater degree of awareness and leadership than we have become used to in our federal politicians. Julia Gillard, in a speech that was more gracious,  transcendent and policy focused than one would have expected, did mention the emissions trading scheme.

But Rudd’s machinations probably haven’t left him time to read a recent report from the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses and the London-based Royal United Services Institute.  For those deniers who think these are left wing think tanks, I note that they are ‘two of the NATO alliance’s front-line strategy centers’.

The report, available at:

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130624/military-report-america-has-misguided-fixation-domestic-drilling

says it is misguided to focus on obtaining more oil, and that climate change is a huge threat to national security.  I would say it is greater than terrorism (connect the dots, they are related issues)

It recommends renewables and energy conservation.

In my book, this means redesigning cities and buildings, biofuels, smart grids, local food production, and development that isn’t linked to traditional measures of growth.

If the Gillard government offered climate change policies among the best in the world, as one of her advisors told me, then this and the urgency of finding solutions has not been shouted from the rooftops.

Is the media where the finger should be pointed? Are we so obsessed with trivia that we can’t recognise what is most important for us to deal with, or its urgency? This article about looking back on what will be our future this century, describes a civilisation that just couldn’t make the necessary changes:

http://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/A-View-from-the-Future.pdf

As far as gender wars goes, I found it repugnant that Germaine Greer got airtime for making vulgar and insulting comments about the PM’s physical attributes that would be suicide for any male in the public sphere.

Maybe someone needs to get the owner of NewsCorp onside to get the climate change message out.  I hear he’s looking for a wife…now does this lipstick flatter me?

@annabelcrabb thinks it is “Kevin Redux”, but could it be “Kevin Reflux”.

The only reason for changing from Gillard to Rudd is self-preservation on the part of 57 ALP federal members. That was obvious in Rudd’s acceptance speech.

Here was a man who has spent the last three years undermining the government of Australia, and who has had three years to hone the speech that he was to give when he was successful in wreaking revenge on his usurper, yet what agenda did he have to offer?

While he used the language of “positives” his one strong position was that he was going to stop Tony Abbott from becoming prime minister of Australia.

He couldn’t nominate a single policy difference with his predecessor, neither could he even say when the election will be.

In fact, rather than differentiate himself from his predecessor he tried to embrace her record. And why not? She achieved what he couldn’t, and the Gillard government was really just an extension of the Rudd government.

So her failures are his failures.

Labor makes a big play on the strength of the Australian economy, but they can’t point to any policies they have implemented that contribute to this, with the exception of allegedly steering the country through the GFC.

Yet this, with the exception of the bank guarantee, which did make a contribution, and was a no-brainer, boils down to obscenely expensive school extensions and the bungled pink batts program, and a government deficit now on its way to $300 million.

The real reason the country skated through almost unscathed is the reforms implemented by the Hawke and Howard government’s and characterised by Rudd as “Brutopia”.

Australia survived because it has a robust flexible economy, minimal government interference in business, and a currency which very quickly adjusted to circumstances making our exports attractive. Since their election the Rudd/Gillard government has done its best to blunt, if not erase, most of those advantages.

How will the electorate react to the Rudd resurgence?

Well, the polls suggest Labor will surge, and in some ways that is the best that Tony Abbott could hope for. This will now make people swing their focus away from him and back onto Labor as they contemplate what 9 years of bumbling, self-congratulation and incompetence could do.

We’re still living off the Hawke/Howard legacy, but it won’t last forever.

I don’t often use the term “unAustralian” because it is essentially undefinable, but reports this morning that Julia Gillard would demand that caucus decide any leadership vote by an open-show of hands rather than a secret ballot, licences me to use it.

For the secret ballot is an Australian invention, and for that reason is often called the “Australian ballot”.

The suggestion that Gillard would try to restrict Labor MPs from this right gives an insight into the bullying and aggression that has been the hallmark of this government.

The reason the secret ballot was first adopted in the 1850s was to prevent voters being stood over and coerced, which is obviously the reason why Gillard wants to abandon it in this instance.

Political parties don’t use a secret ballot for votes on things like motions at branch or conference level, but generally the question of leadership at all levels is decided by a secret ballot.

The ALP has regularly subverted the intent of the secret ballot by using devices such as requiring that factional colleagues show their “secret” ballot to the person next to them, but such practices have never obtained in the Liberal Party.

It is a regular occurrence for successful and unsuccessful candidates to sit around after a ballot and try to work out who had dudded them. Sometimes quizzlings survive as your “best mate” for years because of this secrecy.

And of course the “Australian ballot” is the way we determine who represents us in parliament.

There is an irony in a government running campaigns against bullying at the same time that it is obvious that at its highest levels this is the only way that anything ever gets done.

A lot has happened since the “Two cows” model of how the different “isms” run their economies first appeared. This is the latest instalment, which hit my email inbox a couple of weeks ago, updated to take account of the GFC and the Euro crisis.

Yes, I’m a man, and I vote, and somewhere around 49% of the over 18 year old population shares those characteristics, so why would the Prime Minister set out to regularly antagonise us?

Picking on niche constituencies like billionaires, or dole bludgers, might be smart, but picking on a minority constituency so large it is almost a majority, is not.

It’s in fact worse than that, because to the male constituency you can add a significant portion of the female one who hold a more traditional view of the roles of the sexes than the PM.

Someone suggested to me that Julia Gillard does not live in the same universe as the rest of us, and it’s true. When the Twitterverse went ballistic over her “mysogyny speech” Gillard mistook it for reality. She’s been living in that ‘verse for so long, and become so divorced from reality, that now when you meet a man in the street in the real world there is an 80% chance he is not voting Labor.

At the time of that first misogyny speech I predicted it would “all end in tears“, but for a while her position seemed to be holding up.

I think that was because at that stage she was pretty much down to bedrock, and it took some time for men to hear and digest the speech, much less react.

At the time I interpreted that speech as being the result of stress. Labor was in a badly losing position, the PM was on the wrong end of investigations into union corruption where she had at the very least breached her duty as a lawyer, and Kevin Rudd was, as always, trailing his coat.

When we’re under stress we tend to revert to type and what we know best. And what Julia knows best is what she learned in the 70s at uni in her student union days.

Reverting to type is what all we baby boomer men did as well. We’ve had the “heads you lose, tails I win” arguments with feminists, some of whom we’ve partnered with, and we’ve got used to being a bit passive aggressive in our response and just shrugging our shoulders and ignoring it.

It’s a fact of life, born of biology, that most men rarely insist on winning an argument with a woman.

And anyway what’s to be gained by risking the verballing and the abuse when it’s a woman like this one?

So there’s been a slow build-up from men to the claims of misogyny, but now I think it’s got to the point where we’ve had enough, where even some of the sisterhood think it’s gone far enough.

Where those of us who really do believe in equality don’t want our daughters, or other young women who are significant to us, growing-up and thinking that this sort of calculated bullying using relative physical weakness, distortions and paranoid conspiracy theories as  weapons is a model for how they should behave to get ahead.

So we’ve decided to talk, or those who might normally vote Labor have. Not in the way that women like Julia do, but in the traditional male way. We know that actions speak louder than words, and that ultimately the only way to silence this haranguer is to take our votes away.

If the Labor party is collateral damage, that’s just too bad – they brought it on themselves.

I went to school with Joe Richards, and nothing about “menu gate” surprises me. Even at 17 he was a colourful rogue, and made a great Major General in our 1974 production of the Pirates of Penzance. He was a complete ham, who a couple of years earlier had had similar success as the Duke of Plaza Toro.

After school he went on to run a successful men’s wear business in Woolloongabba, the most unlikely of places, and was known as a bon vivant and racing identity.

He was also known as a fundraiser for various Labor Party figures. And I wonder what menus for those functions are lurking on his hard drive.

For the fact of the matter is that when it comes to sexism, racism, chauvinism, larrikinism and ribaldry, the Labor Party has it all over the Liberal Party.

While it may have some PC Green shoots, and an affirmative action policy for women, it is based on unions dominated by working class blokes.

I have been to Labor Party functions where things have been said that could never have been said at a Liberal Party function.

Liberals tend to hale from the middle classes and the aspiring lower classes, and while sexism, racism, chauvinism, larrkinism and ribaldry are not unknown, they are things you are more likely to keep to yourself.

Which is one reason why Labor is running down the wrong road on this one.

Not only is it taking senior ministers off-message, but the idea that the party of the middle class is secretly vulgar is inherently hard to sell, and the chances that something embarrassing on their side turns up is extraordinarily high.

The IEA is hardly a left wing think tank. They advise governments on energy and are now warning that climate change poses a threat to the oil rig platforms in the North Sea. In an article by Tom Bawden in the Independent , the bigger waves and storms could add to the danger and expense of drilling for oil and gas.

To those who still think solar activity or maybe poltergeists are responsible for the intensification of storms, floods, fires, droughts and tornados, perhaps the view from the IEA will reveal the scale of the risks.

But then, wouldn’t it be ironic if the very climate change caused by burning fossil fuels causes an end to drilling for fossil fuels?

Quoting from the article:

Announcing that global greenhouse emissions jumped by 1.6 per cent to a new record
last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the world is on course for a
4C temperature increase in the long-term. This is double the 2C global warming goal
agreed by nearly 200 countries but yet to be translated into a legally-binding
target.

"A 2C difference doesn't mean that you just need to take your jacket off, it would
have devastating implications," said IEA chief economist Fatih Birol.

Unless the world takes dramatic action to curb greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, we
can expect "sudden and devastating" consequences, such as a significant increase in
the frequency and severity of storms, he warned.

A temperature rise of anything approaching 4C would hit the North Sea oil and gas
industry hard, fostering stronger and more frequent storms. The stormier weather
would add "hundreds of millions" of pounds to the costs of the North Sea oil and gas
industry, in the form of damage, lost production and, most of all, the construction
costs to strengthen the platforms, Mr Birol said. And even if the temperature rise
is less dramatic, the hydrocarbon producers should take pre-emptive action now and
invest heavily to boost their infrastructure, he added. "Oil companies need to
strengthen their platforms. This will lead to higher costs but will improve the
resilience of the structures," said Mr Birol.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-threat-to-north-
sea-oil-and-gas-output-from-increasingly-intense-storms-caused-by-global-warming-8652817.html