2020 PREVIEW?

How climate change decided Australia’s election:

Labor’s vote collapsed in working class areas, particularly in the state of Queensland, despite the party’s redistributive and populist economic agenda. This demonstrates a backlash from the continuing culture war that has waged for the past two decades in the country, which has helped hollow out Labor’s traditional base.

The best example of this is on the issue of climate change and the environment. Labor promised a marked increase in renewable energy usage over the next decade, which Queensland voters translated into fewer jobs for the state’s large coal industry – and higher power prices. The idea of a party of inner-city elites taking away their communities’ jobs was too much to bear for many.

[Scott] Morrison’s election victory will set the course for the nation’s politics for years to come. It will be a long time before a political party takes an ambitious policy agenda to the electorate for fear it will be punished like Labor was on Saturday.

Tim Blair spots “Morrison’s Election Weapon: The Quiet Australians.”

Climate change as an issue may excite many in Canberra, but ordinary Australians take rather more seriously continuing four-figure power bills.

Those ordinary Australians now have a champion in Scott Morrison, whose victory speech celebrated mainstream values.

“To start a family, to buy a home, to work hard and provide the best you can for your kids,” the PM said.

“To save your retirement. And to ensure that when you’re in your retirement, that you can enjoy it because you’ve worked hard for it.

Contrast that with the eco-doomsday commencement speech that Apple CEO Tim Cook gave to the graduates of Tulane on Saturday:

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In some important ways, my generation has failed you,” Cook said. “We spent too much time debating, too focused on the fight and not enough on progress.”

“You don’t need to look far to find an example of that failure,” he continued, pointing to an example that no one understands better than those living in the natural disaster-dogged New Orleans: climate change.

Curiously though, Cook likely isn’t cutting back on producing devices encased in plastics, and powered by electricity, or his private jet.

 

 

h/t ED

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