It is dissapointing and also predictable that the COALition doesn't cannot even bring itslef to say the words "PEAK OIL" in its response. Much of the response was fluff, with empty promises to review things. What I find intersting is that they say we have a biennial review of energy security as recomended in 2004. Well what did the review in 2006 throw up? Nothing to worry about apparently except for the fact that we had $75 oil?

Also taking a holistic (homogenous) approach to energy is naiive and deluded. Please Mr Howard, tell me how nuclear power is going to run my car? At least Howard has grudgingly alluded to high oil prices as being part of the economic storm clouds on the horizon. I think John Howard and Peter Costello are actually very well informed about peak oil and are actaully hoping to be lose thsi election so they won't have to face the consequences. They will be able to thow a lost of it at a Rudd government when it fianlly hits the fan in the next few years.

And Mr Rudd, Is $500M spent to produce an Aus produced hybrid a smart investment of energy when we have a perfectly good car fleet which could deliver the same efficieny as your hybrid experiment with a little good driver educataion and driving pattern modification.

Even the Greens are a bit soft on the PO issue. Their website mentions not a word of Peak Oil and Christine Milnes report is slanted towards Climate Change as being the far more important issue. While there is genuine understanding of Peak oil in the report, CC is clearly the more ideologically pure moral argument for using less fossil fuels. The economic impacts of PO are of little concern to the Greens who don't give a toss about those of us who dwell in consumer land and believe we deserve every misfortune that befalls us.

The only pollie in Australia who I have any confidence in is Andrew McNamara but I fear that he will become the token voice that can be conveniently buried in Qld.

Take only what you need, give everything you can.

I am really confused by the position of Dr Karl. He is running for the Senate on the Climate Change Coalition ticket. As such i posed a question to him regarding Peak Oil and AGW on his Facebook page. he kind of ummed and aahed and promised he would answer it on his blog which he was in the process of setting up.

So shortly after he set up a blog www.drkarl.com yet so far his blog is just full of rubbish about how he thinks Clean Coal is a good short term solution for Australia and pretty much our only option for the next decade. WTF??

For a guy who positions himself as some sort of genius he appears to be wilfully ignorant of gas powered generation, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. And remarkably evasive on the Peak Oil issue.

Does anyone know much about the Climate Change Coalition of which he is a part? Is it an offshoot of the Libs/Nats coalition?

For a guy who positions himself as some sort of genius he appears to be wilfully ignorant of gas powered generation, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. And remarkably evasive on the Peak Oil issue.

Does anyone know much about the Climate Change Coalition of which he is a part? Is it an offshoot of the Libs/Nats coalition?

Lobes,

The CCC are not affiliated with any major party that I can tell, but are a single issue group pushing for geothermal baseload, which is still unproven commercially and tidal power, which is only available in a few places. That Dr Karl, I used to have so much respect for his opinion, but he’s just another baby boomer flake trying madly to preserve the un-preservable. Supply-side solutions are not enough, we must all live much more lightly to make renewables workable, especially if we want to maintain a high population.

Phil, your initiative to get official responses from all political parties to a specific set of questions is laudable and you definitely started early enough.

Whatever the parties may write in their policy documents, what really matters is how they propose to spend available funds. Today, we had this list published in the Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/new-line-to-bring-faster-trips-labor...

Labor:
Rail: $840 + $300 million = $1,140 million for freight lines
Road: $662 million for freeways

Liberal:
Rail: $834 + $300 + $65 = $1,199 million for freight lines
Road: $1,770 million for freeways; big chunk for F3-M2 tunnel

One can easily calculate:
Liberal wastes 60% of $ 3 bn on new freeways, Labor only 37% of $ 1.8 bn

None of the major parties has discovered that crude oil production has already peaked in 2005 and that - barring the sudden appearance of a carbon free miracle fuel to quickly replace declining oil production in adequate quantities - the road congestion problem will be solved by peak oil, without one single dollar of investment.

The 2 conflicting trends of increasing Australian oil imports and declining global oil export volumes are INCOMPATIBLE and will lead to a PERMANENT OIL CRISIS.

I can't accept that we can quickly replace say 50% of current coal use and supplant oil by using unproven technology and voluntary conservation. That immediately cuts out the Greens (per Milne report) and the clean coal enthusiasts. I also question whether my incumbent ALP member deserves to be re-elected. Better not say which electorate but think of large cats which are not tigers. I'm inclined to vote for an Independent who has showed form on air quality issues with pulp mills.

As to the major parties I think it boils down to who will disappoint least.

Chris Shaw, a well known Peak Oiler, has some things to say about the election. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=feralmet&search=Search

Enough is enough – Kick Howard’s a** this time and show him the exitdoor..please..
You(he) have not signed Kyoto-agreement and to some extent YOU have rediculed it for many years. Now, do you still suffer from any drought down there, or? Are you still planning for recycled toilet/drinking-water ? (sarcanol)

Australia needs responsible politicians who can work on the greater issues like GW and PO, alongside the international community. And you will be very welcome in that club !

I was listening to Julia Gillard (deputy leader, probably deputy prime minister next week) being interviewed on ABC radio in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. Someone sms'd a question asking her what she thought about Peak Oil,

She responded by saying that she assumed the question was in regard to how petrol prices go up and down each week and that she didn't like it either !

LOL, you could have asked me! I'm standing as a Candidate (Independent) in Charlton.

Believe me, I KNOW about Peak Oil

And now the Coalition (friend of coal) has lost, and Labor got a majority in the House. It looks as though in the Senate Labor will only be able to pass legislation with the assistance of the Greens, and one lefty independent Senator. Obviously the Greens will do deals.

The new Senators don't take their seats until July 2008 (we have fixed Senate terms, but not fixed elections for them), so we won't see immediate action as the Coalition will still have a majority there. However, to my mind this is a good thing, as it allows the Greens time to make deals with Labor, so that policies can be properly considered and discussed.

Labor does not appear to be aware of Peak Oil issues, but they are aware of climate change and wish to address it, and since the logical measures for each are the same, that's okay. So we've some hope.

surprising ? i thought they were expecting howard to step down even before the votes were tallied.

as an outside observer, it seem to me that if blair was bush's poodle, then howard was his ....... well, other poodle.

I hope he doesn't follow Browns path, after his first visit to the US I've been refering to him as Brown-nose for his cozing up to Bush. Hopefully he has enough confidence not to cowtow to Washington.

On Rudd signing Kyoto, plus everything else, I think this line nails it
Meeting the country's original 2012 target would entail stringent, costly and probably unpopular measures in raising energy efficiency and switching to renewable sources.

From http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22817609-5007133,00.html Add to that mortgage and water woes and a possible slowdown in the minerals boom. The honeymoon could soon be over for the new PM if expectations are high.

The Liberals are gone! Finally!

My old friend staggered off into the dark at 4:00AM this morning and being the last of the crowd I retired a few seconds later. Needless to say, I’m a tad weary this morning.

Labor has a hard job now they’re elected- they have inherited a 'tanked' economy but that will not be as hard as the environmental challenge we need to mount. Keeping the planet in a good enough order to support our species and save the biodiversity we're destroying as our rapacious environmental appetite and negligence chews up more and more, will mean some changes that the old school will find unpleasant.

I’m glad I lived through what I hope has been the last blast of Liberal Democracy in this country, which in my view is more about elitism, industrial madness, corporate excess and personal prosperity at the expense of good sense, happiness and the precautionary principle.

I’ve been called a hypocrite, a contradiction and just plain mad as I rant and plead for alternative action in this society; keeping the world and where you live beautiful and healthy. Some believe sadly still, to the point of pathos, that hope for a better future resides in the consumer economy and uncontrolled expansion of ugly things over the natural canvas – a good dose of traffic jams, mortgages and angst. I don’t get how they don’t see it. I still don’t understand how anyone with a child, a love for anything natural or beautiful could have voted for a Liberal.

Oil extraction efficiency declines

“I learned from Jay Hanson’s unrelenting study of the oil industry (http://dieoff.org), that in the '50s they could produce 50 barrels of energy for every barrel consumed producing finished products for the market. By the nineties, the ratio had fallen to 5 barrels to 1. By the year 2005, the industry will just break even-it will be necessary to use as much energy to produce any given quantity.”

http://www.culturechange.org/issue20/Last%20days%20of%20America.htm

So what? I think what we have to realize is that alternatives and new infrastructure requires a special "escalating" pricing scheme that would baffle most economists. Indeed, I have a background in economics (but, thankfully, I transcended that paradigm), but am not aware of a theory of pricing that will anticipate what promises to be a rather steep slope (sorry) as everything SIMULTANEOUSLY goes up in price. In other words, it won't just be the mining, shipping, manufacturing, workers living expenses, materials, and so forth--there's a 'multiplier effect' going on with prices increasing so rapidly that every sane plan towards mitigation creates a massive cost only assumed by taking on national debt, a bit like the US war in Iraq.

Nevertheless, mitagation is critical. We are already late. Australia could, iif it were to adopt any peak oil provisions, would be setting an international example that is badly needed.

If some writers are correct in anticipating a 'de-industrialization process at $250/b then we only have a couple of years before a new set of 'rules' is imposed upon possible activities and mitigation options.

Where would $500 billion have gotten us in the last 5 years? Dick Cheney can answer that question in front of a war tribunal. Cheney obviously new about peak oil and made public comments about the problem prior to his and his cohorts plan 'solve the problem' through deceit and plunder.

We'll never know how the US might otherwise have dealt with the peak oil crisis if sane people ran this oligarchy-passing-as-democracy. Obviously, the whole thing is run by war criminals, cowards, fools, and scam artists. Plunder. What an idiotic plan. In the end, it just accelerates the depletion and benefits parasitic industries like the weapons biz.

Now that Labor has won and with Green preferences and one more and one more they should be able to get some decent legislation through.
Signing the Kyoto Protocol will be the easy part, convincing the voters that they have to use less, travel less, not be mad consumers and put up with significantly higher fuel prices and most household goods will be the real challenge.
As much as I am happy that Howard has gone, winning the the election might well prove to be a poisoned chalice for for Rudd.
Let's hope the Australian public use some intelligence when things start to get tough.

Congratulations to Australia...

Meanwhile, the world is being run by Dick Cheney...

From Oil Crisis (2005) by Colin J. Campbell, p. 188-192

THE GRAND PLAN

One can be forgiven for seeing it as something of a house of cards built on
nothing more than faith in the continuation of a System, itself supported by
a wide spectrum of vested interests. It may indeed have been precisely the
issue of confidence that occupied the minds of the analysts in various
Washington think-tanks as they tried to define the country's post-Cold War
foreign policy. A grand plan for American economic hegemony and support for
the dollar was needed to support the System. They soon saw the central role
of oil in the equation, recognising that the country's growing dependence on
imports was not about to abate because domestic production had long been in
decline, mirroring an even more serious earlier decline in discovery. They
realised that the country would become ever more dependent on the Middle
East, including Iraq, where it had already fought a war, as described in
Chapter 4.

The Project for the New American Century was formulated in Washington, and a
letter pressing for military action in the Middle East was sent to President
Clinton in 1998, being signed by Elliot Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, Richard
Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert B. Zoellick. A further
document, Rebuilding America's Defences, was drawn up by the same group in
September 2000, together with Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush, the new President's
brother.8 It tellingly contains the following extract

"while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddan'i Hussein"

It could hardly be stated more clearly, with the word justification being
particularly telling. The use of the term Defences in the title is also
revealing, since the country was not in any way threatened in military
terms. The strength of the dollar and its control of the economy may rather
have been the concerns. Human rights or the status of women in Muslim
society would hardly have been issues upon which to propose military
intervention. There were much more obvious objectives: namely control of oil
and support for Israel with which several of the analysts had close links,
even to the extent of dual citizenship. The influence of the Israeli
sympathisers in America is clearly colossal,' as amply demonstrated by the
fact that US Aid to the tune of 100 billion dollars has been given to the
country for no obvious reason other than this link. Certainly, other tribal
re-settlements around the World have failed to attract similar support. It
seems that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was given authority by the new
administration to implement a decisive policy, based on these long years of
planning. The change of administration itself may have been significant for
the incoming members, being new to their jobs, probably found it expedient
to simply extend past policies, not having had time to develop new ones of
their own. They may also have lacked experience or knowledge of the wider
world, giving their advisers excessive new influence.10

In Chapter 1, I described what I called the Task Force Mentality which I
encountered when I went to work for Texaco in Colombia. It could be
epitomised as "Action without Thought". Later, I came upon a variant, which
could be called the Committee System when I worked in the Standard Oil
Building in Chicago. There were committees for everything that delivered
bland analyses and recommendations, but lacked executive authority. The
Executives themselves were dynamic people but not gifted with knowledge or
insight of the conditions in the foreign countries whose governments owned
the oil rights. Their function had reduced to little more than managing the
budget as best they could. The managers on the ground were either old
retainers, put out to pasture, receiving detailed instructions on every
minor step, or more dynamic figures endowed with the Task Force mentality.
The operations themselves were normally conducted very efficiently, but
overall planning and strategy were inept. Little attempt to integrate or
understand the foreign communities, societies or cultures was made. It is
easy to picture how the Vice-President may have taken command within such a
general administration and mindset. He was evidently cast a Task Force
role, and resolved to take decisive action. In digesting the reports and
presentations from the sundry committees, he was soon able to synthesise two
clear and interwoven themes: control of foreign oil and support for Israel.
He probably determined that a military solution was to be preferred,
matching his own dynamic mindset. Having little sympathy for the subtleties
of foreign diplomacy, he may have asked himself what good would come from
trying to talk to all those fellows in their robes and fancy headdresses,
who barely spoke English.

His first action was to strengthen and expand the chain of military bases
around the World, many of which, including those in the Persian Gulf, had
been in place since the Cold War. The key new ones were located around the
Caspian and more recently on the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, off
oil-rich Nigeria and Angola. It proved easy to persuade the countries in
question to accept such bases with offers of loans, military assistance and
training, with no doubt special inducements for the individuals in command.
A base was established in Kosovo on the proposed route for a new pipeline
bringing oil from the Caspian region to the Adriatic, 11 and troops were
also positioned along the new pipeline from Chad to the Cameroons.12

It also probably did not take long to figure out that control of foreign oil
demanded control the Middle East and possibly the Caspian if that should
develop as hopes at the time suggested. However, a glance at the atlas
showed the latter to be a difficult landlocked place, meaning that getting
the oil out would call for special attention. A Balkan export route had
already been secured through the Kosovo War, but it was evident that a
closer presence was desirable. A further study of the atlas identified
Afghanistan as of key strategic importance, especially as it had already
played a role in undermining the Soviet regime, as discussed in Chapter 4.

The next challenge was to determine how to secure domestic political support
for a new foreign war, as it was recognised that the general public would
have little stomach for it unless galvanised into action by some extreme
event. It was soon evident that a strong pretext to move was needed, indeed
a very strong one to reach everyone's TV screen. A further advantage was
identified in that people perceiving themselves to be threatened would be
disposed to rally to their government with a sense of loyalty, which in turn
would allow it to strengthen its grip on the country and improve its chances
of re-election, as indeed has proved to be the case.

THE DOUBLE SIMULATION

So, we may conclude that it was decided to put in hand a bold plan of
action, it took courage to do so, but they were evidently up to the
occasion, deciding to implement it on September 11th 2001. The details of
the operation remain obscure, But the many curious features of the event can
hardly be denied or easily explained. They include:

1. The normal defences being shut down that day or a simulated hijacking.13

2. The rapid identification as hijackers of a group of Egyptians and Saudis,
who had been given minimal flying training at a school in Florida, being
supervised by Intelligence minders in their apartment building.

3. Four airliners were reported as being hijacked, having exceptionally low
passenger lists.

4. Two of the airliners were filmed striking prominent buildings in New
York, which exploded in what struck some analysts as controlled demolitions,
the steel from the sites being later exported to China as scrap, preventing
forensic analysis. The death toll was held to a minimum by timing the
incident to occur before most people arrived at work, some being alerted at
the last minute by the Omega messaging service not to go their offices that
day. Some senior executives also found themselves attending a charity event
at an air base.

5. The Pentagon was depicted as another target. An explosion occurred
leaving a small hole at ground level without trace of a crashed airliner. 14

6. The passport of one of the alleged hijackers was found in the New York
rubble, despite the strength of the explosion.

7. An Israeli film crew was in position on the roof of an adjoining building
to film the event.

8. The manoeuvres undertaken by the aircraft would test the skills of an
experienced pilot, being far beyond those having no more than a brief
training in light aircraft, suggesting that the aircraft may have been flown
by remote control.

9. Within seconds of the event, a sinister figure in an Afghan cave had been
identified as the ring leader of a global organisation, now named al-Qaeda,
threatening the United States. He looked the part in his beard and
outlandish robes, making excellent TV imagery. He was easily controlled
having been previously on the CIA payroll. 15 Various videos and messages
from him declaring a holy Muslim war were broadcast. Knowing full well where
he was, may have made it easy to plan an unsuccessful search.16

10. Finally, the Vice-President took that day to be out of sight, evidently
having taken command from some control bunker, while the President found
himself reading to children at a school in [Florida], evincing no surprise
when an aide burst in to inform him of the incident.

The operation was pulled off immaculately despite a few difficulties that
were experienced when the intelligence services both at home and abroad got
wind of what was afoot, leading to many subsequent claims that the
Government had failed to take proper note of the reported threats.

For good measure, a brief anthrax scare followed to bring home to every
individual the fear that they were personally threatened. A universal sense
of fear was a critical part of the strategy.

Before long, the B52s had been armed and sent into action. Images of the new
sinister enemy in the form of Afghan tribesmen with their robes, beards and
head-dressers, astride donkeys with a musket across their backs, were soon
broadcast around the World. Within a few weeks, it was all over. The Taliban
Government fell to be replaced by a puppet regime, led by Hamid Karzai. He
was a western-oriented man, who had previously been a consultant to Union
Oil of California. The action now was depicted as having a moral objective.
Afghan women appeared before the cameras to explain how they had been
oppressed by the previous regime, which had denied them education or the
opportunity to find careers as dentists, teachers or shop-assistants.

But a setback to the grand strategy came when the Kashagan prospect off
Kazakhstan, once billed as rivaling Saudi Arabia, was finally drilled with
disappointing results…

------------ Australia to sign Kyoto Treaty ------------

Now that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum again in Australia, what can Australians expect from Kevin Rudd’s decision to sign the Kyoto protocol? For those new to Kyoto, here are a few helpful guidelines:

1. Kyoto runs out in 2012

Australia won’t actually have to do anything so no worries there. It's all about warm and fuzzy feelings and not about global warming, because:

2. Kyoto has achieved absolutely no reduction in CO2 emissions

Japan, the home of Kyoto, was supposed to reduce its CO2 emissions by 6%. Instead they are up 8%. This isn’t surprising because Kyoto isn’t about your CO2 emissions. It’s about getting other countries to reduce their CO2 emissions and paying them with carbon credits to do so.

Sorry, my mistake. Make that ‘paying them to use less oil and gas and sell it to us’.

3. Kyoto targets are country based and make no allowance for population growth

The taboo subject. Kyoto is based upon 1990 levels. It’s no accident that the two countries that refused to sign Kyoto (Australia & USA) have both had large increases in population since then. The Australian population is up by 4 million (23.8%) since 1990 and the US by 53.7 million (21.5%).

So what’s it to be? Immigration or CO2 reduction?

4. Europeans are the main cheerleaders for Kyoto

Europe hurls abuse at the US and Bush for not signing Kyoto but is mysteriously silent about CO2 emissions from the 1st, 3rd and 4th largest emitters. Moreover the European Union has a single economy except when it comes to adding up CO2 when the countries miraculously get disaggregated again. Convenient eh?

Now there is nothing unusual about Europeans sneering at Americans. Yes, Europeans are to the left of Americans generally, but it goes right back to the creation of the US when Europe was run by [aristocratic] elites who considered a democratic US republic a threat to themselves. They weren’t wrong either - 1776 US revolution, 1789 French revolution and the king loses his head. Europe is still run by elites, cheered on by the Marxist intelligentsia. The European Union is totally undemocratic – 85% of laws are ‘directives’ issued by unelected European commissioners which are mandatory on countries. We can ignore the anti-US propaganda. It’s not about Kyoto; it happens all the time.

4. So what does Europe really want with Kyoto?

We TODers are all used to the Peak Oil/Global Warming duality and how fixing one will fix the other – peak oil and economic collapse would ‘fix’ global warming; fixing global warming means switching big time to renewables and efficiency so peak oil gets 'fixed'.

Kyoto used to be about global warming but now it's about oil and gas.

5. What Kyoto is really about:

a) Please USA, use less oil and gas so there is more available for Europe.
b) Please Russia, stay poor, raise the price of gas to the world price (which we can afford but Russians can’t) and sell your oil and gas to Europe. We will pay you a premium for your oil and gas in the form of carbon credits no matter what the price is.
c) Third world? For god’s sake don’t industrialise and you get some carbon credits too.
d) China? Well the factories have to be somewhere and, anyway, the US is enemy number 1. China is an ally in the holy war between elite-led government and democracy. Kevin Rudd will find his Mandarin helpful here but he better be careful. His commie hugging might upset the US.
e) Australia? We weren't yelling at you about Kyoto so why do you go and sign it? We actually need your coal and LNG which is very CO2 intensive. Can you please unsign it asap.

German chancellor Schroeder was blatant about point b when he tried to persuade Putin to raise the price of gas internally for ‘reasons of global warming’. Putin turned him down.

I hope this handy guide helps the newbies to Kyoto understand the wonderful world of Kyoto politics.

By the way, Australia's CO2 emissions in 2005 were up 25.6% in excess of the 1990 benchmark according to UNFCCC figures issued last week. That's about the same as Australian population growth (23.8%). What on earth does Kevin Rudd think he is doing signing Kyoto without renegotiating some kind of population adjustment first? His acceptance speech was one sound bite after another so I don't expect his political honeymoon to last long. IMO, this Mandarin speaking prime minister is insider-elite so expect him to get on well with China and Europe. Relations with the US will deteriorate.

My prediction for the Bali conference: our new Preznit Rudd meets his Indonesian counterpart. A deal is worked out whereby Australia keeps burning coal so long as they pay the Indos a few dollars not to cut down the forest. This changes everything, like community awareness, or something.

Alanisthename is right. Immigration is the elephant in the centre left's living room. We have the same problem in Britain. Greens preach population control and then allow mass immigration. The incompatability of reducing resource consumption and increasing your population never occurs to them. Signing Kyoto or anything else will be a waste of time until this is adressed.

This morning in my reading of papers from around the world, I caught this op-ed in Sydney's Morning Herald by Steve Biddulph, an Australian psychologist and author, offering a postmortem on Australia's recent elections. It is rare that I find the words "peak oil" in daily journals and so it is quite refreshing and reassuring that at least Australians are conversant in our impeding future. It bodes well for both Australia and the world that they now have a government willing to discuss energy and climate in stark terms. The article follows below:

The Party's Over and Liberals Will Soon Be History
By Steve Biddulph
The Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday 29 November 2007

The Liberal Party is in trauma. The corporate sector is attempting to calm its nerves, and even the victors in the Labor Party cannot quite believe the seismic change in the landscape of power. But the ramifications of last Saturday may be much greater than just one election won or lost. In a way that seems unthinkable to us now, 2007 may mark the end of the Liberal Party itself. It won't happen overnight, but just watch it happen.

We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But parties spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and place. In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour. A century earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, politics was aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.

This is no longer the central tension in modern democracies. Centrist governments cover all the bases, and conservative politics has begun to wither away. This is a change that has come late to Australia. But social evolution is now speeding up and even this alignment is becoming dated.

The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the only four words you need to know.

Linked to this, but compounding it in frightening ways, is the imminent demise of the United States economy. In fact the whisper, the subplot in economist circles, was that this election was one to lose. That whoever inherited Australia in 2007 inherited a coming economic collapse in globalised trade that would suck Australia and much of the rest of the world down with it. For two years now the best predictions have been that the subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America sucking in what it could not begin to pay for. The avalanche-like fall of US house prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies worldwide, and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we have lived in. In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in collapse.

Labor is the right party to manage this. Despite the widespread belief after years of cynical politics that politicians are all the same, Rudd and Gillard are not in power for power's sake. I am willing to stake my 30 years as a psychologist on this, but I think many observers have also come to this conclusion. Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them, want to make this country a better place for the people in it. In the coming times of deprivation, they have the value systems that will be needed to care for the sudden rise in poverty, stress, and need. They also have the unity.

So what will be the new polarity in future elections? It's the ecology, stupid. The Greens will emerge as the new opposition, though this will take probably two election cycles. By the 2010 election, 20 per cent will vote Green, simply because peak oil and climate catastrophe will have proven them right, and thinking people will see the need for austerity now for our children's tomorrow. The Liberal Party will be lucky to attract 30 per cent, which is the habitual, rusted-on portion of the community that thinks greed is good.

By 2014, we will have a struggle between a new left and right - Labor and Green - and the issue will be simply how green, how to balance the need for a much simpler and more communal kind of life, with the need to give people comfort and amenity now. This issue will continue to define life for the rest of this century.

Climate change will bring horrific costs this century unless a global effort is rallied in a way that has never been done before to regulate our gluttonous use of the air and water. Perhaps a billion lives are at risk, let alone 2 to 3 billion refugees, as agriculture and water supplies collapse across southern Asia and elsewhere, and producer countries, like Australia, find they can barely feed themselves.

The big lie of Liberal supremacy was economic management. In fact, they knew how to generate income, but not how to spend it. We could have been building what Europe built in this past decade - superb hospitals, bullet trains, schools and training centres, low cost public transport of luxurious quality, magnificent public housing. We pissed it all away on tax giveaways and consumer goods. On bloated homes that we will not be able to cool or heat, or sell, and cars we won't be able to afford to drive. A party based on self interest may evaporate along with our rivers and lakes, and have no role to play in a world where we co-operate or die.

--------

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist and author.

Posted by Charles Lemos, Facta Non Verba, San Francisco, CA