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Former
MP Trent Zimmerman said climate change was one of the ‘key issues’ that
cost Liberal moderates like himself inner-city seats at the 2022
federal election.
Mon 30 May 2022 10.31 AESTLast modified on Mon 30 May 2022 11.27 AESTThe outgoing Liberal moderate Trent Zimmerman says his former colleagues should embrace Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target if the Coalition wants to win back the Liberal party’s progressive heartland at the next federal election.
Zimmerman,
a prominent moderate, lost his seat on 21 May to the teal independent
Kylea Tink. On Monday he told the ABC that if the incoming Liberal
leadership wanted to win back electorates like North Sydney,
or other seats where the government’s record on climate change was a
problem, having a “sensible approach” needed to be at the top of the
list.
Rather than launch a new round of the climate wars in the new parliament, he said, the Coalition should accept the Labor party had a mandate for its 2030 emissions reduction target of 43%. That was “an easy step the opposition could take”.
He said the National party
also needed to accept the imperative of emissions reduction if it
wanted the Liberal party to be able to win sufficient seats in the major
cities to be able to form majority government.
When the Queensland National Matt Canavan declared during the campaign that the government’s net zero target by 2050 was “dead”, that was “one of the killer moments for us”, Zimmerman said.
“There’s
a whole package of reasons as to why we lost inner-city seats like mine
and clearly climate change was one of the key issues,” he said. “The
fact the National party leadership and individual members were seen to
not be genuinely enthusiastic about our net zero commitment.”
Resistance to climate action from Nationals and Liberal rightwingers “undoubtably had an impact”.
While some of the departing Liberals have pointed the finger at Scott Morrison,
believing the former prime minister was a drag on their campaigns
because of his unpopularity with centre-right metropolitan progressives,
Zimmerman said the Liberal party should not delude itself that the 2022
election was lost because the frontman was unpopular.
“Blaming an individual may mean we don’t learn the lessons that need to be learned,” Zimmerman said.
He said the Coalition
lost a substantial number of seats in the city and copped significant
anti-government swings in some regional contests because voters did not
like the former government’s policy offering.
The Liberal party
lost six heartland seats to climate-focused independents on 21 May,
including Kooyong, which was held by the former treasurer Josh
Frydenberg, and a host of other inner-city seats including Higgins, Reid
and Bennelong.
The
Liberal party is expected to instal the Queensland rightwinger Peter
Dutton as its new leader on Monday. Zimmerman said Dutton had “a
pragmatic streak” and he would need that quality to reboot the
Coalition’s battered electoral fortunes.
Zimmerman
said on Monday he had disagreed with Dutton’s stance on some policy
issues but the new leader would be fully aware the party had to “regain
the trust of voters in electorates like mine” to plot a pathway to
victory in 2025.
“I think it’s important he’s a constructive opposition leader,” the former MP said.
Anthony
Albanese at a battery manufacturer during the election campaign. Energy
groups say government support for storage technologies may help achieve
the government’s emissions reduction goals.
The
Albanese government should redirect some of the $20bn earmarked for its
Rewiring the Nation plan to support a storage goal that would
turbocharge the take-up of batteries and other methods to store power,
according to a Victoria Energy Policy Centre report.
The
paper, released on Tuesday by the independent group, said the market
alone was unlikely to achieve either the bipartisan-supported net zero
emissions goal by 2050 nor Labor’s pledge to lift Australia’s current
2030 emissions reduction goal by almost two-thirds. The former would
require a 20-fold increase from existing storage levels.
In
the absence of a carbon price, the federal government could introduce a
storage goal, based on the Renewable Energy Target that spurred
investment by requiring retailers to allocate a rising share of clean
energy to 2020. The new target would be more effective than Labor’s
election promise of investing a lot more on transmission.
“If
I were [the new treasurer] Jim Chalmers looking for $20bn to knock off
the budget, I would be sorely tempted to start with the Rewiring the
Nation operation,” Bruce Mountain, the centre’s director and lead author
of the report, said.
“It doesn’t need that
amount of money, and shifting electricity at great cost over long
distances is not where we’re headed” – economically or technologically,
he said.
Energy markets could become an early source of strife for the incoming government, which inherits soaring prices
in part because of outages of coal-fired power stations as well as from
the effect of sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine.
In addition, the
billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes on Monday succeeded in upending plans by
AGL Energy – the country’s biggest generator – to split into two. The climate activist wants to accelerate AGL’s coal exit and shift to more renewables and storage.
The
Australian Energy Market Operator has estimated the full
decarbonisation of the grid will cost $87bn in present values, with
generation and storage taking up $75bn and transmission $12bn.
Excluding
the 2000MW Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project – still in early development –
there are six grid-scale batteries operating, with a further nine under
construction for a further 560MW, the report said. Another 49 announced
or proposed projects would add 12 gigawatts more, but still well short
of the 59GW of storage Aemo forecasts the grid will need by 2050.
“There’ll
be a role for Snowy 2.0, but I think much of the in and out of the
market, [the] day to day stuff, will be done by chemical batteries which
can do the job much more quickly,” Mountain said.
The
scheme would also be designed to reward only newcomers beyond a certain
date, to ensure the target draws in capacity that would not have
otherwise been added.
“The
state governments have no reason not to like it. It doesn’t stand in
their way,” Mountain said. “It gets the federal government doing
something constructive, not tripping over the states on arguing about
transition arrangements and transmission funding.”
Chris
Bowen, set to be sworn in as the new energy and climate minister on
Wednesday, was not available for comment pending a briefing, a
spokesperson said.
Matt Kean, NSW’s energy
minister, said he planned to work with the commonwealth to implement the
state’s electricity infrastructure roadmap, including 2GW of
long-duration storage.
His Victorian
counterpart, Lily D’Ambrosio, said the change of government meant “we
now have a great opportunity to better plan the energy transition at a
national level and storage will continue to grow in importance”. She
reserved judgment on the proposed scheme.
Tennant
Reed, Ai Group’s head of climate, energy and environment policy, said
the energy price hikes did not offer “particularly welcoming
housewarming presents for the new energy minister”.
He said the
storage goal – dubbed Renewable Electricity Storage Target, or REST –
did not necessarily supplant Labor’s “honking big thing on transmission”
and could complement it. “They don’t really stand or fall together.”
Reed
said that while the mechanics of standing up such a target “shouldn’t
be underestimated”, the former RET did provide relevant experience.
Similarly, there was discussion during the Morrison era for a “capacity
market” to ensure at least minimum generation capacity could also be
extended to a storage goal.
“You can make a case for this kind of thing,” he said.
However,
no matter how great the long-run benefits, “there will have a gross
cost to somebody, and they will have upfront costs before they provide
benefits.”
Dylan McConnell, an energy expert
with Melbourne University, agreed there was “certainly a good argument
for policy to support storage technologies”.
“It’s
conceivable, perhaps even likely, that it might ultimately lower
costs,” McConnell said. “But given the current retail price movements,
it’s a politically challenging environment to advocate for potentially
adding a surcharge to bills.”
‘Peter
Dutton thinks events will work against Anthony Albanese – rising
inflation, rising interest rates, high petrol prices, geopolitical
instability.’
Dutton
thinks Anthony Albanese is going to blow the coming term in government
by becoming caught in the crosshairs of the progressive parliament the
Australian people voted for on 21 May.
As
well as parliament dragging the new prime minister left, Dutton thinks
events will work against Albanese – rising inflation, rising interest
rates, high petrol prices, geopolitical instability. Up until the
election, voters blamed the Coalition for these things. Now Australians will blame Labor.
Dutton
thinks the pathway back to government is through the outer suburbs and
regions – and he thinks his personal, tough-guy-made-good political
brand will be a plus in those kinds of contests because aspirational
working people will feel a cultural affinity with him.
The
new Liberal leader, let’s call him Mr Relentless, believes he can
neutralise the voter backlash about an absent federal integrity
commission by supporting one in the new parliament, preferably Helen Haines’s version, just to give Labor administrative heartburn.
Mr
Relentless also thinks his deputy, Liberal Sussan Ley, can first work
out, and then sort out, whatever it is Australian women are cranky about
now they don’t have to be triggered by looking at Morrison every day.
Ley made a point in her opening statement of saying she understood some
women were unable to vote for the Liberal party in 2022 and she’d be out and about listening to them.
Mr
Relentless also thinks some Liberal voters who lodged a protest vote
last Saturday can be wooed back if he can focus the party’s
post-election policy debate on the economy, cost of living and the
future prosperity of small business. The Dutton managerial formula
sounds like a bit less culture war, a lot less religion, and a bit more
traditional Liberal policy.
The new Liberal
leader doesn’t feel the need for a grand bargain with Labor when it
comes to climate action. Dutton clearly thinks the debate the Coalition
has rendered toxic through the decade of lying will default to a brawl
about cost of living once Labor pushes ahead with actual mechanisms and
policies to reduce emissions – and that debate will benefit the
Coalition.
Closer to home, he thinks the Greens territorial high water mark in Brisbane
in this election will be an aberration rather than a permanent feature
of the system, and while it lasts, will be more of a problem for
Albanese than him.
Asked
whether he intended to write off the teal belt – North Sydney,
Mackellar, Wentworth, Goldstein and Kooyong – Dutton said he wasn’t in
the business of writing off any seats, but he was also very clear
climate change won’t be his preferred means of rapprochement with
inner-city centre-right progressives either.
On this point, the Nationals did Dutton a solid by moving on from Barnaby Joyce and installing David Littleproud.
Joyce and his protege Matt Canavan are associated with hardcore climate
science denial in the minds of voters, which makes them a drag on
Liberals and Nationals in parts of the country where climate action
shifts votes, whereas Littleproud has a more nuanced position, which is
broadly helpful in a marketing sense.
When I
say nuanced, Littleproud is progressive by Nationals standards, and he’s
a genuine supporter of the Coalition’s commitment to reach net zero
emissions by 2050. But it is also unlikely the new Nationals leader will
undermine Dutton if he chooses to weaponise Labor’s proposed
medium-term action as a cost of living debacle over the next three
years, which is clearly the new Liberal leader’s current inclination.
So
it’s fair to say Dutton’s situation report post-election was
comprehensive – and clear. But it doesn’t make it predictive. Albanese
may not screw up. Events will certainly be difficult, but the pressures
may not be insurmountable for the new government.
It’s
also hard to see where this swag of Labor-held seats ripe for the
taking is. Looking at the pendulum post 21 May, it is much easier to see
a set of circumstances where the Liberal party could peel enough seats
off Labor in 2025 to put them in minority government than it is to see a
clear path back for a Dutton-led majority government.
The outgoing Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman was blunt on Monday morning.
He said the Liberals needed to win back the seats Morrison lost to
independents last Saturday to form a majority government in the future.
He
was very clear voters in those seats cared about climate change.
Zimmerman, who knows his own electoral terrain, and knows the
sensibility of his constituents, suggested Dutton could make a start on
the necessary courtship of the party’s progressive heartland by
supporting Labor’s 2030 target. Mr Relentless made it clear on Monday
that would not be happening.
So being clear about your political objectives is one thing. Being right is quite another.
A robot dog named Spot surveys the ground at a construction site in Singapore. (Reuters: Travis Teo)
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After
struggling to find staff during the pandemic, businesses in Singapore
have increasingly turned to robots to help carry out a range of tasks,
from surveying construction sites to scanning library bookshelves.
Key points:
A shortage of foreign workers has led to Singapore using robots to fill jobs
Robots are doing a variety of roles including construction work and coffee making
They have also been implemented into more than 30 metro stations for customer-facing tasks
The
city-state relies on foreign workers but their number fell by 235,700
between December 2019 and September 2021, according to the manpower
ministry, which notes how COVID-19 curbs have sped up "the pace of
technology adoption and automation" by companies.
At
a Singapore construction site, a four-legged robot called Spot, built
by US company Boston Dynamics, scans sections of mud and gravel to check
on work progress, with data fed back to construction company Gammon's
control room.
Gammon's general manager Michael
O'Connell said using Spot required only one human employee instead of
the two previously needed to do the job manually.
"Replacing the need for manpower on-site with autonomous solutions is gaining real traction," Mr O'Connell said.
Indoors,
Singapore's National Library has introduced two shelf-reading robots
that can scan labels on 100,000 books, or about 30 per cent of its
collection, per day.
"Staff need not read the call
numbers one by one on the shelf, and this reduces the routine and
labour-intensive aspects," Lee Yee Fuang, assistant director at the
National Library Board, said.
A book-scanning robot used by Singapore's National Library Board reports misplaced books.(Reuters: Travis Teo)
Singapore
has 605 robots installed per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing
industry, the second-highest number globally after South Korea's 932,
according to a 2021 report by the International Federation of Robotics.
Robots
are also being used for customer-facing tasks, with more than 30 metro
stations set to have robots making coffee for commuters.
Keith
Tan, chief executive of Crown Digital which created the barista robot,
said it was helping solve the "biggest pain-point" in food and beverage —
finding staff — while also creating well-paid positions to help
automate the sector.
Many commuters in Singapore now have their coffee made by a robot. (Reuters: Travis Teo)
However, some people trying the service still yearned for human interaction.
"We always want to have some kind of human touch," commuter Ashish Kumar told Reuters while sipping on a robot-brewed drink.
Election analyst Antony Green explains the complex count in the Melbourne seat of Macnamara.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese looks set to form a majority Labor government.
The
ABC election computer is projecting that Labor will hold at least 76
seats — the minimum required to form a majority government.
The ABC projects Labor will secure the Melbourne seat of Macnamara with MP Josh Burns being re-elected.
Mr
Burns defeated Liberal Party candidate Colleen Harkin on two-party
preferred, but faced a strong challenge from the Greens' Steph
Hodgins-May, who finished second on first preference.
He
was able to assure the Governor-General that Labor was the only major
party able to form a stable government, allowing him to head to Tokyo
for a meeting with world leaders.
Given the
Coalition was so far behind on the seat count, having lost heartland
seats to teal independents, it was practically impossible the Coalition
could use the crossbench to form a minority government.
Labor
will need to supply a Speaker in the House of Representatives, removing
a vote from its side of the aisle. But the Speaker has a casting vote
in the event of a rare tie.
The new government is
confident it could have passed its legislation in the Lower House
without a majority, given the size of the crossbench.
Labor's member for Macnamara, Josh Burns, has been re-elected after a tight count.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
The
crossbench will have 16 members, with an ideological spectrum that
ranges from Queenslander Bob Katter on the right to the Greens on the
left.
It is likely, sources have suggested, that
the new government will strike deals with the teals, independents and
Greens to strengthen the passage of its legislation.
The
latest Senate results show Labor will need the Greens, and potentially
either Tasmanian Jacqui Lambie or incoming ACT senator David Pocock, to
pass legislation.
Labor still needs to find a new
deputy leader in the Senate to replace Kristina Keneally, who failed in
her bid to move to the Lower House.
There is
pressure on the Right faction to put forward a woman to ensure the upper
and lower houses' leadership is gender-balanced.
But
that will have implications for Mr Albanese's cabinet because there are
no women in the Right faction on the frontbench in the Senate now Ms
Keneally is gone.
Kristina Keneally failed to win the previously safe seat of Fowler.(AAP: James Ross)
The Labor caucus will determine who will serve in the cabinet when it meets on Tuesday.
The proportion of Left and Right members on the frontbench will be determined based on how many seats each faction wins.
The party is also under pressure to reward Western Australia, which sealed Labor's victory.
Sussan Ley says her party is determined to earn back women's trust.
Mr Albanese is also keen to ensure his cabinet has gender parity, to reflect Labor's ranks.
The Liberal and National parties met on Monday and elected new leaders.
Schools and airports help the leaders of countries that receive cash from Beijing tighten their grip on power, a new book claims.
Mahinda
Rajapaksa, who was Sri Lanka’s prime minister, with the Chinese
president Xi Jinping after launching a project to construct a $1.4
billion port city on an artificial island off Colombo.
Sun 29 May 2022 20.00 AESTLast modified on Mon 30 May 2022 03.16 AESTChina’s
financing of overseas projects has disproportionately benefited the
core political supporters of incumbent presidents or prime ministers of
those countries that receive the funds, according to a new book.
During
the 20th century, China was mostly known as a recipient of
international development finance. Its overseas development programme
was modest – roughly on a par with that of Denmark. But over the course
of one generation, as Beijing emerged as the world’s second-largest
economy, its footprint began to extend far beyond its borders – often in
the form of infrastructure initiatives such as Belt and Road.
Its
use of debt rather than aid to bankroll big-ticket overseas projects
created new opportunities for developing countries to achieve rapid
socio-economic gains, but it also introduced major risks, such as
corruption, “political capture” and conflict.
The authors of the new book, Banking on Beijing,
published by Cambridge University Press, found that in those countries
that receive Chinese aid, funding for the political leader’s home
province increased by 52% during the years when he or she was in power.
But this political capture effect vanished when the leader left office.
They also found that, in the run-up to elections, these areas often saw sharp increases in Chinese government-backed funding.
“There
is rot in the system that Beijing created to fast-track the
implementation of development projects,” said Dr Bradley Parks,
executive director of the AidData research lab at William & Mary college in Williamsburg, Virginia, and one of the five authors of the book.
“Beijing
often asks for project proposals and loan applications from senior
incumbent politicians rather than technocrats. And this often leads to
projects being green-lit that disproportionately benefit the core
political supporters of the president or prime minister.”
In Sri Lanka,
for example, during his tenure as president, from 2005-2015, Mahinda
Rajapaksa tried to transform the remote Hambantota district at the
southern tip of the island – his birthplace and home to only 12,000
residents – into a second capital through Chinese-backed infrastructure
building, including a huge international airport.
But
questions quickly arose about the cost-effectiveness of these projects.
In a 2007 cable from the US embassy in Colombo, the ambassador, Robert
Blake, reported: “An empty port, an empty airport, and an empty vast
convention centre would not generate the benefits that Hambantota needs,
and may, if constructed, be considered the president’s folly.”
In 2014, Sri Lanka’s aviation minister told the parliament
that the airport, which cost $210m, had “only earned $123 in revenue in
a single month”. And when a visiting journalist asked a senior
government official about the airport, he indicated, “when I visited the
airport there, I asked the sole immigration officer how many passports
she’d stamped that day. She said, ‘One.’ ”
But despite such controversies, Beijing has insisted
its China-Sri Lanka cooperation is “mutually beneficial and has been
warmly welcomed by all sectors in Sri Lanka”. On his visit to the island
in 2014, China’s president, Xi Jinping, signed 20 bilateral co-operation agreements, including a $1.4bn Chinese-funded port city in Colombo. Xi described Sri Lanka as a “splendid pearl”.
Former
Sierra Leone president Ernest Bai Koroma and China’s president, Xi
Jinping, preside over a signing ceremony in Beijing in 2016. Photograph: Greg Baker/EPA
In Sierra Leone,
when Ernest Bai Koroma became the president in 2007, his home district,
Bombali, was one of the country’s four most populous districts but also
one of the poorest. His rise to political stardom quickly changed the
situation.
Parks and his colleagues found
evidence that suggests Koroma and his allies, with the assistance of
Chinese aid, actively discriminated in favour of their home provinces
and districts. By the end of Koroma’s second term, the district’s
capital, Makeni, was one of the few places with 24-hour electricity.
In
his 2012 re-election, across the country’s other 13 districts Koroma
received an average vote share of only 51% but in Bombali it was 93%.
“This
research finds stronger evidence for such ‘home province bias’ among
Chinese aid projects for social infrastructure – schools, hospitals,
stadiums, etc – but not so in productive projects financed by Chinese
loans such as mines or factories,” said Dr Hong Zhang of the
China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in
Washington.
“It
would be interesting to see, however, if other bilateral donors such as
Japan – who also follow a request-based approach in their development
assistance – also disproportionally support projects that benefit the
incumbent political leaders’ key constituencies.”
Ben
Bland, director of the Asia-Pacific programme at the London-based
thinktank Chatham House, said it is not just Chinese companies and banks
that have sought to partner with politically connected companies and
business people to facilitate overseas investments. Many other foreign
investors take a similar approach.
He said:
“These deals often reflect the political economy of partner countries
but they also expose foreign investors and funders to public and
political backlashes if and when governments change because of
elections, personnel issues or coups.”
Analysts
point out that as China’s economic growth has begun to slow, Beijing’s
lavish overseas finance has inevitably decreased. Chinese overseas
lending has been in decline since 2017, and lending to Africa and Latin
America almost came to a halt in 2020 as many debtor countries defaulted
or were on the verge of doing so.
And in Asia,
Bland said, many developing countries are still trying to complete and
integrate large infrastructure investments, such as new railway projects
in Laos, Indonesia and Malaysia.
“After a
flurry of big deals in previous years, it is natural for there to be a
slowdown in pace while countries digest these projects,” Bland said.
For
China, an emerging risk is how countries that are mired in fiscal
troubles will keep their contractural obligations. Last week, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debts
for the first time in its history as it struggled with its worst
financial crisis in more than seven decades. China holds nearly 10% of
Sri Lanka’s total foreign debt.
This is a
cautionary tale for Beijing. “China now needs to decide what to do with
countries that cannot repay the loans in time,” said Zhang. “This is a
highly uncertain time for the Chinese banks, companies, and the
borrowing countries.”
