The Australian Labor Party’s Climate Bill Is Empty Symbolism
Labor’s climate bill is little more than symbolism. With escalating climate disasters and soaring inflation, it’s bad policy and even worse politics.
James Clark is an organizer and communicator living on Wurundjeri country. He's spent the last five years working to grow and support the global climate movement.
Labor’s climate bill is little more than symbolism. With escalating climate disasters and soaring inflation, it’s bad policy and even worse politics.
In 2014, Australian Labor PM Julia Gillard’s Clean Energy Act tried to use market mechanisms to take climate action. Its failure underscores the fact that only public investment in climate action will do.
The Australian green energy provider Powershop launched in 2012 with the support of a range of environmental NGOs. Last month, Shell bought the company and took over its clients.
Supermarkets under capitalism are exploitative and ecologically damaging, shaping what we produce as well as what we consume. In public hands, following a different logic, they could supply the creative core of a democratically planned socialist economy.
After waging war on behalf of coal billionaires, Labor Right MP Joel Fitzgibbon has resigned from the party front bench. If the Labor Left wants to undo the damage he did, they need to start fighting for jobs and the environment as tenaciously as Fitzgibbon did for the coal lobby.
Six months after the Australian Labor Party lost what was widely regarded as an unlosable election, the party released its internal review of the defeat. The document refuses to face the real reasons for the catastrophe, while proposing a potentially disastrous shift to the right.