How Australia became the dirtiest polluter in the developed world.
In the year since they took office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Liberal-led coalition have already dismantled the country’s key environmental policies. Now they’ve begun systematically ransacking its natural resources. In the process, they’ve transformed Australia from an international innovator on environmental issues into quite possibly the dirtiest country in the developed world. And in a masterful whirl of the spin machine, they’ve managed to upend public debate by painting climate science as superstition and superstition as climate science. (We should note here that one of us grew up in Australia.)
The country’s landmark carbon tax has been repealed. The position of science minister has been eliminated. A man who warns of “global cooling” is now the country’s top business adviser. In November, Australia will host the G-20 economic summit; it plans to use its power as host to keep climate change off the official agenda.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/09/australia_s_environmental_movement_has_been_overthrown.html?wpsrc=fol_tw
Interesting to reflect that all this came about because Kevin Rudd lacked the balls to take the imposition of an ETS to a double dissolution election, which all the pundits believed he would win. Had he done so, it's conceivable that we'd have been spared the ugly sight of a first-term leader being knifed and the factional brawling which followed - and which allowed Tony Abbott to fill the vacuum that resulted.
It would be a different country.