Climate etc.

This is shaping up to be a very interesting little bunfight.

Also interesting to see will be the Australian Senate vote on the Carbon Tax, that filthy abomination of a plan which oozed its way (just) past the guardians at the gate thanks to a bunch of people who are either incredibly misinformed, incredibly stupid, incredibly greedy, or a combination of the above.

The Opposition will of course block it - fruitlessly, because Labor and the Greens have the numbers to pass it. But the Greens are now of two sorts - the ones we are used to, and an extremely disturbed fringe that got in at the last half-Senate election, with which Bob Brown does not see completely eye to eye. I foresee a slim possibility that they will somehow contrive to wreck it as not being severe or ideologically pure enough for them. And with the Opposition now standing firm, there's no way for Gillard to get it through if the Greens in the Senate go mad and renege.

If they push it through, they will be cutting their own political throats. The damage this will do to the Australian economy and the pain it will put ordinary working men and women through, for no measurable good, will ensure their electoral annihilation. Some of those ordinary working men and women may (probably will) lose their jobs. And unlike, for example, the British in the Blitz - who had the defeat of Germany as the fixed end goal to which they could aspire - these ordinary working men and women have been informed that the measured endpoint for their efforts is sometime in the middle or even the end of this century. By the latter date, most of them and even most of their currently living children will either be elderly or dead.

The British in the Second World War individually knew that there might not be a chance they would see victory, but they knew they would see it if they lived long enough. The Australians who must suffer under the damage that the Carbon Tax must inevitably cause will suffer in the knowledge they will never see the victory, never reap the gains... and never know if the idiots who inflicted this misery on them were right. At the next election, they will rob those idiots of their jobs.

It is said that Kevin Rudd is the only Labor MP who will survive in Queensland if current polling is reflected across the board. Let him - he can sit in opposition till the end of his parliamentary days and preside over the wreckage he unleashed on his country and his party, despised along with his successor (and if rumors of Gillard's dispensability are true, also his predecessor) as the worst Prime Ministers Australia has ever had.