Julia Gillard is to the left…of Attila the Hun

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Great piece at En Passant

Spot on this stuff. Gillard, like her factional soul mate Mar'n Ferguson, act solely in the interests of the big end of town and devil take the hindmost. They would do the H.R. Nicholls Society proud. Ferguson was in the Sydney Morning Herald saying we needed more immigration or, shock horror, wages might go up! Can't have that old chap, think of what it would do with dividends! Send a bad signal to the market and all that.

The structural problem is the luvvies in the union movement share Gillard's understanding the reality for most Australians, i.e. none. Most union officials and Julia have never had a real job in their lives (and no, being a lawyer is not a real job). Gillard's laws slash take home pay for aged care and hospitality staff (real jobs) - the ACTU's response? They run a campaign against Tony Abbott. Cde Burrow is about to swan off to Brussels and is so star struck by Gillard that the union movement has reverted to type: acting like a beaten dog that keeps coming back for more treatment from its "master", in this case the ALP. 

Meanwhile the rest of us that live in the real world are left to our own devices in order to survive.

Electoral politics is a joke. We live in a corporate and technocratic totalitarianism that is so seamless that most people cannot even think outside it. Orwell would marvel at how cleverly it all works to enrich so few.

And it will continue to be such, especially when most media commentary is such a craven repetition of the status quo see Kohler, Grattan, Oakes, et al - useless, the lot of them). 

My advice? Take to strong drink.

The Emperor Has No Lights On

Damn hippies all warning about global warming but I ain’t going nowhere
Cause I believe what I’m told, that the levees’ll hold and that the President really cares

“Deep Deep River” – Fred Smith (From the CD Texas)

Earth Hour drifted past last night, all candle lit and quaffing champagne.

As far as tokenism goes, it is hard to beat.

Folk will be familiar with the concept. For those who came in late, the idea is that lights are turned off for an hour to symbolise reducing our energy use, with the idea that it will encourage businesses and households to use less electricity.

Despite the onanistic self-congratulation that surrounds this spectacle - especially from the major sponsor, the Fairfax news group – it has a miniscule impact on consumption and an even more tenuous educational benefit.

Its primary function seems to be to provide absolution from guilt for shiny middle class types and a platform for self-absorbed public figures to make unctuous statements about the importance of ‘battling’ climate change.

The defence flung out by the event’s marketing arm (what am I writing, it is all marketing) is that Earth Hour ‘raises consciousness’ about energy use.

Well that has been a miserable failure. The Australian Energy Market Operator in its latest Statement of Opportunities is forecasting a steady increase in energy consumption across all Australian states for the next decade.

No government is taking demand management, which was used so successfully with water consumption in capital cities, seriously.

NSW is spending $17,000,000,000.00 on locking in the electricity network to existing coal-fired power stations, with electricity users being left to foot the bill. If that dosh was spent on creating publicly owned community based renewable energy infrastructure we just may have a chance of getting out of this mess with most of the furniture intact.

The problem is that there was no Earth Hour at Wallerawang Power Station. There was no earth Hour at the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, which chews up about ten percent of NSW’s electricity and pays a peppercorn tariff for the pleasure. Earth Hour hasn’t made an impression on the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics who, along with Federal Energy Minister and serial idiot Martin Ferguson, have predicted that coal will continue to be our dominant source of electricity generation for the foreseeable future, regardless of what it will do to the climate.

They are almost certainly right.

Despite these rather salient issues the event has been a hit worldwide with scores of cities and jurisdictions jumping on board. Why is this?

The bottom line, which runs everything in these halcyon days, means people across the western world will demand reliable electricity supply to their houses

Australian society revolves around 240-volt electricity and the motorcar. These two functions are sacrosanct. Only losers catch the bus and, well, we “need” air conditioning and, somehow, a plasma screen TV the size of a small African country is important to have.

Consumption is about status; people acquire things to impress other people. People define themselves by the car they drive, the house they live in, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to; you are what you eat.

At its most extreme, status is marked by conspicuous consumption. Now that is a defining point of status, the ability to throw things away. It shows how rich and ergo, how powerful a person is.

With status wrapped up in the symbolism of what we consume (or don’t consume) it is going to be a hard shit to shift.

Symbolism can be powerful: the guy in front of the tank in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, burning draft papers. Earth Hour is not one of them.

In the end Earth Hour will go the way of solariums and Second Life. Status trumps Change. People just want to get on with the important stuff, like watching Australia’s Biggest Loser on a wide screen plasma TV, upgrading to this year’s Prada or getting a mortgage on a McMansion in the newest estate.

You can turn off all the lights you like, catch the bus forever or live in a solar powered shack in the bush, like I am, but the rest of the world is going to keep on chewing up fossil fuels and spewing out carbon dioxide like there is, literally, no tomorrow.