Dear ,

2020 will be an interesting year. It’s started-off with fire, pestilence and flood, and elections at two levels of government are about to follow, which I guess qualifies as war in our modern, relatively peaceful, era.

We have a lot planned for this year, but first, an appeal for money.

We need to move to a new website. The current website does lots of things right, but its ecommerce facilities have frustrated many of you, and it lacks a lot of the campaigning tools that we need to prosecute the case for good policy and build our support  base.  We need $5,000 to transition to a new site. I already have $2,000 pledged towards this. If you can help to fund the missing $3,000 please click here. Any donations I receive in the next month I will earmark towards the website.

Our current system is based on WordPress. The new system uses NationBuilder, which will allow us to campaign much more effectively, and will solve the ecommerce problems plaguing the current site.  And as you will see below, because of changes to the electoral act, to be an effective voice we are going to have to become more of a mass organisation than we are at the moment.

Functions

March 15 is a special treat with Larry Reed, President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education in Michigan, addressing a topic he’s written a book on “Was Jesus a Socialist”. This will be a Sunday afternoon event and I’m hoping to reach people we wouldn’t normally reach. To book, click here. Larry's visit is being sponsored by Ron Manners through his Mannkal Economic Education Foundation.

Fridays on Logan Road returns on March 6 with Ross Elliott, Chair of the Suburban Initiative Board of the BCC, talking about Better Suburbs. This will be in the context of a city council election which will have a major impact on how this city develops. Ross’s thesis is that too much emphasis is placed on the CBD when most of the action is elsewhere. To book click here.

The Brisbane Dialogues is an initiative of Murray Hancock, one of our members, and its first event features Canadian political philosopher Stephen Hicks debating local economist John Quiggin on the topic “Postmodernism is a Right Wing Philosophy”. Date is Monday March 9, and we are a partner in the project. To book click here.

Other dates to put in your diary are:

April 3: Fridays on Logan Road, Senator Paul Scarr on compassionate capitalism and his experiences working in third world countries for a multi-national Australian company.

May 1: Fridays on Logan Road, Washington Sanchez “Crypto but not currency? The journey so far.” Washington is Co-founder of https://OB1.io, and core developer for @OpenBazaar, a decentralised marketplace where you can buy or sell anything for cryptocurrency.

July 15: Annual McIlwraith Lecture with Professor Perry Bartlett, founder of the Queensland Brain Institute.

Electoral and Other Legislation (Accountability, Integrity and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2019

I’ve spent a fair bit of the last month and a half working on this bill. Without boring you with the details, it appears to be an attempt to monopolise political debate and activity for political parties, trade unions, and a few large and highly organised lobbying organisations.

Most of you probably assume that you have a democratic right to be involved in advocacy at any time. Not anymore. Not only will this bill limit how much you can donate not just to a political party, but to a political cause. It means that in the 12 months running up to a state election, community groups will be forced to register, appoint a responsible officer, set-up a separate bank account, and issue separate receipts to donors, in order to participate in almost any activity that might change a vote and which costs them money.

There were 62 submissions to the parliamentary inquiry into this bill, and more than half of them, including 18 from conservation organisations, had problems with the funding provisions.

Trade unions are unaffected because they don’t take donations, and politicians and political parties already have to do most of these things, and are compensated for loss of donations by the doubling the amount of public funding they receive. (Public funding is so generous that being a serial losing candidate could even make a handy part-time income).

We need to campaign against this bill, not because it will stop the government implementing it - they'll push it through because they are desparate to fortidy their position for the election later this year -  but because at some stage it will need to be repealed, and there needs to be good argument in the public domain to back that position.

Bushfires

According to temperature records there has been somewhere around a one degree increase in temperature since the industrial revolution. I commissioned fire expert David Packham to compute, using the Macarthur Forest Fire Danger Index, the most-used official measure of bushfire danger, the increase in intensity of a bushfire with air temperature at 41° compared to one with air temperature at 40°. The answer is 3 per cent.

This would be undetectable, given the uncertainties involved in the measurement of temperature, fuel load, humidity and wind speed. Which means, that even if you accept that all of the temperature increase is due to man’s emissions of CO2, these fires could not have been the product of climate change – the temperature increase is too small to have made an appreciable difference.

Furthermore, Australian emissions are such a tiny proportion of global emissions that no policy change here could have stopped the fires, even if they were a product of climate change. Australia emitted 556.4 million tonnes CO2 equivalent in 2017, and world emission grew by 550 million tonnes per year each year between 2000 and 2017.  If Australia had been carbon neutral in 2010, and if these fires were the product of climate change, then the most that Australian policy could have done would be to defer this year’s fire season to next year!

You can watch me putting these points and others on a TTR panel discussion (Turkey’s answer to Al Jazeera) by clicking here (starting around 9 minutes). You might also be interested in these articles Aborigines knew it was about management more than climate: an open letter and The parable of Gospers Mountain on On Line Opinion by fire expert Vic Jurskis.

We have to accept that the country has decided it wants to cut emissions, but we can’t allow neurotics and vested interests to panic us. Change has to be done in a way that causes least damage to the lives of individual Australians. We also can’t allow fire chiefs and responsible ministers to hide behind climate change as an alibi for their incompetence.  I have been looking at the prospects for putting a submission into the Royal Commission when it is constituted.

Projects

Polling

We are currently analysing our January qualitative polling on federal politics, which also included questions about China. This will be released later this month. Some surprising results. If you want to be a  member of our polling panel and aren't already, please enrol by clicking here to go to our What the people want website and enrolling in the panel.

Federation

We have received some funding to look at issues to do with how Australia’s federation is working today. We expect to have a first paper out in July of this year.

Power generation

We are currently quantifying the storage needs for the state if it implements its promise to go to 50% renewable generation by 2030.

Conclusion

Election years are the ones where politicians are most likely to be open to new ideas, so we will be pushing our ideas at them, despite the state government making it much more difficult to do this through their changes to the Electoral Act.

Look forward to your help and support. Don’t forget, we need to upgrade the website, and if you can help, please donate here. If you’re not already a member, then please join by going to this link. And if you’re already a member and want to renew, please click on this link.

Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director