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Corporations treat social responsibility as a PR tool or a trade-off for financial success. The truth is that if consumers suffer, so too do the corporations that depend on them. Socially responsible initiatives such as the Carbon Tax will benefit society holistically.
In the 1980s computer journalists used to refer to the 'FUD factor' and its impact on computer purchases. FUD — Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Tony Abbott has become the master of the FUD factor in the debate over climate change and the carbon tax.
The Government has crafted a historic package of reforms: driving long-run reductions in carbon pollution, simplifying personal tax and making it fairer, and reducing poverty traps and barriers to work. It's exactly the kind of smart and gutsy approach we want to see from this Government.
There is nothing radical about fixing a carbon price. While our politicians and pundits quibble, the rest of the world is already implementing its commitments. Gillard's greatest challenge in selling her carbon scheme is in normalising it in the public mind.
If the Gillard Government manages to serve a full term, there is a good chance that Parliament will pass a well-designed, effective national carbon pricing policy into law in 2012. This would be a major policy success that Gillard could legitimately boast of going into a 2013 full-term election.
There was a massive loss of confidence in Labor's policies. The Australian electorate saw through the triviality of what both major parties were offering. Gillard would deserve her party's full support in leading a Labor Government in a hung parliament. This may be the making of her as a great prime minister.
The election has been plagued by trivial spats and personality conflicts, to the neglect of policies based on the values of equity and social justice for everyone. This reinforces the importance of church and community groups being more active in their social advocacy.
We have just experienced a Shakespearean moment. There is real excitement in the land, a sense of new beginnings, as the Elizabethan figure of Julia Gillard takes the reins as Prime Minister. Rudd, to his credit, has accepted the inevitable with grace and dignity.
The new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres is well qualified to help heal the wounds of Copenhagen. If the West can learn the lessons of those failed talks and move forward with modesty, flexibility and sensitivity, we may hope for progress.
The Howard years made me feel ashamed to be Australian, and I felt about his electoral defeat the way East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall coming down: as a kind of cleansing. Rudd disappoints for a different reason.
Rudd is technically correct that the opposition parties stymied his CPRS bills, but the buck stops with his disappointing climate policy leadership. Upon the failure of Australian parliamentary politics, we need now to find the courage to support mass non-violent public action modelled on Vietnam War protest.
49-60 out of 85 results.