Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
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.
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.
In early 2008, 89 per cent of us thought Rudd to be a 'man of vision'. Recall his essay on Bonhoeffer in The Monthly; the promise of a politics of decency and equality; the Apology; the ideas summit. After that it all goes a bit foggy.
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.
In Australia's next federal election, I'll vote One, Zero, Zero — Greens 1, Labor 0, Coalition 0. This is the only way I can fulfil my voter duty, while recording protest at the failure of our major parties to offer real policies on the planet's climate crisis.
At conferences like this, an atmosphere of crisis is necessary for final deals to be achieved. Kevin Rudd will not want to define the summit as a failure so, hopefully, his notorious 5 per cent emissions reduction target will be left behind.
It's hard not to sound misanthropic when discussing population. Conservatives accuse you of favouring abortion, contraception and sterilisation in developing countries. Progressives say you're a cultural imperialist diverting attention from social justice.
Visiting Kiribati and Tuvalu it is obvious that both populations are dealing with overcrowding, unemployment, poverty, pollution, and modernisation. Climate change is a driver for some of these stressors as well as a multiplier of their effects.
Right now, Australian’s elected politicians will decide our fate when they vote on one of the most important pieces of legislation to come before the Federal parliament in recent history. All of us will be directly affected by what is about to happen when the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) is re-introduced into Federal Parliament.
121-132 out of 178 results.