Mirabile dictu: A policy election?

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From Laura Tingle:

[Greg] Hunt has had a busy week this week. He’s finally appointed board members to the Climate Change Authority (which suggests it might survive after Abbott’s attempts to kill it). There have been announcements about maps of the electricity grid designed to pinpoint spots where the efficiency of renewable energy investments can be maximised, and a review aimed at further reducing ozone and hydroflurocarbon emissions. There have been reassuring noises about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency being brought back in to the Environment Department’s fold. But the conflicting signals are illustrated by the fact legislation to abolish both agencies is still in the Senate, and on the agenda for debate.

…Talking about renewable energy this week, Bill Shorten observed that if “both sides of Australian politics are now willing to say they support renewable energy, then the test is no longer a matter of competing rhetoric”.

“Instead it becomes a policy contest, a battle of ideas”, he said.

Yep. It may well be possible. The resignation yesterday of loon pond Grand Poobah Brian Loughnane is important here as well, shifting the Coalition towards the centre and away from the internecine Rovian politics that sees itself as creating its own reality (as opposed to living on planet earth).

It will not be clear air of course. Despite making a pretty good fist at policy, Shorten is still the Kingslayer. His background of faceless back-stabbing politics may yet resurface and in itself could be an election issue. There is also the loon pond rump in the Liberal Party, including the Abbottalyptic smoking crater itself, which is committed above all else to its own troglodyte ideas ahead of evidence or fact. They’ll not be silent.

But it just might be that ideas will triumph over idiots.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.