Letters to the editor, The Daily Advertiser, August 20, 2021

Asylum seekers in detention centres, people incarcerated in prison or in the acute unit of a mental health unit are in lockdown, as are people who have returned a positive test for COVID-19 or have returned from a COVID hot spot.

Everyone else is free to leave their home for essential shopping, exercise, visit a doctor, pharmacy, post office or even a takeaway business selling alcohol.

An asylum seeker in a detention centre is not free to do any of these things and would be insulted by the way the mainstream media refers to this as a lockdown rather than the correct term "stay at home" orders.

Please show some respect.

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Anthony John Abbott once said something honest about climate change: "If you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple carbon tax" (July 29, 2009).

A year later, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard said: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead ... but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon."

When she did just that, Abbott carried on as though it were the greatest betrayal since Judas.

One of his accomplices, Peta Louise Mary Credlin, later confessed to their lie on TV.

So began a decade-long nightmare around climate policy.

On the release last week of the first part of the 6th IPCC Report, the UN said it "is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening". There is now a Himalayan mountain of evidence. Has the attitude of the Coalition changed?

Well, we now have a different three-word slogan trying to do the work of an actual policy. But still we are damned with delay, duplicity, deception and dissembling.

Disgraceful lies that "Australia is doing its part". In July, the UN placed Australia last out of 193 on climate action (with a score of 10 out of 100).

Other rankings have had us last out of 57 (0 out of 100), and 176th of 177 (we beat Brunei!).

Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce wants to see the cost of any action. Here's some costs. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics analysis has found that in the last 20 years the changing climate has cut farmer's profits by an average of 23 per cent a year, which could be 50 per cent in three decades, without an emissions drop.

Likely carbon tariffs on Australian products. Untold extra billions to deal with worsening natural disasters. Plus, of course, increased suffering for every single living thing. From the gibberish he's dribbled in recent days, Mr Joyce is still struggling to work out what it is governments actually do.

Unless the National Party culls its dinosaurs and urgently replaces them with people who accept science and evidence, it should seriously contemplate an extinction event. Its own.

It has been a decade of criminal climate negligence by the Coalition. It has been unconscionable. It continues. It should never be forgotten.

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