Self destruction of a party

Well if I were in the ALP caucus in federal parliament, I'd be buying a number of lottery tickets at the moment.  With very little effort on their part, it seems their opposite number has inflicted untold damage on themselves, and in all reality have made themselves unelectable for another two terms.

"If you can't govern yourselves, how can you govern the country" is a question on everyone's lips.  Turnbull has come out, espoused logic, reasonableness and correctness.  Yet half his party want him out.  That's politics, I suppose.  Despite him being right, he's going to find himself out on Tuesday morning.

Why so?  It can't really be that most liberals DO deny climate change do they?  With a 38 degree day expected today in Sydney they are pushing it uphill to contend otherwise.  Maybe it's because it's just so inconvenient that for centuries, polluters have been able to cost-shift the real costs of their activities to anyone else but them, and now we finally want to price it into the economy.

To clarify what I'm saying for example if you are generating electricty and charging a pretty penny for it, it's really nice if a major cost of your activity: carbon emissions, is picked up by someone or something else.  Your Profit & Loss statements deduct most of the expenses involved except for cleaning up your mess.  Someone else can do that, and your profits don't reflect that REAL cost.  This is great for the shareholders or owners.

Now the government wants you to include the cost of carbon pollution into your accounting system.  Time to cry foul and insist the cost is passed on to anyone else but you like it has been for the last four hundred years.  Get real.

The accounting system is only a model of your business, and if it excludes ALL costs, and here we are talking environmental costs, then ipso facto, as a model it is a failure.  The liberals seem to want this status to be maintained: ie the accounting system simply omits a vast area of costs because it will reduce profits of industries that have been for years getting away with murder.  An analogy would be to eliminate some other valid cost from the accounting system: let's say as a company you'd like to exclude wages from your expenses!  It'd make a fantastic improvement to the bottom line, wouldn't it?  (Mind you I reckon some companies probably have tried this, too!)

I'll be sad to see Turnbull go, really, as he's one of the smartest Liberal leaders we've ever had.  But it just goes to show there's more to it than that.  You have to keep your troops in line and on side as well.  That's probably more important than being right in politics.  Doesn't politics suck?