Wednesday 12 March 2014

The ultimate conservationist? The looming crisis for the Abbott government

The ultimate conservationist? The looming crisis for the Abbott government

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The ultimate conservationist? The looming crisis for the Abbott government







AAP/Alan Porritt
 Two political speeches that grabbed the most attention last week were
those of Greens senator Scott Ludlam and prime minister Tony Abbott.
Both were quite peculiar but for diametrically opposing reasons.




Perhaps timed for this weekend’s Tasmanian state election, Abbott
gave a “let’s help Tasmania” speech to a room full of appreciative
forestry workers, while Ludlam pursued a kind of ode to everything that
he saw as wrong with the current government to an almost empty senate
chamber.




Abbott received applause during his speech, and Ludlam only silence.



Yet these speeches were also covered by mainstream and social media,
where the reception they received was abruptly reversed. Only a few news
outlets bothered making a clip of Abbott’s speech, with tweets and
social media recommendations numbering in the hundreds. As of today, Ludlam’s speech has passed an astonishing 710,000 YouTube views.




Ludlam’s speech dealt with a wide range of issues that are core to
the agenda of the Greens: asylum policy, anti-mining,
anti-privatisation, same-sex marriage, manufacturing workers. It was a
broadside against the Abbott government ahead of the Senate re-election
contest in WA that is not looking promising for Ludlam.




However, Ludlam returned to green themes the most – renewable energy, nuclear power and climate change – to put to Abbott:



Your only proposal for environmental reforms thus far is
to leave minister Greg Hunt to playing solitaire for the next three
years whilst you outsource his responsibilities.


It is “bitterly obvious”, Ludlam said, that these responsibilities
have been handed to the agents of “predator capitalism” rather than the
public interest.


excerpt from the article

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