We live in interesting and self - contradictory times. The day after Malcolm started the Double Dissapointment election process, the big papers came out with coverage that practically excluded the Australian Greens Party. The next day papers are noticing that the major parties have "turned their backs" on the Greens. Apparently the editors are incapable of stating that they also have done so. What are they afraid of?

The only plausible explanation, apart from voter and media adherance to an old clunky 2-party system, is that the newspaper owners, and both political parties have shared vested interests that are seriously threatened by the resurgence of the Australia Greens vote.  The most obvious shared vested interest (denied by omission), is that the older political parties, and the news organisations, are under the sway of corruption from the Australia mining industries, as represented by the Minerals Council of Australia. A vote for LNP or ALP is a vote for more coal and gas mining, regardless of differences in declared support for renewable energy targets. A vote for LNP or ALP is a vote for Australia being slack on reducing dangerous and dirty carbon emissions. A vote for LNP or ALP is a vote for holding back the transition to new clean renewable energy sources.

News today that the ALP internal politics will dis-endorse one of its WA candidates because of a 30 year old minor misdemeanor.  The ALP preselection processes and head - office overrides are a mystery of weightings of union power and preselection votes, but the infraction, if its seems to be a mote in the eye of the ALP,  is nothing compared to the huge plank in its eye,  of accepting large fossil fuel corporate donations, and the seducions of the MCA. Both ALP and LNP return the favours a thousand-fold.  Subsidy favours, many thousands of times larger,which come out of the taxpayer funded budgets, have been returned to fossil fuel corporations by successive ALP and LNP governments. In the past this provided a boom in export mining income, but those times are over and gone.

The decline of the coal and gas industry, the collapse in prices from oversupply, indicates the problems with the markets when everyone wants to ramp up production to earn a profit. The current energy markets would benefit from a significant pruning of production, but this won't happen without additional market interventions. Each producer is trying to maximise income, to pay off capital costs.

The ALP lost many of its supporters to the Greens, for its failures to see the growing concerns over environment and global warming. Its failure to publicly rid itself of large sources of corruption, will mean that it will not get enough votes to form a majority government. Its declaration of not wanting to do a deal with the Greens, is a sign that the ALP would rather have the LNP win government.

"If you think these things don’t matter politically then you should look at Labor’s response. Labor is terrified of being painted as anywhere near the Greens, and terrified of looking weak on boats. Knock-kneed, skin-shivering, eye-covering terrified." - Adam Bandt on ABC's Q and A -

Or as I have put it, clueless, cornered, conniving and cowardly.

To be part of the world-wide movement to rid ourselves of this fossil fuel encumberance, and convice the cowardly politicians, go to Break Free from Fossil Fuels