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Australia Federal 2009
Higgins VIC / Bradfield NSW
By-election

Election Overview

The 2009 by-election was precipitated by the retirement of two senior Liberals, Brendon Nelson and Peter Costello, post their party's 2007 election defeat and personal failure to become party leaders.

The by-election is being held against a background of the debate in the Australian federal parliment over the introduction of the ETS. Labor has chosen to negotiate with the Liberals.

A range of candiates and parties have chosen to run in this high profile election, including climate skeptics, lots of Christians (NSW) and a pro-nuclear candidate.

Without either What Women Want or Socialist Alliance, who ran at the last federal election, running canidates, the Greens have the strongest policies of the candidates running, but disappointingly still not stong enough to avoid a run away global warming event.

See the Policy Comparisons below for an analysis of different candidates' policies as they relate to climate change.

Election Details

• December 5th

Policy Comparison

To view the comprehensive visual policy analysis click the following:

• Bradfield

• Higgins

Voting Recommendations

Higgins

Note: On your ballot paper you must number all boxes, starting with the number "1" with your favorite candidate and putting the rest of the candidate in order of preference.

1. The Greens
   
2. Democrats
   
3. Independent - Joseph Toscan - Anarchist
   
4. Sex Party
   
5. Liberal
   
6. Liberal Democrats
   
7. Independent - Peter Brohier
   
8. Democratic Labor Party - John Mulholland
   
9. One Nation
   
10. Independent - Stephen Murphy - Climate Sceptic
    

Bradfield

Note: On your ballot paper you must number all boxes, starting with the number "1" with your favourite candidate and putting the rest of the candidates in order of preference. There are 22 canidates in Bradfield so the last box you fill in should be number "22".

1. The Greens
2. 4 Change running as the Change Change Coalition
3. Independent - Matthew Kelly
4. Independent - Peter Hanrahan
5. Independent - Philip Dowling
6. Sex Party
7. Liberal
8. Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy
   
9. Liberal Democrats
10. Democratic Labor Party
11. One Nation
12. Christian Democratic Party
    
13. Independent - Bill Koutalianos - Climate Sceptic
    

General Election Analysis

To view general analysis on this by-election visit electon comentator Anothony Green's website by clicking here.

Links to party websites:

4 Change

Policy and Parties - General Comments

The Greens

Though the Green's Policy active at the 2007 election still stands, the Federal Paliamentary Greens have chosen to override this policy by releasing a series of Safe Climate Bills. This is a good thing as their 2007 was only marginally better than the ALP policy.

The Safe Climate Bills are set in a context of rapid transformation of the Australian economy based on renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport, and forest protection, and are the strongest of any party assessed.

The Greens have shown either their committment to political pragmatism or complete ineptitude by choosing to focus on a long term stabilisation target and "ultimate goal" of 350 ppm CO2, claiming it is the upper end for atmospheric CO2 concentration to achieve a "safe" climate. The 350 ppm CO2 is not a safe target, it is simply a target of convenience addopted by a group of American climate campaigners and deliberately misrepresented as safe because they felt to ask a reduction below this would be too much for the public to handle.

The Green's decision to play politics with the lives of billions over climate change, rather than base their "ultimate goal" on good science, is no different in priciple than the approach adopted by Labor or Liberal parties; the only difference being, if the Green were in fact to be elected to Government, their policies are much closer to those that needed if we are to save the future and restore a safe climate for future generations and the world ecosystems.

Some other positve points from their policies include a long term plan to go to 100% renewables, re-establishing support for remote renewable power systems, focusing on energy efficiency, a working ETS, electrified transport, transitioning out of native forest logging, including voluntary emission reductions into an effective ETS and much more.

For a full discussion of the issue of a safe long term CO2 climate stabilisation target see the Target 300 website.

The Greens have also popped high profile candiate Clive Hamilton into this by-election in Higgins, while a NSW party staffer is running in Bradfield. With high profile candidates and internal policy processes being ignored the Greens committment to grass root democracy seems to continue to fade.

Democrats

The Democrats were the first party to bring the issue of climate change to Federal Parliment, and have always taken climate change seriously with excellent work being done by the former Senator Lyn Allison and involvement in current campaigns by their Higgins candidate, David Collyer. Sadly it seems they no longer have enough strength in NSW to field a candidate.

Their policy is, by their own admission, now somewhat dated (2001) and is currently being updated for the next federal election. Much of the analysis for this election was based on the analysis done by Vote Climate on the 2007 Federal Election.

4Change (Change Change Coalition)

4Change is a new party stating that they have evolved from the Climate Change Coalition, which ran in the 2007 NSW and Federal Elections (See Past Elections and follow the links to the National Library archive for Vote Climate's 2007 analysis of the CCC's former climate polcies).

The new party now has as its core focus polcies around better politics with the issue of climate falling back into one of three main areas of interest: economics, environment and community sustainability. In fact their climate policies have gone significantly backwards since the last election, when they originally advocated for a 40% reduction in emission by 2020 and opposed nuclear to now where they have no targets and support research into nuclear energy.

Patrice Newell, the founder of the orginal Climate Change Coalition, is not a member of the 4Change executive committee. This may have something to do with the weak climate policies of 4Change.

For a party that has it roots in climate change, a lack of policy on climate change emission reduction goals and targets, and sectors other than energy (e.g. agriculture, forestry and transport etc) is very concerning.

Liberals

The Liberal party has approached this by-election with a complete lack of substance and no policies, which is at least better than the Labor party, who wouldn't even run a candidate.

Consequently the policy analysis is based largely on the 2007 election analysis with a couple of minor changes to reflect the major divisions within the Liberal Party over climate change policy. One thing the division has shown is the depth of the feeling of the climate skeptics within in the Liberal Party. This opposition to the idea is so strong that even despite Ian MacFarlane's negotiation of billions of dollars of extra compensation in Labor's ETS for big polluters and big business, the sceptics are still opposing Labor's revised ETS.

The Liberal Democrats

They are taking the soft climate sceptic line, claiming the world is warming but the science is still unclear as to how much of this warming is caused by humans.

They argue that no form of energy should be subsidised over another and that we need a national energy grid and despite claiming they don't support any particular energy source over any other, the LDP spends a significant amount of space arguing for the merits of nuclear energy and uranium mining. They seem to ignore the fact the a nuclear power stations can not be insured in the private market with out a government back limited liability.

Given their paramount support of individual porperty rights, I suppose the LDP would also argue all land stolen from aboriginal tribes, taken by force by invading Englishmen, be return to the descendants of those tribes to then be bought or leased back by the current occupiers, or else have the occupiers evicted. Or perhaps it is only property rights for some, not all.

The Christian Democrats

The Christian Democrats have decided that God supports uranium mining and the nuclear industry, that our current climate change is natural and won't destroy the world, and that they dont like Muslims. Just in case God couldn't help you find their candiate on the ballot paper, they are running 9 candidates to improve the odds.

One Nation

One Nation is running a strong climate sceptic line on climate change, claiming it's all and natural and good for us. They propose nationalising our energy indistrusties, in particular oil and gas and to prevent these industries from selling their products based on international parity pricing. They support enthanol and boidiesel, nuclear, coal and hot rocks, but not renewables. In general the policies are quite rambling and not very well put together.

Independent - Climate Sceptics

Stephen Murphy, running in Higgins, is classic climate sceptic parroting the misinformation largely funded by the fossil fuel industries while ignoring the conclusive scientific opinion on the issue. At a climate change forum in Higgins, he made claims such as we are "actually reaching a period of cooling" and that there is "absolutely zero connection between bushfire and and climate", conveniently ignoring the record breaking heatwave and drought that preceded black Saturday in 2009 (Monash Journal 23/11).

The Bradfield Climate Sceptic candidate is Bill Koutalianos, and is part of a group that is looking to establish a Climate Sceptic Party