rstuart- I think the answer of the 360 of both party's policies is simply because Labor are NOW in government, and as thus are now being offered all of the contracts from any companies interested in jumping into the carbon market, while the Liberals are now in opposition and, now likely missing out on the contracts, now have the luxury to lazily say whatever approach the now-government is taking is irresponsible and saying whatever different policy they can come up with.

It's nothing but a change of circumstance between two equally shallow parties trying to make the best of their circumstances in a gigantic scam scheme.

If Labor lost the election to the Libs, expect Tony Abbot to "come up with a new market scheme" and Labor to take Tony's old position within a week.

So Stuart’s irony metre was maxed-out by Lib Lab ETS positions.
Now, I would have thought , to have irony, an outcome needs a certain measure of the unexpected.

So how could anyone who has had experience of OZ politics, have found such ‘contortions’ unexpected.
RobP reminded us of what happened a decade or more ago when Hawke, Keating & Howard played roles other than the ones they auditioned for.
And Stuart, himself, appears to both acknowledge & endorse such
“politicians, their number 1 priority is and should be the politics.”
“ Rudd left an opening ..so big your could drive a truck load of spin through it. That is just what Mr Abbott is doing. He would be a very poor politician if he didn't”

How then could such a piddling thing as libs peddling centralism & labs peddling freemarket max-out his metre ?
One possibility ,considering his handle , could be that Stuarts been shopping for price rather than quality, at El Cheapo Metres .
Which has some credence since I did notice his logic – metre started to go all wonky about six months ago.

The real pity though, is that if now such mundane things max-out Stuarts metre.
He’ll never get to experience the really big ironies like: 1 million+ belching camels NOT counting in ETS calculations , but a few thousand burping, chardonnay drinking, branch stacking, lefties, COUNTING!

Or the carbon lore anomaly that allows the biggest polluters to reduce culpability by offsetting it against their burgeoning populations (per capita)

Now those are real ironies for you…though I guess, none of them would register on Stuart’s Mickey Mouse metres

Still Stuart says: “ No one is compelling you to join the religion… Find somewhere else that will take you, and no one will stop you going”
But with the the ETS intended to be set in L-A-W, one might ask ‘where can one go, other that, to the outback with those disenfranchised camels?'.

Horus,

That post's pretty high up on my wedgie meter. Well, attempted wedgie, anyway.

>>How then could such a piddling thing as libs peddling centralism & labs peddling freemarket max-out his metre ?<<

FWIW, I think rstuart's irony may have been in reference to the way individuals in those parties have been forced to go, rather than the parties per se. You just have to look at Peter Garratt at the moment to see that.

Rstuart
People want to eat bread or drive cars. They don’t want “permits”. The only reason they pay for permits is ultimately to avoid being physically attacked by armed officers, in this case enforcing a law against all productive activity involving carbon unless they pay money to the state. Otherwise people could just do the productive activity without paying for a permit, which is the situation now. Thus the purpose of the ETS is to force people to pay for these permits which, if they were free to choose, the state knows they would not willingly pay for.

The point is, there is no ideological inversion, in which the supposed left wing party is defending the private, and the supposed right wing party is defending the public control of the means of production. Both parties are engaged in central planning schemes for the state to intervene in private transactions so as to control the means of production by forcibly overriding freedom of choice. “Socialist” or “interventionist” is the term you’re looking for, not “free market”.

Why are they doing this? Because they’re trying to adjust the world’s climate by directing economic activity away from certain uses and towards certain other uses. And why? Because they’re trying to achieve inter alia ecological sustainability, or maintenance of ecosystems within existing ranges. So it’s not “delusional” to suggest that they’re trying to politically control the world’s economy and the ecology. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

I haven’t suggested you’re in favour of rape, genocide, etc. But the issue is whether coercion is justified for no other reason than that ”the majority” are (assumed to be) in favour of it. Even assuming AGW, the argument for either Labor or Liberal policies on global warming assume such a justification, which would equally justify rape, robbery or genocide.

“Find somewhere else that will take you, and no one will stop you going.”
You are assuming what is in issue. Why shouldn’t the warmist zealots be the ones to piss off and leave everyone else in peace?

Even assuming AGW, the AGW camp have not even begun to explain or justify what reason there is to think that the best solution is by way of government attempts at centralised control of the climate, the economy and ecosystems. They simply assume all the tenets of central planning that have been disproved over and over again at enormous cost in human suffering and environmental destruction. It’s not enough for them to *disagree with* the ethical and pragmatic arguments for liberty: they need to *refute* them, which they haven't even started.

Thus the irrationality of warmism is not just in the defects of the natural science they rely on, which in any event does not supply value judgments, and therefore provides no justification whatsoever for any policy.

Their vacuousness as a matter of the social sciences is equally irrational and even more culpable.

As to the supposed preferability of one interventionist policy to another, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It would be preferable not to vote for either parcel of rogues. They belong in prison, not in the legislature.

examinator
The fact that you are forced to pay for actions that you consider immoral, destructive, or just plain crazy, is not an argument in favour of other people being forced to pay for actions that they consider immoral, destructive or just plain crazy: it is an argument against both.

Whether the dykes or AGW policies are beneficial is what is in issue. Majority vote does not of itself justify coercion as you have assumed. It is you who are failing to consider the complexity and the context, not I.

Thus even if AGW is happening, the arguments for policy measures still don’t reach first base. The warmists still haven't established - haven't even begun to consider - whether the relevant resources would not be more economically employed to better effect satisfying the relevant human wants (in the widest possible sense including values of ecosystems etc.,) in the absence of such policy measures, and how they know.

Peter Hume: "The point is, there is no ideological inversion, in which the supposed left wing party is defending the private, and the supposed right wing party is defending the public control of the means of production."

The inversion was in the way they went about controling it. It is pretty straight forward. Even my old sparring partner, Horus, doesn't deny it exists. As you can probably tell from his tone, I am sure he would love to be able to do so. Yet you can't acknowledge it. That's just weird.

Peter Hume: "it’s not “delusional” to suggest that they’re trying to politically control the world’s economy and the ecology."

The delusion is to think there is a single world government doing the controling. It is delusional to think an agreement free countries voluntarily enter and can later choose to withdraw from is a form of tyrannical government.

Peter Hume: "But the issue is whether coercion is justified for no other reason than that ”the majority” are (assumed to be) in favour of it."

If you mean justified in some moral sense, then we have another philosophical argument. I don't like such arguments as I think they are essentially meaningless, as in asking how many angles fit in the head of a pin.

If you are asking whether such agreements are in general in everybodies best interests, they usually are otherwise most people would not agree with them. For example, over the past few decades we have had international agreements draw up to try and protect fish stocks. In the short term these were vociferously fraught by the people they most effected, the fisherman as it drove many out of the industry. Nonetheless without the agreements it is possible fisherman around the world might end up like the former Canadian cod fishing fleet. Which is to say, all doing something entirely as there are no cod left to fish.

CO2 and global fisheries are two examples of one situation where your "let everybody do their own thing" style of government fails. That is anywhere the tragedy of the commons applies.