It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point.\u00a0 Australia\u2019s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow.\u00a0 Having himself turned the country\u2019s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language.<\/p>\n
The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success.\u00a0 Billboards featured the prime minister as a \u201cCoal-o-phile Dundee\u201d, mercilessly mocked Australia\u2019s climate policies and responses to the murderously scorching bushfires of 2020.<\/p>\n
It had begun modestly: a target of $12,500 to fund a few billboards in Glasgow during COP26 as part of the project JokeKeeper: Shaming Australia\u2019s climate inaction<\/a>, described as, \u201cSubversive comedy to ridicule fossil fuel supporting parties in the upcoming federal election.\u201d<\/p>\n But the contributions gushed in, passing $160,000.\u00a0 It was then that Ilic began to think even more boldly. On October 14, he announced<\/a> that JokeKeeper was rolling \u201cinto New York City on the way to COP26 in Glasgow\u201d.\u00a0 New Yorkers were advised to head down to Times Square \u201cto see our billboard wrapping the Marriot Marquis for a full 10 minutes.\u201d\u00a0 It also included a 3min20s loop viewable 3 times. \u201cSo you can keep track of it all we\u2019ve made you a handy Bingo Card.\u201d In simple terms, Ilic had secured a 10-minute slot on the 77-foot \u201cGodzilla\u201d billboard.\u00a0 The headline parody: \u201cVisit Australia, we\u2019re rich in wind, sunshine and climate denial\u201d.\u00a0 For good measure, it features a kangaroo ablaze and koalas perched in a tree. Hug them before they vanish.<\/p>\n On CNN, Ilic was also ablaze<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cWe have a PM who at the height of the bushfires took a holiday in Hawaii.\u201d\u00a0 Morrison was the sort of fellow who \u201calways runs away from a national crisis.\u00a0 We have to lead our leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n Morrison is certainly one to run away from a certain target towards the sunset of vague aspiration.\u00a0 His mantra of \u201ctechnology not taxes\u201d is one such example.\u00a0 While few would disagree that technology will play a vital role in reducing carbon emissions, stimulating its development can come from, as Michael Keating puts it<\/a>, implementing \u201cpolicies to first encourage this innovation and then the take-up of the resulting new technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n To aid what is essentially a non-policy, Morrison has his truculent junior Coalition partners.\u00a0 The Nationals portray themselves as the party of opposition, despite being part of the government.\u00a0 Former political advisor John Menadue sums up the somewhat perverse situation by remarking<\/a> that a party which draws in only 5 percent of the national vote \u201cis holding Australia to ransom on climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n In a truly absurd spectacle, National Party politicians pontificate in favour of the fossil fuel industry, seeking a socialist-styled underwriting<\/a> of its workings and policies that would chastise banks for not funding policies that rent the earth.\u00a0 Their traditional base \u2013 the farming constituency \u2013 risks suffering the most from this suicidal adventurism.<\/p>\n Certain figures in the mining industry can only delight in such committed subservience.\u00a0 Gina Rinehart, Australia\u2019s wealthiest individual, has become the lumpy Boadicea of climate change denial, funding think-thanking endeavours that seek to deny anthropogenic change while keeping her influence<\/a> strong with the Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, former resources minister Matt Canavan and the current Attorney-General Michaelia Cash.<\/p>\n As owner of Hancock Prospecting, her interests in coal are global and unsparing, featuring such projects as an expansion into North America.\u00a0 Her ventures into Canada\u2019s Rocky Mountains have so far been frustrated by the governments of Alberta and the federal government but that has not stopped her from taking them to court.\u00a0 She was undeterred by the 679-page report by the Joint Review Panel led by the Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal Impact Assessment Agency on her proposed Grassy Mountain project.\u00a0 The authors had taken a dim view<\/a> of potential effects of selenium pollution, threats to water quality in the Oldman River basin and dangers posed to the cutthroat trout.\u00a0 The Australian, however, remains a devotee of both fossil fuel exploitation and litigation.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Rinehart revealed to students attending her old Perth school St. Hilda\u2019s Anglican School for Girls, how the recipient of a wealthy mining fortune can diminish science and embrace a stubborn parallel reality.\u00a0 In her 16-minute long video<\/a> showing a modest command of language and much footage of herself at school, she wishes to set the record straight on the lunacy of climate change, though the ABC tells us<\/a> that only portions of the production were shown to those tender school minds.\u00a0 \u201cRationale should ask, why does the media in general and those they influence now call for reducing carbon?\u00a0\u00a0 More questions spring to mind.\u00a0 Please be very careful about information spread on an emotional basis, or tied to money, or egos or power seekers.\u201d\u00a0 A marked, if unintendedly accurate self-portrait, a warning for all those around her, if ever there was one.<\/p>\n Rinehart continues her lesson, reflecting on an education free of propaganda (because Australian school curricula were obviously free of that) and full of analytical thrust. \u201cIt concerns me greatly, that the current generation of school leavers and attendees, too often miss such important basics.\u00a0 As too often propaganda erodes these critical foundations.\u201d\u00a0 Rinehart, it should be remembered, has a psychological profile befitting many a dysfunctional Roman emperor, with demanding and suspicious children<\/a> to boot.<\/p>\n With such characters in the fossil fuel consortium, Ilic has his dark comedic scripts written for him.\u00a0 The billboard effort in Times Square has as its target something the German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.\u00a0 And cheap grace is precisely the sort of thing the Australian delegation at Glasgow will be offering in spades and tailings.<\/p>The post Cheap Grace and Climate Change: Australia and COP26<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point.\u00a0 Australia\u2019s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow.\u00a0 Having himself turned the country\u2019s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Cheap Grace and Climate Change: Australia and COP26<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35463,175,478,6207,20461],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351497"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351497"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351633,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351497\/revisions\/351633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}