Conscious Climate Conscience

Dear Reader,

Bradfield by-election is just around the corner on the fifth of December. Do you know who you are voting for? The ABC website has a list of the candidates and a short description here. I thought I’d summarise things quicker for the conscious climate conscience reader.

North Shore drivers head to work through the severe dust storm earlier this year. The dust was blown from drought-afflicted Western NSW by strong winds. The absence of rain has pushed farmers off the land. This change in usual levels of rainfall in Southern Australia has been attributed to climate change.

First, Labor is not putting forward a candidate. This is, of course, because it is one of the safest Liberal seats in the country and Labor would have gotten a beating. At the 2007 federal election when Dr. Nelson was running, the Liberal Party recorded 63.5% of the two-party preferred vote.

So, who are the candidates? (Warning: there are 22) Let’s start with the people I have broadly called the

Climate action candidates

• Susie Gemmell (Greens) Watch the AYCC interview here
• Deborah Burt (CCC or Climate Change Coalition). Appears to be in two parties. The first being CCC; the second being 4change.
• Goronwy Price (Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy) website here
• Simon Kelly (Independent). He says he is running to make Bradfield a marginal seat. He has clear opinions on Climate issues that can be seen here

and broadly the Climate deniers

• Bill Koutalianos (Independent). He has an impressively crap website here
• Victor Watterson (One Nation). He expresses here his painfully bad understanding what he calls ‘accepted science’.
• Any of the eight Christian Democratic Party - Fred Nile Group Candidates
  
  • J. Whitehall; J. Luke; R. Peebles; D. Allen; L. Thew; A. Hestelow; J. Pender; D. Pix;
  • I don’t know which Christians they are. Apparently, they disagree with The Pope (who is talking with climate activists tomorrow) and Australian Bishops (see this article from 2006) and they side with the extreme right as deniers.
  • Did i mention they are running eight candidates from the same party and making the by-election a farce? Even with all my experience as a candidate and commentator, when I voted last week I was confused by the amount of unnecessary candidature. It is likely to backfire on them though as any vote they would have got will end up being donkey votes as people fail to complete the form.

What about the other candidates?

• Can’t go past Marianna Leishman (Australian Sex Party). Don’t google it = ) Visit the website here
• Peter Hanrahan (Independent). He has lived with Bi-Polar disorder much of his life. Peter is running because he wants to show that people with disabilities can run for Parliament.
• Brian Buckley (Independent). This guy loves an election contest and appears to have run in Federal, State and Local elections all over Sydney. His main issue is making Australia a Republic.

Here you have a very broad and general outline of the Candidates. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of this election. It is the last national election before COP15 Climate Conference. Rudd and his team will watch it and plan for next year’s federal election. So, vote loud for a safe climate.

Have you got any opinons on who is going to win? Who are you voting for?