Latest news with #Kooyong
West Australian
29-05-2025
- Politics
- West Australian
Randwick Council votes to consider ban on election corflutes on power poles
A local Sydney council has voted to consider a total ban on election corflutes on all public infrastructure, citing 'visual pollution' and a perceived 'impost on campaigns' for the move. Randwick Council voted 9-5 on Tuesday night to pass a motion from Greens councillor Masmoomeh Asgari for council staff to report on reducing election waste material and banning corflutes on council property, including parking poles. 'In the past three years we have had two federal elections, a state election and a local government election and in each case large amounts of waste have been produced in the form of corflutes and paper (how-to-votes and flyers) in order to inform voters about candidates, their policies and how they should vote,' the motion states. 'Corflute waste is a particular issue in Randwick. Ausgrid have banned them on telegraph poles, so the main display structures are council's parking poles and the like. 'This annoys residents due to the visual pollution, the inconvenience of placement and the litter, including from plastic ties. 'Informing voters is essential in a democracy but it's time to investigate how this can be done with less waste.' The potential ban follows a burst of corflute controversy in the May 3 federal election, including furious debate over where exactly corflutes are permitted. Footage of federal independent MP Monique Ryan's husband Peter Jordan pulling down a corflute of Liberal challenger Amelia Hamer went viral on social media during the heated Kooyong contest in Melbourne. The footage shows Mr Jordan walking away with the Hamer placard, with a Liberal Party supporter pursuing him. Mr Jordan claims the sign had been illegally placed on public land. 'I'm taking the sign down … it's on public land … I'm not saying who I am,' Mr Jordan says in the video. Responding to the kerfuffle, the Australian Electoral Commission said it did not regulate the placement of political signage. 'Signage on public land is generally a matter for local council,' the AEC said. Later, Mr Jordan apologised for the blow up. 'I unreservedly apologise for removing the sign. It was a mistake,' he said. 'I believed the sign was illegally placed, but I should have reported my concerns to council.' South Australia, meanwhile, has banned corflutes from public roads, trees and poles in state and federal elections. Randwick, which takes in Sydney's eastern beach suburbs, sits within the federal electorates of Wentworth and Kingsford Smith. Liberal councillor Christie Hamilton voted against the motion on Tuesday night, telling NewsWire candidate posters served an important democratic function. 'I don't think we should ban them everywhere,' she said. 'They trigger for people that there is an election coming. It is up to the parties and candidates to do all they can do to put their candidates out there and it needs to be visual. 'It can't just be words on a page, they need to see who the person is. And if they see them on the street, they can come up and talk to them. 'It's part of the democratic process.' Ms Hamilton said Ms Asgari's motion had come about because of Greens anger over their corflutes being taken down during campaigns. 'Everyone gets their corflutes taken down,' she said. '(Liberal Wentworth candidate) Ro Knox had her corflutes taken down. There's nothing you can do about it. 'She (Ro Knox) put up funny stickers saying, 'please don't steal my corflutes'. You try to combat it with a bit of humour.' A report on the motion is expected within six months and Ms Hamilton said that vote on the report's recommendation would be the crucial one to watch for. 'When it comes back with the recommendation, that's when the real fight will start,' she said. 'I don't think Labor (councillors) will do it.'
Perth Now
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Perth Now
Corflute ban looms for fed up Aussies
A local Sydney council has voted to consider a total ban on election corflutes on all public infrastructure, citing 'visual pollution' and a perceived 'impost on campaigns' for the move. Randwick Council voted 9-5 on Tuesday night to pass a motion from Greens councillor Masmoomeh Asgari for council staff to report on reducing election waste material and banning corflutes on council property, including parking poles. 'In the past three years we have had two federal elections, a state election and a local government election and in each case large amounts of waste have been produced in the form of corflutes and paper (how-to-votes and flyers) in order to inform voters about candidates, their policies and how they should vote,' the motion states. 'Corflute waste is a particular issue in Randwick. Ausgrid have banned them on telegraph poles, so the main display structures are council's parking poles and the like. 'This annoys residents due to the visual pollution, the inconvenience of placement and the litter, including from plastic ties. 'Informing voters is essential in a democracy but it's time to investigate how this can be done with less waste.' Randwick Council has voted to investigate whether or not to ban election corflutes. NewsWire / Jeremy Piper Credit: News Corp Australia The potential ban follows a burst of corflute controversy in the May 3 federal election, including furious debate over where exactly corflutes are permitted. Footage of federal independent MP Monique Ryan's husband Peter Jordan pulling down a corflute of Liberal challenger Amelia Hamer went viral on social media during the heated Kooyong contest in Melbourne. The footage shows Mr Jordan walking away with the Hamer placard, with a Liberal Party supporter pursuing him. Mr Jordan claims the sign had been illegally placed on public land. 'I'm taking the sign down … it's on public land … I'm not saying who I am,' Mr Jordan says in the video. Responding to the kerfuffle, the Australian Electoral Commission said it did not regulate the placement of political signage. 'Signage on public land is generally a matter for local council,' the AEC said. Later, Mr Jordan apologised for the blow up. 'I unreservedly apologise for removing the sign. It was a mistake,' he said. 'I believed the sign was illegally placed, but I should have reported my concerns to council.' South Australia, meanwhile, has banned corflutes from public roads, trees and poles in state and federal elections. Randwick, which takes in Sydney's eastern beach suburbs, sits within the federal electorates of Wentworth and Kingsford Smith. Liberal councillor Christie Hamilton voted against the motion on Tuesday night, telling NewsWire candidate posters served an important democratic function. 'I don't think we should ban them everywhere,' she said. 'They trigger for people that there is an election coming. It is up to the parties and candidates to do all they can do to put their candidates out there and it needs to be visual. 'It can't just be words on a page, they need to see who the person is. And if they see them on the street, they can come up and talk to them. 'It's part of the democratic process.' Randwick Council encompasses Sydney's eastern beachside suburbs. NewsWire / Damian Shaw Credit: News Corp Australia Ms Hamilton said Ms Asgari's motion had come about because of Greens anger over their corflutes being taken down during campaigns. 'Everyone gets their corflutes taken down,' she said. '(Liberal Wentworth candidate) Ro Knox had her corflutes taken down. There's nothing you can do about it. 'She (Ro Knox) put up funny stickers saying, 'please don't steal my corflutes'. You try to combat it with a bit of humour.' A report on the motion is expected within six months and Ms Hamilton said that vote on the report's recommendation would be the crucial one to watch for. 'When it comes back with the recommendation, that's when the real fight will start,' she said. 'I don't think Labor (councillors) will do it.'
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Who's Winning the Climate War? Australia.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office in 2022 pledging to end the country's climate wars — and he may have just done it. "The wars are on, but the good guys are winning them more,' Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen told me ahead of Albanese reappointing him to his post last week, after his Labor Party won its largest majority in 80 years. Climate does not generally win elections — but it can help lose them, as demonstrated by four previous Australian prime ministers and the Greens' recent losses in the EU. More often, it simply becomes a partisan cudgel, as in the United States, where Republicans are fast dismantling the Biden administration's clean-energy agenda after Democrats failed to defend it in the 2024 election. So the fact that Albanese became Australia's first prime minister in 20 years to serve a full term and win another in part on his climate agenda is worth unpacking, even for politicians and energy leaders who have never heard of Warringah or Kooyong. His trajectory holds lessons for not only how to win on climate-friendly energy policies, but how to hold power while executing on them. Key among his tactics is a relentless focus on positive economic messaging — namely, that Australia has hitched its economic engine to renewable energy. At the same time, he's pursued a decidedly all-of-the-above energy policy that envisions continued exports of coal and natural gas from the country's ample deposits. (Compare that to the indifference of national Democrats in the U.S. when party leaders in natural gas-rich states protested against former President Joe Biden's moratorium on export permits.) The campaign marked a new chapter in selling voters on not just the prospect of climate action, but the specific policies needed to get there. "The 2022 election, when we came to office, was a climate win," Bowen said. "The 2025 election was an energy win." It also helped that Albanese and his party got a big assist from Donald Trump. The election was a toss-up until late February, when Trump and his trade wars began dragging down MAGA-embracing Liberal leader Peter Dutton in the polls. But the climate formula is simple — not to say boring — to hear Bowen tell it. The win was not particularly sexy. It was basic economics and a willingness to course correct in response to voters' anxieties about the cost of energy. "Climate change in Australia has cost several prime ministers their job," Bowen said. "We won the argument when we turned the debate around and didn't accept the premise that action on climate change can come at an economic cost, but in fact was an economic opportunity for Australia." Albanese's achievement in getting voters to accept this idea comes after a decade and a half of painful political lessons. One key takeaway: double down on carrots over sticks. Where enervated Democrats in the U.S. are now backing away from climate policies in the name of "affordability," Australia's Labor fended off cost-of-living arguments by giving out $300 energy bill credits and corporate tax exemptions for electric vehicles. It handed out subsidies for renewable energy — rooftop solar in particular, which is now on a third of Australian homes, the highest concentration in the world — but also batteries and efficient appliances. Another message other countries are already heeding is to jettison carbon pricing, the policy that toppled Labor's Julia Gillard in 2013. Turning away from carbon taxes has proved a political winner in two hemispheres. It's much the same story as in Canada, where, before Trump proved decisive to that election as well, now-Prime Minister Mark Carney's first campaign move was to cut himself loose from Justin Trudeau's consumer carbon tax (he kept a cap on big industrial emitters, though). At the same time, on Australia's right, worsening wildfires and heat waves eventually coalesced enough independents into a loose coalition known as the Teals that campaigned on climate change. In 2019, a Teal ousted Tony Abbott, the former Liberal prime minister who unseated Gillard six years earlier over her carbon tax. That set up the 2025 election along a broad axis of nominal support for maintaining the country's net-zero emission goal. But where Labor campaigned on more renewables to replace aging coal plants, the Liberals threw their weight behind nuclear power — complete with a $331 billion price tag, by their own estimate. Energy policy turned into an own goal, with Dutton losing his seat after he proposed putting a nuclear plant in his district. "They weren't vulnerable to cost of living being tied to their electricity policies or their car policies or anything, because the Liberals had already made a terrible blunder in going for really expensive nuclear," said Mark Kenny, a professor at Australian National University and a former chief political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. Albanese also hasn't made any moves away from the country's considerable coal and natural gas reserves, which have made it the world's second-largest exporter of both (after the U.S., for gas, and Indonesia, for coal). "We are a traditional energy superpower, and we want to become a renewable energy superpower, but it takes time," Bowen said. (Carney is similarly pledging, "We can be an energy superpower.") Bowen's now seeking to secure Australia's bid to host next year's U.N. climate talks, on the basis of his record. "We'll be making economic arguments to other countries," he said. "Even if you don't think this is a moral obligation, the economics can work pretty well for us.'" That's how Australia has arrived at something of a Goldilocks moment. When automakers protested Labor's first-ever vehicle emissions standards, they scaled them back some. Not everything is kumbaya — farmers are still revolting over transmission lines being built across their property — but by and large, the wars have receded. "You must thread the needle of economic benefit first and foremost, then climate benefit," said Andrew Forrest, the Australian mining magnate turned climate evangelist who's made his Fortescue iron mining empire into an advertisement for the economic benefits of going green. If these policies sound a lot like Biden's, who signed laws that were projected to unleash roughly $1 trillion for clean energy and infrastructure while presiding over a historic boom in both fossil fuels and renewables, it's not a coincidence. "My little slogan is, 'The world's climate emergency is Australia's jobs opportunity,'" Bowen said. "That was, in part, to be fair to our American cousins, inspired by Joe Biden saying, 'I see climate change and I see jobs.' We're really saying the same sorts of things, but we've been able to, I guess, continue to argue and continue to prosecute it." Yet for all the lessons other countries might take from Albanese's win, Australia's success in extricating climate from the culture wars into the realm of policy debates may not be replicable here. As the Trump administration dismantles everything from fuel efficiency rules to power plant emissions standards, the biggest remaining question is whether Republicans will muster the motivation to maintain any scraps of the Inflation Reduction Act. There's something almost quaint about Australians having actually had it out over a period of decades, compared to the U.S.'s trajectory of pushing Democrats' profferings ever more irretrievably into the partisan fray. Australians concede a certain cynicism is lacking from their politics — in part thanks to mandatory voting, which reduces the incentive for politicians to pander to their bases. "They take what a politician says, as we say in Australia, with a pinch of salt, and look for the facts,' Forrest said. 'And therefore you got a different result in Australia than you did in North America." Still, politicians in other countries around the world would do well to look to Australia for how to turn down the temperature.
ABC News
13-05-2025
- Business
- ABC News
Breakfast Wrap: The 'messy' factional moves behind the new cabinet
How is Labor coming to terms with its new cabinet, after dumped minister Ed Husic labels Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles a "factional assassin"? On the Breakfast Wrap podcast, hear our interview with the federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Also, the brakes have been slammed on the US-China trade war, with the two countries agreeing to a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs. And one of the most fiery campaigns in the federal election has ended with a nail-biting finish, with Independent Dr Monique Ryan returning as the member for Kooyong in Melbourne's inner-east. After a tense week of counting, the incumbent defeated Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer by several hundred votes. Recap the morning's news, politics and global affairs with the Breakfast Wrap
News.com.au
12-05-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
Teal Monique Ryan claims key Victorian seat of Kooyong from Liberals Amelia Hamer
Liberal candidate for Kooyong Amelia Hamer has conceded defeat to teal independent Monique Ryan, with result taking nine days to finalise. Ms Hamer revealed in a post on her Instagram about 4.30pm on Monday that she had called Dr Ryan to congratulate her on her re-election. 'While counting continues, it is now clear the remaining ballots will not deliver us the majority we need to win the seat,' the post said. Dr Ryan released a statement shortly after, thanking Ms Hamer for her campaign and wishing her the best for the future. 'I am deeply grateful to my family, friends, my incredible team, and the many, many Kooyong volunteers, for their unwavering support over the past three years and throughout this campaign,' Dr Ryan said. 'It's a crucial time for Australia – we're facing a cost-of-living crisis, housing shortages, increasing intergenerational inequity, and our response to the global challenge of climate change has been too slow and too incremental. 'With the Albanese government holding an increased majority, it's time for it to show the courage we need – and respect the mandate given to it by the Australian public – by taking real action on these issues. 'I'm grateful for the opportunity to continue to hold the government to account on the economy, climate, health, and the other critical issues for my community.' Ms Hamer said standing as the Liberal candidate 'has been an honour' and thanked a list of groups who had supported her campaign. 'To the more than 54,811 Kooyong locals who voted for me, thank you for your confidence and trust in me as a potential representative,' she said. 'To those who took the time to speak with me and share your perspectives, values and ideas, thank you. 'To all our incredible volunteers who knocked on countless doors, stood at train stations in the early mornings, and shopping centres on the weekend thank you.' Ms Hamer concluded the post by saying the Liberal values 'like individual freedom, equality of opportunity, and free enterprise', are 'timeless' and 'worth fighting for'. 'We are so lucky to have a beautiful local community, a fair democracy, and a wonderful country,' she said. 'I hope to play my small part in making it a better place, now and into the future.' The battle for the seat of Kooyong was one of the most closely watched of the May 23 election, after controversial moments derailed the campaign for both candidates. As election campaigning began to ramp up in March, Dr Ryan's husband was forced to apologise after he was filmed tearing down a corflute poster belonging to rival candidate Ms Hamer. A month later, Ms Hamer was called out by Nine newspapers for owning properties in Canberra and London, despite claiming to be a renter throughout her election campaign. Dr Ryan claimed Kooyong at the 2022 election, where she controversially booted former treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Dr Ryan was a pediatric neurologist at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne before she entered politics.
