A maverick currency scheme from the 1930s could save the Greek economy.

The Eurozone crisis calls for radical solutions – and one of the most thrilling has been tried and tested. George Monbiot

Compare the terms demanded of the Greek government to those offered to the banks. Eurozone ministers now insist upon unconditional surrender: a national abasement that makes a mockery of democracy. But when the banks were bailed out, governments magicked up the necessary money almost unconditionally. They shyly requested a few token reforms, then looked away when the bankers disregarded them.

The German government, now crushing the life out of southern Europe, merely tickled its own banks. As the New York Times reported, though the corrupt German banking system “required a bailout bigger than the one American banks received”, “there is little appetite for change in Germany because the banking system is so deeply intertwined with its politics, serving as a rich source of patronage and financing for local projects”.

When the Greeks complain that they have been reduced to colonial subjects, they are right, but the colonial masters are not the northern members of the Eurozone. They are the private banks. The governments that seem determined to destroy a sovereign state for its impudence are merely the intermediaries of power.

None of this is to deny the corruption and fiscal promiscuity of previous Greek administrations. But while the banks have got away with far worse, the bullies of the Eurozone insist on extracting every last drop of blood from people who had no role in their governments’ deceptions.

Greece is stuffed: or so almost everyone asserts. Perhaps. Or perhaps there are possibilities we have scarcely begun to examine. I should warn you that no one in their right mind would take financial advice from me.(Or, for that matter, from most financial advisers) I seek only to suggest that there may be some possibilities of hope among the ruins.

One of these radical ideas was proposed a few months ago by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. He suggests stripping private banks of their remarkable power to create money out of thin air. Simply by issuing credit, they spawn between 95% and 97% of the money supply. If the state were to assert a monopoly on money creation, governments could increase their supply without increasing debt. Seigniorage (the difference between the cost of producing money and its value) would accrue to the state, adding billions of pounds to national coffers. The banks would be reduced to the servants, not the masters, of the economy.

An entirely different approach is proposed by Ann Pettifor, in Just Money. She argues that governments have failed to understand what money is. It should not be seen as a commodity, she says, but as a social relationship based on trust. Unusually for a radical critic of finance, she sees the creation of money by private banks as “a great civilisational advance”, freeing nations from the usurers who once monopolised and restricted wealth.

The supply of money is, in effect, unlimited: as long as there is sufficient productive activity to absorb it there is no obvious restraint on the amount of money that can be issued. So when governments and central bankers tell you that the money has run out, Pettifor argues, they are either deceiving us or deceiving themselves. What holds back economic activity is an unnecessary and artificial restriction of the medium of exchange.

Banking’s great civilisational advance has been all but destroyed through deregulation, whose result is a new system of usury, speculation and exploitation. Private banks borrow cheap and lend dear, forcing us to work ever longer hours and to inflict ever more damage on the natural world to service our debts. Pettifor suggests that*governments should reassert control over interest rates at every level of lending.

But perhaps the biggest transformation could happen at the local level. Greece already has set up some local currencies that have kept money circulating in several towns and cities as it cannot be siphoned away. (There are similar systems in Britain, such as the Bristol Pound). But strangely they do not make use of the thrilling, transformative system that almost saved Europe from fascism; the currency developed by the economist Silvio Gesell called stamp scrip. It is explained in Bernard Lietaer’s magnificent book The Future of Money.

In its original form, stamp scrip was a piece of paper on which a number of boxes were printed. The note would lose its validity unless a stamp costing 1% of its value was stuck in one of the boxes every month. In other words, the currency lost value over time, so there was no incentive to hoard it. Stamp scrip projects took off across Germany and Austria after national currencies collapsed in the early 1930s. In 1932, for example, the Austrian town of Wörgl was almost broke, unable to finance public works or to support its destitute population, until the mayor heard of Gesell’s proposal.

He put up the town’s tiny remaining fund as collateral against the same value of stamp scrip, and used it to pay for a building project. The workers then passed on the currency as quickly as they could. Like the magic pudding, this little pot of money kept circulating, enabling Wörgl to repave the streets, rebuild the water system, construct houses, a bridge and even a ski jump. In the 13 months of the experiment, the 5,500 scrip schillings in circulation were spent 416 times, creating between 12 and 14 times as much employment as the standard currency would have done. Unemployment vanished, and the stamp fees paid for a soup kitchen feeding 220 families.

The governments of Germany and Austria, profoundly threatened by the success of these projects, shut them down and employment collapsed once more. When the US economist Irving Fisher examined these experiments he concluded that “the correct application of stamp scrip would solve the depression crisis in the US in three weeks!”. Roosevelt’s government, aware that such currencies could invoke a massive loss of federal power, promptly banned it. Could these ideas be useful to Greece? Could they be of relevance in other parts of Europe? Even perhaps in Scotland, where the currency issue was unimaginatively fudged before the referendum? I don’t know. But if Greece leaves the Eurozone, it could open up a world of

possibility to which other nations have closed their minds.

A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

Melatonin and Aspirin - two common, cheap drugs that together prevent cancer and protect the cardiovascular system

Melatonin, the new partner to aspirin?

Aspirin is the most common drug taken for cardioprotection, with the added benefit of anticancer properties. Yet, it causes gastric haemorrhage. An alternative, safer cardioprotective drug than aspirin is needed.

Melatonin, commonly taken to induce sleep or counter jet lag, has cerebroprotective and anticancer properties, with no reported side-effects. We hypothesise that melatonin has beneficial preventive properties for various organ diseases through mechanisms not shared by aspirin.

Melatonin is synthesised mainly in the pineal gland. Its secretion into the bloodstream is regulated by the environmental light–dark cycle via the suprachiasmatic nucleus. The initial event is that very sensitive ocular photoreceptors stimulate formation of melanopsin within the basal retinal ganglia, which, in turn, sends signals to the pineal gland, from which release of melatonin, synthesised from serotonin, is either stimulated or inhibited.

Melatonin acts by both inducing sleep and restoring the inherent sleep rhythm that is related to the rise and fall of blood melatonin concentrations. Melatonin treatment helps to restore these human circadian rhythms, resulting in better cognition and less daytime fatigue¹. Experimental and clinical data have implicated melatonin in reduction of ischaemic-reperfusion injury, as originally studied in isolated rodent hearts². If melatonin concentrations also affect the occurrence of human infarcts, then the day–night pattern of changes in melatonin blood concentrations² becomes relevant. In patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction, the normal pattern is reversed, with less melatonin produced at night³.

In the brain, melatonin inhibits the potentially lethal opening of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore in isolated brain mitochondria, albeit at high concentrations⁴.

Finally, melatonin has antidiabetic⁵ and not well studied anticancer properties.

Overall, the organ and vascular protective qualities of melatonin at the cost of very few or no side-effects far exceed those of aspirin, which is much more widely used for cardioprotection than melatonin is. We declare no competing interests.

Lionel Opie, Sandrine Lecour lionel.opie@uct.ac.za Hatter Institute for Cardiovascular Research, Cape Town, Western Cape, ZA 7925, South Africa 

The Lancet, volume 385, February 28, 2015

1 Hickie IB, Rogers NL. Novel melatonin-based therapies: potential advances in the treatment of major depression. Lancet 2011; 378: 621–31.

2 Reiter RJ, Tan DX. Melatonin: a novel protective agent against oxidative injury of the ischemic/reperfused heart. Cardiovasc Res

2003, 58: 10–19.

3 Dominguez-Rodriguez A, Abreu-Gonzalez P, Garcia-Gonzalez, et al. Association of ischemiamodified albumin and melatonin in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction. Atherosclerosis 2008; 199: 73–78.

4 Andrabi SA, Sayeed I, Siemen D, et al. Direct inhibition of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore: responsible for anti-apoptotic effects of melatonin. FASEB J 2004; 18: 869–71.

5 Bazwinsky-Wutschke I, Bieseke L, Mühlbauer E, Peschke E. Influence of melatonin receptor signalling on parameters involved in blood glucose regulation. J Pineal Res 2014; 56: 82–96 .

Does Australia have a 'political crisis'?

By Don Aitkin
Posted Tuesday, 3 February 2015

This is my last reflection on what Paul Kelly has called 'the Australian crisis', his proposition that our political system is now unable to deal with reform of any kind, because the politicians find it just too hard. One cause is that our politics is almost completely adversarial, and another is that the electorate does not understand the realities of our political economy. We have become too used to annually increasing wealth.

I mentioned in one of the earlier posts that he argues that with respect to politicians we seem to move quickly from adulation to contempt. It may be that we are returning to an era of short-term governments, which enter on their term because of total dissatisfaction with their predecessors, and are in turn tossed out by an equally disenchanted electorate. Nothing much gets done at such times. What is it that has to be done, you ask. To that in a moment.

But we can notice, in support of Kelly, that the Baillieu/Napthine Government in Victoria lasted only one term, that the LNP in Queensland may have lost to the ALP that was thrown out of office only one term ago, and that the Coalition in NSW will probably get back in its coming election, but with a much reduced majority. Federally, the Coalition is way behind Labor, and is only halfway through its term. Is this a crisis?
Not really. There have been electoral phases like this before, and opinion polling is only a rough guide to outcomes. But we need to consider Kelly's point about the difficulty of undertaking reform. We are only fifteen or so weeks away from Joe Hockey's second Budget, and it seems that aspects of the first one are still in contention. What will happen to the second? Perhaps more important, what will the second Hockey budget be about?

I do think that there has been a marked reluctance by the ALP, the Parliament and the mass media to accept that the six-year Labor Government spent far too much, and that it committed future governments to a continuation of that spending. Yes, there was the global financial crisis, and some of that spending was necessary. But when that was over there was no return to economy or thrift. Instead, more was promised, as though the money-tree was having a second crop.

Instead, there was a rapid decline in our terms of trade, our export earnings and government revenue. For too long Treasury kept reassuring the Government that there would be an uptick. It never came. The first Hockey Budget was tough, but you would expect that. The response was that the Budget was unfair, because too much of its economies fell on those least able to afford them. The trouble is, that far too much of the Budget is a transfer system, exacting money from those able to pay taxes, and handing it over, in divers way, to those who don't, or who pay little. The following graph, which appeared in an earlier post, sets out the problem.

Societies have a choice in all this. You can ask the people who already pay 95 per cent of the income taxation to pay even more than they presently do, or you can reduce the transfers, or you can increase the GST level. You can increase company taxation. There is anguish whatever you do. Some people depend on the transfers. Those who already pay a lot of taxation (mostly wage and salary-earners, who can't offset easily) feel angry that they are to pay more. Increase company taxation and you reduce the incentive to create jobs. Increase GST? Well, the States would get it.

The Coalition is of the view that people pay too much tax anyway. Its position is that we are all expected to have a job and look after ourselves and our dependants. That is the responsible thing to do. The Government's task is to ensure that the economy is strong and that jobs are plentiful. It can tweak a bit, but tweaking is not the aim of the game. The expectation that tightening our belt is really unnecessary, because Australia is doing well in comparison to other countries, seems a tad on the loony side to me, whoever says it. And it is loonier still when you look at the great decline in mining revenue, and the number of companies in that sector that are closing down mines, laying off people or having other troubles.

The Greeks are congratulating themselves on the election of a government that is going to stand up for Greeks against the perfidious Germans and other Europeans who lent them lots of money, and want it paid back. No! say the Greeks, you're wealthy, so you can afford to wipe off our debt. I think that there are echoes of that sentiment across our country, and it's no more sensible here than it is in Greece.

There is, of course, a way out - for Australia, anyway. If we do not make appropriate reductions in public expenditure there will be a reluctance on the part of overseas lenders to provide loans, our interest bill will become an ever-larger proportion of our government's budget, and we will soon be back in the dark days. It happened in the late 1920s. it happened again in the stagflation period of the 1970s, and happened briefly in the early 1990s. It's a bit like war. We have generations now that have no memory at all of the Second World War, the Korean War of or the war in Vietnam. War sounds exciting to some, especially those who have never experienced it. We have had twenty years of continual prosperity. Affluence is seen by younger people as the natural order of things. If it is declining, then it must be the government's fault.

I feel like many others with whom I've talked. I would be most apprehensive about any return of the Labor Party, given the dysfunctional ALP government of 2007-2013. But I confess to a deal of disappointment with the actions so far of the Coalition Government. I had hoped for a lot better. I accept that the Senate has made things difficult, and there will be many more who find the position and actions of some of the cross-benchers juvenile and almost intolerable.

But that is where leadership comes in, and we haven't seen much of it. Yes, we have a crisis, but I think it is a short-term one. Unless there are substantial changes in the Government's leadership, the outcome will be unpleasant.

Don Aitkin has been an academic and vice-chancellor. His latest book, What Was It All For? The Reshaping of Australia was published by Allen & Unwin.

This article was published in On Line Opinion.

First, understand the history of the Vasse and Wonnerup Estuaries and the Lower Vasse River. Only then can you better manage these waterways.

It's important for people to understand what the environment of the Vasse and Wonnerup estuaries and of the Lower Vasse River were like prior to European settlement and how we've changed their environmental character in the years that followed.

The Vasse and Wonnerup estuaries were fresh in winter and saline to brackish in summer. The Capel River flowed into the eastern end of the Wonnerup estuary, with the Ludlow also contributing its water to the system. Today, the Capel River flows direct to the sea at Peppermint Grove Beach, so the total amount of freshwater entering this estuary is probably less than 25% of what it was.

The Vasse estuary received water from the Abba, Sabina, Vasse and New Rivers, with water from the latter two watercourses now mostly diverted to flow direct into the sea. Overall, it's likely that less than 50% of the original winter water flow is now entering this estuary.

The Lower Vasse River was, according to Pioneer of the Year award recipient Les Peaker nothing more than a winter-flowing creek that meandered through dense tea-tree thickets. It contained small permanent pools along its course in which fish and marron could always be found. When the Butter Factory floodgate was put in, the check boards turned this meandering creek into a large permanent pool which, because of the very low gradient in the river bed, extended for 2 or more kilometres upstream. It thus formed a very artificial but attractive entrance into Busselton.

Water quality problems in all these waterbodies are ultimately caused by excess nutrients. While fertiliser run-off from farms was the largest and initial source of these nutrients (phosphorous and nitrogen), urban development around Busselton has added extra nutrients via septic tanks polluting the groundwater and garden fertilisers washing off and also adding to the groundwater.

As a result, we today have 3 legacy issues which have to be dealt with. First, excess nutrients are still coming from farming land, although the amount is reducing as farmers improve their land management practices and as genuine farmers are being replaced by hobby farmers. Second, nutrients from urban areas are also reducing thanks to better fertiliser management by the City and by septic tanks being replaced by deep sewerage. Third, in the bed of the Lower Vasse River and in the Wonnerup Inlet, there is a thick layer of black, organic- and nutrient-rich sludge that has accumulated from when the floodgates were first installed. While the then Shire under Beryle Morgan dredged some of this sludge out of the Lower Vasse River in the 1980s, most of the pre-dredging sludge remains and it continues to accumulate.

What to do? In the Lower Vasse River, there is absolutely no alternatives but to remove the sludge and to work with farmers in the catchment of the Vasse River to reduce their nutrient losses. Cost: many millions of dollars and it will take another 10 or more years for this to happen. In the meantime, there are some cosmetic actions that can be taken - fountains that aerate the river water and vegetated floating islands - see www.fiatechnology.com.au (warning: I'm a director of this company) - but they will only ever treat the symptoms, they won't cure the illness.

In the estuaries proper, a return to hydrological conditions similar to those that prevailed prior to the installation of the floodgates is critical, together with removal of the sludge in the bed of the Wonnerup Inlet. Allowing more 'fresh' seawater into the two estuaries over the summer and autumn months will improve water quality, allow fish to move to parts of the estuary system where they won't die of low oxygen levels or bacterial/algal poisoning, while also providing food habitat for the 30,000+ waterbirds that use the estuaries over the summer. Cost of better floodgate management: a few 1000 dollars per year. Cost of dredging: a million or more dollars.

The picture is more complicated than this, of course, but state govt funding of an organisation such as GeoCatch which has almost 20 years' experience in land and water management is critical. Sadly, the announcement by water minister Mia Davies last October was a non-event, as the money promised to various bodies was far too small to make any real difference. The minister's commitment to a committee to report on what actions are needed next, while commendable in some ways, can also be seen as a way to defer any serious funding commitments until after it reports in about a year's time, coincidentally just before the next state election. You'll have to excuse my cynicism but GeoCatch has studied what needs to be done in the catchment - have a look at the various River Action Plans that are available online - and they simply need the money to implement these actions.

Four reasons I won’t have a prostate cancer blood test - Prof Ian Haines

5 December 2014

Four reasons I won’t have a prostate cancer blood test

Ian Haines

Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor & Senior Medical Oncologist and Palliative Care Physician at Monash University

For many men, the down sides of PSA testing outweigh the benefits.

Cancer Council Australia and the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia yesterday released new draft guidelines to help GPs counsel men who ask about prostate cancer tests. They advise GPs to explain the pros and cons of testing and, if the man wants to proceed, to give him a prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test every two years between the ages of 50 to 69.

Over the past few decades public health messages have drummed into us that early detection and treatment of diseases are key to good outcomes. Add to this the celebrity testimonials for prostate tests and non-celebrities who tell us their PSA test “saved their life” and it’s easy to see why men think the tests are beneficial.

While some prostate cancers are harmful and require treatment, many are not. So the prevailing wisdom – that early detection and treatment is best – doesn’t necessarily apply. At least 70% of men over 70 have prostate cancer detected in autopsies, and only 3% of men die because of prostate cancer.

I’m a 60-year-old male oncologist who has practised full-time for 36 years. Having “skin in the game” I’ve followed the testing debate closely since PSA was first used for screening in the early 1990s. Based on the evidence, if I was asymptomatic, I would not choose to have PSA test. Here’s why.

1. PSA is a poor testing tool

Prostate specific antigen (PSA) is an enzyme secreted in large amounts by normal as well as cancerous prostate cells. Only small amounts of PSA leak into circulation from a normal prostate, but this increases with any prostatic disease, benign or malignant.

An elevated PSA very often does not indicate cancer. Just one in four men with a positive PSA test will have prostate cancer.

PSA tests also miss many cancers. A 2003 study found that 21% of men who had a “normal” PSA of 2.6 to 3.9 at the end of a seven-year study did, in fact, have prostate cancer. Of the men with a PSA of 2.5 or less, 15% had cancer.

2. Prostate cancer isn’t like other cancers

The point of a cancer screening test is that it can reliably detect lesions that, if removed, will reduce the chances of that patient later developing a life-threatening cancer.

This is certainly true for polyps and bowel cancer screening. It is also powerfully true for precancerous lesions of the cervix and cervical cancer. It is somewhat true for mammography and precancerous or early invasive breast lesions.

It is not at all true for prostate cancer screening. In the majority of cases, prostate cancer behaves more like an indolent condition and does not pose any threat to the patient’s natural life span. This proportion of men dying of other causes continues to increase in the PSA era.

The only prostate screening study showing an advantage for screening has very serious flaws, which have also been noted by the head of the American Cancer Society Professor Otis Brawley and Professor Richard Ablin, who discovered the prostate specific antigen in the 1970s.

3. Surgery won’t always cure you

The only study comparing radical surgery with no treatment found equivalent outcomes. It concluded:

Among men with localized prostate cancer detected during the early era of PSA testing, radical prostatectomy did not significantly reduce all-cause or prostate-cancer mortality, as compared with observation, through at least 12 years of follow-up. Absolute differences were less than three percentage points.

Radical surgery “cures” six in seven cases of prostate cancer. But this does not remove the uncertainty and doubt for men with prostate cancer, as most of the six in seven who are “cured” did not require treatment and most of the one in seven with dangerous cancers requiring cure will not be helped by the treatment.

4. Detection and treatment comes with side effects

One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. Their lives will be profoundly changed by this cancer diagnosis, whether or not they proceed with treatment.

I do not want the anxiety, depression and relationship changes that follow diagnosis, radical surgery, active surveillance or any regular monitoring. I do not want to be impotent, which is very likely after radical treatment, or have urinary incontinence.

Even before treatment commences, after an abnormal PSA result, men are referred for a prostate biopsy: a surgical procedure that, even though it can indicate cancer, cannot give reliable information about how that cancer will behave.

I do not want the 1-2% risk of life-threatening infections caused by prostate biopsies.

Bottom line

I’m happy to take active positive steps to improve my health where it is proven that the benefits of the intervention outweigh the costs. But I’m not prepared to have my life ruled by a regular blood test like PSA that has no advantage.

First published in The Conversation

What do the Greens support as alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels?

The recent China/US agreement to reduce CO2 emissions prompted Martin Ferguson, former Labor Minister for Resources and Energy, to publicize a few "energy" facts which raise the question of whether emissions reduction is the real objective for "The Greens". Here is the reaction from my retired financial advisor friend AP to the former Minister's criticism:

"China and US have shown they will act," cheered The Greens' leader, Christine Milne. "The Australian Greens are congratulating the US and China on their agreement to act on global warming and say it's not too late for Australia to get on board."

It's fair to say the Greens and their boosters have used the USA-China accord as a stick with which to beat pretty much anyone outside of the renewable energy sector.

Their rhetoric is symptomatic of a broader malaise; our increasing inability to listen to, analyse, and properly understand the words and numbers underpinning complex policy.

Slogans should not be a substitute for serious discussion or critical thinking.

The question I would like answered is whether the Greens and the wide array of energy dogmatists who cheer them on actually understand - let alone support - any of the energy technologies that underpin the capacity of the two global superpowers to enter into the "Climate Pact" in the first place?

The People's Republic of China has 22 nuclear power reactors operating and a further 26 under construction.

Additional reactors - enough to triple nuclear capacity to at least 58 gigawatts by 2020 - are planned. As a rule of thumb, a typical new-build reactor will generate about 1 gigawatt a year, so it appears there are quite a few new Chinese nuclear power plants on the drawing board.

This will raise the percentage of China's electricity produced by nuclear power from the current 2 per cent, to more than 7 per cent, by 2020. Thereafter, another threefold increase in nuclear capacity (to about 150 gigawatts) is planned by 2030; and then more again by 2040.

Not only does nuclear power offer an enormous opportunity to Australia's uranium exporters, it clearly has a central role to play in China's decarbonisation. Yet the last time I checked, the Australian Greens were trenchantly opposed to the use of - let alone the further development of - this major energy source. Of course, they are not the only people in Canberra to hold such a view.

Hydroelectricity is also incredibly important to any future reduction in China's emissions.

Hydro is the world's leading source of renewables-based electricity and in
2012, it produced more than twice as much power as all other forms of renewables combined. In China, hydropower has long been the single most important source of renewable energy and it will remain so in 2040. China last year brought online a record 31 gigawatt of hydropower.

And while the country's investment in hydro will fall after 2020, this is simply because most of the suitable hydro sites will have been by then developed, not because better or cheaper renewable technologies will have become available. Hydro will still account for about 40 per cent of total energy produced by renewables in China in 2040.

As a party who owes its parliamentary advent to an anti-dam campaign, it is hard to see how the Australian Greens could change the party's opposition to China's - or anyone else's - dam-building.

Now let's look at the USA; a country that is already leading the world in the field of carbon reductions; with emissions today back to levels last seen in the mid-1990s. It is an astounding achievement, but not one born of a carbon price or a Renewable Energy Target. Rather, it has been the rapid and dramatic discovery and use of cleaner burning indigenous natural gas supplies that has cleaned up the American power system.

The scale of the USA shale gas expansion is immense. In the few years immediately following the technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that made vastly more resources commercially available, the price of gas fell from more than $13 per gigajoule in 2006, to less than $4 today.

Gas use has soared and gas has displaced coal as the country's leading energy source.

The United States today has 487,286 gas wells in production; a staggering number. And throughout 2014, more than 300 drill rigs have been drilling for gas across the US. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that in 2040, gas will provide more energy to the USA than coal, wind and solar combined.

And what do The Australian Greens say on natural gas development? They oppose it.

Lastly, the IEA forecasts China will remain the world's largest coal user in
2040 - with consumption three times that of India, the world's second-largest user. Not surprisingly, the IEA says carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an essential mitigation technology.

As part of their "Climate Pact" the US and China aim to use advanced coal technologies, including a major CCS project in China.

The Australian Greens? In 2011, they insisted CCS be excluded from the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, set up with the Gillard Government.

Frankly, it is hard to see what Senator Milne was referring to last week when she said: "The Greens will continue to push for true leadership and real action to address the greatest challenge of this century - global warming."

Energy security and climate policy are areas of complex policy. "True leadership and real action" is indeed required.

But it actually consists of sophisticated thinking and rigorous debate; not opportunism"