Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is meeting farmers and council representatives in south-western Queensland on a trip to see the effects of the drought first-hand.

Ms Palaszczuk arrived in the town of Charleville on Tuesday afternoon and said the trip was mostly about listening and witnessing the impact the drought has had on communities.

She visited a grazing property just outside Charleville owned by the Hindmarsh family.

Brock Hindmarsh said they ran about 1,200 cows on their property, which had been "hugely affected" by the third failed summer in a row.

"It's cost us a fortune, we really used all our resources just to keep our stock alive," he said.

"We had some relief at Christmas which allowed us to sell a few cattle for a bit better money than what we've had the last couple of years, so yeah, hopefully we can get some [rain] soon again."

Mr Hindmarsh said they had benefited from some government drought relief but that getting paid more money for their stock would be the best outcome for them.

"Western Queensland, there's a lot of areas now that's really ... it's dragged on, it's not just 12 months it's been three, four years - for some people longer."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-21/palaszczuk-begins-tour-of-drought-stricken-western-queensland/6410594

A second storm cell developing off New South Wales is expected to hit northern parts of Sydney and the Central Coast in the next few hours.

Three people died in wild weather conditions in Dungog, north of Newcastle, yesterday where homes were washed away after 300 millimetres of rain hit the area in less than 24 hours.

The Bureau of Meteorology said winds were expected to reach gale-force on the coast and rain could be heavier than yesterday before conditions ease later in the day.

The hardest hit areas are Northern Sydney and the Central Coast, where an evacuation warning remains in place for residents around the Manly Dam and lagoon district.

So far, emergency services have responded to more than 8,000 calls for help to address flash flooding, fallen trees and downed powerlines.

Electricity provider Ausgrid said its crews were focused on making the network safe and returning power to 200,000 properties.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-22/second-storm-cell-expected-to-hit-parts-of-sydney-central-coast/6410792

The apple hasn't fallen far from the Abbott government's policy tree when it comes to Bjorn Lomborg's think-tank funding. Thom Mitchell explains.

Bjorn Lomborg has been billed a ‘climate contrarian’ by most media since he hit the headlines on Friday, after it emerged taxpayers would be coughing up $4 million to help transplant his ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ think-tank to Australia.

It’s a politically correct way of saying he’s viewed with deep scepticism, even ridicule, by many scientists and policy makers. Indeed, air pollution from fossil fuels are what Australians, but developing nations in particular, would likely be coughing up if Lomborg got his way.

Now, thanks in part to the federal government’s support, Lomborg’s centre has a new home at the University of Western Australia, from which it will espouse its views on where the government should spend taxpayer money.

Like the Abbott government, Lomborg believes in climate change, but doesn’t think it’s as bad as the ‘alarmists’ say, or that we should be doing much to address it. In short, like Australia’s current climate policies, Lomborg’s views are ‘contrary’ to the overwhelming international consensus.

It will be useful for the government, though, to have a seemingly legitimate backer in Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre (incidentally, another of the government’s ideological allies, the Institute of Public Affairs, welcomed Lomborg on a first name basis, saying “Bjorn, it’s great to have you!”).

For Professor Tim Flannery, the former head of the Australian Climate Commission which the Coalition scrapped, funding of the “Danish opinionist” must be grimly ironic.

“He has no real credibility, he’s got no credentials in either the economic area or the climate area,” Professor Flannery told New Matilda.

There are literally books devoted to debunking the smokescreen of academic references the political scientist and statistician deploys in his own writings.

“Basically he’s been telling the same story for 10 years,” Professor Flannery said, “which is using economics to look at comparative benefit of doing things in a social sense.”

“What he’s been saying consistently over time is ‘Don’t bother spending money on climate change mitigation, spend on research and development and spend on other social areas.’

“The whole idea is really bankrupt because if you use that approach and applied it to say cancer treatment or old age care, or whatever, you wouldn’t ever bother,” Professor Flannery said.

And not bothering is, by and large, what Lomborg advocates. In 2004 his think tank ranked climate change as the lowest priority in a list of international development initiatives, and that’s a line he’s largely held.

While accepting that climate change is real, and a problem, Lomborg argues that “the narrative that the world's climate is changing from bad to worse is unhelpful alarmism, which prevents us from focusing on smart solutions”.

“The UN-led policy solutions” - like the Kyoto carbon trading scheme which Abbott’s predecessor John Howard refused to sign - “are incredibly poor”.

Incidentally, the government appears to have abandoned Australia’s commitment to the United Nations goal of developing a climate pact in Paris this year, which would limit temperature rises to below two degrees.

Recently, it has taken to using modelling in government papers that would put the world on track to something more like a 3.6 degree temperature rise.

Notwithstanding the fact that poor nations will be hardest hit by such drastic temperature rises, Lomborg argues that “what those living in energy poverty need are reliable, low-cost fossil fuels”.

Of course, this primarily means coal, and those people are largely located in the developing Asian economies the coalition wants to continue to export fossil fuels to, so much so that it was recently revealed Tony Abbott was blocking US, UK and French efforts to end subsidies for the construction of new coal-fired power stations in the region.

read more: https://newmatilda.com/2015/04/20/meet-bjorn-lomborg-abbotts-four-million-dollar-climate-contrarian

The MMMM response to this OUTRAGEOUS FUNDING OF Lomborg by the TURDY government has been meek at best and vacant at worst... Come on fellows, outrage !  OUTRAGE !

I agree with Tim Dunlop when he says we’re currently living through a phase of ‘the normalisation of bad politics’. There are hundreds of examples of the way in which the low expectations of the Abbott government due to their blatantly, and now universally acknowledged ineptitude is giving them a free pass to keep being inept without the usual outrage that follows. Just this week, Hunt has been on a campaign of lying, saying his Direct Action policy is stunningly successful and that it will easily meet the 2020 target of reducing emissions by 5%. But it won’t. All you need is a calculator to understand why. And he gets away with lying that the Carbon Price wasn’t working, when in fact a cursory search of Google will show factually that it was, in its short life time, working just as it was meant to thank you very much.

http://victoriarollison.com/2015/04/25/curing-outrage-fatigue/