Tony Abbott says climate change action is like trying to 'appease the volcano gods'

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-10/tony-abbott-says-action-on-climate...

While our turdy Abbott bullshits in England, in front of a denialist outfit let's recall the reality:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19214

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26870

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31126

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19732

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8789

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30164

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31106

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27355

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8985

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31847

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31205 (sarcastic)

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32397

and plenty more on this site... And please don't forget that should YOU start to feel the impact of global warming, WE WOULD ALL BE COOKED WITHIN FIVE YEARS. Present global warming is super fast on a geological timeframe but in human life terms, the real nasty effects will start by 2032. Beyond this we will be in trouble. Planning to minimise our emissions of CO2 now HAS TO BE A PRIORITY! TONY ABBOTT IS A DANGEROUS IDIOT...

Turdball's tinkering promise of lowering the "cost of electricity" instead of getting it from the renewable source thereof is a fully despicable dishonest tactic to fool people. He is today declared an official member of the Turdy tribe.

GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, FAST AND ANTHROPOGENIC.

It would be tempting to laugh at Tony Abbott’s feelings about how carbon dioxide is secretly good for humanity, and his insights into the goat sacrificing habits of primitives subduing volcano gods – except it isn’t that funny.

The London outing is more strange and sad, and the strangeness and the sadness manifests itself on multiple fronts.

Let’s start with strange.

The bloke who hobnobbed with the climate sceptics at Global Warming Policy Foundation is the same bloke who took a decision as prime minister to sign Australia up to the Paris international climate agreement.

He’s also the same bloke who produced a set of initiatives in government which was badged as a policy to incentivise emissions reductions.

That policy still exists and it’s called Direct Action.

He’s also the same bloke who kept Australia’s renewable energy target, while abolishing the mechanism designed to give the market certainty to make future investments in baseload power generation.

Abbott has a whole lot of feelings, and some loyal media megaphones to help him spread his singular insights, but these are basic facts he can’t escape.

Abbott’s record in government points to him being a “warmist” (as Andrew Bolt is fond of characterising the modest band of weirdos who don’t think they know better than the world’s most eminent climate scientists).

London’s hardcore climate sceptics, frankly, should have laughed him out of the room.

Now let’s get to sad. Abbott’s climate frolic isn’t about a substantive issue. It’s about politics, because Australians haven’t had quite enough of politics, right?

Abbott wants to cause a ruckus. He wants to make enough ruckus to constrain Malcolm Turnbull from producing a sensible energy policy.

The lightbulb moment he’s trying to manufacture for colleagues is simple: the Abbott rationale is we can win the next election like I won the election in 2013 – by belting Labor on climate and energy policy.

The country, the national interest, actually needs the major parties to come to terms and settle the climate wars which have generated the current problems we are all experiencing in the energy market, and settle them in sensible fashion.

But politicians behind in the polls like to win elections.

Put simply, Abbott’s pitch is an appeal to baser instincts – a pitch that prolonged polarisation serves the Coalition’s immediate interests.

The former prime minister has also positioned himself in the public domain as a critical player in Turnbull’s ultimate settlement of energy policy, when the truth is all the heavy lifting on the new policy is happening completely outside Abbott’s orbit.

The actual decision makers in the government are heads down bums up on the new investment framework, swerving around the many obstacles, trying to land something vaguely credible, which doesn’t blow up the Coalition.

That’s the objective. Whether the government can produce something credible, given one of the core objectives has to be not blowing up the Coalition, is at this point seriously moot.

Meanwhile, Abbott’s persistent wrecking tactics allow Labor to claim with a veneer of truth and credibility that the former prime minister is driving the government’s energy policy rather than Turnbull – elevating his status from fringe agitprop activist to centre-stage.

In politics that sort of caper is called frontrunning, but I struggle for a word to adequately characterise that behaviour.

Perhaps we can just keep it nice, and say cynical?

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/10/tony-abbotts-clim...

No Katharine... Cynical is too nice a word. Abbott has gone apeshit, loony and mad. He is demented and DANGEROUS. He is a psychopath. And the more frightening thing is that Turdy Abbott is not the only one in the Australian parliament who is completely loony...

Turdy Turnbull is actually worse than Turdy Abbott. Turdy Turnbull talks as if he still believed in the science of global warming but acts contrarily to what he says. It's a trick. It's a con. He has joined the rank of the denialists with a twisted mind about cheaper electricity rather than saving the planet. He could not care less. The dark blood of ugly capitalism flows through his veins. This is where we're at:

We should read "Coalition accept the scientific evidence on energy (and the rest)"...

Tony Abbott titled his London speech on climate change “Daring to Doubt” – a challenge, if you will, to reject mountains of evidence and instead lick your fingers and shove them into the plug socket of denial.

Go on, I dare you.

Throughout his speech, the former Australian prime minister urged listeners to think that dismissing decades of research backed by the world’s leading scientific institutions required bravery and fortitude, rather than other less celebrated human attributes.

But what would constitute bravery for a conservative politician like Abbott? Changing your mind when the evidence tells you you’re dead wrong, or saying what you’ve always said, using the logical fallacies that you’ve always used? One step is brave, the other is cowardly.

Abbott was giving the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual lecture – an “honour” previously bestowed on his spiritual and political mentors John Howard andCardinal George Pell.

Nobody should be surprised that what we got was an absolute crap speech from a man who confessed he still thinks climate science is “absolute crap”.

Abbott went for the whole canon of tired climate science denial talking points – carbon dioxide is just food for plants, the climate has always changed, it’s the sun – in what constituted a warmed-up meal of misinformation with a side order of supercilious gravy.

Several leading Australian climate scientists have hit back. How tired they must get of debunking this stuff.

Abbott’s speech was also chock-full of internal contradictions.

He suggested a conspiracy to tamper with temperature readings, but admitted the globe was warming. He described carbon dioxide as a “trace gas” and dismissed its role in warming, but elsewhere thought warming (which might not be happening) would be good. And the “trace gas” is insignificant, but not when it comes to its ability to “green the planet” and help plants grow.

Professor Steve Sherwood, deputy director of the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, read the speech and said it was “the usual mix of misdirection, falsehoods and tirades against ‘brigades’ who supposedly say this and that but are never clearly identified”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/oct/11/tony-abbot...

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A former Liberal leader has urged Malcolm Turnbull to defy Tony Abbott in the party room over climate and energy policy, saying that by "drawing a line in the sand" he could deliver better policy and save his prime ministership.

In a searing assessment of the Coalition's chances of recovery, John Hewson told Fairfax Media that Mr Turnbull looked weak for failing to assert his past commitments on climate change, tax policy and marriage equality, and for refusing to call out Mr Abbott despite the growing absurdity of his arguments.

Dr Hewson cited Mr Abbott's claim this week that global warming could be good for the world saying the statement had laid bare the former prime minister's role as a wrecker while further isolating him from mainstream Australian voters.

He said Mr Abbott had adopted every position on climate change from "it being a significant issue to being crap".

"In those circumstances, I'd call him out," he said.

But he said while Mr Turnbull failed to implement a proper policy that drove new energy investment it would be Mr Abbott's attention-grabbing statements from the conservative right that would define the government to voters.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/liberal-statesman-...

Bullshit from the pissweak turdy Malcolm' s senior minister presenting a "restrained blah blah blah", ... with "as a by-product?"... That smoke of sulphur Turdy Tony bullshit from smouldering rubbery lies and fat porkies burning is filling the cabinet room...

It was well that Tony Abbott gave his climate change denying speech this week in London, because his thinking betrays a bizarre Euro-centric conservative outlook that constantly ignores multiple studies that show Australia’s economy will suffer greatly from climate change.

His speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation was a typical Abbott speech: a greatest hits of climate change denying canards that collapsed under its own lack of internal logic.

It was redolent of the shallow conservative thinking that unfortunately dominates far too much Australian commentary – especially when it comes to climate change.

They think climate change is a myth but it doesn’t matter because global warming will be good because, as Abbott put it, “far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2017/oct/15/why...

It is therefore not surprising to discover that the former prime minister’s recent speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation displayed a similar juxtaposition of the Bible and an endorsement of the west. On this occasion, however, there was an added concern: the alleged advance of a new religion.

"Climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the west. Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures” – could have made such a religion out of it."

The logic seems to go like this. Climate change is replacing Christianity as the west’s religion. But if we’d just stick to the Bible we would realise that climate change isn’t a problem. After all, the Bible teaches that we are to “subdue the earth”. In other words, climate change is actually part of the divinely-mandated human vocation.

It is regrettably true that the teaching about “subduing the earth” (found in Genesis 1:28) has been used as an ideological tool to justify exploitative and destructive attitudes towards the earth. But even a cursory engagement with the critical discussion of this verse will quickly reveal that this use and English translation of the text are themselves in some tension with its use in Genesis 1.

The text preceded the industrialised world by at least a couple of thousand years and was pitched at an agrarian society. Even if we take the resonances of the English word “subdue” at face value, it would have meant something quite different in that earlier context. To invoke it to justify the climate change produced since the industrial revolution is a straightforward category mistake.

But, and this is the crucial point, we shouldn’t take the English translation at face value in any case. We need to engage the meaning of the original Hebrew word: kabash.

All exercises in translation are complex, and, yes, there are some problematic dimensions to this word where it surfaces in other parts of the Bible. But in Genesis it’s connected to the divine declaration of creation’s goodness. In this first chapter of the Bible kabash can suggest the idea of “development”, argues Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim. “This process offers to the human being the task of intra-creational development, of bringing the world along to its fullest possible creational potential.”

When the original readers of this text read it they would not have heard a cavalier “change the climate at your convenience”. Instead, they are more likely to have heard something like, “make something good of this earth”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/tony-abbott-needs-...

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I don't care what god said 2,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago. What is written in the Tanakh is simplistic and in ignorance of greater relationships in nature, which were unknown at the time, despite the plagues of frogs. There is no wisdom in the scriptures. Our life has nothing to do with the godly hour.

The planet is a small cosmic drop in the vast universe. It is imbued by chance with particular relationships of environment, evolution and changes of which we are part of. Understanding these processes is in our survival interest. Ignorance at this level is not bliss and telling fairy stories as truths is not going to help us. We need to take a deep breath and cross this somewhat difficult step for many people — the abandonment of faith in favour of greater knowledge of processes through science, including our relationships with our self, others and the planet itself, while maintaining an artful romance of whom we could be without loosing the sight of whom we are.

Global warming is a simple part of these processes. The relationship between surface temperature and carbon dioxide is an important one and we can twist our understanding of this relationship whichever way we can in order to salvage our industrial burning of fossil fuels, the result is incremental rise of temperatures that are calculable — and eventually will be destructive.

This is the way some atoms and molecules acts and reacts in relation to electromagnetic wavelengths.

We could wish differently but this is not going to change the processes that have been studied by Galileo, Planck, Einstein, Bohr and the countless persons of precise scientific observation and applied deductions which make your mobile (cell) phone work — or give your MRI and the atom bomb. It's the only proper understanding.

Global warming through producing EXTRA CO2 by our burning of fossil fuel is our slow-release atomic bomb. The emissions of CO2 released since the human industrial revolution in the atmosphere have basically added 25 per cent more potential energy into the atmosphere, above the natural settings for the last million years. At this level, there are delays between cause and effect, but the effects are coming, NO MATTER WHAT. 

Present global warming is real and — unfortunately as much as we hate to admit it — is anthropogenic. The tragedy is that people like Tony Abbott are engrossed in devious deceit in order to ... Well I have no clue why people like these are doing their scientific denialism. Protecting the "word of god"? I don't think so. It seems people like Tony who talk about biblical stuff have no clue about the biblical stuff. Protecting a deadly industrious setting of capitalism? Possibly. But why? What do they get out of this denial? The satisfaction of being ignorant and powerful through political machinations? We might have to ask these idiots, away from their faith into the folly of godly instructions written by old men who died long ago — and saw nothing else but their own misery. 

Actually, I know why people like Abbott are acting as they do. Without contrariantly shitting in someone else's garden, especially reality, they would not have any purpose in life. They would be lost in the emptiness of their own mind. Talking shit with brilliance defines whom they are are, without having to do the hard work of knowing something properly.

We have the opportunity to reduce our future CO2 emissions to nil. This has to be the goal without creating more potential havoc such as having to deal with nuclear waste. So how do we go about it? The planet has its own potential energy continuum with electromagnetic wave bombardment from the sun. This can be captured by solar panels, solar heaters and the likes*. The atmosphere has currents and eddies and we have become very efficient at capturing the energy of the wind since the windmill of the Dutch landscapes...

We have been able to apply the science of the atoms into storing electrical energies and are getting better at it. So in order to get our comfort energy level at this point in time we could reduce our CO2 emission close to nil. Should we plant "a few" trees and stop deforestation in favour of belching cows or of insecticide-laden cotton fields, we even might be able to go into carbon emission reversal.

What's stopping us? The RELIGION OF BURNING COAL because it's "tradition" since... 1750? or since 1698, when Thomas Savery, an engineer and inventor, patented a machine that could effectively draw water from flooded mines using steam pressure? 

Time to let go. Everyday we burn carbon, everyday we add potential devastating change in the atmospheric conditions. And this is the reality.

Read from top.

* Variant to photosynthesis, a new technique in development uses the sunlight to excite atoms in certain potentially charged substances, above and beyond the energy supplied by the sun. The depletion of electron in these substances are replaced by addition of different substances that eventually can electronically slowly (naturally) "recharge" independently of being "online" — via ambient electromagnetic waves... 

If you don’t like political correctness, advised Tony Abbott two months ago, vote against legalising same-sex marriage “because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks.”

It was the former PM doing what he does best, artfully setting out an agenda for a negative, divisive campaign. Abbott’s mentor and fellow “no” campaigner John Howard is renowned for his political skills, but when it comes to campaign slogans he’s no match for his protégé.

Abbott’s most cunning trick was to drag political correctness into this already crowded debate. We regular heterosexual guys and gals, he’s saying with a sly nudge, are being railroaded by trendy progressives into allowing people who are not like us to desecrate the sanctity of marriage.

Fast forward to last week. During one of his frequent visits to Mother England Abbott delivered the 2017 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture to a cosy gathering of fellow climate-deniers.

The GWPF website was down when I tried to access it last week, but Abbott was thoughtful enough to release the text of his address for everyone to see. It makes fascinating, disturbing reading.

The man who as prime minister said he supported climate measures now says he no longer believes human-induced climate change is a settled issue, and those who say it is are acting in “the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought-police down the ages”.

The man who as prime minister had access to the best scientific advice in Australia declared that “more than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen” and that those say they have are “alarmists”.

And for good measure, here’s his final word: “It’s climate change policy that’s doing harm; climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm.”

read more:

http://southwind.com.au/2017/10/17/political-correctness-tony-abbotts-we...

The health of hundreds of millions of people around the world is already being damaged by climate change, a major report has revealed.

Heatwaves are affecting many more vulnerable people and global warming is boosting the transmission of deadly diseases such as dengue fever, the world’s most rapidly spreading disease. Air pollution from fossil fuel burning is also causing millions of early deaths each year, while damage to crops from extreme weather threatens hunger for millions of children.

The findings, published in the Lancet journal, come from researchers at 26 institutions around the world, including many universities, the World Health Organization, World Bank and the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO reported on Monday that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made a record jump in 2016 to hit a concentration not seen for more than three million years.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/30/climate-change-alrea...

According to the 2.7 million year old ice drill in the Antarctic, a record in its class, there has not been a single year, period, time-span with more than 300 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere for the last 2.7 million years on this planet. The record, like that of the Vostok record, also shows the strong relationship between CO2 levels and climatic changes.

Read : 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

So what's happened to him [Tony Abbott] since he lost the leadership?

Tony, I think, is dragging the nation through his personal grief process. My completely unqualified psychoanalysis is I don't think he had suffered life-altering, bone-crushing grief before being dumped as PM. He had a very happy childhood; fantastic opportunities, which of course he's worked hard to convert into a very successful life; a wonderful family with good health – both his parents are still alive. But grief can change people. It's a shame he's not using his intellect and experience to contribute positively. I don't know – maybe that's what he thinks he's doing.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/minutes-with/claire-kimball-abbott-is...

Tony has been surviving by lying happily like a spoiled brat... He never understood much beyond the "liberal" religious confines of the North Shore... He lives in a perpetual momentum of delusional self-importance... And if he had ANY intellect, he keeps it well hidden under a giant pile of hubris. So far we have not seen any of his "intellect".

From the tail end of the Howard government, through the Rudd and Gillard periods, Parkinson was prominent in bureaucratic efforts to implement an emissions trading scheme, setting up a climate change department, before returning to the Treasury.

Abbott, who was part of the Howard government at the time the then prime minister supported emissions trading, later campaigned vociferously against the so-called carbon “tax”, which was not a tax but a carbon price with a fixed period.

Abbott sacked Parkinson after winning the 2013 election, against the advice of senior Liberals, but Parkinson was asked to stay on in Treasury on an interim basis, serving for a further 15 months.

He says in the interview he had a “perfectly professional” and “very open and honest” relationship with Abbott, who listened to his advice, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing. “You couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Parkinson said the damage Abbott had caused by the sacking had been subsequently “ameliorated, but there’s no question that for the service as a whole, I think it came as quite a shock”.

The departmental head also reflected in the conversation with Davis about the breakdown in consensus over carbon pricing which has plunged the Australian parliament into a decade-long deadlock over climate policy.

Parkinson describes “almost a conspiracy of silence between the true believers of climate change and the true deniers of climate change”.

“The true believers did not want to talk about adaptation because they felt that that would take away from a focus on mitigation, and the true deniers didn’t want to talk about adaptation because to do so you would have to talk about the fact that climate change was real,” he says.

“So the debate became one around the merits of a particular approach to mitigation which was an emissions trading scheme.”

Parkinson says the global financial crisis prompted a shift in the position of the business community to carbon pricing. “Suddenly a lot of people in the business community who had been supportive of action on climate change, found themselves in a much more existential situation of trying to save their businesses ... In that environment, they were much more focused on that than on supporting action around climate change.

He also reflected on the disruption technology has caused to the media cycle, and how that has affected the public policy debate.

Parkinson says in the 1980s journalists had more time to write longer, more analytical pieces about policy debates, which helped inform public debates but “if you look around now, the journalists don’t have the opportunity, they don’t have the time to do those thoughtful pieces”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/06/turnbulls-departm...

Read from top.

Gus thinks that Parkinson is a public servant with no fixed idea of his own... In which camp does Parkinson fit? The believers or the denialists of climate change? In regard to the changes in the media, it's not because of the new technology that many journalists stink. The "gotcha" moment of course has a lot of influence on the "news" whatever that is... but journos have been unable to adapt. When Parkinson expresses:

“You begin to try and have a conversation with stakeholders about an issue and all of a sudden the social media campaigns are running either for or against the policy option.” ... “and that makes it much, much harder to do this sort of thoughtful, careful analysis and policy design that in the past we were able to do”... “Now it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it means we have to do it in different ways,” ... “We have to find different groups of trusted interlocutors. We have to find different vehicles in which we can engage. ... “I’m not sure that we’ve quite found our equilibrium yet. I think it’s still a work in progress.”

Hey, Martin, politics-policies-and-democracy is ALWAYS A WORK IN PROGRESS. In regard to climate change (aka GLOBAL WARMING) the stakes are high and the lies from many influential sectors are BIG, while the science is accurate. So which one are we going to "believe"? The scientists or the big idiots with cash? The first question is as simple as this. "Equilibrium" spells disaster... The second question is: are we going to solve this with government support or are we going to let the market forces determine the future of the planet, while the government discreetly supports the destruction of the planet with subsidies to COAL and golden gifts to new coal mines like Adani's? A strong "social media" or in our case "citizen journalists" is always urgently needed to kick the arse of the Trumble government into shape, as well as that shit-head Abbott — and also kick the denialist shit-heads of the murdoch media. We have no choice. Sciences have to win now. Serious scientists are your most trustworthy interlocutors. 

Even Scott Pruitt — the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief known rarely to turn down a freebie — doesn’t want to have anything to do with the UK’s premier climate science denial group.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) invited Pruitt to give its annual lecture in 2017. Pruitt either rejected or ignored the invite, as it was ultimately former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott that took to the stage.

Pruitt is currently in charge of implementing the US’s environmental regulations. But he has well-publicised ties to the fossil industry, and has made it a priority to roll back President Obama’s power plant pollution limits.

Pruitt is currently embroiled in a wide-reaching ethics scandal in the US.

The GWPF’s  invitation was sent via the US-based lawyer Latham & Watkins, which runs the GWPF’s US fundraising arm. The subsidiary is represented by Los Angeles lawyer, Paul Tosetti, who has handled several mega-mergers of large pharmaceutical companies, and who registered the GWPF at a PO Box in Delaware.

A representative of the US bank, Midfirst, later lobbied Pruitt on the GWPF’s behalf.

Midfirst’s CEO is a “good friend” of Tosetti’s, the email reveals. And despite the fact that the Midfirst representative acknowledged that he did “not know the organization”, he agreed to try and “ensure Scott at least received and considered the invitation”.

The emails were part of more than 24,000 pages of emails, call logs, and documents from Pruitt’s office, obtained by environmental group, the Sierra Club. The GWPF email to Pruitt was first revealed by New York Times journalist Lisa Freidmann on Twitter:

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/05/08/uk-climate-science-denial-group-gw...

Read from top... Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8985

and please consider that it looks that Monbiot's brains have gone AWOL in regard to Syria... But this is another story...

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described his government as "remarkably underappreciated" during a tribute dinner to mark the end of his 25 years in politics.

Many who spoke at the event in Sydney last night told guests Mr Abbott had been equally undervalued.

• Around 1,000 people attended the event celebrating Mr Abbott's 25-year political career
• Speakers included former prime minister John Howard, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison
• Mr Abbott told the crowd he felt his government had helped the country to be its best

He spoke last.

"I used to think that the Abbott government was a remarkably underappreciated one," he said.

"The great thing tonight is that finally I think it might be seen for what it really was — a good-faith effort to help our country to be the very best it could be."

Master of ceremonies Alan Jones said there was so much love for Mr Abbott that even with 1,000 guests attending "hundreds" more had to be turned away.

It was a contradiction for a politician who had been defeated in a nasty and bruising campaign for the seat of Warringah, Mr Jones said.

"Tony Abbott … has a heart which beats like everybody else and he's been brutally wounded by appalling condemnation and vilification which no person of his ability should ever have had to endure," Mr Jones told a Liberal Party who's who.

Mr Jones described the campaign that unseated Mr Abbott at this year's election as "one of the most disgraceful chapters in Australian political history".

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-08/tony-abbott-tells-dinner-his-gove...

Read from top.... Turdy Abbott did so much damage to the heart of many people that we don't care if he has one or not, Mr Jones... He destroyed the funding of the ABC  and SBS by lying through his teeth. His policies were a dog's breakfast on the pavement of ignorance... etc. Bye bye bye... and, Turdy, don't make a mess of your new employment at the whatever of war...

More than 1,000 elephants face starvation in Thailand because the coronavirus crisis has slashed revenue from tourism, conservationists say. 

An almost total absence of visitors means that many caretakers are struggling to afford food for Thailand's 4,000 captive elephants.

The animals can eat up to 200kg (440lb) of food a day.

Thailand reported 127 new confirmed cases of the virus on Monday, bringing the country's recorded total to 1,651.

Lek Chailert, founder of the Save Elephant Foundation, told the BBC: "If there is no support forthcoming to keep them safe, these elephants, some of whom are pregnant, will either starve to death or may be put on to the streets to beg."

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52110551

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