EDITORIAL : THE AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALIA

A once-in-a-century royal visit

THE noble hopes of the Good Friday pact are being realised

Dissidents within what remains of the Irish republican movement just cannot help themselves. Passing up the opportunity to show what pathetic cowards they are was too much to ask. They duly fulfilled expectations by seeking to disrupt the Queen's historic visit to Ireland by placing in the luggage compartment of a bus a bomb designed to cause major disruption and minimal risk to themselves.

By trying and failing to upset a visit by a universally respected 85-year-old woman, the dissidents attracted contempt and, happily, did not detract from the celebration of the new normality in relations between Dublin and London flowing from the 1998 Good Friday peace settlement in Northern Ireland that has enabled to Queen to travel to Ireland after almost 60 years on the throne. In that time, she has made 300 visits overseas. Until recently, however, a trip to the republic was unthinkable. A BBC reporter summed it up neatly when he drew a parallel between the Queen going to Dublin and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon -- a small step for the Queen, but a huge step in Anglo-Irish relations. Not since 1911 has a reigning monarch visited Ireland, and Anglo-Irish animus stretches back centuries before the 1916 Easter Rising. The Queen would have been reminded of this when she landed at an airport named after the executed Irish hero Roger Casement then laid a wreath in memory of those who died in the Rising. 

More recently, the Troubles in Northern Ireland overshadowed hopes of a rapprochement. But the signs are that the Good Friday peace agreement, give or take the stupidity of a few extremists, is working well as the foundation for close and enduring bilateral relations. The peace agreement could, indeed, serve as a template for similar accords between warring factions elsewhere.

In reality, relations between Ireland and the United Kingdom have always been close. Geography and family ties across the Irish Sea mean it could hardly be otherwise. Not insignificantly, Prince William, when he married the other day, wore the uniform of the Irish Guards, something that underlined the close historical ties.

The important symbolism surrounding the Queen's visit cannot be overstated. Hopefully, the murderous extremists are forever sidelined and the noble hopes articulated in the Good Friday peace accords are firmly entrenched.

Quigley probe is no smear

SENATOR Conroy is disregarding the public interest

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's claim that National Broadband Network Co chief Mike Quigley was no more responsible for corruption at Alcatel than News Limited chief executive John Hartigan was for corruption at the Melbourne Storm is a bad analogy, and a desperate but inadequate defence.

It was always widely known in the public domain that News Limited, publisher of The Australian, owned the Storm. In contrast, when Mr Quigley, a former senior executive at Alcatel, was appointed to run the NBN in 2009, he failed to mention that Alcatel was then the subject of a five-year investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over bribery allegations, an issue that the Rudd government, with a shortage of due diligence, knew nothing about. That became public only last month in a front-page story in this newspaper.

Contrary to Senator Conroy's conspiratorial claim that Mr Quigley is "the victim of an absolute smear campaign", his corporate background is a legitimate topic for investigative reporting in the public interest, given his $1.8 million-a-year job as head of the nation's largest infrastructure project.

There is no suggestion that Mr Quigley was involved in corruption, but on Monday he "unreservedly apologised" to the joint parliamentary committee overseeing the $36 billion NBN for incorrectly stating previously that during his time at Alcatel, he was not responsible for overseeing operations in Costa Rica, where Alcatel employees paid more than $7 million in bribes to corrupt officials in return for hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. Such revelations kick-started the US government's five-year investigation, which resulted in the US government and Alcatel agreeing that the company will pay a fine of $US137m ($130m), one of the largest of its kind in US corporate history.

Senator Conroy is satisfied that Mr Quigley has been upfront about the probe into Alcatel, but the minister has scant regard for the public interest if he thinks the media should not be asking questions and seeking official records to report the full picture of what happened at Alcatel, and Mr Quigley's role in the company. Senator Conroy's frustration at the scrutiny being applied to the NBN by this newspaper will not deter future reporting, however much mud he throws. 

Gillard must grapple with climate, carbon and cant

PM should stop blaming the opposition's scare campaign

Carbon dioxide is a political killer and Julia Gillard urgently needs to gain control of her carbon price agenda if she is not to become its next victim. The Prime Minister cannot expect sympathy because this mess is of her own making. The policy aspects of this debate are complicated enough without the government botching the politics. Taxpayers, businesses and investors have faced uncertainty on climate change policy for at least four years, the only changes in that time being three prime ministers, three opposition leaders and three climate change ministers. All sides of politics want to reduce emissions and both major parties are committed to minimum cuts of 5 per cent by 2020. The current acrimonious debate should be a technical one about the most effective way to meet that common goal. Over the intervening years, governments of all persuasions, state and federal, have wasted billions of dollars on inefficient schemes marketed as carbon reduction initiatives. Solar electricity schemes, green car initiatives, mandated renewable energy targets and a myriad grants and subsidies have paid homage to the climate change mantra but only added to our energy costs and taxation burden. It has been more about cant than climate or carbon.

The Australian supports a market-based mechanism for pricing carbon because it ensures CO2 is abated at the cheapest possible cost and encourages technological innovation to develop increasingly efficient abatement, energy production and energy use. The logic of this approach is so compelling that politicians as diverse as John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Ms Gillard found it impossible to resist. The odd man out is Tony Abbott. By thumbing his nose at the market approach, he almost guarantees his carbon abatement will cost more per tonne than under an ETS or carbon tax. And it involves picking winning projects, a process fraught with the risk of governments making costly mistakes, such as those cited above. But voters understand that the Opposition Leader's plan allows us to get on with abating carbon without drastic changes to our economy, while we wait to see what the rest of the world does. Even the government's own climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has always argued that Australia cannot go it alone. Politically, Mr Abbott holds the upper hand. His clear, strong and consistent "stop the great big new tax" message contrasts against a confused government message.

Ms Gillard was probably wrong when she urged Mr Rudd to abandon his ETS, but when she replaced him she was right to say Australia needed to develop a consensus before "moving forward" on the issue. She then ruled out a carbon tax during the election campaign because she knew it would be electoral poison. We can only assume the Prime Minister broke that promise, ditching considerable political capital and the sensible push for consensus, as the price for Greens support post-election. So now she is caught in a Greens tragedy of her own making, with squabbles about the exact carbon price, inclusions, exemptions and compensation making the opposition's scare campaign easy. But she chose this path. Instead of blaming Mr Abbott, she needs to clearly articulate her rationale and outline her carbon formula.