Thursday, March 24, 2011

Julie Bishop, Tony Abbott, and the freedom to speak like mug punters in the domain ...


(Above: Tony Abbott speaking under the sign, and to the proposition, that Juliar is Bob Brown's bitch.)

It's hard to imagine anyone lending gravitas and dignity to the current federal government, but somehow day after day Tony Abbott manages to do it.

Consorting with Pauline Hanson and a mob of bussed-in, shock jock arranged and organised, remarkably aged demonstrators, replete with vulgar signs worthy of the pond, is just the latest in a long string of rabble rousing, fear mongering performances. What on earth, deep down, does the Bob Menzies yearning Gerard Henderson make of such feats?

But it's not just Abbott, or more predictably Barners barn storming in front of a crowd of true believers.

Take Julie Bishop. Please anyone. She contributed a delightfully silly piece yesterday entitled What the government doesn't want you to say on climate change, which meandered towards this splendid, triumphant conclusion:

There is much more at stake in this carbon tax debate than whether science can or should ever be settled, and that includes the principle of free speech.

It's such a profoundly disingenuous, if not completely stupid remark, that it's astonishing Bishop calls her column The Bishop's Gambit. How about the prawn's folly?

The principle of free speech, the last I looked, wasn't under attack in relation to climate change science. Nobody shuts up the relentless ravings of the shock jocks, led by the likes of Alan Jones and Chris Smith.

Nobody hinders the relentless linking by Tim Blair to obscurantist ratbags, and nobody stops Andrew Bolt from celebrating climate denialism on what seems like a daily basis (not to mention linking to the irradiated thoughts of Ann Coulter). You can get a hearty dose of free speech denialism anytime you care to visit Dolt Pond.

But not content with this diversionary tactic, Bishop gets even more sanctimonious:

Next time Julia Gillard spits out the words “climate change denier” she would do well to remember the famous quote by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who summarised Voltaire’s beliefs on freedom of thought and expression as, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Uh huh. So let's defend to the death the right of Tony Abbott to speak on climate change:

Now, I say to you in all honesty there are a lot of diverse opinions about climate change and I don’t think this is about climate change. Climate change happens, mankind does make a contribution. It’s important to have an intelligent response, not a stupid one ... (Address to the No Carbon Tax Rally)

Hang on Mr. Abbott, that's not what we had in mind. An intelligent response to actually happening climate change? Pull the other one ...

You see the science isn't settled, or so says your deputy leader, as she spends the rest of her column quoting scientific sceptics, doubters and deniers

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist told me recently that “science is never settled” and that scientific assumptions and conclusions must always be challenged.

This eminent Noble Laureate pointed that had he accepted the so-called “settled science”, he would not have undertaken his important research, which challenged orthodox scientific propositions and led to new discoveries, which resulted in a Nobel Prize.

Indeed. No doubt Mr. Bolt and Mr. Blair are eyeing off the tuxedos they'll wear while collecting the Nobel prize for challenging orthodox scientific propositions.

Fortunately Bishop doesn't name the Noble Laureate involved, since naming and shaming him would be inappropriate, because while politicians might say the science is settled, you won't catch many scientists doing the same.

Most of their pronouncements will be hedged with provisional, cautionary statements, noting uncertainties and areas requiring further research, in much the same way that the theory of evolution isn't in a position to be considered complete.

It just happens to be a better theory and descriptor of what's happened on the planet than alternate theories, such as the theory of intelligent design nee creationism, and the bizarre notion that god created the earth in seven days, hid the dinosaur bones from the compilers of the bible, allowed the dinosaurs room on Noah's Ark, and allowed humans and dinosaurs to frolic together ... just after the world began some six thousand years, in the year 4004 BC ...

So it goes with climate science and risk management.

Sad to say, the coalition has got itself into a state of abject populist confusion, such that when Tony Abbott says climate change happens and mankind does make a contribution, it's impossible to believe him - not when his deputy leader lines up a bunch of sceptics in a row and quotes them approvingly, all in the name of free speech and Voltaire ...

The absent lord better return to help the planet when the population hits the nine billion mark, because there's bugger all signs of an intelligent response to climate change science in the coalition, and plenty of signs of stupidity ...

Meanwhile, is there a genuine conservative - in the old fashioned sense of the word - in the house, ready to argue the importance of handing the world on to the children in better shape than when the older generation received it?

Cue poor old Lord Deben, a former Tory MP for thirty five years, who strolled through town whispering climate change pieties, and no one paid any attention, not in the way that the media fawned and simpered over the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley ...

It just goes to show that there are scientific peerages and then there are peers you can ignore.

There doesn't seem to be any sign of Deben, nee John Gummer's transit of the antipodes in the Fairfax press, though he does collar a story in The Australian, in Climate change action is the Right thing, and an opinion piece by him headed Climate change doubters are endangering our common future.

Gummer once worked for Thatcher, converted to Roman Catholicism late in life and is as conventional a conservative politician as you might find, including claiming parliamentary expenses for mole-catching and jackdaw nest removal.

"The Right has tended to believe you have to hand on to the next generation a better situation than you received.

"It's a sense of stewardship, that you don't foul up the earth for your children.

"That kind of prudential management, assessing the balance of risk, is something conservatives should be good at."

He's so far removed from Julie Bishop blathering on about free speech, and unsettled science and Voltaire that it almost makes you weep, and yearn for Bob Menzies ... or John Howard, who if re-elected, would have already delivered an ETS ...

But it's not just Bishop blathering on about free speech.

I also want to say thank you to Chris Smith and 2GB. You know, it’s easy to be critical of our media and I’ve got to say sometimes I am critical of our media but the great thing about a free media in a free democracy is that it gives the ordinary people of our country a voice. Thank you Chris. Thank you Chris for the voice you have given to the people of this country.

Yep, there's Tony Abbott simpering and fawning over a shock jock, the very same shock jock pinged on Media Watch for mounting a relentlessly silly anti-science crusade.

Smith loves the unsettled science gambit, and has a pet stable of unsettled scientists whom he consults with monotonous regularity. As well as being a rabid denier, Smith is something of a humorist:

She said she knew who she’d rather have on her side, not Alan Jones, not Piers Akerman, not Andrew Bolt, but the CSIRO, The Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate change scientist in the world. Did you hear that?

Well when you put it that way, who else to back other than those tremendously scientific highly credentialed scientists, Jones, Akker Dakker and the dolt?

But it gets even more peculiar for Abbott. Here's how he opened his stump oration:

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say congratulations to all of you for coming out today and letting the Government of Australia know that the people of Australia can never be taken for granted. As I look out on this crowd of fine Australians I want to say that I do not see scientific heretics. I do not see environmental vandals. I see people who want honest government.

Which clearly means that as well as being a lover of shock jocks, he's as blind as a bat, as this collage of signs on display suggests:


Yep, clearly carbon dioxide is a harmless trace gas you fraudulent criminals is what passes for unsettled anti-heretical science these days. Pass me another can of coca cola Dr Dennis Jensen, I feel the need for another whiff of some of that fine CO2.

And then there were other signs and portents, as noted by Michelle Grattan in Abbott fell into obvious trap.


Now that sort of sign is perfectly in keeping with the farther reaches of the squawking that we constantly hear on loon pond. Where would loon pond be without loonish signs held aloft by elderly dingbats?

But is that the best company for a leader of the opposition who aspires to be John Howard who aspired to be Bob Menzies to keep?

Actually it gets weirder:


Yep, climate denialist Pauline Hanson turned up to dance with the star speaker, Tony Abbott.

Ah memories. It seems the hatchet has been buried, and all forgiven for the role Abbott played in the demise of One Nation, a role he dissembled about whenever he could, and if you want to walk down that memory lane, start with Abbott misleading the ABC in Hanson's fall the result of long campaign, and Tony Abbott's dirty Hanson trick - and he lied about it, of course.

I guess Hanson's now had her revenge with Gillard's jibe about Abbott preferring the company of certain kinds of red heads.

Wisely jolly Joe Hockey and Malcolm Turnbull stayed well out of sight of the rally, and Abbott himself must at least wonder at the wisdom of associating himself with a crowd and signs that described Julia Gillard as a bitch, a witch, a dictator and a liar. Australian politics has never inclined to the Tea Party style, not even in the darkest days of the depression, and this crowd was way too small and skewed to signal a genuine people's revolt, but big enough to provide all sorts of awkward associations.

Still, it goes to show that Julie Bishop is a complete doofus, and there's no need to quote Voltaire at us or somehow muddle up freedom of speech with science, like some kind of Fool's Mate, which funnily enough can in some variations involve the bishop pieces ...

Tony Abbott showed he had the freedom to speak, and the dangers of speaking freely, like a mug on a fruit box in the Domain ...

(Below: yes, it was a lot more civilised in the domain, whether in the hippie days or the days of the suit).


4 comments:

  1. Tea Party is right: did you see those posters? "Mom"?, "Ass"? Are they importing them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Its strange that they still seem to think that an election is coming any day now, don't the conservatives realise they actually lost the last election? The behaviour hasn't changed from campaign mode to opposition, or anything resembling a competent alternative as yet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. David Irving (no relation)Mar 24, 2011, 2:59:00 PM

    The last election doesn't count, funksoul123 (mostly, I guess, because they lost it). Obviously, we have to have a new election RIGHT NOW, or they'll hold their collective breaths until they turn blue ...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, they certainly won't have the sort of pull in a real election that the Tea Party does in the U.S- with the structure of their voting system it tends to bias the vote towards the older, whiter crowd. BTW shouldn't all these tax paying true Aussies be at work? I'd love to be able to flit of to Canberra on a working Thursday myself...

    ReplyDelete

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