Category Archives: Politics

How the sausage is made

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People like me should never, ever be told about parliamentary RSS feeds. Unfortunately, I found out anyway, and soon after discovered a report from last week entitled Plebiscite for an Australian Republic Bill 2008 (tabled by the enchantingly-named Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee).

Briefly, the proposal is to hold a plebiscite on whether Australia should become a republic – a simple yes/no question not connected with any specific republic model. Should the response be affirmative, a second plebiscite would then determine a particular model, and a subsequent referendum would finalise the deal.

I’ve posted previously on the subject of such plebiscites. Professor David Flint  returned to bestow his special brand of wisdom on the committee:

4.9        Professor David Flint, National Convenor of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy,  held the view that a plebiscite would create ‘constitutional instability’:

Not only unwise; it is irresponsible, because it invites a vote of no confidence in the existing system. It creates periods of constitutional instability where we do not know where we are and then leads to nothing.

I quote Flint (or at least the committee’s interpretation of Flint’s comments) only for my own amusement, because his arguments are so comically and transparently vacuous. My real purpose here is to look at the committee’s recommendations. Most of the report deals with the arguments for and against holding a plebiscite on whether Australia should become a republic. So what did they conclude?

Recommendation 1

6.5       The committee recommends the establishment of an ongoing public awareness campaign on Australia’s constitutional system which engages as wide a range of the public as possible.

Recommendation 2

6.7       The committee recommends that if any further process advocating constitutional change is undertaken, including that of a republic, it seek to encourage Australians to engage meaningfully in the debate.

Observe the most skillfully-crafted of non-answers – a compromise position that involves no actual compromise. An information campaign and public debate is something we can all agree on, right? Well yes, but if that’s all we can agree on then we’re not making an awful lot of progress.

Senator Bob Brown goes on the offensive in the Additional Comments section of the report:

The Labor government supports an Australian republic, but not yet.

So, to avoid embarrassment, the committee has declined to make any recommendations and declined to acknowledge that I was the senator who introduced the Bill.

And that’s how the sausage is made.

Reality fails to sway Fielding

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From our adorably naïve Family First Senator, via the ABC:

When I put forward the question ‘isn’t it true that carbon emissions have been going up and global temperature hasn’t?’, they wanted to rephrase my question and not answer it.

Of course they did you fool – it’s a loaded question. Technically the answer is “yes”, but that has nothing to do with the validity of climate change. If you’d wanted a straight answer you’d have asked a question related to climate (e.g. regarding the global temperature trend) and not merely weather.

There’s some irony in the ABC’s use of the phrase “fact finding mission” to describe what Fielding was doing in the US. He was at the Heartland Institute’s so-called “International Conference on Climate Change”, which, considering the denialist preconceptions that pervade the website, might not be the first place you would think to look for actual facts. Unless, of course, you’re an elected member of parliament.

Abbott’s nightmare world

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Tony Abbott – Mr People Skills himself – is on-message, describing the Rudd government’s use of the phrase “temporary deficit” as “Orwellian”, on Insiders this morning and elsewhere. One may surmise that Abbott, being entirely honest and reasonable, fears the rise of absolute tyranny and the end of all forms of freedom, with human dignity forever trampled beneath the jackboots of Rudd’s front bench. This all begins with the bone-chilling use of political spin by the government, something Abbott would never have contemplated in his entire political career. Nineteen Eighty-Four is indeed right around the corner. And you thought it was just a budget deficit brought on by a recession!

The impending annihilation of liberty aside, Abbott has an intensely irritating manner of speech. He artificially pauses for a split-second every couple of words, as if he’s trying to give the impression that he’s actually thinking about what he’s saying. It’s irritating because it completely fails to cover up the sheer inanity of his rhetoric, and in doing so makes it even more inane. That said, I muted the TV after a few seconds, so I suppose it’s not that much of a problem.

Science fail

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Apparently one of the world’s foremost experts on global warming – as far as the denialist camp is concerned – is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. The sum total of his qualifications appear to be his propensity to comment on the subject. A google search turned up the Heartland Institute’s take on Monckton.

Observe the ad on the left of the page: “Why Does Gore Refuse To Debate His Critics? CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A CRISIS”. It looks like something straight out of a political campaign, which ought to be enough to toss it aside without further contemplation. But let’s contemplate for a second. The ad shows Al Gore’s face above four people who – we presume – are “his critics” (one of whom is our esteemed Viscount Monckton). How much tomfoolery can you squeeze into something so small?

  1. The one-versus-four theme makes Al Gore look like he’s on his own, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
  2. The ad conjures up images of public debates of the sort that have nothing to do with science. One does not resolve anything, least of all matters of scientific enquiry and public policy, by having proponents of each view point stand up on a stage and hurl sound bites at each other.
  3. If anyone did need to be involved in a debate, it would be the hundreds of scientists who contribute to the IPCC’s reports, not Al Gore, who is after all just the messenger.

Science. We’ve heard of it.

Yes and no

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I came home from a dinner with the rellies to find that the daylight savings referendum had been defeated, which was mildly disappointing but hardly surprising. There’ll be another referendum in a while. At least I remembered to vote this time.

However, I am surprised and intrigued that the Greens candidate Adele Carles managed to pull off a convincing victory in the Fremantle by-election – 54% to Labor’s 46% two-candidate-preferred vote (with 79% of votes counted). The Libs seem not to have bothered to field a candidate, but I suspect they’d be satisfied with a Labor defeat. Even though the Greens are even more ideologically opposed to the Libs than Labor, they might create complications for the formation of a future Labor government.

Keeping score

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It seems 300 names have been added to the original list of 400 “prominent scientists” who dispute things about climate change. If you follow that link there are a couple of good examples of the calibre of debate on the issue. I posted a few days ago about attempts to rubbish the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I can’t help myself, however, so I’ve been looking at the “highlights” of the 2009 update.

Needless to say, there’s no remotely valid methodology behind this whole exercise. The people on the list were not asked in a standardised fashion (say, via a questionnaire or interview) whether they believe AGW to be real or not. It appears that their quotes were simply harvested opportunistically from myriad sources of unknown reliability, while the reader is left to ponder (or ignore) the total absence of any argument for the existence of AGW. This is clearly not a survey, but nor does it attempt to paint any coherent picture of what the evidence itself tells us. It’s simply an exercise in industrial cherry-picking. Now, since the whole sordid result is in one convenient compilation, it has been endlessly regurgitated in blogs, forums and pseudo-news sites across the web. Grassroots climate change denialism* thrives on copy-and-paste.

Now for some of the people quoted.

First up there’s Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate. This is fantastic, but his Nobel Prize winning research was in superconducting, and it was half a century ago. You might recall that just two years ago the IPCC and Al Gore jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. If Giaever’s Nobel Prize is a mark of authority, then what does that make Al Gore?

Second, we have  Dr. Joanne Simpson, whose heavily edited quote makes it sound like there’s a conspiracy going on in the research community. She is represented as a climate sceptic, but consider an excerpt from her full statement:

What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical.

Of the above excerpt, the report quotes only the highlighted part. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a scientist to say, but quoting such a remark without context is clearly very misleading, if not an act of deliberate deception. Scepticism means very different things in science and politics. How can a scientist who explicitly states that “we must act” on the IPCC’s recommendations be tagged as a dissenter from the consensus?

Third, there’s a  Dr. Kiminori Itoh, who describes himself as “physical chemist familiar with environmental sciences, and not particularly specialized in climate science. He is described in the list as a “UN IPCC scientist”, which is somewhat misleading because Itoh was a reviewer for the IPCC report, not a contributor to it. His quote, that “Warming fears are the ‘worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,’” is clearly mangled, and the second part isn’t actually his.

I’m selecting a small sample of quotes because it helps illustrate how the deception works. I clearly don’t have the time and energy to go through them all, but I shouldn’t have to because the methodology is rubbish to begin with. The introduction on page 2 is farcical enough. Consider the point being made – that there is no consensus on climate change. Now consider that throughout the entire document, virtually no attention is drawn to disagreements between those actually quoted. The report states that “The over 700 dissenting scientists are more than 13 times the number of UN scientists (52)”. If that ratio reflected the general balance of opinion, there would be a consensus – a consensus against the notion of AGW. However, nobody argues this, because it would imply that a large part of the world’s media, many of the world’s governments and most of its scientific institutions are part of a vast conspiracy. That’s the point where most people would – quite rightly – stop listening.

Even if we accept the legitimacy of the entire list of AGW sceptics, the 700:52 ratio is still complete nonsense. If someone had the patience to draft a list of “prominent scientists” who believe AGW to be real, by similarly harvesting every available quote, that list could easily run into many tens of thousands. But we don’t need to. More than ten years ago, when we were far less certain about AGW than we are now, a group of more than 1500 scientists actively urged “action at Kyoto”. The IPCC itself is a forum for hundreds of scientists actively contributing to fields relevant to AGW (not just the 52 who summarised the report). Its reports are endorsed by numerous other organisations, including the science academies of the G8+5 nations in a joint statement.

But that’s all irrelevant, because we have luminaries like Chris Allen, who assures us that AGW is wrong primarily because “it completely takes God out of the picture.”

* I don’t usually like using concocted terms like “denialism”, but there has to be a label for the kind of grossly dishonest, politically charged make-believe that goes far beyond scepticism and even cynicism. Scientists are right to keep an open mind about climate change – and for the most part that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Denialism, by contrast, is something quite different. It seems to be broadly interested only in accumulating sound bites, treating the acquisition of quotes like a point-scoring system and stripping away all context and nuance.

Talking about refugees

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The Liberal Party has reminded me in no uncertain terms why I (at least) voted it out at the last election. John Howard was a competent leader, and his government can take the credit for several good deeds. However, these cannot make up for an (almost) complete lack of conscience regarding refugee policy. I can accept that the Liberal Party, by its nature, is given to supporting a free-market approach to things, including privatisation, individual workplace agreements, etc. In many cases I don’t agree with this philosophy (particularly where it disadvantages the poor, and asks the private sector to maintain infrastructure and services that are not commercially viable), but I do respect it at some academic level as an alternate perspective. Refugee intake, on the other hand, is a humanitarian issue that must surely transcend squabbles over how much control the government should exercise over the economy. You don’t screw around with humanitarian issues, unless you’re John Howard and your (re-)election depends on the irrational fear of outsiders. It’s not just wrong – it’s obscene.

This is a deficiency that the Liberals’ time in opposition has clearly not remedied. Evidentially the lull in hysteria since the “children overboard” and Tampa scandals was not the product of enlightenment, but merely a truce. Ideologically-aligned elements of the media are now helping Turnbull in making bizarre leaps of logic and claims of a government conspiracy. But this time, the facts – the ones that we actually know – seem to be making a greater impression. The government, as far as anyone can legitimately tell, is doing precisely what it should be doing, given the latest grisly incident. Meanwhile, those who do possess – simultaneously – a brain, a conscience and a sense of perspective are speaking out* in defence of some of the most vulnerable people we will ever hear about. The few Liberals who do so deserve a great deal of respect.

* Some articles you might peruse on the subject:

Talking about racism

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The combination of Israel’s consummate paranoia and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pursuit of some grubby nationalistic agenda has done the world a great disservice, from what I can tell. If Ahmadinejad knew that his anti-Israel rant would turn the UN’s Durban Review into a circus – and surely we can credit him with a modicum of intelligence – he certainly didn’t care. But what can we do? He is, after all, the head of government of a UN member country (a founding member, no less). The UN is a forum for intergovernmental co-operation, so we can’t just shut him out of it.

Israel and the West are not absolved of blame, though. Israel, the US, Australia, and the other absentees could have chosen to make something of the forum, ignoring or condemning Ahmadinejad’s comments as appropriate, and even using them as evidence for the need to act against racism. Adhmadinejad may have destroyed the conference’s credibility, but only because Israel and the West let him have the stage to himself. The Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – who probably feels betrayed by just about everyone – tried to point out the futility of boycotts and walk-outs. They say a lot about the nature of the problem that the forum was intended to address. Racism and other forms of intolerance thrive on different groups setting themselves apart from one another. They continue to exist because these groups fail to communicate, and instead of developing an understanding of each other they make silly assumptions and generalisations. The solution at every level, from individuals to nations, is dialogue. (Putting conditions on dialogue is just an excuse for not having dialogue.)

To achieve meaningful dialogue, everyone needs to be just a little less sensitive. Israel needs to stop being quite so paranoid about its existence, the West needs to accept that Israel is not above criticism, and Iran and the Arab world need to be much more pragmatic. If the world’s leaders can’t bring themselves to discuss racism in a civilised fashion, what example does that set?

It’s interesting to note that the Pope did actually endorse the conference (while condemning Ahmadinejad, of course), which is something.

Climate control

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For someone who rails so vehemently against global warming “alarmism”*, Andrew Bolt sure seems to be alarmed about hypothetical fatalities attributed to air conditioning failure during blackouts. Bolt states: “Just how many died because power blackouts knocked out their airconditioning is not known.” It’s not known, of course, because nobody has reported it happening, not because there’s some sort of shadowy government conspiracy. By contrast, the World Heath Organisation estimates that about 150,000 excess deaths are already occurring annually in “low-income countries” as a result of climate change. But then that’s based on actual research, so we can safely ignore it.

Indeed, the scientific consensus on global warming has been ignored and disputed by any number of media and political hacks. There are lists of the scientific battalions that supposedly dispute anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but most of the people on them are (a) connected to the fossil-fuel industry or funded by some like-minded “think tank”, (b) not connected to climate science in any significant fashion, or (c) not actually in denial of AGW at all. For instance, Dr Olafur Ingolfsson (whose credentials I have no particular reason to doubt) merely reassures us that the polar bear may not be in danger of extinction. For that he made it into the US Republicans’ list of “Over 400 Prominent Scientists [who] Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007“. The Heartland Institute’s list of “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares” doesn’t give any reasoning at all for the inclusion of any given name, and many of those listed have expressed their outrage.

Al Gore, who in the US now seems to be a piñata for the cynics (as though discrediting him is equivalent to discrediting the entire field), tried to point out that the consensus on AGW is real. In An Inconvenient Truth he cited a metastudy on the subject, which found that none of a sample of 928 climate-related papers had argued against AGW. A newer, more direct survey has since found that 96% of climatologists (actively publishing) agree that temperatures have risen, and 97% believe that human activity is a significant contributing factor. Moreover, the closer you are to the science, the more likely you are to agree with this view. Only 58% of the general public believes that human factors are influencing the climate. However, to argue that there is no scientific consensus is risible. Such claims seem to be based on the views of a few outspoken individuals, amplified by political and corporate interests and parroted by ideologues in the media (who, of course, complain loudly that it’s the other way around).

Needless to say, air conditioning failure is a lot more likely if more people are relying on air conditioning.

* Can one accept that anthropogenic global warming is occurring without being contemptibly tagged as an “alarmist”?

Conroy and Bolt on filtering

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The ABC’s Q&A programme spent about 30 minutes last night pondering Senator Conroy’s mandatory Internet filtering plan… well, idea, because it’s increasingly clear that “plan” is too strong a word. Conroy was, frankly, an embarrassment. To be honest, most of the questions put to him were not especially articulate, but Conroy made a mockery of himself. What disturbs me is that he seems to be fully cognisant  of the reality of public opposition, the technical barriers and even the dangers of encroaching on political freedoms, and yet at the same time he has no inkling that it means anything. Sure, ACMA may have blacklisted a dentist’s website, among a number of other worrying examples, but somehow that’s perfectly alright and acceptable simply because Conroy is able to explain how it happened (something about the Russian mafia, apparently). Forgive me if the idea of a secret blacklist doesn’t fill me with confidence. If said blacklist hadn’t been leaked recently, such errors would never come to light, and so there would be no pressure to correct them.

Andrew Bolt’s remarks on the filter were mostly directed at the Internet libertarian strawman. The argument – not terribly innovative – lays down a few of the worst examples of criminal behaviour and suggests that you can’t allow free access to everything. Possibly true, and utterly beside the point. Mandatory Internet filtering is and should be opposed on the grounds that there just isn’t a workable mechanism, by which I mean one that is effective while being compatible with basic democratic principles. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your filtering criteria are. Computers aren’t smart enough, humans aren’t honest enough and the Internet is just too damn big.