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Julia Gillard's new climate policy released yesterday is a marvel to behold. A melange of bewitching hokery-pokery and beguiling flummery, it is designed to get her through the election unscathed, with a tinkling laugh and a confident toss of the red head. Orwell could not have crafted it better. Lo, a new climate change commission to propagandise the people … er, ''explain'' the science of climate change.
Behold, a ''citizens' assembly'' of 150 ''randomly selected'' volunteers to deliberate for a year on whether Australia should have an emissions trading scheme. The chosen ones will be subjected to a ''rigorous process'' to establish consensus, Gillard said. After 12 months of duchessing, subtle bullying and brainwashing, what kind of consensus will materialise? ''If I am wrong, and that group of Australians is not persuaded of the case for change, then that should be a clear warning bell that our community has not been persuaded as deeply as required about the need for transformational change.''
As required by whom? And by what sinister means are we to be more ''deeply'' persuaded?
No mind that we already have a citizens' assembly - a democratically elected Parliament. Warning bells should be going off, if they haven't already been blaring since Labor's preference deal with the Greens this week, the precise details of which remain hidden.
But the Greens leader, Bob Brown, has let the cat out of the bag - in more ways than one. First he said he would never countenance preference deals just as his party was doing one of the most comprehensive ever preference deals with Labor. It is the deal that will cement the Greens' hold on the balance of power in the Senate if Labor wins. Then, sniffing the scent of power wafting in from the post-August 21 future, Brown let everyone know the Greens would effectively tell the government what to do. Forget Gillard's deal with the mining companies. Brown wants a draconian 50 per cent tax, not the agreed 30 per cent.
There's a lot more Brown and the Greens want if Labor wins: mandated zero net greenhouse gas emissions, the effective end of coal-fired power generation, phasing out of coal exports, a ban on new coalmines or power stations, removal of GM crops, and active discouragement of cars. They want a ban on the exploration, mining and export of uranium, and closure of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, which produces medical isotopes used for cancer treatment. They want to restrict funding of private schools. They want to abolish mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and to expand the definition of refugee to include ''environmental'' or ''sexuality'' refugees. They want to legislate for same-sex marriage, tinker with age of consent laws, establish ''intersex'' as a legal gender, fund gender reassignment, require government to consult lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people on policy, and provide easier access to abortion. On drugs, they are harm minimisation all the way, with more needle exchange programs and injecting rooms. And be prepared for a barrage of nanny-statism, starting with a ban on junk food advertising.
The Greens' published policies are carefully couched in escape clauses, to avoid the scare campaigns of past elections, when their extreme social agenda cost them votes. But the effect will be the same. And of course, their big-ticket policy, the one with the most nation-changing consequences, is an ETS or carbon tax, with householders paying the price in soaring energy costs.
As the former treasurer Peter Costello said on Thursday night at a Quadrant dinner in Sydney to launch his father in-law Peter Coleman's new book, The Last Intellectuals, while the political class may have given up on an ETS this election, the idea is as strong as ever in the education system.
''This argument will come and come again over the next 30 years,'' Costello said. ''But if you really want an ETS and you don't want to wreck the economic fabric, there's an answer staring you in the face … nuclear power … I'd love to see Australia bite the bullet and take that on.'' Fat chance of even a debate about that with the Greens in the passenger seat.
In a new book, the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter says emissions trading schemes are a token offering by governments to get green campaigners off their backs, and have been championed by opportunistic financiers as a win-win solution to climate change, even though they do nothing to alter world temperatures. In Climate: The Counter Consensus he also points out the alarmist argument on human-caused climate change has been beset by the sort of ''noble cause corruption'' of science that had the Wood royal commission destroy police careers. The book - the first print run sold out in days - taps into disquiet about the scientific ''consensus'' on climate change in an electorate unlikely to be duped so easily again.
Thus Gillard's policy, like everything else she has done since becoming Prime Minister, is aimed at giving the impression of being all things to all people - respectful and flattering to the ''decency and plain commonsense'' of those with whom she disagrees, while quietly reassuring those who know she is on their side that they'll get everything they want if they just keep mum until after the election.
C.S. Lewis would recognise her ploy of beguiling the masses with endless supplies of Turkish delight, just as her lookalike, actress Tilda Swinton, does as the White Witch, Jadis, who froze Narnia in the Hundred Years Winter.
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