There has been a subtle but significant shift in the climate change debate recently. You might think I am referring to the ‘climategate’ emails that have exposed the misleading claims made by leading climate ‘experts’.
The leaked emails show that data has been falsified, inconvenient truths were covered up by ‘tricks’ and that global cooling remains an unexplained phenomenon.
Surely it is simply a coincidence that these falsehoods lent support to the same scientists’ claims for millions of dollars in additional research funding.
Perhaps the subtle change I am referring to is the admission by alarmist of the year Tim Flannery on Lateline that “for the last few years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend”. Or his frank admission that “we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it” – a position previously denied by those who claim the science of climate change is settled.
No, the change I am talking about comes from Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party. Given their track record of redirect and reinvent, one could be forgiven for considering it political spin.
For years we have heard from Rudd and friends that climate change is the ‘great moral challenge of our time’. We have been told that it was important for Australia to act without waiting for the rest of the world because ‘the cost of inaction was greater than the cost of action’.
Even Labor’s hard-left Industry Minister Kim Carr proudly proclaimed “Australia can lead the world in climate change, and this government is determined to ensure that it does.”
Somehow that has now changed. This week’s Labor message is ‘We will do nothing more and nothing less than the rest of the world’.
Let me spell this out for you. Just two weeks ago, Mr Rudd and Labor wanted to impose a $120 billion tax on the Australian economy under the guise of climate change. Somehow it didn’t matter if it imposed punitive costs on every family or cost tens of thousands of jobs.
Labor weren’t concerned about the viability of our electricity generators or the interests of Australian industry. Labor insisted that we had to act now and we had to act irrespective of any global agreement.
Since the defeat of Labor’s ETS it appears they will now only do what the rest of the world agrees to do. Why then are they insisting on reintroducing their greedy green tax into the parliament in February?
They say a week is a long time in politics. Labor’s hypocritical backflip-with-double-twist suggests that a fortnight is all it takes to try and rewrite history.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
