At a recent The Spectator climate change debate with Lord Lawson hosted by the IPA (reviewed here), Mark Latham, not surprisingly, gave perhaps the most entertaining speech. Particularly interesting was his description of an “informal fourth arm of government” which is probably as true as it is concerning. So who watches the scientists?
Mark Latham: …… over time, I was convinced step by step by the weight of scientific opinion. Now the previous speaker aside, I think it is reasonable to suggest there is majority scientific evidence pointing to climate change and the need for Government to act. So I am on the side of evidence – I am on the side of scientific assessment.
What worries me a lot about this debate is the way parliamentary consideration of these issues has changed.
When I entered parliament in 1994, there was a clearly established doctrine: that’s the one Joh Bjelke Petersen famously had so much trouble with at the Fitgerald inquiry in the 1980s. It was called the separation of powers: the idea that there were three divisions of Government – the parliament, the executive and the judicial system. They were separate and they balanced each other, guarding against corruption and other problem in our system of government. Well, I think with the massive advances in technology that we witnessed over the 20 or 30 years, there is now in our parliamentary system an informal fourth arm of government and that is the notion of science. To be a parliamentarian today is to rely heavily on scientific evidence. We see this with new drugs that are placed on the PBS, we see this with the purchase of expensive medical equipment on the advice of medical science. We see it in agricultural policy, we see it in marine science.
And I think one of the saddest and most regrettable aspects of this debate is the denigration of the scientific evidence. There is in the Australian Parliament today and there has been in the immediate past, a significant body of climate deniers, climate change deniers. Not just on the Liberal party side, not just people like Nick Minchen who’s recently retired, people like Tony Abbott who’s described the science as ‘crap’, but also on the Labor side. Martin Ferguson is someone I would regard as a climate science denier.
Now, the problem with this approach is how would they know, how would they know? Why are these the people willing to accept the scientific recommendation on the PBS, on the purchase of medical equipment, on agricultural policy, on marine science, but they reject it in the all important question of climate science. This denigration, this process of ignoring and belittling the science is something I think we’ll live to regret. I think it comes from the arrogance of parliamentary power. In Nick’s case, you run a little faction there in the South Australian Liberal party and all of a sudden, you know everything about every issues, and you’ve got the right to say that the majority of climate evidence is wrong. So this step is in the wrong direction: it takes us back to the sort of talk – to some of the crackpot views – that we heard in the Dark Ages, the irrationality, the end of enlightenment, that I think very much imperils our parliament system and the future of our country and indeed the planet. So action is needed.
This [Gillards carbon tax] is in fact a massive money churning policy [applause]. And of course, the weakness in the policy is revealed in the government’s own forecast. They’re aiming to reduce carbon emissions in Australia by 160 million tons by the year 2020 compared to the business as usual scenario. Seventy percent, seven tenths of this objective will be realised not as a result of the work of the carbon tax but by the purchase of carbon credits overseas. A further 10% will come from tree planting green programs and the like and only 25% will come from the price effects that arise from the carbon tax and my estimates of the treasury estimates are probably generous, because the substitution for carbon based consumption is very limited.
It’s instructive to look at the Gillard proposal compared to other taxes. We do in fact have like minded and like intended described normally as punitive taxes. And a carbon tax is to carbon use what tobacco excise is to smoking. Imagine if the Government in the tobacco excise gave most of the money to smokers, compensated the big tobacco companies and exempted some of the brands from the tax [laughter].
So this is the economic fiasco that another old mate Julia is putting in front of the Parliament. As I said before, I am in favour of a carbon tax, a genuine, real carbon tax that gets the result the country and planet needs and not the sham tax we have.
Mark Latham’s critique of Gillard’s Carbon Tax is spot on. Compensating smokers for tobacco excise indeed. It will not only churn money, but worse, shred money. The vast majority of CO2 abatement projected by the Government’s own figures will be outsourced overseas, through overseas carbon offsets – which third world countries will gladly sell to us for a staggering total of $57 billion annually by 2050. All to be administered by the UN, of course.
More interesting is Latham’s prescient description of the new strategically powerful place of science in our governance – indeed as the informal fourth arm of the government, next to the parliament, the executive and judicial arms. The three formal arms have checks and balances developed and proven over centuries since the first issue of the Magna Carta in 1215.
What checks and balances exist for this science arm?
What did Dwight D. Eisenhower mean in his 1960 speech:
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.
Eisenhower meant don’t let scientists become the high priests and capture policy.
Mark Latham demonstrates this capture of government by Eisenhower’s ‘scientific technological elite’ when he says: “. There is in the Australian Parliament today … a significant body of climate change deniers ….. Now the problem with this approach is how would they know, how would they know?
He propagates the fallacy that climate debate is elite scientist versus non-scientist. But that is simply absolute fiction. The debate is between the majority insider ‘elite scientists’ versus a minority but equally-qualified peer reviewed outsider scientists with contradictory findings, those not yet captured by the “Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”. There was one just to the right of Mr Latham in the room – Professor Ian Plimer. Like him or hate him, Professor Plimer is a published scientist, as are hundreds of others like Professors Lindzen, Christie, Spencer, Singer, Soon, Carter, Nils-Axel Morner, Svalgaard and even Curry – just off the top of my head.
The ‘deniers’ listen to both camps of these scientists and they assess who is more trustworthy, just as lay juries in court decide which of the two opposing expert ‘scientists’ are more believable. The non-scientific public may not know Stefan-Boltzmann Equations, but they are very good at detecting telltales of a culture of insiders, of exaggeration, of group think, of conflicts of interests and of influence of commercial interests.
The Government resists domination by any of its arms – judicial activism is combated by new, clearer legislation, executive by oversight, parliament by voters. How does it resist the elite science? In medicine, agriculture, marine – cost-benefit and budgetary restraints at least put a cap on the effects, even if the science often gets it wrong. But there appears to be no limits on climate science – clearly saving the world has no limit, no possible moral opponents.
On climate change, Eisenhower’s ‘scientific technological elite’ has captured the Government, and it’s time to break that capture and look at the problem objectively. We may be surprised that there is no serious problem.
