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The Mad Marathon: The Story of the 2013 Election
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereLunghezza: 334 pagine5 ore
- Editore:
- Black Inc. Books
- Pubblicato:
- Sep 25, 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781922231161
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
With the 2013 race for the Lodge now run and won, who better than Mungo MacCallum to make sense of it all?
With wit and insight, Mungo documents the ups and downs of this longest of campaigns. He dissects Labor's self-destructive leadership war, the Coalition's cheap and nasty Broadband Lite, and the plight of our billionaire battlers, doing it tough on $250K.
This fast-paced and incisive account follows Canberra's finest as they speed around the country, taking selfies, kissing nuns and generally saying anything to get your vote.
The Mad Marathon is the essential chronicle of the 2013 election year from one of Australia's most original and entertaining writers.
Mungo MacCallum is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades.
With wit and insight, Mungo documents the ups and downs of this longest of campaigns. He dissects Labor's self-destructive leadership war, the Coalition's cheap and nasty Broadband Lite, and the plight of our billionaire battlers, doing it tough on $250K.
This fast-paced and incisive account follows Canberra's finest as they speed around the country, taking selfies, kissing nuns and generally saying anything to get your vote.
The Mad Marathon is the essential chronicle of the 2013 election year from one of Australia's most original and entertaining writers.
Mungo MacCallum is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades.
Informazioni sul libro
The Mad Marathon: The Story of the 2013 Election
Lunghezza: 334 pagine5 ore
Descrizione
With the 2013 race for the Lodge now run and won, who better than Mungo MacCallum to make sense of it all?
With wit and insight, Mungo documents the ups and downs of this longest of campaigns. He dissects Labor's self-destructive leadership war, the Coalition's cheap and nasty Broadband Lite, and the plight of our billionaire battlers, doing it tough on $250K.
This fast-paced and incisive account follows Canberra's finest as they speed around the country, taking selfies, kissing nuns and generally saying anything to get your vote.
The Mad Marathon is the essential chronicle of the 2013 election year from one of Australia's most original and entertaining writers.
Mungo MacCallum is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades.
With wit and insight, Mungo documents the ups and downs of this longest of campaigns. He dissects Labor's self-destructive leadership war, the Coalition's cheap and nasty Broadband Lite, and the plight of our billionaire battlers, doing it tough on $250K.
This fast-paced and incisive account follows Canberra's finest as they speed around the country, taking selfies, kissing nuns and generally saying anything to get your vote.
The Mad Marathon is the essential chronicle of the 2013 election year from one of Australia's most original and entertaining writers.
Mungo MacCallum is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades.
- Editore:
- Black Inc. Books
- Pubblicato:
- Sep 25, 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781922231161
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Mungo MacCallum has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades. He has worked with the Australian, the Age, the Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald and numerous magazines, as well as the ABC, SBS, Channel Nine and Channel Ten. His books include the bestselling Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, Run Johnny Run: The Story of the 2004 Election and Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election.
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Anteprima del libro
The Mad Marathon - Mungo MacCallum
Copyright
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia
email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com
http://www.blackincbooks.com
Copyright © Mungo MacCallum 2013
Mungo MacCallum asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
MacCallum, Mungo (Mungo Wentworth), 1941- author.
The mad marathon : the story of the 2013 election / Mungo MacCallum.
ISBN for ebook edition: 9781922231161
ISBN for print edition: 9781863956185 (paperback)
Australia. Parliament—Elections—2013. Elections—Australia. Political campaigns—Australia. Australia—Politics and government.
324.994
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Lewis Carroll
Chapter 1
If all weren’t a little mad we’d be totally insane.
Stacy Lucero
The year 2013 began with fire and destruction, tumult and terror; but the overture came as no surprise to either triskaidekaphobes or psephologists. Sure, the Mayans had predicted the world would end on 21 December 2012, but what did they know? The Mayans had never had to suffer through a federal election year in Australia, always an occasion for wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in 2013 holding the real possibility of apocalypse.
Already the four horsemen were abroad, spreading war, setting the scene for Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil – or, depending on your point of view, between evil and good. The most rational response for the majority, who didn’t like either side very much, was to dive into a deep hole and pull the hole in after them. But alas, for all too many of us that option was not open, so we assumed our normal role as innocent bystanders, glued to the unfolding of that strange and terrible drama known as ‘the campaign’.
In practice, of course, it had started long ago; indeed, a cynic might have said that the last election, in 2010, had been little more than a punctuation mark in the epic vendetta between the Red Witch and the Mad Monk, as they were unaffectionately known to an exhausted and exasperated media. For the best (or worst) part of three years, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott had been sniping at each other, inflicting numerous ugly flesh wounds but unable to strike the mortal blow.
However, some of the scars were permanent. Much of the electorate now saw Gillard as a liar, unwilling to keep her promises and, on the rare occasions she did, unable to deliver on them. Her government, if not downright illegitimate, was untrustworthy and incompetent, compromised beyond all hope of redemption. Abbott, on the other hand, had assumed the mantle of a conservative, sloganeering, utterly negative bigot, with no interest in public policy and not much in anything other than his body and his ambition. If not actually a misogynist, he was deeply sexist, uncomfortable with women and immured in a medievalist view of the world, which he planned to visit upon the rest of us if we gave him half a chance.
To call the choice uninviting was like describing Hades as a trifle warm for a relaxing holiday. But it was the only choice we had, so we watched gloomily as they fronted the cameras for their new year’s messages, which, almost identically, spoke of their optimism and confidence for the year ahead. Almost immediately the bushfires began. Even to convinced atheists it had the appearance of divine retribution.
But at least one convinced atheist, the prime minister herself, was unfazed. She had already got out of the blocks early with an appearance at the Woodford Folk Festival, where she took part in a love-in (verbal, that is) with Bob Hawke – an act for which Malcolm Turnbull obligingly provided the curtain-raiser. Now she invited the Australian cricketers and the touring Sri Lankan team to Kirribilli House for new year’s drinkies and to cavort with her cavoodle Reuben, in both of which activities they obliged. In return, she attended Jane McGrath Day at the Sydney test match and, after giving a large sum of money to the cause, was generously applauded by the crowd – surely a first for a politician interrupting a sporting function.
There was also a more solid reason for her to feel that she was perhaps, at last, moving forward. The last Newspoll of 2012 had the two-party preferred vote locked at 54–46 in favour of the Coalition – right where it had been nearly twelve months previously. A later, more discursive analysis seemed to put the real figure at 52–48. Abbott was still headed for a win, but from Labor’s point of view it wasn’t nearly as bad as the indefatigable Dennis Shanahan tried to portray in his accompanying comment piece. When the next Newspoll showed the gap narrowing further, to 51–49, Labor could, for the first time in three long years, claim to be back on track.
So we had a contest, and a bitter and even ugly one it might turn out to be, because it could only end with the destruction of one or the other of the combatants. Neither Gillard nor Abbott could survive defeat at the polls, and they knew it. This was a fight to the political death. But first, both would have to survive in their respective positions until the election was called. And while Gillard now looked safe enough from any resurgence by Kevin Rudd, it seemed that Abbott, incredibly, could just possibly be vulnerable.
*
A year earlier, this assertion would have been preposterous; by almost any measure, the man who had been thrust into the leadership almost by accident was the most successful opposition leader in many years. Abbott had already seen off one prime minister, and he’d given his party what looked like an unassailable lead in the opinion polls.
Most importantly, there was no credible challenger within his ranks. True, there were some who remained uneasy about his undeviating aggression, his take-no-prisoners approach to every issue, however subtle and complex; there were well-grounded fears that it could rebound on him and the Liberal Party, especially with his apocalyptic pronouncements on the carbon tax. There were those who yearned for the insurance a little more nuance might provide.
But to these doubters, Abbott’s army of supporters in the party room and the media replied simply: ‘Look at the scoreboard.’ Their man was firmly on track to lead the Coalition back to its rightful place on the Treasury benches, and in the long term – and the short and medium terms too – that was all that mattered.
During 2012, however, things had become a little less certain, and the great paradox of Tony Abbott had started to emerge. Sure, he had put his party in a winning position, but he was also the lead in its saddlebags. If anyone could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it was Abbott.
Although the Coalition remained in front in the polls, Abbott himself was deeply unloved by a growing majority of the electorate. The voters didn’t like Julia Gillard much either, but the feeling that had prevailed for so long – that the Labor government was so horrible that the voters were willing to pay any price to get rid of it, up to and including installing Abbott as prime minister – no longer applied. If the voters had to choose a prime minister, most preferred Gillard. This did not mean that they couldn’t be persuaded to close their eyes, hold their noses and elect Abbott, if only to get rid of the minority Labor government, but it did mean that a lot of them were far from enthusiastic about the prospect.
Of course, the public had its own favourite. Malcolm Turnbull, the leader Abbott had deposed by a single vote back in 2009, was overwhelmingly the popular choice as prime minister. Even Kevin Rudd was preferred to either of the incumbent party leaders. The problem was that the voters, as so often in the last few years, were utterly out of step with their political masters. Rudd, excoriated by his former cabinet colleagues and unceremoniously rejected by his party room only a year earlier, was not a serious competitor, while Turnbull, in spite of (or possibly because of) his well-aired abilities, was considered too liberal for the Liberals and was utterly unacceptable to the Nationals.
There was at least one other possibility: Joe Hockey, John Howard’s ‘great big bear’, who would have got the job in 2009 if he had been prepared (as Abbott was) to kowtow to the right-wing warlord Nick Minchin instead of insisting on a free vote on the question of an emissions trading scheme. Hockey had made considerable progress as shadow treasurer and said some sensible things about the need to end the culture of entitlement, but he had never really lived down the image of the clown in the Shrek ears on morning television. But he was still available and had even embarked on a weight-loss program, considered a certain indicator of leadership ambitions. He remained well liked within the party room and was the most likely candidate if the Liberals concluded that Abbott might not, after all, deliver the goods.
If that did happen, they would act ruthlessly. Abbott was there for just one reason: to win. If it appeared he couldn’t, he became expendable. Just ask John Gorton, or Billy Snedden, or John Hewson, or Brendan Nelson – or even the sainted Robert Menzies back in 1941. However, that time would not come unless and until Labor became seriously and consistently competitive in the polls, and even then the Libs might still decide it was too late to change and that they might as well stick with the Catholic they knew.
This did not stop them trying to give Abbott a makeover. There was a growing air of desperation about claims that, whatever he might have done or said in the past, he was now a born-again feminist: why, his wife and daughters loved him, and he even let his chief of staff, the formidable Peta Credlin, keep her IVF drugs in the office fridge. I mean, you can’t get more female-friendly than that, can you?
But the electorate stubbornly refused to buy it, and Abbott’s image remained unassailably macho. He had spent most of 2012 dressing up in hardhats and taking part in long-distance bike rides and ironman contests; he now started the new year by inviting the media to photograph him in the guise of a fearless firefighter. This worked a treat with the blokes, and Abbott showed a total reluctance to give it up, however much it failed to excite the sheilas (always excepting Janet Albrechtsen).
There were times when it seemed that he just couldn’t help himself: he often talked about the need for reasoned debate and thoughtful policy discussion, for a measured and positive approach to politics, but then he’d see a stoush and have to throw himself into it, fists swinging. It was the pattern of his student days, and it had persisted since he entered parliament. His unedifying efforts with Peter Coleman and Piers Akerman to destroy Pauline Hanson, his hyperbolic attacks on the carbon tax, his support (at least tacitly) of the Ashby/Brough conspiracy against Peter Slipper, his pursuit of Julia Gillard over real or imagined misdeeds in her past – there was a manic belligerence to all of it, which had been admired in the early days of his leadership but was now increasingly seen as counterproductive.
Worse than that, it seemed ineradicable: with Abbott, what you saw was what you got – always had been, always would be. And in opposition it worked … well, it did for a while. But, wondered the more thoughtful conservatives, what about in government? Tony Abbott as Australia’s twenty-eighth prime minister? The challenges of the twenty-first century would be many, and they would be fraught and complicated; would they succumb to a swift left hook and right uppercut? The real concern was not whether Abbott could get to the Lodge, but what would happen if he did.
*
However, that was not what was focusing the collective mind of the electorate in the early days of 2013. The overwhelming mood seemed one of surly disgruntlement; if everything was as rosy as Gillard and her Panglossian treasurer, Wayne Swan, insisted, then why weren’t we better off? Actually, most of us were – and much better off, according to the ABS. But the people were feeling the pinch, partly because, after the wake-up call of the global financial crisis, they were no longer thrashing the plastic with reckless abandon and had started to pay off some of their accumulated debt, and perhaps even to save a bit. Ending the profligacy had induced withdrawal symptoms that were far from pleasant, and the desire to blame someone else for the pain was entirely natural, as was the selection of the government as the scapegoat.
In vain Gillard talked of the great reforms in progress and ahead: the National Broadband Network, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the implementation of the Gonski report on education. The punters were more interested in the undoubted fact that their electricity bills were going up. Wasn’t this the government’s fault? Wasn’t it something to do with the carbon tax? Well, no; at least, only a very little of it was. And certainly the carbon tax was nothing like the destroyer of worlds predicted by Tony Abbott. His ongoing mantra about ending the taxes now seemed almost as irrelevant as Gillard’s crowing about Australia’s two-year term on the United Nations Security Council.
What was needed, the swinging voters insisted, was action on cost-of-living pressures. In other words: ‘What do we want? More money! When do we want it? Now!’ Surely, since Wayne Swan had ended 2012 by finally abandoning his magnificent but quixotic obsession with producing a budget surplus in the 2012–13 financial year, it was time to free up the purse strings. But the government didn’t; if anything, it went the other way, and it did so through policies which in general looked mean or tricky or both.
On 1 January the new welfare payments structure for single parents kicked in: once the youngest child turned eight, the sole parent (usually, of course, a mother) went off the single parents’ allowance and onto the dole – or Newstart, as it was euphemistically named. This meant a loss of up to $100 a week and introduced the obligation to actively seek full-time work, or else lose Newstart too. Some 80,000 people were immediately reduced from acute penury to abject poverty. At a minimum of a little over $265 a week, the Newstart allowance had always been considered grotesquely low, and considerable pressure had come from the Greens and the government’s own backbenchers to raise it by some $50 a week. For a single parent supporting at least one eight-year-old and perhaps other older children as well, it verged on child abuse.
The responsible minister, Jenny Macklin, was asked if she could live on the equivalent of $35 a day and unwisely responded ‘yes’; then her office issued a transcript from which both question and answer had been omitted, thereby proving once again Stubbs’ Rule: (1) Everyone screws up sooner or later; (2) Any attempt to cover up the screw-up is invariably worse than the screw-up itself; (3) Everyone forgets Rule 2. Macklin was not allowed to forget it, and eventually apologised and said that she herself had been agitating for an increase in cabinet. Gillard played tough love: sure, it wasn’t a lot of money, but the whole idea was to encourage people to get off it and back into the workforce.
A nasty taste remained, though, as it did after foreign minister Bob Carr’s sleight of hand removed $375 million from the foreign aid program to pay for feeding, housing and clothing those asylum seekers who had overflowed the offshore camps and were now in some form of detention on the mainland. Carr insisted that this was perfectly legal under the OECD guidelines, and it probably was; a good lawyer can always find a loophole somewhere. But that was not the point. It looked mean and tricky because it was. The foreign aid program is supposed to provide help to the wretched of the Earth, not to pick up the tab for failed domestic policy.
It gave the opposition scope for an easy attack; even Julie Bishop got off one good line with the observation that Australia was now the third-largest recipient of its own foreign aid, after Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. This was true but not entirely newsworthy: given that Australian aid is often given in kind rather than in cash, quite a lot of the money usually ends up in Australia anyway.
In 2005–06, for instance, some 41 per cent of aid money was paid to Australian businesses in one form or another, making Australia by far the largest recipient of its own foreign aid. And much of our aid to Afghanistan was providing facilities for our troops, rather than for the long-suffering Afghan people. At least there was an end in sight to that. By now the troops were making preparations to leave, so what aid there was might be better directed – at least until the Taliban took over, which most strategists felt was only a matter of time. Another adventure into a silly and futile foreign conflict, another costly failure.
*
In January, though, the more urgent concern was the bushfires, which hit first in Tasmania and then in New South Wales and Victoria. The superstitious again looked for omens when the Heat beat the Scorchers in the final of the Big Bash cricket. But there were other indicators that things were now severe: the politicians were getting in on the act. The previous week, Tony Abbott, firefighter extraordinaire, had paraded across the front page of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in a pristine protective outfit, preparing to go on standby duty. The housing minister, Brendan O’Connor, branded it a stunt but later withdrew that claim, and Abbott was in fact filmed going into action on the South Coast.
Someone who described himself as ‘the firefighter on duty’ tweeted that Abbott’s spotless uniform was clearly untouched by action, and someone else claimed that while it was nice to see him back, it was in fact the first time he had fronted for an actual fire (as opposed to a branch meeting) in thirteen years. Nevertheless, Abbott fans were entranced by yet further proof of his blokiness.
The best Julia Gillard could do in response was to go feminine and compassionate, which she had already done with some success on the Tasman peninsula and now repeated in the Warrumbungles. Her detractors dismissed her appearance as a cynical ploy; like Abbott, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
The fires and the heatwave that provoked them inevitably reopened the ‘debate’ on global warming and climate change, and brought out the sceptics and the deniers in plague proportions. Undoubtedly the silliest was the Liberal member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, who dismissed any suggestion that a new and dangerous trend was emerging. Why, it was just a hot spell, he scoffed. There had been plenty like it before; back in 1790, Watkin Tench, the celebrated First Fleet diarist, had noted that the heat was intolerable. And so it undoubtedly was, to a Pom in a redcoat. Anyway, this proved that there was no global warming.
Others noted that Dorothea Mackellar had written of droughts and flooding rains in a sunburnt country, so what did we expect? An international researcher revealed that it was also bloody cold in parts of Europe at the moment – no global warming there. The cautious rejoinder from the senior principal research scientist of the Bureau of Meteorology, Scott Power – that while it was unwise to attribute any single instance to climate change, it was quite clear that the world, including Australia, was warming and that, as a result, extreme events such as those of the past week would become more common and more severe – was relegated to a footnote.
So the old fight between those who believed the science and those who believed the rent-seekers of the fossil-fuel lobby, the ranters and demagogues of the airwaves and the tabloid media was on once again, with the sceptics and deniers getting just about the same exposure as the scientists – in other words, about 99 per cent more than they deserved. But even if you sided with the experts, your view of the climate-change debate probably depended on whether you were a rain-gauge-half-full or rain-gauge-half-empty kind of person – or, to put it more dramatically, whether you found the weather getting just a bit more exciting or positively scary.
Because, as the scientists confirmed at the end of 2012 in a diligently researched article in the authoritative journal Nature, their figures were right on track. The world was warming precisely as forecast, and it was not about to stop, meaning that the weather would continue to get more extreme and less predictable, with consequences that could only be dire. The future might not be catastrophic – at least, not for everybody. But it will, to paraphrase the great British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, not only be different from anything we imagine, but different from anything we can imagine.
Nothing concrete had been achieved at the last climate-change conference, in Doha in late 2012, and although many of the right noises were heard, especially towards the end of what had been a thoroughly acrimonious gathering, practical measures to reduce the rate of emissions appeared as far away as ever. True, some thirty-five nations had recommitted to the Kyoto Protocol in the interim before a new agreement could be forged in 2015, but they were mainly from Europe (plus Australia) and were responsible for only about 15 per cent of the damage. Some of the middle-rankers who had been part of Kyoto – Russia, Canada and Japan among them – pulled out, while the big players – the United States, China and India – remained intransigent.
Yet there had been moments of consensus. The standoff between the developed and developing countries was finally starting to crack. There was now a general agreement that as the developing countries sought to improve their standard of living, they would need help to do so in ways that inflicted the least possible damage on the environment, and that a ballpark figure of US$100 billion should be set aside for this purpose. Note that this was not compensation for damages past, as the Australian appeared to believe, but provision for future needs. In fact, Australia had committed nearly A$600 million to the cause, most of it going to Pacific Island nations threatened by rising sea levels. Many other nations were ready and willing to kick in, although inevitably the global financial crisis and the subsequent economic downturn made the job more difficult. But the long overdue recognition that it would have to be done was a major step forward, and suggested that genuine worldwide agreement on emission reduction targets in 2015 might not be out of the question.
In the meantime, the world was not standing still: carbon pricing in Australia, throughout the European Union and in other pockets around the world was becoming established practice, and supplementary measures were being implemented in most countries according to local circumstances. For instance, in India all public and private buses were being converted from diesel to natural gas as a matter of urgency. Measures such as these revealed changes in government attitudes around the world. China, as you would expect from a dictatorship, was reportedly taking even tougher action. At the other end of the scale, Sri Lanka, the small island state with a population slightly bigger than Australia’s, now relied largely on clean hydroelectric power to supply its expanding grid; where there were gaps, they were being plugged by wind and tidal power. No new fossil-fuel stations, and definitely no nukes.
So that was the good news. It might not be enough to stop the weather from going crazy but at least we could report progress. But not, apparently, in the pages of the Murdoch press, whose increasingly dotty proprietor had recently tweeted that all the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was actually a good thing, because carbon dioxide produced the greenery in plants. Well, yes, but also the heatwaves, cyclones, droughts, superstorms and rising sea levels.
But hang on: that last one just wasn’t happening, at least not in the Australian, according to its environment editor, Graham Lloyd. As the fires in the south-eastern states raged on, Lloyd gave us a breathless front page ‘exclusive’ headed ‘Sea rise not linked to warming
’. He quoted a paper from the Journal of Climate co-authored by John Church, described as ‘Australia’s pre-eminent sea-level scientist’, and claimed that Church had said sea-level rises were not accelerating.
When he saw Lloyd’s report, Church gave a press conference to say he had been misrepresented and that in fact his paper said precisely the opposite: of course sea levels were rising, and the cause was anthropogenic. Undeterred, Lloyd wrote a piece calling it a ‘war of words’, under the headline ‘Scientists split on the question of sea-level rise’. In fact, as the chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, pointed out, they weren’t; there was certainly argument over just how quickly the rate was accelerating, but the fact that it was happening was not in dispute.
Lloyd, in a desperate spirit of overkill, ran a turgid feature claiming there was a ‘rising tide of discord’. The next day the Australian published a belated correction to Lloyd’s original story. Lloyd, as insouciant as ever, wrote another tedious piece of self-justification the following weekend, headed ‘Rising uncertainty about sea level increases’. Well, in his mind, at least.
Lloyd was soon upstaged by a retired political scientist called Don Aitkin, who enthusiastically joined the Australian’s jihad against the ABC. Truth and balance, thundered Aitkin, are important values and ought to prevail, and at the ABC, this was not the case. His evidence? ‘To me the ABC seems committed to the view that anthropogenic global warming (AGW, now transmuted into climate change
) is a real and present threat to humanity.’ Well, yes, and also to the view that the Earth is round and revolves around the sun.
But oh dear, the science is far from settled about any of this. No doubt Aitkin and Lloyd could
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