Into the Vortex

When I started this blog, my intention was to try and produce one post per week.  Nothing too demanding on myself or anyone who may care to follow my self-indulgent ramblings. But there was one thing I hadn’t counted on – the demented superficiality and dangerous stupidity of Australian public discourse and its contributors.  The material is un-ending, almost overwhelming.  Every day a failure of leadership, direction, intelligence and wit.  And today is only Tuesday...

This morning’s exercise in idiocy comes from dedicated non-thinker, Senator Barnaby Joyce, who made this comment in regard to climate change and our response to this threat:

''It is an indulgent and irrelevant debate because, even if climate change turns out to exist one day, we will have absolutely no impact on it whatsoever … we really should have bigger fish to fry than this one.''

Like many of Joyce’s comments, this statement is just a tangled knot of inanity that seems too hard and too pointless to untie. And yet to let such a comment pass without consequence, to let it be tacitly accepted through silence and allowed to spread its festering influence, is unbearable.  Stupidity of this scale must be challenged and exposed.  A manager of mine once said, “As a leader, if you set your own standards at 10 out of 10, your people will come in at 8 out of 10.  Set your standards at 6 out of 10 and you’ve got big problems.”  If the leaders of public discourse are permitted to drive the quality of thought around critical debates down to this standard, it only serves to create a broader environment of ignorance, easy answers, denial and gut reaction. This type of a public discourse creates the excuse for an assertive apathy and proud nescience – where not only do I not care or think, but I attack you for being “indulgent” enough to do so.

I am not an animal...

Let us assume, just for a moment, that the science around climate change is questionable.  As Liberal Senator Busby says, “I know eminent scientists have one view but I know other eminent scientists - usually ones who have retired and are no longer reliant on government grants - have a totally different view.”  Don’t know about you, but I often look for expert scientific guidance from scientists not actively working in a particular field.  Anyway, let’s run with it.

Sen Bushby: I have consulted Copernicus by ouija board and he says, "Don't panic!"

Even if we accept that climate change is contested, the potential ramifications of the phenomenon would mean that, from a purely risk management perspective, there is more value and importance in debating a response to climate change than discussing boat people, union slush funds, misogyny, the NBN and even Kate Middleton.  Good rational, economic management would insist that we plan for a reliable climate change response and put protections in place today, even if we do debate the scale and scope of impact.  The risks are simply too high to do nothing. Ask the insurance companies what they think about climate change ... there’s a reason they are ahead of the curve on corporate action in this area.

To argue that we shouldn’t discuss climate change because there is nothing we can do about it is, to put it nicely, disingenuous.  But, the key is not to look for rhyme or reason in Joyce’s comment – if for no other reason than you’ll be sucked into a cretinous vortex – but to look to its sub-text. The underlying premise here is that the future be forfeit to the current political agenda.  Climate change only affects the lives and livelihood of every person on Earth, but we have issues of political immediacy and expediency to deal with, issues that may affect Barnaby’s re-election, issues pertinent to one man’s agenda.  These, seemingly, are our “bigger fish to fry”.  If we allow any long-term or strategic issue confronting our nation to be supplanted by the frivolous to-ing and fro-ing of here and now politics, then we will all join Barnaby in the mad spiral to oblivion.  Short-term, narrow agenda politics is the politics of destruction.  Socially, economically and intellectually it fails to prepare us for the future, leaving us standing like a lost Amazonian tribe as the bulldozers move closer ... [fades to static]