How did environmental issues become so politicised? The people purge early in the Abbott government – beginning in 2013 with the "night of the short knives" – gives some clues.
By Marian Wilkinson
"What surprised the scientists most was not their hasty sacking but how quickly the government obliterated their work. “The website that we’d spent a lot of time building was taken down with absolutely no justification as far as I could see,” says Flannery, the one-time principal research scientist at the Australian Museum and internationally renowned scientific author. “It was giving basic information that was being used by many, many people – teachers and others – just to gain a better understanding of what climate science was actually about.”
The Climate Commission had been set up in 2011
by Julia Gillard’s Labor government as an independent source of
information for the public to understand climate change and its impacts
on Australia. But the commission and its members had been pilloried as
“alarmist” by sceptical columnists in the Murdoch media and by radio
shock jocks from the beginning. Flannery was expecting the commission to
be disbanded, but the decision to kill its website hurt."
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"Not long before this, the Liberal Party’s donor cash cow, the Cormack
Foundation, which Morgan chaired, had stumped up another $300,000 for
the Institute of Public Affairs. The conservative think tank’s latest
publication, Climate Change: The Facts 2014,
was soon in the works with essays from Australia’s best known climate
sceptics, News Corp’s Andrew Bolt and former James Cook University
professor Bob Carter, along with their international cohorts by now so
familiar here: MIT’s Professor Richard Lindzen, Dr Pat Michaels from the
US Cato Institute – a think tank co-founded by American billionaire
Charles Koch – and the former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson.
At the
same time as Morgan’s attack, Lawson’s UK think tank, The Global Warming
Policy Foundation, welcomed Abbott’s old mentor, John Howard, to
deliver its annual lecture in London. The former Liberal prime minister
used the opportunity to enthusiastically back Abbott’s plan to dismantle
Labor’s climate policies in a speech he called “One Religion is Enough”."
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"By the end of Abbott’s first year in office, the PM had made it clear he didn’t believe most climate scientists, even those who worked for his government. But while his climate scepticism could shape policy in Canberra, it would soon put him in conflict with the most powerful leader in the world, US president Barack Obama.
This is an edited extract from Marian Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club (Allen & Unwin, $33), out Monday."
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