At the mercy of fools and lightweights

BLAME for the extension of the carbon tax must be laid at the feet of the arrogant and irresponsible Clive Palmer, the ringmaster of his eponymous circus.

Even though he was unable to appear on the senate floor, it was his abject ignorance of parliamentary procedure that aborted the planned repeal of the carbon tax yesterday. Far from being the genius he proclaims himself to be, the Queensland mining magnate showed he lacked the ability to grasp the simplest procedural steps that would have ensured the end of the carbon tax — an outcome that he had claimed to support. Palmer’s first problem was he tried to make policy on the run, even though he had said on Wednesday evening that he had decided on the amendments he wished to introduce as part of his reward for helping axe the tax. By yesterday morning, and even then not until 9.10am, too late for his amendments to be circulated, he had changed the content of his amendments. The other problem for Palmer was that the clerk of the senate decided that Palmer’s proposed amendment could be interpreted as a new tax and had to be ruled out of order as the senate lacks the power to introduce tax bills. Privately, Palmer was huffing and puffing and making ungenerous asides about “clerks” who didn’t know the law while he was a “professor of law”. Even that is a stretch. Palmer was given the honorary title “adjunct professor” by Bond University in 2008 in recognition of “goodwill, positive endeavours and support” of the institution, rather than any academic prowess. Following agitation from academics who earned their titles after years or hitting the books, a Bond University spokesman told The Australian: “We have clearly communicated to Mr Palmer the appropriate use of academic titles ... we are confused ourselves as to why Mr Palmer and other parties make continual reference to him as Professor Palmer.” Let’s not be cute. The Snoarasaurus calls himself professor because he has a hunger for relevance and status. A smarter person would have helped himself and his party if he had sought some guidance from more experienced hands than the rank greenhorns the PUPpies leader has chosen to be his parliamentary sherpas. He would then have discovered he could have introduced his amendment in the lower house, where he is meant to sit, and he might have been able to negotiate a deal with the government for support in return for his party’s fair dinkum backing for dumping the carbon tax. That is not the way the showboating Palmer chose to go, however, and now the government will have to hope that the PUPs learn something from their humiliating senate experience and try to walk before they attempt to run the show. After the first sitting week, the talent or lack thereof in the new cross- bench senators is embarrassingly apparent. South Australia’s Family First senator Bob Day and NSW’s Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm are prudently observing carefully and feeling their way cautiously. WA’s PUP Dio Wang is asking excellent questions of his more experienced colleagues and has not yet taken the plunge, PUP’s senate leader Glenn Lazarus is gingerly participating but has no real understanding of the process. The rest of the PUPs and the Motoring Enthusiasts’ Ricky Muir just don’t look as though they have the intellectual stamina to stay the course. For the moment they can all claim their inexperience as an excuse for their performances — but that situation will not last. Just as the public rapidly tired of the three amigos in the last parliament — the lower house independents Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Bob Katter — so too will it turn on the new cross -benchers unless they improve their performances. Voters who thought last September’s election was in large part about dumping the unpopular and ineffective carbon tax have every right to be enraged at the abysmal performance of Palmer and his party. That the carbon tax continues to be an anchor on the economy, an impediment to growth and a hit to every Australian householder is entirely due to the posturing Palmer’s ignorance. So-called protectors the real Barrier Reef polluters LISTEN to the Greens, Labor or their broadcast arm, the ABC, and you might think the biggest threats to the pristine waters of north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef came from the mining industry and the ships that serve our export industry. Dig a little deeper though and you will find it is the ecoterrorist group Sea Shepherd, a darling of the Leftist media, that has been fouling our northern waters. Not that you would know about it if you were wedded to the taxpayer-funded broadcaster, Fairfax or the other news services which pander to the group. Yet it was Sea Shepherd Ltd, whose Australian arm is chaired by former Greens leader Bob Brown, which was found guilty of pouring up to 500 litres of diesel into the Trinity Inlet, the mangrove-lined estuary which serves as the port to the city of Cairns, and fined $15,000 last month for marine pollution. Another case of do what I say, not what I do, for the global green movement. According to court records, Sea Shepherd’s ship New Atlantis pumped diesel fuel into the harbour as the ship was moored alongside the Cairns wharf on October 13, 2012. It was claimed that a crew member failed to manually flick the “low level” switch during a fuel transfer, despite being aware the switch was faulty. The court was told Sea Shepherd Australia, which had only recently taken possession of the ship and brought it from Japan a week earlier, had yet to translate signage and manuals or repair the switch. Crew members had been given basic handover information but the chief engineer had to work out the ship’s systems “by his own devices” due to instruction manuals and other materials all being in Japanese. All crew members were volunteers and were either German, Dutch or American. Fortunately, a member of the public noticed diesel flowing into the sea and after unsuccessfully attempting to alert crew members notified the master of a ship moored alongside who boarded the New Atlantis and notified its crew. “She noticed a strong smell of diesel fuel and saw liquid running from the New Atlantis into the water,” the court document read. “The smell was so strong the passer-by had to put a jumper over her nose ...” Magistrate Kevin Priestly called the amount “not insignificant” and questioned why a crewmen carried out the fuel transfer and not the chief engineer. No conviction was recorded against Sea Shepherd and the group was given six months to pay. While Sea Shepherd’s polluting activities were not reported by some, every accusatory claim made by the Greens about the development of the deep water Abbot Point harbour has been unquestioningly repeated, even though they have been baseless.