Tim Blair: The virus started by a Swedish schoolgirl has been caught by those who should know better
It destroys political careers with ruthless efficiency, but still our national and state leaders are drawn like hypnotised Swedish schoolgirls to ruinous climate policies, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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What is the best way to combat the greatest economic threat ever to reach our shores?
Some argue for complete eradication, banking on the arrival of a vaccine. Others say we should simply live with the threat, hoping we eventually develop a form of community-wide immunity.
But perhaps there is another, as-yet undiscovered way of dealing with the insidious and destructive menace of climate change activism.
Let’s hope so, because we’ve already tried eradication and it just didn’t work.
Their own Labor Party quickly cast aside Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard after they became infected with climate activism, yet many of their colleagues still exhibit obvious symptoms.
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Bill Shorten’s Prime Ministerial ambitions were ended when he ventured unmasked into the climate madlands.
And Malcolm Turnbull proved that an initial painful dose of climate activism is no barrier to subsequent reinfection.
Nine years after he was dumped by his colleagues as opposition leader for proposing that the Coalition support Labor’s emissions reduction scheme, Turnbull had to be thrown out as Prime Minister when he again went climate crazy.
As for attempting to ride out this threat, the promise of herd immunity seems to be wishful thinking.
Herd conformity is more likely, as any discussion with your child’s teachers (and coal-frightened zombie classmates) will immediately reveal.
It’s a funny old disorder, this climate bug. Mostly it infects the young, but political careers of the 50-plus set are generally hardest hit.
Gladys Berejiklian is this year approaching her 50th birthday, and so is in the prime at-risk category for a raging dose of climate panic.
In fact, it may already be too late to save the NSW Premier.
Having failed to socially and politically distance herself from the likes of NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean and other climate-spooked inner-city NSW Liberals, Berejiklian last week displayed obvious high-range eco-obsession indicators.
Not to frighten anybody, but the state’s leader has got herself a case of the sudden-onset Greta Thunbergs.
Chatting online last week during a webinar with former UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Berejiklian described herself as “progressive about climate change”.
Remember her pro-business 2019 election theme? That version of Gladys is evidently on the way out, replaced by a business-crushing proto-Green.
Discussing the UK’s aim for zero emissions by 2050, Greta Berejiklian said: “To have a conservative Tory government legislate 2050 emissions is the stuff of dreams in Australia, and we can only hope to emulate it.”
Normal Australians presently dream of visiting friends and relatives interstate – or in the next suburb, if you’re in Melbourne.
Normal Australians dream of one day being allowed to watch live sports events from the stands.
Normal Australians may even allow themselves to fantasise about keeping their jobs.
Berejiklian vaults way past all of that mundane nonsense to an imagined wonderland of nationwide mandated carbon dioxide oppression.
She’s even hoping that current legislative overkill may helpfully soften up Australians for their coming emissions restrictions.
“We fear disruption less,” Berejiklian said of the public response to coronavirus rules. “The population will feel more amenable to jobs of the future, sustainable living.”
Good Lord. We haven’t even finished yet using the coronavirus as an excuse to destroy the economy – and Berejiklian is already working on the second and terminal phase.
The Premier’s timing was not optimal. Her zero-carbon glee was revealed as the latest economic figures exposed an 8.6 per cent contraction in NSW.
“To be describing it as the ‘stuff of dreams’ on the day in which the economy has collapsed is disgraceful,” One Nation MP Mark Latham told The Australian.
Incidentally, Berejiklian’s cosy chat with Theresa May was organised by a mob calling itself the Coalition for Conservation, which claims to “work with the conservative voices within the Coalition debating, devising and show casing centre-right ideas to reduce emissions whilst supporting our economy”.
In reality, it seems to be more of a support group for allegedly conservative politicians whose non-conservative instincts led to the premature end of their careers.
Beside May (who resigned in 2019), other Coalition for Conservation speakers include her predecessor as British PM David Cameron (quit in 2016) and Turnbull (driven out in 2018).
Nice crowd you’re running with there, Gladys. It’s an international fellowship of the failed and forgotten.
And why has this CFC conservation crowd adopted the same abbreviation we use for chlorofluorocarbon?
There are other signs in the NSW Coalition government of anti-conservative impulses.
Nationals leader John Barilaro is right to describe the Koala Habitat Protection State Environmental Planning Policy, for example, as “greyhounds on steroids” – a pointed reference to the attempt to ban greyhound racing that halted Mike Baird’s premiership.
The planning policy places stupid demands on regional property owners to comply with complicated and expensive environmental regulations.
And it won’t do much at all to save whatever koalas survived the summer bushfires. “All it does,” Barilaro correctly points out, “is strip farmers of their property rights.”
The NSW Liberals may require an extended period of enforced electoral quarantine, beginning in 2023.
At the very least, the party needs a thorough deep clean to purge it of the career-stopping and society-wrecking climate virus.