Few desires are as insatiable as the hunger and thirst after righteous. No sooner has one progressive crusade run its course than a new one must be found.
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Which is why many of us felt our spines chill at the sight of lawless livestock liberationists marauding across paddocks the other day.
Could LGBSP be the new LGBTI? How long before creatures who identify as lambs, goats, bovines, swine or poultry are counted in the census of the oppressed? How long before the Human Rights Commission’s brief embraces non-human as well as human beings?
As the perennial early adopters of cuckoo campaigns, the Greens have already signed up. Their 2019 federal election manifesto demands a parliamentary declaration affirming animal sentience, thus stamping a decisive full stop at the end of the centuries-old debate between philosophers, theologians, ethologists and neurologists that many of us thought had some way to run.
Under the Greens policy, the poachers become gamekeepers. Those pasty vegan vigilantes we saw intimidating farmers last week, high on dudgeon and low on vitamin B12, will be granted the same right of entry to private property as the RSPCA, with powers to “fully investigate and prosecute charges relating to animal welfare”.
If hypocrisy was a vote-killer, the Greens would be dead by now. It is supposed to be the party of niceness, the only true champion of inclusion, diversity, cultural awareness, respect and other modern virtues that imperfectly fill a gap we created by abandoning the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself.
Yet three women candidates in Victoria have resigned this year, complaining of a bullying and toxic culture. Among them is mother-of-two Alex Bhathal, who SBS reminds us is “a woman of Indian origin”, who complained that “the emotional trauma, for myself and my family, has at times been too much to bear”.
Paradoxically, while the credibility of the Greens as a party crumbles, the ideological force that inspired it has never been stronger. The idea of greenness, like the idea of communism, turns out to be more resilient than the institutions it spawns.
Just as the influence of communism drove Labor to extremes in the 20th century, so the influence of environmentalism is leading the party astray in the 21st.
We have seen before how today’s halfwitted campaign can become tomorrow’s official Labor policy. Labor’s platform on the environment, energy, mining, asylum-seekers, taxation, education and health has seldom been as extreme as it is at this election.
The saga of emissions reduction target creep shows how quickly this can get out of hand.
In 2007, Labor set an emissions abatement target of 60 per cent by 2050 based on 2000 levels, confident that it had 43 years to work out the detail. Four years later, the target was altered to 80 per cent with 39 years left to run.
Last December’s conference raised the bar again, this time setting a 100 per cent target by 2050 and a 45 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 based on 2005 levels.
It means Bill Shorten, in ways that he is not yet able to explain, must stop 1.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere in a little over a decade, and considerably more by the middle of the century.
These dreamy targets are only partly driven by Labor’s turf war with the Greens. It is the insidious infiltration of green ideology, rather than political jostling, that is doing most of the damage.
Labor is not conspicuously copying the Greens any more than Ben Chifley was copying the communists in the 1940s when he tried to nationalise the banks. It is simply that the same intellectual class is dominant in both parties. They suffer from the same utopian delusion, convinced that the kingdom will be built by purity of heart and leaving the details to sort out themselves.
The setting of targets, saintly in ambition, is the way the intellectual Left chooses to deal with complex economic and social challenges. Not for them the melding of common sense and pragmatism that seems to have solved most of humankind’s woes up to now.
It took little foresight in 1987 to realise that Bob Hawke’s zero child poverty target by 1990 would be impossible to achieve.
When Kevin Rudd set a target of a 50 per cent reduction in homelessness by 2020, he fell into the trap of assuming that sleeping under cardboard was simply caused by a housing shortage. Alcohol and drug addiction, mental incapacity, broken relationships or the many other factors that limit personal capacity apparently weren’t worth considering.
With climate policy, target overreach and sentimental policy formation has reached peak sloppiness. We are afforded a poor definition of the problem to be solved.
No cost-benefit analysis is required, nor is serious any consideration given to other policy choices. Confirmation bias pushes counter-arguments aside. Contrary evidence is written off as the work of dullards, vested interests or ideologues, in which category, incidentally, the progressives do not include themselves.
One doesn’t need to know much about the Australian car market, topology or the state of battery technology to know that Labor will not achieve its 50 per cent electric vehicle sales target by 2030.
It will be no more successful than Julia Gillard’s $400 million ruse to get 200,000 old cars off the road by offering motorists $2000 to trade in their clunkers.
It offers as blinkered a view of the future as Rudd’s $500 million Green Car Fund announced in 2006 that was supposed to revitalise domestic car manufacturing.
Yet that won’t stop the Shorten government trying, convinced that the intellectuals this time have got it right and that dry, old-school economists are wrong in warning of the pain this audacious piece of central planning will inflict.
In today’s attention-challenged era, sentiment and the desire for the quick sell trump conviction and persuasion.
The result is the policy equivalent of the Mother’s Day card that comes home from kindergarten thick with traces of sticky bun. It is the thought that counts, not the quality of the art.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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