Unhealthy climate of political orthodoxy

MELBURNIANS, beware: Robespierre is on the loose in Toorak. Blue-rinsed heads tumbling into the basket of the guillotine? The thought causes a certain frisson. Unfortunately, far from being humorous, the reality is sinister.

I refer to the Greens' candidate for Higgins, Clive Hamilton, who believes disputing climate change may be even worse than denying the Holocaust.

Hamilton is a professor, of philosophy no less. But it does not seem to have occurred to him that denying historical fact may be different from disputing a complex scientific hypothesis about the future. As Mark Twain observed, it seems quite unlikely that drawing such distinctions "could have offered difficulties to any but a trained philosopher".

As for equating mass murder with the harm that may come from climate change, it suggests a startling lack of moral compass. No doubt, if we were to get it badly wrong on climate change, great suffering could result. But that would also be true if we accepted the claims about climate change and they proved to be false. That is what makes the decision difficult and, in a real sense, tragic. But getting it wrong is surely different in kind from throwing children into gas chambers.

If Hamilton does not understand that, I suspect there is no way of explaining it to him.

The trouble, however, goes deeper. What Hamilton is really saying is that those who disagree with him are not merely incorrect: they are evil. In fact, they are murderers, wantonly risking "the lives of hundreds of millions in the future". And we know how murderers should be dealt with.

This is the logic that leads to the guillotine, the gulags and the killing fields.

Hamilton's embrace of that logic is what makes him a fanatic, a man unable to accept the fallibility inherent in human judgment. What is distressing, however, is that he is not alone.

The hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how far the rot has spread within the scientific community. I doubt the researchers involved view the issues in Hamilton's moralising terms. What is clear, however, is that these researchers regard scepticism as a dirty word.

Yet scepticism is the price knowledge pays for truth. We question our theories because that questioning is the means by which they will be displaced by better theories in future. The moment scepticism is abandoned for orthodoxy, scientific inquiry degenerates into pseudo-science, as with genetics in Trofim Lysenko's Soviet Union.

The failure to understand the value of questioning, however, goes much further than the researchers whose emails were leaked.

Consider the Prime Minister's recent speech on climate change to the Lowy Institute. Kevin Rudd is no fanatic. But what he said at the Lowy Institute is that the debate about climate change is closed and that any questioning of it is fundamentally illegitimate.

Since when do we have gag rules about policy issues? I thought democratic centralism -- Lenin's notion that political parties should be monoliths, presenting a single, agreed view to the world -- had collapsed with the Berlin Wall.

Rather, we should encourage views to be put and tested, including views that are unpopular. That should be the political system's key function: not to fake a consensus but to build it and, where it cannot be built, to express and explain the differences. Of course, decisions must be made, but even then it is entirely appropriate that debate should continue.

That is what distinguishes democracy, which is first and foremost an open process of deliberation, from authoritarianism. Democrats know one big thing: that they may be wrong. And they value one big thing: the scope democracy creates for mistakes to be set right.

Alexis de Tocqueville, surveying the nascent US democracy, saw that as the enduring virtue of democratic institutions: that they have "the faculty of committing errors that can be corrected". In that sense, disunity, far from being death, is the oxygen of society.

In contrast, the authoritarian cannot countenance opposition. He does not merely disagree with opponents; he despises them.

This is ground where the Prime Minister needs to tread more carefully than he has to date. His comments at the launch of Paul Kelly's book, The March of Patriots, were especially disturbing, highlighting a Manichean world view centred on a struggle between a Labor Party that stands for progress and a Liberal Party about which there must be "legitimate doubt" as to whether it is entitled to be a "partner with Labor in the great project of economic modernisation for Australia".

"Great project of economic modernisation"? There is more than a whiff of Maoism, with all its sectarianism, in phrases such as these, just as Building the Education Revolution evokes images of Julia Gillard leading the Red Guards, disguised as management consultants, as they "storm the schools" and "with long strides tear down the capitalist roaders".

But this is a government of doctrinaires without doctrine. Its rhetoric exudes a politics of moral certainty in which the light of dawn glows on the crucibles of human destiny. Its practice, however, is hand-outs and questionable deals, with sordid compromises, such as those on the ETS, that are as economically irrational as they are remote from the high ground of economic reform the government claims to cherish.

The result is a curious cocktail, in which policies that sprinkle rents far and wide, extravagant spending initiatives (such as the national broadband network) and an almost complete lack of progress in key areas -- health, education, federalism -- where so much had been promised, sit aside a tone ever more exasperated and ever more intolerant of dissent.

Power, the great US political theorist Karl Deutsch said, "is the ability to afford not to learn". That insulation from learning is the first step on the path to corruption and eventual collapse. But to learn one must accept to be challenged. Fanatics such as Hamilton are impervious to questioning; but government in hard times cannot survive without it.

The year ahead will be a tough one. All the more important, then, to open up the debate rather than constantly seek to shut it down. Doing so would run against this government's every instinct. But the alternative is ultimate failure, with a great deal of unnecessary pain along the way.