Debate divorced from reality: 2022 in review
What disturbs me most is a trend that is not led by science or innovation, diplomacy or war. It is the growing chasm between public/political debate and reality.
So, in an era of Facetime, autonomous vehicles and space tourism, it is discombobulating to be looking back from near the end of 2022. What stands out about this year, one in which we prised ourselves free from the pandemic, changed our federal government and saw war break out along the old tracks of the Iron Curtain?
What disturbs me most is a trend that is not led by science or innovation, diplomacy or war. It is a societal trend, and it is the growing chasm between public/political debate and reality.
There is an old joke stemming from the mad cow disease crisis in Britain that used to amuse me intensely because of its absurdity. But now it seems more like a parable.
It talks about two Friesian cows (a common, black and white dairy breed) grazing in a paddock, and one looks up at the other and says, “This mad cow disease is a bit of a worry.” The other cow chews on her cud and replies nonchalantly, “Doesn’t worry me, I’m a penguin.”
Disturbingly, such satire is becoming redundant, like the comic genius of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which once amused us with the absurdist demands of Stan. “I want to be a woman, from now on I want you to call me Loretta,” Stan (or Loretta) said, before explaining that he wanted to have babies and that “it’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them”.
It is not so funny this week because the Cambridge Dictionary added to its definition of woman with a new meaning – “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. Soon the dictionary will be redundant as words can mean whatever we want.
This denial of reality is not superficial, it stretches deep into our politics, governance and public debate. When I covered the Cambridge entry on television this week, one viewer responded brilliantly: “My LandCruiser identifies as electric.”
In climate and energy policy, the connection between public debate and reality is almost non-existent. We saw that this week when the federal government made an extraordinary market intervention to cap the price of gas, even though governments have been trying to price gas out of the market for years.
Anthony Albanese and Labor came to government promising to reduce annual electricity bills by $275 but they have now seen them increase by more than that, with Treasury forecasts predicting they will rise by that much again, two times over. Now public debt is increased so the government can pay rebates to people and businesses, and prevent soaring power prices sending them under.
Voters are told we can reliably power this nation on renewable energy with storage, even though this is categorically not possible – many countries have tried and all have failed. Yet most of our politicians and media go along with the ruse.
They also pretend that, despite this transition costing hundreds of billions of dollars, it will make electricity cheaper. This does not make sense – who will pay those hundreds of billions of dollars and the return on that capital? The public also is told this physically and economically impossible transition will reduce the threat from natural disasters and extreme weather. Again, this is a perversion of reality because global emissions are rising and it is a scientific fact that even if all Australia’s emissions disappeared overnight there would be no discernible change in the climate. The inanity of all this leaves anyone with a rational approach exasperated.
To watch parliamentary debates or the nightly news is to fall through the looking glass.
Governments state and federal, Labor and Liberal, have deliberately subsidised renewable energy to up-end the economics of fossil fuel energy, with the express desire of forcing coal and gas out of business. But now these same governments impose price caps on the fossil fuels to try to make them more affordable, while they also subsidise some gas and coal to maintain operations because we need them, and provide financial support to consumers so they can pay for the expensive electricity these policies deliver, despite promises the opposite would be true.
If this sounds a little confusing, self-defeating and paradoxical, you need also to remember that Australia is the world’s leading exporter of both coal and gas. We are happy to export these commodities at premium prices to countries that will use them with flagrant disregard for their greenhouse gas emissions.
We use the royalties from these sales, in part, to continue to undermine our own energy security through a heavily subsidised renewables push that disadvantages our industry, strains our economy, reduces our standard of living and does nothing to benefit the environment.
The clever country title has become a study in irony.
We are a country at war with our major export industries. We have gas, coal and uranium reserves that are the envy of the rest of the world, yet we seriously contend that we should not use any of them ourselves. As a nation we have taken self-loathing and self-harm to new levels. Sometimes it is enough to make you wish you were a penguin.
Still, the broader global disconnect with facts and reality is even more disconcerting.
The revelations about how Twitter deliberately censored information and people, with a clear political bias and intent, should be an international scandal, yet much mainstream media and politics averts its eyes.
Joe and Hunter Biden were protected while Twitter conspired with Democrats and the FBI – and, given it relies on free and fair debate, democracy was subverted.
The most important recent global debate also was corrupted, as Twitter worked secretively to silence Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya and others who challenged the imposed orthodoxy of Covid-19 lockdowns, restrictions and vaccine mandates.
Here was monolithic, corporate power exercised against the interests of democracy, public health and freedom of speech, and the broader political left has been struck dumb. Indeed, the green left now attacks Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, because they have opened their files and provided accountability – for many journalists, transparency is welcome only if it confirms their own political disposition.
In the postmodern world, motives are assumed before facts are considered, which makes much of our public debate anti-rational, anti-intellectual and anti-truth. Try to discuss the known facts about the origin of Covid-19 or the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing transmission without ending up in a political or ideological discussion.
Even the known facts, and known unknowns, of the Brittany Higgins Parliament House rape allegations do not seem to matter. Ideologues make their arguments, stake their claims and weaponise theories for their own partisan aims, regardless of what we do or do not know. Meanwhile, Higgins has been awarded compensation (perhaps as much as $3m) and taxpayers are none the wiser as to why or how it was justified.
This is a year when we struggled to shake off the authoritarian shackles of the pandemic. Back in July, Monique Ryan seemingly admonished the nation to “put your masks on” and even this week the teal independent member for Kooyong pushed for a return to Covid restrictions.
Our fears about the marshalling of information during the pandemic, and the redundancy of vaccine mandates, lockdowns and draconian rules have all been borne out by the facts. But we had a hard time finding or airing these facts when we needed them most.
When we read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World we feared an authoritarian regime controlling our personal information and liberty – Soviet or Beijing style. But in 2022 we know the real risks are how much freedom and information we willingly surrender to governmental authority and digital giants.
Truth, all too easily, can be hidden or ignored. But reality cannot be changed by censorship or definitions, so there will always, eventually, be a reckoning with the facts.
We just need to confront that as soon as possible. I suggest 2023.
My generation read Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1970s, so we consciously wondered what the world would be like in that famous year. We watched 2001: A Space Odyssey with similar trepidation.