Charles Wooley: New regime has rung in changes with a refreshing symbolic approach

The new Tasmanian Premier’s climate change portfolio may not achieve much it but sends a strong message to the powerful Right wing climate sceptics, writes CHARLES WOOLEY.

Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein has announced a new climate change portfolio, sending a strong message to the climate sceptics in the powerful Right wing. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

THE new regime has “rung in the changes” with the Premier assuming the position of Tasmania’s first Minister for Climate Change. Whether the portfolio achieves much in the short term, it is the symbolism that is so striking. Peter Gutwein has triumphed over the climate sceptics on his right wing, people, like the unsuccessful leadership aspirant Michael Ferguson. The liberal right was deeply influenced by a man not even in the state parliament. Yes, you know who.

Even as the new Premier was framing his climate portfolio announcement, that old influencer, Senator Eric Abetz, was thumping out an opinion piece for the Mercury. You can’t blame this paper for printing it. Eric is avidly read, especially by the legions who dislike him.

The PC crowd of course rage about Abetz getting his say, but Left or Right surely it is better we know what the extremes are thinking rather than have their doctrines fester in the dark, one day to surprise us.

The good Senator was a cross that former premier Will Hodgman often quietly admitted he just had to bear. It is one that Peter Gutwein might now wish to discard.

While the effects of climate change and global warming are abundantly clear around the world, still Eric thundered that the fires here were all the fault of the Greens. He continued to pursue political sinners, heathens and apostates with the intensity of a medieval witch-hunter.

Normally you should be wary of opinion pieces putatively written by politicians because they are usually the work of ex-journalists who have decamped to “the dark side”. In the guise of advisers and press-secretaries these ghosts considerably outnumber Tasmania’s real journalists who work in print, television and radio.

Gallingly for real journos, those who have gone across are usually much better paid.

But Eric’s piece with its implacable and forensic prosecution of his hated enemies is clearly all his own work. Terse and staccato, its creator’s fingerprints are all over it. Even as you read, you will hear the familiarly distinctive and oddly mechanical voice.

“Figures on the Green Left have taken faux exception to the valid identification of the role played by environmental activists, often with ties to the Greens Party, in obstructing fuel reduction burns. They say that because the Greens do not control majorities at any level of government, they cannot bear any responsibility for preventing fire mitigation.”

Unless there is a brilliant satirist employed in his office this is the fair-dinkum voice of the Senator whom Tasmanians have come to love or loathe. But the truth is, wouldn’t we all miss him?

Meanwhile a new broom is also sweeping through No 10 Downing Street and great changes have been promised.

Normally a government in its first months seeks out consultants and advisers who are most often just like the folk who informed the previous administration. It is said the strength of the Westminster system, which we share with the British, is that no matter what loonies are elected to government, in the end the wiser and cautious heads of the permanent public service will prevail. Radical ideas for change are dampened down by the world-weary advice of mandarins whose brief is above politics and is to ensure the safe continuity of government.

Perhaps not this time.

There may be no better proof that Boris Johnson is a loose cannon at Number 10 than the PM’s appointment of Dominic Cummings as his right-hand man. Cummings was an architect of the victorious Brexit campaign. He was responsible for the winning slogan “Take Back Control” which he developed, not by talking to experts and the elite but by hanging out in pubs and talking to punters. He listened to the voice of the people, not to the great and the good nor to the shrill, ill-spelt and intemperate echo chamber of social media but to the voice of real people.

Having a quiet one in the local is a great learning experience. In Australia we call it “the pub test”. While Cummings was doing his research in the amber zone, he learned that while the Brits hated their life being run by foreign public servants from the EC, they didn’t much like their own career public servants either.

Ordinary Brits believe their civil servants are neither civil nor do they serve anyone but themselves. The higher echelon who run the country are largely drawn from the upper classes, all went to the same schools, are members of the same clubs and are dedicated to the status quo.

Privately their motto is “ne quem stabam navem”. Don’t rock the boat.

With Johnson’s approval, his chief adviser Cummings is plotting to capsize the civil service elite and to replace them.

Cummings placed a nationwide employment advertisement, not in the Financial Times but on his own blog site calling for the CVs of “weirdos and misfits with odd skills ... oddballs ... wildcards, artists, people who never went to university ... an unusual set of people with different skills and backgrounds”.

Sir Humphrey Appleby would be horrified.

But here in Tasmania I reckon our mob would love it. Throw in a few forgers, a couple of horse thieves, chancers, rebels and miscellaneous villains and Mr Cummings might be drawing from a very Tasmanian gene pool.

Cummings’s prospective team of government advisers, whether loopy or just outside of the loop, will be most unlike Sir Humphrey from the evergreen British television series Yes Minister. While Sir Humphrey cautioned against reform and change because, “you never know where these things might end up”, Cummings believes things can’t get any worse.

Cummings won applause from the influential Times’ columnist Clare Foges. A former No 10 insider and speech writer, she earned the title of “the prime minister’s larynx”. From her experience in the system, Foges in her column, deep-throated her personal frustration with “the slow pace of change” and “the tolerance of mediocrity”.

She recalls in her time at No 10 how she was frustrated by meetings that “went nowhere” and that the place seemed “stuck in second gear” and how “beyond six o’clock, it was the Mary Celeste”.

All of which goes to show, at heart, how very British is Tasmania.

The idea of changing the guard at No 10 has got the whole UK talking and other democracies watching.

Whether so much change can really happen in a system of government so hidebound by archaic tradition depends on how much the new advisers can get in Johnson’s brain. If they do, it would certainly lead to what Sir Humphrey might ironically call, “A courageous decision, Prime Minister.”

Here in Tasmania our new innovative Premier Gutwein might be tempted to look at what Boris and Cummings are thinking.

But Premier, google it yourself.

Don’t ask an adviser.