Talk on media to Turks Head Club, Melbourne 10 April 2024

My style is not big thinking but getting down into the weeds and detail of what’s going on. So in this talk I’ll cover a variety of issues. First an overview of the media industry’s economics and reputation. Then I’ll focus on the NYT as a case of study of where the mainstream media is at. I’ll deal with the wire services like Reuters and their new business model. I’ll provide some Australian context and Finally I’ll look at misinformation laws globally.  

Business-wise,  the news media are travelling poorly – the old model of ads financing journalism is broken. . In addition loyal readers are ageing, youngsters get their news from social media.   

Papers that can’t generate paid on-line subscriptions will fold. In the US 2-3 papers are folding every week. The NYT says it will become on-line only before long. Personally I recently switched to reading the Australian daily on-line. It’s a different way to brief myself. 

NYT publisher AO Sulzberger laments what he calls the “Collapse of public confidence in press”  

Only 11 per cent of Republicans – who comprise half the population – now trust the media, and only 10 per cent of Americans as a whole trust the media’s reporting on COVID.   

    In Australia reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers.  

Michael Gawenda, ex-editor Age is quite a leftist but disillusioned by journos and union petitions favoring Hamas.

“I think journalism is in crisis.  The line  between   the social justice warriors on social media, and the  journalists in the mainstream media, is becoming unclear. That is disastrous for journalism and journalists. And not to be too pompous, for liberal democracy as well.”

I’ve had a good look at The NYT  because it is a Goliath of newspapers —   Sulzberger owners claim a quarter of the world’s population engages with NYT annually. Two decades ago it seemed in a bad way as its ads migrated online, but now there’s 10m readers paying for on-line vs only half a million getting it in print. It’s profitable ; its market cap has risen ten-fold in 15 years; It’s added 1000 journalists in recent years (half through acquisitions), when elsewhere 10s of thousands of journos have lost their jobs.  btw as a greedy journo, I looked up salaries at the NYT — very low, $50k to only $100k for important editors, how do they survive New York cost of living?

The other story is that it only caters for left readership . Even six years ago they were 85% lib-democrat readers — who knows what today?.

The young journos – politely people of color – are dragging it even further left.

I’ll document this in three examples.

Late 2019, NYT staff had a revolt because a headline was just neutral instead of hostile about President Trump. The staff revolt was similar to all these ABC staff revolts and no-confidences over Gaza. Someone at the internal town hall meeting with the chief editor Dean Baquet leaked the meeting transcript.  Baquet said, We have to Pivot from Trump Russia collusion to 1619 Project damning US historically for slavery and white supremacy — ie get onto this whole black power/victim narrative. That won almost instant Pulitzer Prizes and brainwashing forays into thousands of US class rooms. It’s now mainstream.

NYT was caught flat-footed by Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary   so Sulzberger demanded the paper broaden its range of views. (Bit like ABC having to hire or publish Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson). In 2020   

there was the  riots over the cops killing George Floyd — 500 violent outbreaks, burning and looting, 30+ deaths including half a dozen cops shot, and way over $2b damage — that was just the insured component. 

 So the op-ed page editor John Bennet allowed a comment piece by a Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying that as a last resort the military  should control rioters. Calling in the military is not outrageous and many precedents for it  in post-war US history, including the 1960s deep south school segregations. This caused another revolt of the younger black staff of saying they the Cotton piece put them (somehow) in danger. Management initially backed the op-ed editor   then went completely to water and sacked him. They also   demoted his deputy back to the news floor and published a grovelling apology 

  the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.

the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved 

  the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.    

 SO much for allowing diverse voices more space in the paper.

 One of the NYT political-diversity hires was a Jewish conservative writer called Bari Weiss, who outraged the staff. Just a month after the Riot piece, she quit   saying it was impossible to withstand the bullying culture.

She finished,  Rule One at the NYT:     Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative.  . Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.

 the great   scandal of the NYT taking China Communist Party money is public record material. 

In 2020 Republicans in Congress forced China Daily, run by the CCP, to properly disclose its US influence-peddling as a foreign agent.

It showed up an undisclosed USD 100,000 a month for a decade from China Daily alias CCP for advertorial  (pretend news) supplements in the NYT.  like Diayou (Senkaku) Islands belong to China. and nice Tibet and HK stories. One 2019 NYT video ad depicted the oppressed Weegurs as happy under Chinese rule. In other words, the Chinese Communists bought coverage in the NYT for a decade for a piddling $10m. 

When this came out,  100s of these advertorials vanished from NYT digitised archives, dating back to 1851. The CCP money could have influenced NYT covid coverage dismissing stories the Wuhan lab leak theory.  2 NYT Whistleblowers were told “don’t go near” those stories.

Not many lay people recognise the key role of the media wire services, aggregators of content to thousands of newspapers and websiites globally. They used to take pride in being neutral, not biased. That’s out the window and they’re proud to flaunt their progressive bias.

  Agence France Press, Reuters and Bloomberg have literally signed the climate pledge and partnered with 460 other media groups for hyping warming and cancelling whatever doesn’t fit the climate narrative. 
This green coalition is called Covering Climate Now (CCN), run by groups like The Guardian and the COlumbia Journalism School. CCN’s founders view fossil fuel executives as criminals against humanity. They also want to “revoke the social licences” of “deniers”. 

The worst signatory is probably AFP. Its climate stories are even run by the Australian, coming from  AFP journo Marlowe Hood who has laughably self-titled himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet”.  

 And America’s biggest wire service, Associated Press (AP), in a jaw-dropping breach of journalistic ethics, last year hired 20 specialist climate  reporters using an $US8 million gift from five green/Left billionaire philanthropies. AP explained candidly that  it needed the money:

  philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.

 AP’s style book is a global guide for publishing. It now prescribes that the term“climate change,” can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.” Also “avoid false balance” because climate science is settled and near unanimous. It’s taken other foundation money to push the diversity and inclusion line – even after the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative admissions to universities.

I’ve found it costs very little to set up an outfit to bias the climate media.  — budgets of just 5, or 10 million dollars.   I’ve profiled at least a dozen of them worldwide. The ABC has subscrivbed to at least three of them., One is Trusted News Initiative, launched by the BBC as a global alert system to cancel narratives that don’t suit progressives. Another is Newsguard, which puts a red warning label system on your browser to flag “untrustworthy” sites. The goal is drive advertisers away from those sites. Trusted News is being sued by Robert Kennedy Jr , the Democrat contender, for anti-trust conspiracy.

Others are Earth Journalism Network that bribes LDC journos to write climate propaganda, and Science Feedback (France), that offers ignorant journos expert advice from their tame climate alarmists. 

Now for Australia’s main private climate outfit .Tim Flannery’s Climate Council as a case study in successful media manipulati0n.   The Council is really a media annex for Minister Chris Bowen. They stood alongside him on the platform –  literally – for his first ministerial press briefing.  

$8m budget – more money from green left foundations than it knows what to do with. Council  Chair is Carol Schwarz, daughter of retailing royalty Marc  Besen worth $2.5 billion.  Big donor is Chris Morris from Computershare – worth $1.2b. 

 Its latest annual report  boasts of its “drumbeat” of climate calamity. Its 20 media spinners spoon-fed more than 22,000 stories into the media last year   to influence “millions” of Australians . That’s 800 items a week.  

The Council   actually trains reporters with Media Union help to propagate the narrative like bushfires are due to climate change – when globally, wildfires are declining.   

 The Council is prioritising now the narratives about gas cooking in kitchens being unhealthy and why drivers should be forced into electric vehicles by so-called fuel pollution standards.

The worst threat today is literally government control of the media.  Governments are sub-contracting out censorship to the media giants like Meta, microsoft and Google.  Australian misinfo bill:  2300 submissions and 20,000 comments.  No timeline. ACMA run by Nerida O’Loughlin on $610,000 per year — will impose its own standards. And she is to enforce them with fines literally up to billions of dollars per day. Even ABC and Media Alliance are worried, while our science and tech academies want crackdowns on climate dissent. 

ACMA would turn to Fact Checkers ABC/RMIT and AAP FactCheck as arbiters for what’s misinformation. This is asking a wolf to guard the sheep.

Study by IPAs John Storey of all checks since 2019 – 65% show leftist bias . On referendum, 91%   bias. On covid, 94% bias. On climate, 81%.

He  concludes: “The government’s proposed misinformation and disinformation laws are the single biggest attack on freedom of speech in Australia’s peacetime history.”

OVerseas:US 2022 pre-mid-terms: Biden launched “Disinformation Governance Board” = Ministry of Truth, under Homeland Security 

 Headed by Nina Jankowicz, who said inn 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures were foreign disinfo campaign . Truth Ministry Scuttled within weeks after derision and legal challenges on First Amendment.    

 UK and EC: each with their own sets of rules purporting to benefit online safety and democracy. 

I hope all this hasn’t been too incoherent and I look forward to round-table discussion.

The Australian Academy of Contrivance

• 28th July 2023
•  Comments (7)

Tony Thomas

Is the Labor government’s drive for 43 per cent CO2 emission cuts by 2030 — and net-zero by 2050 — a tad unrealistic? As Climate Minister Chris Bowen has mentioned, the CO2 cuts require 22,000 more 500W solar panels each day from now till 2030, and at least one new 7MW wind turbine every day to 2030.[1] We are to hook all this gear up with more than 10,000km of high voltage pylons. That’s about seven times the distance between Melbourne and Brisbane, as the rather exhausted crow flies.

Unrealistic? Not at all, according to the experts at the Australian Academy of Science. In a submission to government on July 14, the Academy wants the targets close to doubled. It says the emission cuts by 2030 should be 74 per cent[2] and net-zero should be brought forward 15 years to 2035, 12 years hence. So make that roughly 40,000 new solar panels every day – bought from China, I assume- and daily installation of about three 7MW turbines until 2030.

The Academy’s acceleration will up our net-zero cost of $3 trillion , but whether it doubles it or quadruples it I have no idea. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 has already had a five-fold cost blow-out to $10 billion-and-rising.

What’s a 7MW turbine involve? The 180 biggies for the Macintyre windfarm in Queensland are only 5.7MW. A turbine of 7MW is a 110m tower of steel and concrete on a vast concrete base, with total height, including 160m blade diameter, close to 200m. (These blades defy recycling). Each turbine involves about 200 hectares of cleared land, along with rare and highly-toxic minerals and lubricants and more than 20 tonnes of copper.

So what, says the Academy climate experts, pencilling in more than 5000 of these beasts by 2030! I hope all the construction isn’t wasted – the turbines’ output is zero during the wind droughts across the Eastern States that can last for days, lulls overlooked by turbine advocates.

The Academy is, ahem, apolitical. Its science policy director, Chris Anderson, has his name on the July submission. He has a Monash University honours degree in history and a Melbourne University Master’s in Public Policy. Pre-Academy, he had been adviser and then chief of staff for six years to Labor Senator, Rudd-Gillard minister and factional warriorKim Carr. Mr Anderson reports to Academy CEO Anna-Maria Arabia who attained Academy leadership in 2016 after three years part-time as policy director/principal adviser for then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.[3] 

The submission says,

The Academy supports building to this more ambitious target – noting the effort and behavioural changes that must be made to get even close.

To give you a feel for the “behavioural changes”, there’s some overseas reports. A UK government-funded report from Cambridge University engineerslate last year says that to dump CO2 by 2050 – never mind by the Academy’s 2035 – UK construction sites would have to do without CO2-intensive bricks, glass and cement. The group’s previous report said that for the UK to get to zero-2050, all flying and shipping must stop, beef and lamb are to be severely rationed, along with home cooking and heating. Car traffic (even when it’s all electric) must fall by 60 per cent. These two reports, sensibly, don’t assume that presently untried or half-baked technologies will come to the rescue of our comfortable lifestyle.[4]Our Academy’s submissions swarm with such get-out-of-jail-free cards.

But this net-zero push is all impracticable anyway, because the world’s mining industry can’t possibly output the extra metals and materials needed, as the International Energy Association (IEA) has indicated. To meet the theorised demand for “clean energy technologies” by 2040, the IEA says key minerals supply must increase between two and four times. Electric vehicles and battery materials alone (graphite, copper, nickel etc) must increase by ten to thirty times.[5] But finding and developing even one new ore body involves a decade or more, assuming green lawfare doesn’t strangle such a project at birth.Adam Creighton in The Australian this week wrote,

Indeed, to accommodate the desired rollout of electric vehicles, the mining and processing of the minerals that underpin them, such as cobalt, nickel and lithium, would need to increase by several thousand per cent by 2040, according to Mark Mills, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute.  “If it were to be achievable, it would be the largest single increase in demand or the supply of metals in all of human history,” he said.

Undeterred, the Academy’s submission begins pamphlet-style: “It is beyond dispute that climate change is one of the greatest threats to Australia’s social, economic, and ecological well-being.” Beyond dispute? Well, Australia’s crop output and wheat yields, and global yields, were at record or near-record levels last year after a century of healthy global warming plus CO2 fertilisation. And Australia’s social well-being has never been higher, thanks to $244 billion earnings from our energy exports last year. These economic foundations are threatened not by climate change but by green fatwas and lawfare against fossil-fuel production, abetted by the Academy, GetUp, the Greens and the metropolitan Aboriginal Industry. And ecologically, added CO2 has greened the planet and shrunk deserts equivalent to two and a half times the Australian land mass,according to peer-reviewed research co-authored by the CSIRO.

The Academy submission continues, avoiding mention of that emissions powerhouse China,

While we have a real need for action, Australians cannot do what needs to be done on our own; we share one planet and atmosphere. Along with every other citizen of every other country, Australians need action to be taken – locally and globally. 

It is imperative, therefore, that Australia work with all members of the global community to achieve more ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction than those that have been announced so far. 

As a rich, developed country, Australia should play a leadership role in mitigation and adaptation to climate change. We should lead by example; our actions should be clear and our ambitions achieved. We should pursue a ‘do as we do’ style of leadership, not a ‘do as we say.’ 

The unmentioned China is not only dwarfing the emissions of the entire Western world, but last year was approving two new coal-fired electricity plants a week, for a year’s increase that is four times Australia’s total coal-fired electricity of 23GW. In mid-July, dictator Xi Jin-ping brutally rebuffed Biden climate envoy John F. Kerry in Beijing. Xi announced that China would generate energy at a rate and type to suit itself, regardless of Paris Accord pieties.[6]With China heading for record-high emissions this year, I doubt Xi will notice Australia “leading by example”. Across Europe, governments and voters are now pushing back against net-zero folly and expense.

Further perusal of Academy work turned up its surprising point (if I read the woozy syntax correctly)that being critical of the Chinese communist dictatorship smacks of “McCarthyism”.[7] The paper was co-authored by the Policy Director Anderson and specifically endorsed by the Academy president and CEO. McCarthyism is a 70-year-old term obscuring that Cold War US institutions were indeed riddled with Communist spies, traitors and sympathisers, as proven by the Venona code-breakers.[8]

The Academy’s July submission continues that Australians should not only blitz their own emissions, but “embrace our responsibility” and “intensify efforts” to measure and cut indirect emissions from our huge coal and gas exports (“Scope 3” emissions) and indeed from “all sources”, which might mean farm fertilisers and cow belches (probably harmless anyway).

By taking these actions, Australia can contribute to a comprehensive and better global response to climate change, managing our own future and that of the planet.

Intrigued by the Academy’s style, I’ve been checking out its other submissions and policies – including its “Yes” support last June for the referendum which does some dogmatic re-writing of history.[9] It has not yet submitted on PM Albanese’s draft censorship bill threatening $2.75 million fines (or 2 per cent of turnover, whichever is higher) for tech giants who host “misinformation” causing “serious harm” on their platforms.[10] But here’s from the Academy’s submission last August, which urged amendments to the Code of Practice on Misinformation and Disinformation to make the tech giants harass and censor unwelcome media.

The Code currently excludes professional news content that is published under a publicly available editorial code, except where a platform determines that specific instances fall within the scope of disinformation. However, some Australian news outlets are havens for climate science misinformation – so this exclusion undermines the ability of the Code to guard against such denialism. 

This exclusion allows climate science denialism and other misinformation to flourish, either through lack of enforcement of the disinformation provision of the Code or failure of news outlets’ misinformation to meet the higher bar of being considered disinformation. For example, a UK report recently found that Sky News Australia and its media personalities are a key source of climate science misinformation globally, including during the late 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference … Clearly, the Code was not sufficient to address the traction of climate misinformation from Sky News Australia during this time. 

Read the Academy’s full horror-show here: “Shut Them Up, Argues the Academy of Science“. And recall how much alleged “misinformation” during COVID turned out to be valid and vice-versa.

I suppose the views of last year’s Nobel Laureate in physics John Clauser are suppression-worthy. His favoured climate model has cumulus-cloud feedbacks as a dominant thermostatic control. He told a Korean quantum conference (see transcript) this month that there is no climate crisis; the peer review checks have broken down. “In my opinion,” he has said, “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” His views also include that “misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience” . As a result the IMF abruptly cancelled his seminar talk scheduled for July 25. Obviously the Australian Academy would not want ‘misinformation’ from Nobel physics laureates to cast doubt on its climate papers like “The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world” (2021).^[11]

The Academy did make an interesting, albeit timid, submission last January on Australia’s legislative ban on nuclear energy. It complained that Australia needs more nuclear experts – “there are as few as three permanent experimental nuclear physics researchers in Australia … These nuclear science capability gaps affect a broad range of fields, including medicine, space radiation, quantum technologies, and defence.” The submission strangely omits mention of emissions-free baseload nuclear power generation, which is unpalatable to the Albanese government.

However the Academy does say its position is unchanged since its 2019 submission on nuclear power by then-president John Shine to the Morrison government.

I looked that up to find Professor Shine calling for an end to government bans on nuclear power plants and strongly endorsing small modular reactors (SMRs) as “a low carbon option that can potentially enable Australia to meet its emission-reduction obligations while providing affordable and safer electricity”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Nationals, who are also advocating SMRs, can be thankful they’ve got the Academy on their side in this stoush with Prime Minister Albanese.[12] Other submissions include:

Clean Energy Superpower-dom

On December 20, 2022,  the Academy made a submission to the parliamentary inquiry on “Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower” (whatever that is). The Academy extolled “opportunities to export electricity to South-East Asia via undersea high voltage direct current cables”. Just three weeks later the $35 billion Sun Cable solar project near Darwin, for Singapore’s benefit, went into voluntary administration in a welter of acrimony.  For a laugh, visit the scheme’s vainglorious and still-active website, redolent with the pong of over-ripe hype and bovine extrusion. Over-spending and failure to meet milestones were reportedly behind the collapse. (On July 26 the Canadian ATCO group scrapped its small “green hydrogen” project in WA, taxpayers kissing goodbye to $29 million in subsidies from the Renewable Energy Agency).

Noting the harmful impacts of wind/solar electricity on the countryside and on biodiversity, the submission found a vague solution in “social licensing” to operate, thus mollifying farmers, land-owners and Aborigines. It urges, in a new variety of federal socialism, that

Strong national leadership, for example, through a Green Energy Commissioner or existing body such as Infrastructure Australia, can coordinate investment, development, and use of green energy infrastructure and resources to eliminate wasteful duplication and ensure competitiveness.

 The submission supported what it calls “a just transition” of workers from officially-condemned fossil-fuel industries into “green energy jobs”. It followed the Academy’s Future Earth conference in 2021 to work out the “just adaptation” strategies. What Future Earth actually delivered as opening plenary speaker was fake Aborigine Bruce Pascoe discussing how whales circa 12,000BC warned his mob in Bass Strait about sea-rises, upon which his peace-loving people joined their peace-loving mainland cousins (shields an optional fashion accessory). 

Carbon Capture, August 2022 and July 2023:

The Academy knows emission-cutting sums don’t reach its targets for saving the planet. It has explained,

There is a compelling need to identify what novel scientific and technological approaches might be possible, as well as improving the scalability of existing technologies to address this critical challenge.

It wants to balance the climate ledger by getting CO2 pulled out of the air on a massive scale through “Carbon Capture & Storage” (CCS), and storing it safely for hundreds of years. In itself this requires enormous energy. In 2022 worldwide there were 30 such plants in operation, capturing 42 million tonnes of CO2. In Australia there’s 4-6 million tonnes operational with another 9 million tonnes in prospect in 2025-26. Not much of a ‘wow!’ given that energy-related Co2 emissions are running at 37 billiontonnes a year. The Academy complains that

Australia has no policy to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. In its April 2022 Report, the IPCC identifies that meeting the modelled 1.5°C pathways requires a net negative carbon dioxide emissions volume of 20-660 gigatons by 2100. 

Taking the mid-point of that vast range as 320 gigatonnes, that’s nearly ten times current annual human-caused emissions. In 2008 Labor’s PM Kevin Rudd, to make a good impression at an international conference, announced $100 million a year in research dollars for his Global Carbon Capture & Storage Institute, literally more money than its execs knew what to do with. (Rather like PM Turnbull’s $444m out of the blue in 2017 for studying the non-threatened Barrier Reef). Rudd’s vision was for CCS by 2050 to be grabbing 9 billion tonnes of airy CO2. After 15 years the results are derisory.

Electric Vehicles 

In a submission on National Electric Vehicle Strategy last October the Academy urged that people be forced out of their petrol/diesel vehicles as “an integral part of our national emissions reduction imperative.” How the grid is to cope with the extra EV demands, doesn’t trouble the Academy. In this case its pipedream is for Australian-designed and produced batteries for next-generation EVs. It acknowledges that current lithium EV batteries are horrid environmentally (just ask the poor kids who mine the minerals in Africa), vulnerable to ageing and prone to annoying fires.

So Australia should pursue creation of next-gen batteries of sodium-ion, along with “fibre batteries and liquid solar-generated fuels such as hydrogen.” If you’re wondering, fibre batteries are millimeters-thin and feeble additions to wearable “smart clothing” and electronics. The global market by 2031 is estimated at a minuscule $US420 million. The Academy concluded, “Australia can develop an end-to-end battery production supply chain, from fundamental research, built in Australia, for the benefit of Australians and the world.” I hope so, notwithstanding that China already has a 60 per cent global dominance of EV battery production.

The July submission with which I started, finishes with a rhapsody in green:

Australia has a lot of strengths; all we have to do is develop them and use them wisely. We are not a superpower but we can be a voice for good. 

 With that flourish, the writers probably e-scootered to Manuka in quest for a CO2-free celebratory beer.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 on-line from Connor Court here.

[1] Bowen’s calculation is 40 per month.

[2] From 2005 levels

[3] I don’t know if other ex-Labor alumni are ensconsed at the Academy.

[4] “We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track. For twenty years we’ve been trying to solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting new technology options are being developed, it will take a long time to deploy them, and they won’t be operating at scale within thirty years.”

[5] IEA: “However, a concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement (climate stabilisation at “well below 2°C global temperature rise”) would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.”

[6] According to the China-dominated United Nations, China continues to get climate concessions as a “developing” nation. Xi said, “the pathway and means for reaching this goal, and the tempo and intensity, should be and must be determined by ourselves, and never under the sway of others.”

[7] Academy: “Rising concerns about Chinese technological advancements have resulted in investigations into links between US-based scientists and China, leading to Chinese claims of McCarthyism—a claim familiar to Australians.”

[8] I’ve yet to see the movie Oppenheimer and how it handles that fact.

[9] “The Academy recognises that this continent was falsely declared terra nullius, or nobody’s land, to legitimise British settlement, and this was corrected only in 1992 when the High Court of Australia recognised the continuous connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the land. The Academy observes that the adoption of terra nullius was profoundly detrimental to generations of Indigenous peoples.” See Michael Connor on the terra nullius fiction.

[10] Plus, “ACMA would be able to establish and enforce its own industry standard. Violations of this standard could lead to companies being fined up to $6.8 million or five per cent of their global turnover.” 

[11] It’s a vanity project, with the authors citing their own works multiple times, especially chair Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (16 self-citations), Mark Howden (11 times) Lesley Hughes (10 times), Will Steffen (10 times), and David Karoly and John Church (8 times). Even Sarah Perkins-Kilpatrick, who is supposed to be reviewing the document, is reviewing herself as she’s cited seven times in the references.[2] Reviewer Jason Evans is cited nine times. Another reviewer is Martin Rice, who works for Tim Flannery’s propaganda outfit Climate Council, but he features only four times in the body of the report.

• [12] The plan followed what The Australian on Dec 5, 2022 (paywalled) reported : “Anthony Albanese has scotched a push by South Australian [Labor] Premier Peter Malinauskas to restart the nuclear debate in Australia, citing waste and safety concerns as key reasons nuclear should not be considered as an energy option.”

If Only Cash Could Fix Culture

Tony Thomas

Is this a leg-pull among bored pollies, bureaucrats and Aboriginal Industry bigshots? The feds have earmarked $8 million to create a “high-quality First Nations-led national Aboriginal Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Support”. Excellence indeed, when across the Australian continent every key indicator of the kids’ safe upbringing is going in hellish directions. (See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series).

This “high-quality” Centre for Excellence is supposed to be Aboriginal-designed to boost Aboriginal-led research “grounded in Aboriginal knowledge and theoretical frameworks” (whatever they are) and “build an evidence base” for the kids and parents. The urgency time-scale — while chaos reigns outback — is 2023-25 with funding to 2027.

The latest news on the Excellence Centre is within an Aboriginal themed and decorated document that emerged in January from the Department of Social Services. It is tactfully christened “Safe and Supported – the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children 2021-31. First Action Plan 2023-26.” It starts lugubriously (my bolding):

We acknowledge that Australian governments have been complicit in the entrenched disadvantage, intergenerational trauma and ongoing institutional racism faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

The Excellence Centre is somewhat cumbersome, being a joint venture of the feds, the states and territories, the National Voice for Our Children (SNAICC) and ATSI Leadership Group, Families Australia, and the steering group of the National Coalition on Child Safety and Wellbeing, with input also from the National Children’s Commissioner Ms Anne Hollonds. A scoping exercise has started on Aboriginal representatives “giving in-principle support” to designing the Centre for Excellence for their communities “with appropriate governance and support to direct community-based research”. After the scoping, “jurisdictions will consider and work towards agreeing ongoing funding arrangements” (p31). The plan includes this woozy finale:

Support the review and evaluation of initiatives and knowledge sharing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and organisations. Timing: 5 years (2023 to 2027) 

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth is sprinkling an extra $30 million of these feel-good initiatives for Aborigines, according to the Family Matters report on children in care. (One initiative bears the sad acronym of HIPPY).[1] For example, the feds will spend $2 million over four years to fund “a national advocate” for the kids, the role being “co-designed with First Nations partners”. At $500,000 a year, that should keep the new panjandrum and his/her courtiers in reasonable comfort.

Those amounts are all flea-bites in the great federal-state spending splurge on the children-in-care crisis (additional to all other special Aboriginal programs). Literally on the back of an envelope, I totted up $6 billion being thrown at the care problem over a span of around five years.

In discussing the nitty-gritty at state level, the Family Matters report also has to confront the intractable issue of “who’s a real Aborigine” – a dilemma glossed over in all the Voice referendum’s “Yes” advocacy. Family Matters appears to seek maximisation of Aboriginality. It wants practitioners to be trained in “culturally safe” ways to “explore cultural identity” of child clients, who must not be “de-identified” without checking with Aboriginal communities. It says:

Current practice for identifying [Aboriginal] children is extremely poor. Families are not being properly engaged in conversations about identity. This is resulting in children’s identity being ignored or inaccurately recorded… the accurate recording of the identities of children and young people is essential to fulfilling cultural, legal, policy and practice obligations.(p54)

Current general identification practice varies wildly among states. Beset by fakery and corruption, the South Australian system[2] is now happy with a mere statutory declaration that someone “believes” to the best of their knowledge that they are Aboriginal. But in NSW there is ruthless application of the three-part test for accessing Aboriginal scholarships and similar perks. For example, one or both parents must be Aboriginal and the applicant must provide written endorsement from a suitable Aboriginal body using its common seal on original documents. Heavy penalties apply for wilful mis-statements.

In Tasmania, where one Aboriginal faction claims more than half the supposed 30,000 Aborigines there are fakes, the report’s data go haywire compared with other states.[3] Recently, it said, the Aboriginal status of 30 per cent of Tasmanian kids in care was “unknown” but hard work by the Child Safety Service has somehow got that “unknown” 30 per cent down to 2 per cent. (p77-8). The report implies that most of the “unknowns” in care became Aboriginal.[4](Whether any living Tasmanian is dinki-di Aboriginal is an interesting question).

Family Matters provides a rare glimpse by states of the chaos and dysfunction surrounding Aboriginal child-care policies. It’s noteworthy that none of the pieties of Labor administrations and their green allies are reflected in grass-roots improvement – and conservative-led states do little better. For example, while Victorian Premier Dan Andrews spends bucketloads (I’m talking nine-figure sums) on his farcical State Treaty, the report says,

The over-representation of Aboriginal children in care in Victoria continues to escalate year after year, and our communities do not have time to wait…(p76).

It continues that Victoria

stands out as having by far the highest rate of entry for [Aboriginal] children to out- of-home care (36.5 entries per 1,000 children), though this decreased significantly from 39.8 entries per 1,000 children in 2019-20. (p25-6)

Victorian legislation requires a ‘cultural plan’ for all the kids in care, but at December 2021 the rate was only 63 per cent. (p80).

 It’s hardly a shortage of money problem: Premier Daniel Andrews has sunk an extra $160 million since 2018 into “Wungurilwil Gapgapduir: Aboriginal Children and Families Agreement” to reduce the in-care levels, on top of all other Aboriginal funding. At June 2020, Victoria had the highest rate of Aboriginal children on long-term or permanent care orders; at 80.1 per 1000 children (p82). That’s about one in 12 kids. The latest rate for Victorian Aboriginal kids in care is 21.9 times the non-Aboriginal kids rate (p81).

Here’s a snapshot of other state Aboriginal child-care scenes, the variables being how acute the disaster is, and how rapid the deterioration.

ACT

The kids “were 13.8 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be in out-of-home care. This is well above the national rate of 11.5 times for the same period. Of the children in out-of-home care, 48.5 per cent have been in care for five years or more. This is an unacceptable rate of over-representation that must be addressed.” (p57).

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

WA Government figures (p29 and 83) show the Aboriginal kids in out-of-home care in the past decade rose a massive 90% (non-Aboriginals, up 20%). Aboriginal kids now comprise a shocking 57 per cent of WA’s removed kids .

From 1977 to 2020 the rate of kids coming into the WA care system rose every year, but in 2021 there was finally a minor reduction of 2.8 per cent. None-the-less Aboriginal kids were 19 times more likely to go into out-of-home care than other kids. For kids in care, the numbers rose annually from 1996 to 2020 and then fell in 2021 by just 26 kids, or 0.8 per cent (p83).

The WA government the same year announced an extra $114 million for child protection, “to protect vulnerable children and their families so they can thrive.” (p83).

The federal government in 2019-20 allocated $5.2 billion over four years to 2023 to its Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), involving grant-making across the country via a peak Aboriginal body. The WA government reported $230 million a year in federal IAS money for family support for early childhood and schooling. There was another $410 million for a “Safety & Wellbeing” program against violence, grog and drugs, along with support for the “social and and emotional wellbeing of First Nations Australians.” (p85).

NORTHERN TERRITORY

The report is scathing about the NT, where Aborigines are 31 per cent of the population. Of kids in out-of-home care, 91 per cent in 2021 were Aboriginal, a 14-times rate of over-representation. The rate had increased from 11.5 two years earlier. (p65-66).

The NT’s reform plan for kids in care ended in 2021 “yet it remains unclear how the plan has improved outcomes”. The plan was supposed to phase out “extremely expensive” purchased care support but in fact use of it rose for four years straight. The rate of kids placed with non-Aboriginal carers has also risen with “no clear future plan” from the NT government.  “The lack of accountability, transparency and independent scrutiny of reporting by the NT Government on their own progress against major reforms is of significant concern,” the report said. (p64).

As usual, fancy-name government schemes to connect kids to their culture failed to deliver. The NT one was called “Safe Thriving and Connected Strategy” but 56 per cent of the kids had no current cultural support plan, and for kids in first year of care, 68 per cent had none.

The report on the NT concluded, “Aboriginal communities are tired of the countless reports and strategies outlining plans for action. Aboriginal people and communities want to see these actions progressed, and accompanied by robust monitoring and evaluation to show what is working and what needs further improvement.” (p65)

QUEENSLAND

In Queensland in 2021, one in 20 Queensland Aboriginal kids were in out-of-home care and they spend high numbers of years there. Only 194 of the 4822 Aboriginal kids were involved with formal efforts to get re-united with family. (p68).

Queensland has the second-lowest rate of over-representation of kids in care, but they are still 44 per cent of all the state’s kids in care. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of kids rose by 757 to 4911. Only 22 per cent of them were placed with kin (nationally, 31 per cent), while 36 per cent were placed in non-Aboriginal homes with no kin. (p71).

Queensland special spending on kids in care (titled “Our Way”) involves a sizeable $535 million from 2017-26.

NEW SOUTH WALES

In NSW, the report accuses authorities of swapping kids into permanent guardianship and adoption orders, to cosmetically reduce numbers in “out-of-home” care. NSW topped states for these guardianship rates, at 18.7 per 1,000 kids in 2019-20, or 11 times the rate for non-Aboriginal kids.

 Government support services were under-resourced leading to many kids being placed with non-Aboriginal homes.

In the 2022 NSW budget, an extra $99m went to six new Aboriginal child centres and support. (p60-61).

To conclude, literally hundreds of Aboriginal statutory and NGO “voice” organisations have been operating for half a century and correlate with an ever-growing crisis in Aboriginal child-care and family dysfunction. I don’t see how adding a Canberra-based Voice will turn around this horrific situation.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com 

[1] Home Interaction Program for Parents and Youngsters (HIPPY)

[2] Mark Koolmatrie: “Too many are feeding off our native title bounty – Now is the hour when our indigenous community calls on South Australia’s Marshall government — and other governments — to help lead us away from the corporation management system that has led to widespread corruption, incompetence and nepotism.” Some family members of the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association (ATLA) royalty trust have received only a few hundred dollars every few years, while ATLA has been receiving more than $3m a year for 12 years from the Beverley uranium mine in the Flinders Ranges.

[3] For example, in 2021 just 11% of Tasmanian Aboriginal kids in care were placed with Aboriginal kin, the lowest rate among states and contrasting with 31% nationally. The rate of increase of the Tassie kids in care was what the report calls a “staggering 49.1 times larger” than the percent increase (0.9%) in the population of Tassie Aboriginal kids.

[4] The report says the added certainty “will support and enable targeting of culturally responsive practices.”

Why the mainstream climate journalists can’t be trusted

Talk for Tom A Nelson podcast, 24 May 2023

By Tony Thomas, journalist-contributor to Quadrant Online (quadrant.org.au), based in Melbourne Australia.

I appreciate that Australia’s not the centre of world affairs, but keep in mind that more than 60 Australian scientists helped write the latest IPCC report.

I’ve been a journalist in Australia since 1958. I went straight from school at 18 to The West Australian newspaper, doing news and light features. I also studied literature at university part-time for eight years. In 1971 I switched to Economics and business coverage. I retired from paid journalism in 2001 but I continue writing unpaid for the right-of-centre blog Quadrant Online. In the past ten years I’ve published 460 essays. All up I’ve been reporting for 65 years and I’m now 83 not out.

I’ve also authored close to a dozen books on anthropology, business, history, current affairs and climate, including five collections of my Quadrant essays. 

 I also like to make my stuff funny. The most effective weapon against climate cultists is to play back their own overblown nonsense — with academics my favourite targets. 

My first article for Quadrant in 2012 was about the supposedly drowning Pacific atolls, which in fact are growing in area. Their problem is high birth rates and destructive lifestyles, not rising seas. But this drowning island myth never dies, in fact just a fortnight ago I forced our government-funded ABCTV to correct their latest Tuvalu item.

My first big climate article was titled The Fictive World of Rajendra Pachauri, an expose about the long-time chair of the IPCC who later hastily resigned a decade ago because he was caught out groping his young female staff. The second article was The Integrity of the Australian Academy of Science, which no one had questioned before . I interviewed the president, who is a microbiologist called Suzanne Cory, and she readily agreed that climate science at that time in 2012 wasn’t settled. This was heresy and her climate minders soon got her to change her tune.

Both main Australian political parties, sadly, aspire to net zero CO2 by 2050. The 2030 target involves installing 22000 solar panels a day for eight years and more than one maxi-sized wind turbine a day. These days I happily write on the emerging train wreck as green politics collides with energy realities.

My talk today will be about the world’s mainstream climate journalists, and the many third-party institutions that are snowing them with alarmist stuff. They warn them off accessing sceptic material, and shower them with money and honors for writing the net zero and alarmist lines. 

I began this researching a month or two ago. And every time I check out one of these organisations influencing the media behind the scenes, I discover new ones. They are breeding like rabbits. 

A week ago I noticed that Matt Taibbi and 8 colleagues had been working on the same project – they’ve just published a “Report on the Censorship Industrial Complex”, a compendium of no less than 50 govt/big-tech/ and NGOs feeding the approved lines to the media and shutting down opposing views and platforms. Those groups don’t  just go after climate and covid sceptics, but all conservative material. 

I’ve found it costs very little to set up an outfit to bias the climate media. Some of these groups have got huge results from budgets of just 5, 10 or 20 million dollars. Moreover the climate propaganda is usually wrapped inside a platform of worthy roles like training third-world reporters to do a good job. I’m ignoring those feel-good operations.

BBC Verify

I mentioned these groups popping up everywhere. 

Just thisweek I picked up material about the BBC boasting about its truth-checking, called BBC Verify. 

I watched a BBC News video from yesterday by Marianna Spring, whose title is  “Disinformation and social media correspondent” for BBC Verify. She uses several dummy accounts to keep tabs on unapproved media material.

She targets what she calls “conspiracy theory newspapers, alternative media, the “UK conspiracy movement”, and far right figures and local communities. 

You can guess what all this really means. 

It’s pretty rich given the BBC’s own conspiracies such as “28-gate” dating from 2006. The BBC pretended that a group of 28 external “best scientific experts” had advised the BBC not to give climate sceptics any coverage. After many years of FOI battles to drag out the names, and the BBC using 3 top barristers, the 28 “best scientific experts” turned out to be just 3 scientists, and a mob of 25 Greenpeace and other activists, vested business interests and even someone from the US Embassy. In 2018 the BBC policy reaffirmed to deny sceptics any platform on the BBC.

Trusted News Initiative

BBC has also co-launched a group called Trusted News Initiative. Core membership is newswires Associated Press, AFP, Reuters,Washington Post, and Australia’s government-owned broadcaster ABC. Trusted News has partnered with the online giants Meta/Facebook, Google, Youtube, and Microsoft to rapidly flag what it calls climate and health “misinformation” . The heavyweight in there is Google News Initiative backed by $300 million of Google money. 

Trusted News finds something it doesn’t like and spreads the word among members immediately. They set about knee-capping these sites by warning away advertisers. They’ve already destroyed many popular right of centre sites. One victim Robert Kennedy Jr is suing Trusted News for treble damages on anti-trust grounds. Well done, BBC.

Australia’s Climate Council

My native Australia has an influence group with a strangehold on our media, that extends into the Pacific region. 

Climate Council is led by Australia’s most influential alarmist, Dr Tim Flannery, whose qualification is actually in mammal paleontology. His predictions have been as bad as Paul Ehrlichs. During a big drought here 15 years ago he predicted it would be permanent and that two of our capital cities would become waterless ghost towns. The state governments spent billions installing seawater desalinators that have never been needed as floods — not drought — became the problem.

His Climate Council is chaired by a billionaire’s offspring and runs on a $6m budget. I calculate most funding now is from tycoons and the usual foundations including Rockefellers. It has several investors in renewables on its board, with no concern about conflict of interest. In fact one top alarmist scientist here, Dr David Karoly, was quoted,

The ability to make money while simultaneously solving climate change, can be an appealing proposition to people with deep pockets.”

The council includes a huge 20-member media spinning team. It is incredibly successful in planting stories in the media. Time after time I detect the fingerprints of the Council behind our country’s climate reporting. 

The Council’s 2022 annual report boasts of its “drumbeat” of climate calamity, citing the planting of more than 22,000 stories in the media last year intended to influence “millions” of Australians. And it claims a further 20,000 media items “supported” via third-party climate enthusiasts. That’s 800 items a week obligingly regurgitated by stenographers identifying as journalists.

 For example, reporters here originally just reported on recent bushfires and floods. After the Climate Council influencers got to work, the journos began routinely calling the fires and floods “climate-caused” or “climate fuelled”. In the Council’s own words, it has “well socialised” journos to parrot the alarmism. 

One effective technique has been to create a standing committee of first responders to weather disasters, like firefighters, emergency service leaders, medicos and so on. They brief the reporters as if they have credibility in climate science, rather than rescuing old ladies from their flooded houses. 

The council has found and trained another 200 local leaders of all descriptions as “trusted voices” to spruik the climate message, because they know that grassroots local material is more influential than big-picture science.

The Council has saturated local government leaders with climate alarm. 175 councils now claim a “climate emergency” – that’s coverage of 70% of our population.

The council actually trains journos in workshops run with the journos’ union. The goal is partly to inoculate them against sceptic arguments, claiming these are “misinformation”. Typical journo education from the Council is that

# Coal and gas are expensive compared with renewables

# Renewables are reliable

# Renewables create net jobs and

# Australia can make a difference to the world climate even though it does only 1-2% of the emissions. 

The Council, although claimed to be non-political, wades into federal election campaigning for green candidates. It helped remove the conservative govt in last year’s elections and bring in our present climate-crazed radical government. 

The Council’s CEO is a young woman who’s passionate, smart, wholesome and very photogenic. How can we grizzled old sceptics compete with her? 

Covering Climate Now

The most sinister and effective global influencer/manipulator of the media is Covering Climate Now or CCNow. 

More than 500 Media outlets have signed on with CCNow pledging to hype climate alarm and suppress critical views. It’s claimed CCNow members have 2 billion readers in 60 countries.

The big endorsers are the global newswires Reuters, Bloomberg, and Agence France Press. Many if not most US TV and radio outlets have signed up. It’s really deplorable that the science journals Nature and Scientific America have joined CCNow and signed away their objectivity.

CCNow was started four years ago by the Guardian, The Nation magazine and the Columbia School of Journalism. It wants to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture. It showers reporters with resources and story templates and ideas and pushes absurdities like a billion “climate refugees” by 2050.

Given that the Guardian is a key member, it’s not surprising that CCNow’s founders view fossil fuel executives as criminals against humanity. They also want to “revoke the social licences” of “deniers” in the same way tobacco companies were shafted last century. 

CCNow has its style guide for the world’s media, here’s some samples:

Bottom line, there’s no excuse to skip the climate connection in your stories. Here’s some simple language to help:

This [heatwave] is exactly the sort of extreme weather that scientists around the world associate with climate change or a warming planet.

This [hurricane] comes at a time when human-caused climate change is consistently making storms more intense.

It tells journos, “You can also try an analogy or turn of phrase:

Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but…

… it stacks the deck against us.

… it’s baked in with our weather, and often a key ingredient in the outcome.

… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.

I had trouble rooting out who funds CCNow, and discovered that even the Wattsupwiththat blog tried and failed two years ago, suggesting it was the usual gaggle of leftist foundations.

Agence France Presse

 I’ll give you a look now at one key member of CCNow, the newswire Agence France Presse. It has 1700 journalists operating in 150 countries. It’s independent but gets about 40% of its funding from French government subsidies.

AFP’s signed the CCNow pledge to hype climate alarm

despite AFP’s clear ethical code of objectivity. This code states

AFP may under no circumstances take account of influences or considerations liable to compromise the objectivity of the information; it may under no circumstances fall under the controlof any ideological, political or economic grouping;

AFP readers are getting their global warming fix from AFP’s  specialist Marlowe Hood, who has the title  “global coordinator for climate change”. This journo has laughably self-titled himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet”. He tells us he was “born at 314 ppm (that is, when CO2 was 314 parts per million) and he now calls himself a “herald of the Anthropocene.” 
His stories have headlines like “Acceleration of global warming ‘code red’ for humanity“and “Climate cataclysms set stage for key UN science report.”

He was at an Oxford conference in 2009 on (supposed) impacts of a (supposed) 4degC warming. He wrote, “And suddenly the reality of global warming and the human misery it will trail in its wake hit me in the gut and left me gasping for air. Humanity is standing at the crossroads of a “sixth mass extinction” 

Prizes and Rewards

For the environmental journo rat-pack, there beckons not just awards and acclaim for saving the planet, but great gobs of cash. AFP’s Mr Hood pocketed a $110,000 prize from Spain’s BBVA Foundation two years ago . 

Elizabeth Kolbert, writer for the New Yorker, has peddled her ridiculous “Sixth Extinction” scare for the past eight years. She picked up a Heinz prize of $US100,000 from the wife of Biden’s loopy “special presidential envoy for climate” John Kerry. She got another $110,000 award from BBVA last September. 

The BBC’s not very accurate climate journo Matt McGrath got the same BBVA $110,000 windfallin 2019 for his “accurate” reporting. Typical McGrath scare-stuff was from the IPCC confab in Korea in 2018: “Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’.” There’s been a lot of such “final calls”.

Covering Climate Now hands out prizes like confetti. So do academies like Arizona State University, which on Earth Day last year handed out cash to climate writers for their pieces headed, “Is It OK to Have a Child?”; and “In Search of Environmental Hope,”; and “A year’s diary of reckoning with climate anxiety.” A special mention by Arizona University involved an essay chapter aptly titled, “The Great Derangement.” 

Earth Journalism Network

My essay last week in Quadrant was about a UK based group called Earth Journalism Network or EJN. It targets journos in the third world to spread the alarmist message. It’s sponsored by a bigger group called Internews which was created to help improve third world journalism. 

Internews Europe has a twin relationship with Internews US. When combined, the pair claim to be the world’s second or third largest media supporting group. 

Earth Network claims to have trained 15,000 third world reporters to produce more than 15,000 stories. The network writes climate stories itself to plant in third world countries. It woos low-income journos with a host of small money grants and has distributed 500+ fellowships so far. Indeed the network has had more than 11,000 journos applying for its money, 1000 successfully. 

The Network pays for dozens or scores of these journos to have a great trip to big climate conferences, especially the annual UN Cops. The Network even provides money to small third world news organisations, many of them financially struggling.

The Network knows how important visuals and graphics are to stories, so it has 10 regional centres pumping out net-zero friendly graphics for free use in the third world.

I can’t find out how much the Network has paid out, only that its “sub-grants” total $3m. 

Funders are the usual Hewletts, the Packards, the Rockefellers, plus giants like the European Commission, UN aid agencies, and the governments of the US, UK and Sweden.

I found a good example of how it woos journos in South Africa, giving them ideas and templates for these stories. Here’s two of their prompts to South African journos: 

* What risks will South Africa face if it fails to transition to a low carbon economy by 2050? In contrast, what benefits will the country enjoy from aligning its climate commitments to its developmental agenda? 

* How is the climate change bill poised to solidify South Africa’s commitment towards reaching net zero? 

What’s the reality? South Africa is facing blackouts even worse than the 10-12 hours a day at present. More than half the country – possibly 80% – is without electricity at any given time. It’s now preparing for blackouts even as long as 32 hours to prevent collapse of the grid. It appears that South Africa is on the edge of a total blackout, thanks to incompetence, corruption and especially its absurd renewables and anti-coal policies . But Earth Network is helping ensure the media sticks with the net-zero advocacy.

NewsGuard

I noticed an international crowd called NewsGuard launching in Australia two months ago. It partners with Microsoft. It flags health and climate websites with green or red flags depending whether Newsguard approves of them. You can add Newsguard as an extension to your browser for a token amount of about $50 a year. 

Newsguard wants to drive advertising revenue away from the unapproved sites. 

Who funds Newsguard? The liberal Knight Foundation, Publicis and others. 

Where does it operate? US, UK, Europe and Australia. 

It’s already red-flagged 20% of the Australian sites it’s looked at. In the US it’s flagged nearly half the sites.

Almost any sceptic claim leads to red-flagging, such as extreme events not being fuelled by climate, or sea level rise not accelerating. It is even rating TV news and talk shows.

The fearful part is Newsguard’s broad reach. It targets journos, bureaucrats and so far 900 libraries with 7 million users, plus schools. I can imagine a teacher shying away from letting kids look at a red-flagged site. It’s just Newsguard’s inhouse liberal journos and activists choosing the colors. 

My final look is at Science Feedback – based in France.

Science Feedback claims to use blue-chip scientists to “Combat misinformation to protect democracy.” It supposedly fact-checks and gives a score to climate and vaccine articles for journalists and editors.   

The scientist reviewers need a PhD plus an article in top-quartile publication in past four years.

 The Feedback’s web says, “Climate Feedback and Health Feedback use on-call academics to quickly highlight hype or spin in news reports and warn reporters against repeating misstatements of fact.”

Revenue is about $1.3m, which finances 16 staff

It’s used by NYT, Politifact, Guardian, Washpost, BBC, etc 

The group is part-funded by Chinese-controlled TikTok. Feedback also partners with TikTok to check viral videos for misinformation. Other funders are Meta/Facebook (also a partner), the Intl Fact-Checkng network,/ and Google News Initiative, which began with $300m Google funding.

Science Feedback laughably claims to be non-partisan . But I’ve counted 10 fact checks against Prof Ian Plimer, a leading Australian sceptic geologist, which seems a bit obsessive. I found no fact-checks of everyone who claimed the Great Barrier Reef was dying when right now it’s showing record coral cover.

In recent months Feedback was among the consortium going after Elon Musk and Twitter.  Feedback, like other liberal groups, was working to deprive unapproved sites of advertising.

 Who are these Feedback non-partisan scientists? They’re the usual suspects like Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth of Climategate fame, Stephan Rahmstorf of the extremist Potsdam Institute, Peter Gleick who was involved in an ethics scandal ten years back which he said he deeply regretted, and Gavin Schmidt of NASA.

• In the Australian context I recognise the standard alarmist scientists like Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick who attributes weather extremes to warming and three of those Barrier Reef scientists. There’s also a data quality expert from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau is right now in the firing line for low-quality temperature recording and refusal to allow critics access to check it.
• A number of the Australian scientists on the Feedback panel are notorious for doing a disgusting rap video a decade ago about “we’re climate bleep scientists, what we say is true, sucking bleep in Copenhagen.” It was not even juvenile, they were professors and post-PhDs singing this, and who wants such people steering the transformation of our society – for the worse.
• I’ve looked at a few more media manipulators like the Oxford University Climate Journalism Network, Climate Central, and Poynters but I’ve rabbited on long enough. In six words, don’t trust the media on climate. #####
•  

Were there Dutch castaways in Central Australia?

Tony Thomas

Was there a colony of up to 300 Dutch people living in Central Australia from about 1710 until they died out before 1860? If that were true, a mass of Australian history would have to be re-written. To even suggest it invites the same mockery anyone gets about UFOs or finding Lasseter’s lost gold reef. And yet there is strong documentary backing for this story of a Dutch settlement in central Australia long before Captain Cook and the landing at Botany Bay.

Finding and marshalling this evidence has been the life’s work of an Australian authority on survival in bush and desert – the “Bush Tucker Man” Les Hiddins AM, of Townsville. Everyone knows how Hiddins, 76, can find edible grub and drinkable water, rather than doing a perish. But few appreciate that Hiddins is also an amateur historian whose rigour, depth of archival inquiry and savvy about the terrain leave academic historians frothing over their skinny lattes back at University House. Hiddins’ track record is here. For academics’ bogus Australian history, try here and here.

For those who don’t know of Hiddins, he is an ex-Army major who did two Vietnam deployments, the first as a forward scout. His first authorship was the 1987 Australian Army Survival Manual. On TV nature shows internationally he was of comparable stature to Steve Irwin.

If his convictions about the Dutch colony are crazy, well his interrogations of the documentary evidence might convert you too somewhat to the crazy side. Moreover, you’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder with your ABC on this. In 1996 it ran the half-hour Series 3 Episode 5 of Bush Tucker Man covering what Hiddins then knew about the colony. The ABC saw fit to repeat it unchanged four months ago, without guidance such as: “Warning. Disinformation!” Last year’s program involved his early Research 101, with many mistaken guesses. He’s now corrected those and substituted outputs based on better archival documents and intense ground and helicopter-based explorations. His work is barely half-finished: there are still more questions than answers.

I’d better add here that Hiddins’ Dutch-colony story has nothing to do with fake Aboriginal Professor Bruce Pascoe of Melbourne University and his fake “Aboriginal agriculture” compilations. Whereas our historians dance along with Pied Piper Pascoe, they won’t give five minutes to Hiddins and his 30 years of painstaking research into a massive Australian mystery.

Hiddins’ key document is a 1300-word Leeds Mercurynewspaper account of January 1834, which we reproduce in full at this link. Stop to read it now, to understand what I’m writing below.

With that preamble, I’ll set out the basic “Dutch colony” facts that Hiddins has winkled out.

1/ In 1708 three Dutch ships, Mercurius, Zuiderburg and the “great vessel” Concordia, set off from Batavia to the Netherlands. They hit a storm south of the Sunda Strait and Zuiderburg and Concordia were wrecked.

2/ Concordia was of 900 tonnes with 130 on board, including – as Hiddins established via Dutch archivists — an officer named Constantijn Van Baerle. Hiddins’ claim, based on the prevailing currents, is that 80 men and 10 women survivors, including van Baerle, wound up somewhere on the north/west coast of WA and with some access to ship’s stores.[1] His claimed sequel is that they trekked inland eastward some 2000km looking for liveable country.

3/ Hiddins (above) says that in April 1832 a British army explorers’ party pushed due south from Raffles Bay (210km north-east of Darwin), looking for the reputed inland sea and rivers and commercial prospects.

4/ In January 1834 the respectable Leeds Mercurynewspaper published 1300 words of journal entries from the expedition leader, who was named in the piece as “Lt Nixon” – a fictitious name. He described how he came across a Dutch colony of 300 people housed 800km to the south of Raffles Bay. The people had descended six or so generations (stated as 170 years but properly about 125 years) from shipwreck survivors.

5/ The settlers told Nixon their leader was named “Van Baerle”. This beyond question pins these reported 1832 Dutch colonists to the 1708 Concordiawreck and its known passenger Van Baerle. It is such an uncommon Dutch name that barely a handful of Dutch people go by it today.

6/ Nixon reported the Dutch had settled by permanent waters, living off maize, yams and the plentiful fish, with a suggestion of Dutch-style water management and irrigation.[2] Hiddins attributes their population growth to interbreeding with the local Aborigines – described by the Arrenda as “Luridja” meaning “foreigners”.

7/ Nixon said he was with them eight days. They spoke only a crude version of the original Dutch language and practised crude Christian observance and weddings.

8/ In 1851 a veteran harbourmaster, Captain-Lieutenant Van Blommestein at Samarang, Java, in the Dutch East Indies, corroborated that he had heard the story first-hand from an English merchant vessel that passed through soon after the discovery of the Dutch colony. He recalled incorrectly that the ship visited in 1836, but he meant 1832 or soon after. He reported the news at the time to the local governor – a document for which Hiddins is searching but has yet to find.  The harbourmaster had nothing to gain and much to lose by telling lies about such an episode. Sadly, he didn’t name the ship or persons, but Hiddins, checking ship movement records, believes it was the vessel Monkey on a routine trading run between New Holland and the Indies. It had a Lascar crew run by a Captain Pace, who could well have been the ship captain of the Raffles Bay expedition, according to Hiddins.

9/ English/Dutch relations in the 1830s were tense, with various diplomatic stand-offs. Hiddins believes the Swan River officials reported to London in person and in writing in the wake of the alleged discovery of the Dutch settlers. But in virtually every case the specific records have gone missing or been erased.

10/ When the first missionaries – the first white men — got to the Arranda community around Hermannsburg in 1876, the missionaries reported that Aboriginal women had Dutch Old-Testament names such as Judith, Paula and Mirjam. Hiddins says those names could not have come from the only other remotely feasible source, which would have been those building the overland telegraph 130km to the east and with hostile tribes in between.

11/ There were at the time unusual numbers of fair-haired (below) and western-looking Aboriginals around Hermannsburg. Some cave and rock art was Western rather than Aboriginal, such as pairs of sentimentally drawn “hearts” (below at right) and semi-realistic portraits and profiles (above). A traditional Luridja owner told Hiddins that the local word for “gun” was “Muket” (Musket), notwithstanding that muskets were long obsolete when the first explorer John McDouall Stuart passed through Central Australia in 1858.

12/ Some time after 1832, and before 1872, when explorer Ernest Giles moved through, the alleged colony died out from causes unknown. At what Hiddins suspects to be “ground zero” of the Dutch settlement, he has photographed a shoulder-high relic of a stone-slab corner (reproduced atop this page) using mud mortar, rather than limestone mortar. He claims it is pre-British but possibly re-used in recent times. No other mystery stonework is visible there, but similar examples exist within 30 or so kilometres. He dubs it “ground zero” because it’s near two un-natural arcs of trees 80m apart and 1km long. He believes them to be vestiges of Dutch-made channels.

Resolution of the Dutch-colony story will require multiple DNA data of Aborigines – which is difficult to acquire — and intensive aerial-based ground-penetrating radar . That job would cost several million dollars.  

Hiddins’ investigations have shown that the primary document – the Leeds Mercury newspaper account two years after the 1832 incident — is steeped in camouflage and misdirection. Initially these caused his research to hit blind alleys. But now, through archival detective work, he’s able to conjecture at likely truths.

Hiddins’ UK, Australian and Dutch-based research has proved the narrator “Lt Nixon” from the expedition was fictional. The Leeds Mercury claim is also false that the expedition was sponsored by scientific authorities in Singapore. On the basis of textual clues and a detective’s mantra of means, opportunity and motive, he claims the April 1832 expedition was organised in secret by the Swan River colony’s first Governor, James Stirling. It was led by Ensign (later Lt) Robert Dale, a talented 22-year-old explorer of proven local track record. Hiddins makes the Dale identification based partly on identical phrases in both the Leeds account and Dale’s local journals.

The secrecy, Hiddins says, was because the expedition was trespassing in NSW territory run by the outgoing and irascible Governor Darling.

When Dale reported back to Stirling (right), Hiddins says, the governor promptly sailed uninvited on HMS Sulphur to London to report on the international ‘bombshell’. The orthodox history is that Stirling’s abrupt 1832 voyage home was to plead for extra food for his hard-scrabble Swan settlers. However, the Fremantle weekly Colonial News added (14/7/1838) about the departure:

There is a vast deal more in this arrangement we apprehend, than meets the public eye.

And Stirling showed no urgency to relieve the Perth food shortage. He ignored the chance to load the Sulphur with food and supplies at Capetown, send it back to Perth, and continue to London on another vessel. He hung around in England from December 1832 until February 1834.

Likewise, the orthodox history is that London took a dim view of Stirling turning up without permission. Hiddins then asks why, in fact, Stirling got knighted four months later, notwithstanding the forlorn state of his Swan colony.

Meanwhile, in late September 1833, Lt Dale in company with or escorted by his commander Captain (later Major) F.C. Irwin, also left Swan colony for London. The probable summons from London was odd because the Swan elements of their 63rd Regiment of Foot were concurrently packing to re-locate north-east to India. Hiddins speculates that the Colonial Office, intrigued by Stirling’s report, also wanted Dale’s eye-witness account of the Dutch settlement. But all the whats, hows and whys are opaque because precisely those documents are missing or censored. Even to this day Hiddins’ researchers can view one volume – where a reference to Dale is literally scratched out — only under supervision in closed rooms.

Hiddins says Dale must have got a shock to find on arrival in London in March 1834 that a mere month earlier his alleged big secret had been touted all over the Leeds Mercury and the provincial press.

British archivists cleverly established the Leeds leaker to be an ex-Indian army Lieutenant T.J. Maslen, living near Halifax, with an armchair passion (eccentricity might be a better word) for Australian exploration and affairs. Maslen somehow gained access to the expedition’s journal and passed extracts to the newspaper, after corrupting some details to suit his own ambitions to be sponsored to Australia. The worst deception was Maslen adjusting the settlement’s latitude from the correct 24.30deg to 18.30deg, placing it wrongly some hundreds of kilometres to the north.

Hiddins used two helicopters for three days trying to locate the appropriate ground features at this wrong 18deg latitude. He finally twigged the correct latitude after magnifying a fold-out map that Maslen owned, to show the man’s faint pencilling and erasings on the margins.

This Leeds Mercury version over the following decade was recycled by other newspapers in England, internationally and in the Swan River colony but with only desultory reactions. The tale of castaway Dutch settlers has resurfaced from time to time in recent decades – including one report by my ex-colleague Alex Harris of The West Australian on June 4, 1988. But there’s been no reaction from academic historians.

The $64 question is why did the asserted Dutch colony, which had survived 125 years, disappear totally within 40 years of its British discovery? The alleged Swan expedition party could have introduced ‘flu or smallpox, or the colony died out from drought, salinity or internal or external violence.  

Critics say Hiddins’ quest is a quixotic example of many stories and fictions about castaways on the WA coast – including real castaways whose fate remains a mystery. (In May 1963 I was the junior member of a party from WA Newspapers which went looking for Dutch castaway evidence from the Vergulde Draeck or “Gilt Dragon” wreck off Ledge Point 100km north of Perth. We checked coastal caves, found nothing but of course wrote riveting stories anyway).

Hiddins’ critics also marvel at his claim of 90 Concordia  survivors marching 2000km from the west coast to settle in the Palm Valley/Hermannsburg zone in the centre of Australia. His response includes

♦ Coral core analysis from the Australian Institute of Marine Science show the northern regions in 1700 enjoyed three times more rain than in the 20^th century.

♦ As the party had access to ship’s stores, they would have prioritised gunpowder for shooting game

♦ Seafarers, soldiers and citizens of the 1700s were hardy by today’s standards. At 10km a day they’d reach the centre in well under a year. The journal says that many died on the way.

The critics’ next best attack is that the story is just another traveller’s yarn, of the “Peg-Leg Pete and the pirates” genre. This is why academics can’t be bothered even to rebut it.

Hiddins’ response is that if the 1834 Leeds Mercurynewspaper account is just an elaborate hoax, cui bono— who benefitted? No-one got fame, money or even an ego trip. The leaker was anonymous, the named authors of it didn’t exist, and there were no consequences for anyone, good or ill. The alleged expedition itself (as distinct from a newspaper account) also didn’t benefit anyone, except maybe Governor Stirling who, for whatever reason, received an unexpected knighthood. And it’s the job of academic critics, not himself, to refute that the 1832 Dutch settlers’ leader was a “Van Baerle”, presumed descendant of the “Van Baerle” officer on the Concordia in 1708. They also need to refute the account by harboumaster Van Blommestein at Samarang in 1851.

Hiddins claims other support. He has filed what he calls important testimony by a station ringer/stockman Ross Milne in 2005 concerning Aboriginal lore about a “white tribe”. Milne as a young man in 1973-75 worked mustering with motorbikes at Tieyon Station SA, often with a black drover Richard Stewart on the pillion seat. Richard at the campfire used to yarn about Aboriginal stories. After Milne happened to save Stewart from an angry bull, Stewart’s tales became more intimate and secret. As a boy his grandfather told him of a “proper white fella” tribe around the Finke River. They lived “plurry long long time (ago)” and sandy-haired Aboriginal kids (below) were recognised as throwbacks from that tribe. Stewart said the “white tribe” was gone but Milne couldn’t remember if the word that Stewart used was “perished” (violent) or “pinnished” (non-violent). Milne wrote to Hiddins, “I know that there must be other people who know of the white-fella tribe as I have.”

A person less dogged than Hiddins would have given up on this quest long ago. Hiddins in 30 years work, suffered not just from the booby-traps inserted in the original Leeds document, but from a concerted campaign – presumably pre-1850 – to expunge official reports within the Colonial and Public Records Offices. If the reports were innocuous, why were they targeted? Hiddins now hopes for Dutch archivists to hit paydirt sooner or later. His website is here.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is now available: Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1] The SMH reported only this week that a bronze infant Buddha found at Shark Bay could be a valuable Ming Dynasty antique. While there is speculation it could be from Zheng He’s 1421 Chinese expedition, Hiddins says he has picked Shark Bay as a likely 1708 landfall for the Concordia survivors from Batavia, where Chinese objets d’art would be plentiful.

[2] Explorer Giles in 1872 reported the Palmer River to be “literally alive with fish, insomuch that the water had a most disagreeable fishy taste, great numbers of fish floating in the water”

Climategate, the Film: Boffins Turning Tricks

If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change a thing, except I’d skip The Trick, a movie about the Climategate scandal that makes heroes of the villains.[1] The BBC aired it last year, and it’s finally accessible on Britbox via my Apple TV. It’s a thriller and the hero is Dr Phil Jones, who, in 2009 when the scandal broke, was a “world renowned” top scientist on a mission to save the planet from the perils of CO2.

He actually pestered UK’s Vox Pictures last year to make the BBC film about himself. It was rather as if Napoleon had pestered the BBC to make a film about his win at Waterloo. The Trick is an alleged “true story”. The real true story is marvellously encapsulated here. This is the BBC’s synopsis(Caution: Risk of nausea):

The Trick tells the story of world-renowned Professor Philip Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Back in 2009, he found himself at the eye of an international media storm and the victim of cyberterrorism. The film charts the unjustifiedpersecution of Phil Jones and his wife Ruth’s fierce support of her husband alongside the fight for the ultimate exoneration of himself and the science…

With time running out against an unseen enemy, The Trick looks at the potentially devastating consequences to humanity from climate change denial – how a media storm undermined public confidence in the science and how the concept of ‘truth’ took a back seat causing us to lose a decade of action.  (My emphases).

I hate to spoil the movie’s plot but controversial emailer Dr Phil is triumphantly vindicated by tame-cat inquiries, although the UK Institute of Physics comments that “worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research and for the credibility of the scientific method.” [2]

Phil’s urgings for his cronies to big up the warming peril and stifle critics are sent down the memory hole. He is soon back at work adjusting raw temperature data to better inform policy-makers. Discomfited critics like Canadian ace statistician Steve McIntyre slink back to their lairs like the routed devils in Paradise Lost.

No-one involved in the film project has a friggin’ clue about the real Climategate parameters but they leapt at the chance to trash those pesky fossil fuels. Pity about the UK households now facing $A8,000 annual fuel bills).

Actor George MacKay has a key role playing Sam Bowen, an idealistic PR flack – is that an oxymoron? His job is to coach Dr Phil on how to look good before a House of Commons committee. Interviewed about the role, actor George said (I’m not making this up):

The nature of how we live our lives has changed including how we live and work. We cannot continue to be using plastic.[3]

Around my study, the synthetics from the wall paint to the carpet and my laptop are oil-based. George’s anti-plastic jihad “to ensure our long-term survival” is a tad misguided. But in the film, his character, Sam, reeks of goodness, especially as he has fathered (or adopted?) a brown baby whom he tenderly kisses a lot, while his father does the ironing and housework. It’s a double or triple triumph of BBC diversity. Where’s the brown mother? We’re not told.

Scriptwriter Owen Sheers’ job is to make us love the horrible Dr Phil Jones, played as the cliched other-worldly professor by Jason Watkins. (In real life, Jason’s a fan of Extinction Rebellion while Sheers imagines climate is “the most significant existential threat we face as a species”).[4] So Phil skylarks on Norfolk’s Happisburgh beach with cute granddaughter Lily, watched by adoring, laughing Ruth (Victoria Hamilton). He gambols with Lily amid the wavelets, in his shoes, slacks and jacket. Far from learning from a mistake (shoes are never the same after a sea dip), he repeats his feat (or feet) twice more in the film. I can imagine him squelching to the university’s climate super-computer, disgorging sand, crabs, starfish and the occasional small squid from his pockets. Only after being “utterly exonerated” does he finally take his shoes off before paddling. Some symbolism there?

The next scene is Phil backstage at Copenhagen Cop15, blushing to be announced as “a world-renowned climate scientist”. He hangs back but adoring Ruth pushes him into the spotlight, giggling, “Go on, Phil!” as hero-music swells. This scene’s a pinch from (in film jargon, ‘homage to’) that Nobel Prize movie The Wife of 2017.

We meet PR man Sam rushing out of his diverse household to a meeting about how to extract Phil from Climategate’s doo-doo when Phil has to appear before a House of Commons inquiry. We learn that the Climategate emails have generated a global scandal, pushed by TV fast-talking heads including sceptic US Senator James Inhofe, who correctly call it “junk science and part of a massive international science fraud.”

East Anglia Uni boffin Trevor Davis (Aneiran Hughes) alerts Ruth, saying in incredulous tone, “They are accusing him of fraud, Ruth!” The film makes out, for suspense purposes, that the Commons committee is ravening for Phil’s blood: in fact only one member (Graham Stringer, Labour and a science PhD) gave Phil a hard time. Stringer later complained that the East Anglia University had done a con job on the committee. The Commons’ own terms of reference did not include investigating Phil let alone exonerating him. The parallel inquiry by Scottish senior bureaucrat Sir Muir Russell did investigate and reported that Jones’ (and Michael Mann’s) now-notorious Hockey Stick diagram was “misleading”, a serious slight on crucial “evidence” for unnatural warming.[5]

To build suspense, no-one’s sure if Phil has been naughty, and we bite our nails for half an hour. Phil has a breakdown, and can barely speak. Says PR Sam; “Jesus they [the dons] weren’t joking, he’s broken.” Phil’s behaving oddly if, as the film believes, he’s as innocent as a suckling lamb.

The director’s problem is that spelling out the emails might alienate the audience from lovable world-renowned scientist Phil. So in the middle of reading out the worst emails, the film inserts a scene break or adds an auditory distraction. Only a very alert viewer would understand Jones’ lines like

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature Trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

 And (to Australian climate scientist Warwick Hughes),

Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it?

Other Jones’ emails of course go unmentioned, like gloating over the fatal illness of Tasmanian sceptic John Daly (“In an odd way this is cheering news!”), and literally “making up” missing data.[6]

The film backtracks three months to Scotland Yard coppers sleuthing how 1000 emails were “stolen” by “cyberterrorists” (ie., hacked, leaked by a disgruntled insider or just left lying around on the internet).[7]

The top copper rates the case as “Category A”, literally worse than a homicide investigation because it could imperil the planet, you see. “So we can expect some additional support from national counter-terrorism, Scotland Yard,” he intones. A brown lady constable (two BBC diversity boxes ticked) interjects, “Sorry, boss, but who’s been murdered?” He snaps at her, “Look at the timing! Join the dots! Three weeks before COP15 [Copenhagen]. If this is someone trying to influence the global response to climate change, then I’d say Category A is not enough!” The now chastened lady constable nods: now she gets it.

A US forensic expert (black, another box ticked) called “Gareth from Kinetic” has a wonderful line putting down genuine Climategate hero Steve McIntyre. Gareth from Kinetic sneeringly calls him “a Canadian ex-mining consultant turned self-appointed climate science fact-checker”. Jones in 2002 initially gave McIntyre some of his data, “but then Mcintyre started using it to criticise Jones to undermine his career” — how shocking is that in the science world? Jones dug in and McIntyre allegedly persuaded his entire data base to flood Jones with FOI requests. “Sixty in a week, look it’s a bloody tsunami” [i.e. 9-12 a day].

Competent scientists would have their temperature stations, data and countries neatly archived and could have send the spreadsheet off in a quarter hour. The technical problem for Jones was that his data was a mess, with hundreds of individual files (he didn’t even know how to use Excel to show a trend)[8], and some were destroyed or gone missing.[9] As Melbourne climate scientist Dr John McLean[10]discovered in 2018 when he did the first-ever audit for his PhD of Dr Phil’s HadCRUT4 global temperature series, it was about the standard of a first-year uni student’s work. For example, McLean found that for two years Jones derived the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere from just one site in Indonesia.

Gareth from Kinetic plants, then nixes, the suspicion that analyst McIntyre hacked the emails, explaining in a beaut put-down, “It was a relatively sophisticated attack, (so) he would not have the capability.”

At home with Ruth, Phil’s crack-up worsens.

Phil (screaming): I have not falsified any data!

Ruth: They can’t argue with the facts. 

Phil (sobbing): But that’s what they do all the time! (Weeping) I haven’t done anything wrong, Ruth.

It’s darkest-before-the-dawn stuff. Can decent but nearly ga-ga Phil get his act together before the Commons inquisitors?

Script maestro Sheers uses every filmic device to keep viewers on-side with Phil. In a maybe Oscar-inspiring episode, he scripts loving wife Ruth telling Phil,

You said when they finally came to act on it [alleged catastrophic warming circa  2100] they would need data they could trust. They need EVIDENCE. And you would be able to give it to them. Well that time is now and you were right. That’s why you can’t let those BASTARDS [sceptics like Quadrant readers] destroy all you have done. It is TOO IMPORTANT. (Sobs). YOU are too important. 

Phil puts on his stunned-mullet look, as violas swell. Then they both sob together. They’re soon at it again.

Phil: They have finally found a way to get me. They have won, Ruth.

Ruth: No they have not. They know the truth is out there now [i.e. truth about climate Armageddon etc in 2100]. All they can do is try to find ways of delaying how soon it reaches everyone. That is the desperation of people who have lost!

Phil: You are forgetting something. Not everyone wants to the truth to reach them.

Phil and Ruth hold hands , the music throbs, they gaze into each other’s eyes and as Oscar Wilde wrote of the death of Little Nell, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.[11]

PR Sam laments that “the blogs” and “American right-wing media” are pursing the scandal, and he adds, “The BBC [too], for Christ’s sake!” Personally I’d intuit that if even the BBC and The Guardian were putting the boots into Phil, he was letting the side down big-time.

The PR team laboriously coach Phil on how to look good, or at least not too ga-ga. To show that even PR presstitutes are not cynical talents-for-hire, the film cuts to Sam’s flat, with Pop doing the ironing and Sam cuddling motherless brown baby, furnished with both a dummy and a teddy bear. Son and Pop discuss how dastardly sceptics are, using ancient talking points about tobacco liars, “Exxon knew” about the CO2 peril but hid it, and vast funding of sceptics by oil companies (we wish).

The film hasn’t finished dealing sympathy cards to Phil. Next up are ‘death threat’ emails, the usual deplorable stuff. But as I heard US pundit Tucker Carlson say the other day, get over it, it’s everywhere. The authentic death threats come from Koran-toting Islamists, as Salman Rushdie learnt, and ideologically driven bureaucrats financing their vendettas on the public teat, as our late, great cartoonist Bill Leak discovered. The e-threats cause Phil to — you guessed it — walk into the sea with his briefcase, but he walks out again with shrimps in his cuffs. In reality, he said he’d only contemplated suicide.

I can find no instances of any violence against orthodox climate scientists, apart from someone allegedly throwing eggs at someone’s Canberra house. But immediately after an Alabama weekend Earth Day procession in April 2017, someone fired seven Belgian 5.7mm rounds from 70 yards range  which hit the fourth floor offices of sceptic climate scientist Dr John Christy. Incredibly, local police couldn’t figure out any motive.

Next in the film is a vignette of Ruth and Phil’s early romance, mercifully minus a nude bed romp. Ruth says,

Just show them [Commons] who you are. Do you remember when we first met? [Violins]. The Halls of Residence. It was dark, your room was on the other side of the wall. And you came out to ask us to be quiet. [Her tears well up]. The way you acted and carried yourself, I could tell straight away he was a good man, a kind man, a man of integrity. [Oh, go on! And do fix the grammar] All the pieces of that man are still here today. Which means so is he.

Phil orates about imminent climate doom if we don’t heed and believe his dodgy data:

Phil: CO2 emissions and temperatures rise by 1.5 to 4.5degC by 2100 [hey, that’s quite a range!) and the poles by maybe 10deegC. By 2100 dust bowl conditions across North America and Africa and Asia too. Sooner than that, massive reduction in agricultural production [yields are annually hitting new records], less access to drinking water, migration in huge numbers [none to date], and bushfires on a massive scale in Australia and the West Coast. And melting of the poles and the West Antarctic ice sheets causing global sea-level rise of metres [on a thousand-year time scale]. In this worst-case scenario [never mind plausible scenarios] 20% of the habitable world will no longer be able to sustain human life. Millions of species will become extinct. Coastal and delta cities will be under water, and more – if methane in the permafrost and sea-beds releases, the results will be…

PR man: What?

Phil: The climate will collapse and the world as we know it will be gone.

Phil gazes sternly at the camera with the all-seeing eyes of a world-renowned climate scientist. The face of PR Sam displays six varieties of shock.

Then comes the climactic Commons hearing. The director can’t ignore the money-quote from Phil. Waving his hands, Phil says in the film (and in actual transcript), “Uh. Yes, I’ve obviously written some very awful emails.”

Much suspense and sad music ensues until the committee report comes out. Ruth reads (my emphasis), “As far as we have been able to consideraccusations of dishonesty, for example, Professor Jones’ alleged attempt to ‘hide the decline’, we consider there is…[Ruth pauses to sob]… no case to answer.” [sobs and weeps].[12] Six other tame inquiries are said to have cleared Phil, including of course by Obama’s dark-green Environmental Protection Agency.

Thus vindicated, Phil climbs the local lighthouse to embrace Lily and point histrionically at nothing. PR Sam’s brown baby has now grown up into a brainwashed teenager toting school-strike placards, “There is No Planet B”. Plastics-hating actor George intones,

It only took one generation to break the planet [what? It’s never been in better shape, apart from Ukraine and President Biden] so why can’t it take just one generation to fix it? I know we should have more time but at least we still have time — just! 

In Britain’s case, just time to wreck the economy with renewables and get clobbered by Putin’s gas crunch.

The on-screen wrap-up reads:

Today Phil Jones is one of the world’s most cited and respected [what?] climate scientists. He still works at CRU [albeit demoted] where he continues to measure the increase in global temperature.

Actually that’s zero rise for the past eight years and one month, according to the reliable UAH satellites.

Anyway, after all the inquiries, Phil was asked by a Nature interviewer why he’d urged deletion of info subject to Freedom of Information requests. An attempt to thwart critics, perhaps?

That was probably just bravado at the time. We just thought if they’re going to ask for more, we might as well not have them.”

Bravo, world-renowned climate scientist!

Tony Thomas’ essay collection “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from publisher ConnorCourt. A new book, “Anthem of the Unwoke —Yep! the other lot’s gone bonkers”, is in production

[1] I think this witticism originates from Woody Allen in respect of the movie “Titanic”.

[2] And written evidence submitted to the Commons committee by the Institute of Physics in London claimed the hacked emails had revealed “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions” through “manipulation of the publication and peer-review system” and “intolerance to challenge”.

[3] Some have suggested he is merely condemning plastic bags on environmental grounds. But plastic bags have nothing to do with humanity’s “long term survival”. He really does condemn “plastic”.

[4] Jason also played PM Harold Wilson in The Crown

[5] One of the inquiries was led by Ronald Oxburgh, a member of the House of Lords and honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association. Oxburgh “has paid directorships of two renewable energy companies, and is a paid advisor to Climate Change Capital, the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank.” In other words, Oxburgh stood to make a lot of money off AGW and could not, under any circumstances, be seriously considered an independent investigator.

[6] Jones: For much of the SH [Southern Hemisphere] between 40 and 60 [degrees] S[outh] the normals are mostly made up as there is very little ship data there. And “For the 1940-1960 period if the SSTs [sea surface temperatures] were adjusted they would look much better. Here’s another one: … I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! 

[7] The still-unidentified perp actually said his motive was to help divert useless trillions for renewables towards doing genuine good for the world’s poor. Melbourne climate scientist Dr John McLean says that the CRU documents first appeared from website www.tomsc.ru. That address was very similar to www.toms.cru.

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that the CRU people were trying to hide emails away, maybe onto an old PC used by CRU analyst Tom Wigley (hence ‘toms.cru”), in order to avoid disclosing them under Freedom of Information requests.”

[8] Jones: “I’m not adept enough [he means totally inept] with Excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.”

[9] One email from a university staffer himself reads, “I do hope all these emails are just staying within UEA because it really makes us (UEA as a whole) look like a bunch of amateurs”

[10] The multiple requests occurred largely because a lot of Jones’ data files weren’t aggregated so requests might have gone in for say, Australian data 2008, NZ data 2008, Fiji data 2008, Vanuatu data 2008 etc.

[11] Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop:

“She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who has lived and suffered death … Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead.”

[12] The Commons findings read: “In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty-for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”- we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact.” (My emphasis).

GO AHEAD, CLIMATE SCIENTISTS, MAKE MY DAY

Some stories I come across are so weird that I don’t know how to write them. No-one will believe I am serious. For example, in 1974 I attended a talk by Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns at the ANU in which he called for the abolition of money and for Australia to return to barter along pre-Sumerian lines. He was in love at the time with a stunning Eurasian lass. I’m sure the Treasury and Reserve Bank were not in favour of a barter economy. It was 39 years before I mustered the chutzpah to actually report on Dr Jim’s proposal.

These days “climate science” has equivalent oddities. Try page 1 of the PhD thesis of psychotherapist Dr Sally Gillespie, of Psychologists for a Safe Climate. It’s about the dream that turned her into a climate activist:

It’s the end of the world through climate change. Whole continents are sinking beneath the sea as water levels rise. Millions of people are attempting to cling to the shore, and to their lives, fruitlessly. At one stage I swing in the air clinging to a rope as land masses shift around beneath me. At another stage I cling to the shore line and a poodle swims up into my arms. I steal biscuits for us… I know billions must die and only tens of thousands will remain… The air is running out, death is close.

These examples help me now to write about the recent peer-reviewed climate paper of three senior Australian-New Zealand climate professors titled “The Tragedy of Climate Change Science.” It’s in the learned journal Climate & Development and has undergone the rigours of peer review.

What’s in it? The professors call on their fellow climate researchers to go on strike from climate doomism and also scuttle the plans for a Seventh IPCC Report. This strategy, they imagine, will force Western governments to stop their shilly-shallying about emissions and finally get serious about the Year Zero agenda – not that China, India and Russia would cooperate. As winter looms, Germany and the UK are frantically back-pedalling to fossil fuels, so our Antipodean climate savants must be crying themselves to sleep.

The professorial troika is Bruce Glavovic of Massey University, NZ; Timothy F. Smith of University of Sunshine Coast; and Iain White of Waikato University, NZ.[1]

The paper has been accessed at least 32,000 times. Moreover, Professor Glavovic was coordinating lead author of the sea-level chapter of the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and is lead author in the IPCC Sixth Report. IPCC authors seem to moonlight as activists.

Tim Smith, of our sparkling Sunshine Coast, is also an adjunct professor at Brock University (Canada) and a Senior Research Associate at Uppsala University, Sweden. He’s an ARC Future Fellow and on the steering committee of the green/left Australian Academy of Science’s even wackier Future Earth Australia affiliate. Incidentally, my perusal of Sunshine Coast University’s climate content for local teens has left me with post-traumatic stress disorder (more on that later).

The third author Iain White at Waikato Uni explains that “he is committed to engaging beyond the discipline to researchers, practitioners and communities to generate real world impact”.

You’re muttering by now, “Stupid Tony Thomas, making up stuff again.” But pasted here is the paper’s conclusion, verbatim but with my emphases (throughout this essay):

Climate change science is settled to the point of global consensus. We have fulfilled our responsibility to provide robust knowledge. We now need to stop research in those areas where we are simply documenting global warming and mal-adaptation, and focus instead on exposing and renegotiating the broken science- society contract. The IPCC’s 6th Assessment will be completed in 2022. Will the response to this assessment be any different to the previous five assessments? Nothing indicates that this will be the case. In fact, given the rupture of the science-society contract outlined here, it would be wholly irresponsible for scientists to participate in a 7th IPCC assessment. 

We therefore call for a halt to further IPCC assessments. We call for a moratorium on climate change research until governments are willing to fulfil their responsibilities in good faith and urgently mobilize coordinated action from the local to global levels. This [third] option is the only effective way to arrest the tragedy of climate change science. 

The three options we set out here are either untenable or unpalatable. Readers may well agree with the nature of the tragedy of climate change science outlined here but disagree with our analysis of viable options. Some may want greater detail on what a moratorium could encompass, or argue for expanding traditional forms of advocacy. 

Equally, while some may see the third option [strikes] as damaging the credibility and objectivityof the scientific community, we see this option as a new powerful possibility for scientific advocacy and a further means by which scientists can act in the public interest when all other avenues have failed. The moratorium will be hard, and there will be short-term pain for researchers, with an uncomfortable spotlight on the scientific community. Questions will be raised regarding whether it is our ‘duty’ to use public funds to continue to improve the state of climate change knowledge, or whether a more radical approach will serve society better? We argue that a critical juncture has now been reached for human and planetary well-being. Given the tragedy of climate change science outlined here, a moratorium offers the only real prospect for restoring the science-society contract. Other options are seductive but offer false hope. 

I hope the three professors won’t also throw cream-cake at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre to raise awareness of climate doom.

The paper is short at 2300 words. I’m not complaining: Einstein needed only 760 words to wreck Newtonian mechanics. An elaborate diagram, with data from WWF shills, occupies one of their four pages. The professors explain:

Figure 1: The tragedy of climate change science. Governments concur that climate change is occurring. Yet scientists are compelled to do more research. The tragedy is conducting more climate change research even when the science is settled. Governments need to take action to halt global warming and enable transformational adaptation and climate resilient development.

Actually, it repeats six times that “the science is settled”. At one point it even says, “climate change science is settled and has been for decades” (p2). Wow, by 1991 (or maybe 1981), climate scientists had nothing left to learn about climate change. Any scientist saying that cancer research or earthquake research is settled would be fired, but not one of this paper’s 32,000+ readers has complained (or complained successfully) to Climate & Development.

The study was part-funded by the NZ Earthquake Commission. Under “Funding”, the paper also says, “Tim Smith acknowledges support by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects Funding Scheme (Project FT180100652).”  This grant totalled $1.047 million but was for Australian coastal protection research. [2] Smith could have made a typo about Grant FT180100652 supporting his paper urging strikers to pressure governments. Smith and the ARC assessors can readily sort this out.

The professors see the now increasingly-discredited COVID-19 responses as a model for enforcing climate policies by “radical government action”. [3] In my home state of Victoria, the “radical government action” included hand-cuffing pregnant Zoe Buhler in pyjamas at her Ballarat home because of her social media post about a protest event.

The authors have been conditioned by our catastrophist Will Steffen, Potsdam’s fanatics, and conspiracist Naomi Oreskes to imagine that  climate sceptics are members of Mike Myer’s “Dr Evil” crew striving to destroy the planet. They say:

Vestiges of inevitable scientific uncertainty are being exploited by ‘merchants of doubt’. This is a tragedy for humanity, for current and future generations, and for life on Earth. It is also a tragedy of and for science, especially climate change science. 

Neither the authors nor peer reviewers do fact-checking. The authors say the 1990 First IPCC Report

concluded with certainty that human activities were substantially increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases and warming the earth’s surface (IPCC, 1990).”

Stop it there, professors, you’ve screwed up with certainty. The 1990 Report actually said the opposite,

♦ “The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observation is not likely for a decade or more”.[4] Section 1. Page 53.

♦ “Scientists working in this field cannot at this point in time make the definitive statement: ‘Yes, we have now seen an enhanced greenhouse effect.’”Section 8, Page 254. Part 8.5.

♦ “On the basis of this simple analysis alone we might conclude that detection [of the enhanced greenhouse effect] with high confidence is unlikely to occur before the year 2000. If stringent controls are introduced to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions and if the climate sensitivity is at the low end of the range of model predictions then it may be well into the twenty-first century before we can say with high confidence that we have detected the enhanced greenhouse effect.” Section 8, Page 253. Part 8.4.

Climate & Development might retract or withdraw the paper any time now. And professors, CO2 hypocrite Al Gore and high-school dropout Greta Thunberg have no credentials to be shouting about “the warnings of climate change science”.

Given that the strike is option Three, what are options One and Two? No. 1 is research as usual, to “stay politically neutral and avoid being policy prescriptive.” In climate science, that would never do, hence “Not tenable”.

Option Two (also not tenable): “Intensified social science research and advocacy on climate change” to deliver to the masses unreliable and expensive renewables. The professors bemoan that most of the delicious government funding is going to the hard sciences of climate, leaving the “political scientists, sociologists, economists, human geographers and the like” (and I assume themselves) to whinge in corners during Varsity House happy hours. That’s despite the social-science crowd heroically exposing all the fossil-fuel money allegedly pouring into denialists’ pockets, according to the professors. Strange that top sceptics like Paul Homewood, Joanne Nova and Anthony Watts rely on their website tip-jars.

Thus Option Three, the Great Researchers’ Strike, is to bend governments to their will. I assume the trio, as strike leaders, will cheerfully forfeit their $200,000 pay-packets (with packaging), 17% super, tenure and seventh-year sabbaticals. They do talk about “hard” times and “short term pain”.

I mentioned climate courses at Professor Smith’s University of Sunshine Coast. It’s a hot-bed of climate fanaticism. The School of Science, Technology & Engineering offers credulous Sunshine Coast teens a course, Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. The course notes start:

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels and clearing land have changed our climate and produced largely irreversible and almost exclusively negative impactson the environment and our wellbeing. 

For a start, our extra CO2 has helped green the planet to the extent of 2.5 times the area of Australia. For seconders, rising agricultural yields and output,with CO2 help, have underpinned unparalleled living standards notwithstanding huge population growth. For other benefits, see here.

The course ends with Assessment Task 3:

In this simulation task, you will take on the role of Special Advisor to the Chair of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. You will be responsible for using actual global emissions data and the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induce Climate Change (MAGGIC) used by the IPCC to produce a plan for cutting global emissions … sufficient to avoid a 2C global average temperature change. The plan will include…strategies to address issues of equity, historic responsibility [of colonial imperialists] and future emissions growth; technology transfer and funding arrangements; and other features you see fit to include, such that it can be presented for discussion by 165 signatories to the UNFCCC at the next Convention of the Parties (COP) meeting. [What? The correct number of signatories  is 198].[5] Effectively, you will produce a plan to save the world as we know it.

 I came across the three professors’ paper while checking out other Sunshine Coast University piffle (peer reviewed) about getting “Inside the mind of a sceptic: the ‘mental gymnastics’ of climate change denial”. Why are there no studies, inside the mind of a green/Leftie: the ‘mental gymnastics’ of belief in climate doom?

Given a choice between the professors’ strike paper, enrolling at Sunshine Coast for climate brainwashing, or dreaming about poodles paddling around chasing a biscuit, I’ll take the poodles every time.

Tony Thomas’ essay collection “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from publisher ConnorCourt. A new title, Anthem of the Unwoke —Yep! the other lot’s gone bonkers, is in production.

[1] Attempts to contact them for comment were unsuccessful

• [2] Summary:Coastal governance. This project aims to discover coastal governance approaches that embrace vulnerability and change. Current coastal management approaches are failing as existing threats intensify and new threats emerge. This project expects to generate knowledge on diverse vulnerabilities, with insights advancing the disciplines of human geography and public policy through improved understanding of the relationships between people, place and change. This is expected to support ongoing economic, environmental, social and cultural benefits that are derived from the Australian coast.

[3] “Covid-19 has provided a window of opportunity to restructure economies and budgets away from reliance on fossil fuels.”

[4] “Associations of locus of control, information processing style and anti-reflexivity with climate change scepticism in an Australian sample.”

[5]   Apart from all the scammers and swindlers: “Disclaimer   The UNFCCC secretariat has become aware that certain admitted observer organizations are using commercial business model packages to solicit business. As an inducement to sell these packages, potential clients are assured participation at UNFCCC conferences, sessions and meetings through quotas of admitted observer organizations. The UNFCCC secretariat would like to make clear that it does not endorse such practices nor does it charge any fees for participating…”

Raising a Generation of Junior Jackbooters

• 13th July 2021
•  Comments (8)

Tony Thomas

Australian schoolkids get multiple forms of green/Left indoctrination (for a partial list click here). Conservative state and federal governments do nothing about this and even promote it. But how well are kids actually absorbing the green/Left narrative? Very well indeed, is my guess. Judging from copious material I’ve been sifting, schools are training a generation of horrid little eco-tyrants hot to embark on the mightiest state planning and control makeover since Stalin destroyed private agriculture and re-introduced mass slavery.

 “Young Australians’ Plans for the Planet” — an astounding trove — involves myriad pages of kids’ takes on social issues. They were organised by local climate zealots to support the United Nation’s 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) for 2030. The UN’s eight “Millennium Development Goals” for 2000-15 did great work reducing indicators like childbirth mortality and extreme poverty. But the 17 SDGs are a joke on “inclusiveness”, involving 169 sub-targets and no prioritisations (“End poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all”). Indeed the UN’s original SDG draft involved 1400 indiscriminate goals proposed by 120 organisations.

Our locals organised about 240 kids from Year 10, drawn from [1] 20 high schools nationally, to flesh out kids’ own plans for Australia out to 2050. The kids and supervising teachers did the eight months’ extra-curricular work during 2016-19,  stopping when COVID-19 intervened. The superstructure was bigger than Ben Hur. The exercise went international with kids from Mauritius (10 schools, 120 kids) and Singapore endorsing the template. Asia, Africa and North America wait in the wings.

The local organisers were: Questacon and Inspiring Australia (the National Science and Technology Centre run within the Department of Industry), the green-Left Academy of Science and its affiliate Future Earth, UN Youth Australia, six universities led by the ANU’s woke vice-chancellor and Nobelist Brian Schmidt, and green fanatics such as Beyond Zero Emissions and OnePlanet Partnership.

The 240 kid volunteers are probably a green-biased sample (if you know of any free-market warming-sceptic school groups out there somewhere, please let me know). Actually some of the  kids taking part occasionally went off-message: an outlier even urged debate and polling on nuclear power, and some others were gung-ho for a gas pipeline from PNG and a gas-powered electricity plant to help North Queensland’s industry – climate Armageddon be damned. The mainstream want a green socialist nirvana where governments dictate how we live and work, and ensure we think only proper thoughts about renewables.

I’m not blaming kids for what teachers have dinned into them; I’m sure kids’ hearts are in the right place. But here goes, fasten your seat-belts, because here is what the junior jackbooters think is needed to confront that climate emergency we’re always hearing about.

♦ “Stop the debate as climate change is real.”

♦ Kids want their parents to be slugged with a carbon tax, plus 50 per cent hikes in both petrol prices and car insurance. (Mum and Dad to kid: “Gee thanks, Fiona, that’s just what our family needs.”)

♦ WA kids: “Go to the federal government and ask them to put through a law saying all vehicle owners need to drive an electric vehicle by 2030.” (Even the uber-progressive Canberra kids want only an 80 per cent cut in normal cars by 2040).

♦ New coal mines are banned and coal and petroleum replaced “with a job-rich, clean energy economy.” The kids say that our green jobs can grow by 28 per cent per annum, which on my calculations suggests nearly 60 million green jobs by 2050.[2]

♦ Central planners are to decrease fossil fuel exports (the lifeblood of the Australian economy) and increase exports of “sustainably farmed crops and livestock.”[3]

♦ Federal and sng tate legislation for mandatory use of biofuels in vehicles, aircraft and off-grid electricity production.

♦ “Increase fuel excise on non-biofuels with all funds invested back into biofuels technology and development.”

♦ WA kids: “We aim to stop live export by any means completely. We want live exports to be completely illegal and those who will break this law will get a reasonable punishment.”

♦ “Legislation/guidelines as to where a shop can import from, based on their location.” (This is to support local production, never mind any advantages of trade).

♦ The kids want the government to snuff out “infamously” water-intensive crops like cotton and rice, “while providing viable alternatives”. I assume the NSW Premier sets up a Ministry of Artichokes & Pineapples.

♦ WA kids want farmers to be levied “4 per cent of their output or $2 billion a year” to stock “community fridges” available to anyone wanting a feed. (Fat chance that teachers would know that WA farm output isn’t $50 billion, it’s $11 billion).

♦ “New laws” should place quotas of women in high-paid male-dominated sectors.[4]Workplaces should run compulsory courses against sexism. (comparable, I assume, to current compulsory safety courses.)

♦ A steadily increasing tax on sugar-laced foods, while subsidising fruit and veges for the poor. The sugar tax to be followed by something called a “trans-fat tax”.

♦ Kids want to teach farmers how to run their farms, imagining that profligate farmers are over-spraying fertilisers and pesticides, heedless of cost. Farm problems can, of course, be ‘solved’ by government funding for increased farmer wages, the kids explain. “It would make sense that we all pay for agriculture through tax.”

Australians were once famed as rugged individualists. But today’s snowflake kids want a taxpayer-funded program for free beach umbrellas to combat sunburn, and taxpayer-paid seaside sunscreen dispensers. Students from households on less than $80,000 a year should get taxpayer-paid lunches.

The NSW kids, who have been familiarised with green politics, write:

Australia previously had a carbon tax under the Gillard government that lasted from 2011-14.[5] Unfortunately there was extreme backlash towards this and it was repealed in July 2014…

The introduction of a Carbon Tax could be a potentially viable way of reducing the state’s dependence on coal and fossil fuels as it becomes more expensive to use them.

The NSW kids have got the climate-catastrophe panic prose down pat:

We have 18 months to reduce impact of climate change until irreversible damage including unadaptable changes for animals according to the UN.

The 18 months are now up, kids, and global temperatures actually fell in June to a range last seen 20 years ago.

Schoolkids, who’ve learnt so much engineering from their teachers, envisage

teaching the community the benefits of renewable energy and dissipating the myths surrounding solar/wind farms (that they are too loud, look unattractive in the countryside).

A reminder, kids: they’re also intermittent.

The union movement has tumbled from 51 per cent of the workforce in 1976 to a under 14 per cent today, with the education sector probably the most strongly unionised. It appears that union supporters have invaded the classrooms to shore up future membership. Here’s kids’ reflections:

Creating jobs in the renewable energy sector that are attractive, high salary and have good unions …  All organisations should have equal pay policies and employee access to third party pay negotiators. Funding from government to allow people to have access to a third party negotiator… Organise various third party negotiators for the government/businesses to readily supply for employers and employees … By communicating with their government prior to a job interview, an employee will be able to access a third party to negotiate pay.

Combatting unemployment is seen as the job of “schools unions and unemployment benefit centres” –  employers don’t rate a mention.

On Clean Energy goals — the need for baseload power is typically overlooked — coal miners are seen deftly transitioning to solar energy jobs and “the price of electricity will drop to more affordable prices for all communities.” Actually, kids, studies show that the more solar/wind wattage a country has, the dearer its electricity. In NSW, electricity is to be 100 per cent renewable by 2030. Heaven help fridge-owners during wind droughts.

The kids’ push for electric cars would be aided by taxpayer grants to buyers and free access to bus lanes, toll roads and ferries. Since the kids want electric cars to swamp the roads, bus drivers and ferry operators will be cursing.[6]

As to CO2 in the atmosphere, currently 416 parts per million, the kids believe it can be sucked down legislatively or by technology to 366ppm in 2030 and to 330ppm in 2050. It was previously at 330ppm in 1975, an era when Asian and African peasants were starving from lack of mechanisation.

The nadir of the kids’ teacher-supervised output comes from a Perth high school. Its 31 planet-savers aim to re-shape human society and revise the Western Enlightenment, but they first need more instruction on grammar and spelling. For example, “This an extra income a little bit more unrestricted.” I wouldn’t normally care but I would have expected teachers to correct kids’ grammar in a public document for clients like the Prime Minister and the Academy of Science. Perhaps the teachers’ command of basic grammar and coherence is no better than that of their indoctrinated charges.

These kids, in their plan for quality education, say,

Also to improve the staff work ethic so we can (sic) quality teachers over a quantity of average teachers (sic) … More important Topics come first an aren’t just restricted to being taught by one person yelling out information expecting others to take notes.

Understandably, they want the school budget to finance a therapist. These kids lobby for “Quality teachers … performance management salary based incentives” – a good thing but sounds odd from the mouths of babes.

During the planning exercise WA had some drought so the kids’ plan reads,

The amount of drought is reduced by at least 35% in the heavily drought affected areas.

Almost as ambitious as planning the weather is halting WA coral bleaching for the first time in about 26 million years.

Reduce the temperature of sea water by trying to reduce the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere that lead to global warming that lead to coral bleaching.

The budding civil engineers want to turn Argyle, Australia’s second-largest dam, into a Malcolm Turnbull-style Snowy 2.0: “Get a huge pump to pump water up pipes. Power the pump by a nearby solar farm that has to be made.”

Kids nationally bemoan water scarcity but seem unaware of green bans on vital new dams and catchments. Some are also clueless but zealous about construction materials, claiming that inter-city water pipes should be converted to copper because copper is the “most affordable” material (recent price $A13,000 per tonne). They know better than water boards how to prevent leaks – boards must apply anti-rust coatings “for all pipes made of a Ferris (sic) metal.”

The ACT kids are demanding the honoring of the 2015 Paris climate pledges – notwithstanding that all pledges are discretionary. They urge their fellow young  to lobby the Australian curriculum authority to include climate change teaching “in collaboration with students” who clearly know what’s what. Like the WA kids, the ACT kids lobby, curiously, for higher teacher pay, more teacher support, benefits and longer annual leave (six weeks’ Christmas leave plus term breaks are apparently not enough). Need one be corroded by cynicism to guess who has been planting in kids’ heads the notion that teachers need more pay and fewer hours?

Kids meanwhile should be able to change their legal sex identity without the inconvenience of gender assignment surgery, according to the NSW kids. This looks a bit esoteric for Year 10s but nothing in today’s education surprises me.

In other kids’ miscellany, violent Aboriginals are incarcerated because they’re victimised: “We need to uproot biased judges and make sure all trials are fair.” And in what must be news to NSW loggers, kids inform us that “The NSW Government also needs to stop subsidising the native forests logging industry with the people’s tax money.”

My first recommendation is that woke teachers and green do-gooders stop shoving their perverse and naive pet causes down kids’ throats. Second, jettison this whole idea that we’ll get any wisdom from teenagers’ hormone-fevered brains. The kids are in school to learn stuff and acquire some worldly knowhow. When they’ve flown the parental coop, paid their own way and experienced the real world’s rigors, their views might be worth a listen.

Until then, kids can ponder Greta Thunberg’s latest message: “The audience has grown weary. This show is over. Thank you”

Tony Thomas’s just-published “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from author at tthomas061@gmail.com or publisher Connor Court.

[1] If you imagine the UN is a noble organisation, keep in mind that the China is taking over key committees; the founder of the UN Environmental Program Maurice Strong got sprung with a corrupt cheque for $US988,000; the 2013-14 President of the General Assembly John Ashe (Antigua) enjoyed the proceeds of at least $US1.3 million in bribes and died pending his trial; and UN peace-keeping forces have been hotbeds of child sex abuse. The Age reported in 2006 that two Jordanian soldiers with the UN Peacekeeping Force in East Timor were evacuated home with injured penises after attempting intercourse with goats.

[2] Based on 27,000 jobs in renewables in 2018-19.

[3] The kids believe our fossil fuel export subsidies total $12 billion a year – a canard probably from the Greens Party. Tim Flannery’s Climate Council puts the subsidies at $4b a year, which is still ludicrous. The “subsidies” are in fact largely refunds of fuel taxes to prevent double-taxation.

[4] “ Increase the number of women in influential positions/positions of power by 50% in 5 years. Increase the number of women in positions of power by 10% each year.”

[5] In PM Gillard’s immortal or immoral words, “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.”

[6] Buses and trams would have sensors to dob in traffic violators, and the public transport system would get 25% of the fines – bounty-hunting by behemoths

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Why Teachers Get Away with Preaching Green Rubbish

• 8th April 2022
•  Comments (5)

Tony Thomas

In the impending May federal election, how are young voters (18-24yo) going to vote? For sure they’re keen on the Greens Party, and for sure they’re biased against the Coalition.

To elaborate, the March Newspoll of The Australian showed 17 per cent of youngsters (18-24) intending to vote Greens compared with 9% of all voters. Youngsters favored Labor 47 per cent (all voters 41 per cent) and youngsters gave the Coalition a derisory 24 per cent support (all voters, 34 per cent). On two-party preferred, the poll went 66 per cent of youngsters for Labor and only 34 per cent for the Coalition (all voters 55/45 per cent).

How the UK combats activism in the classroom

I’d say they’ve emerged from 13 years of brainwashing by teachers, with further years at university getting them fully indoctrinated. States have anti-brainwashing policies, but the ability of all teachers to understand them, let alone implement them, is doubtful. In NSW and ACT in 2015, school leavers who scored in the bottom 50 per cent ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) scores made up half of all teaching degree offers. There were 28 offers made to students scoring an ATAR of 0-19, 29 offers to those scoring 20-29, and 73 offers to students with an ATAR of 30-39, according to a leaked study by academics which the universities had sought to suppress.

It’s no accident that schools are awash in green-Left dogma, such as from WWF, Cool Australia and Oxfam. Here’s a little time-line.

1985: Joan Kirner, soon to become Victoria’s Education Minister and Premier, argues that education must be reshaped as “part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system”.

February 2005: Wayne Sawyer, the president of the NSW English Teachers Association and former chairman of the NSW Board of Studies English Curriculum Committee, bemoans in his editorial for English in Australia that the Howard Government was re-elected. He cites this as evidence that English teachers have failed in their job.

2006-22: Teachers uncritically force-feed literally millions of schoolkids Al Gore’s movies Inconvenient Truth and Inconvenient Sequel, often multiple times in various years, followed by Damon Gameau’s green propaganda movies 2040 [2019] and Regenerating Australia [April 2022].

December 2008: Federal Labor Education Minister Julia Gillard and Labor education ministers from five states[2] concoct the “Melbourne Declaration” leading to “Sustainability” and the environment becoming one of three cross-curriculum priorities in Australian education.[2] This gives free rein in schools for direct green/Left indoctrination and via third party curriculum material.[3]

December 2015: School lessons compiled by the Australian Academy of Science and used by a third of secondary science teachers and 50,000-60,000 students include this for 15 to 16-year-olds:

♦ “Ask students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause.”

♦ “Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will … appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.”

♦ “If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?” 

♦ Could we do without It [mining]? Would you work for a mining company?”

November, 2018: Woodville High (SA) teacher, ex-Fair Work inspector and union delegate Regina Wilson, 58, posts to the Australian Education Union’s Facebook page her vow to “ensure that the next generation of voters in my classroom don’t vote Liberal”.  She is the international student program manager at the 1000-pupil school and teaches classes in Years 8, 9 and 11. She claims in her defence that she is being targeted because of her gender. She retires with thanks from the principal a year later.

November 2020: Education Services Australia (ESA), a company set up by federal-state education ministers to provide free supplementary online materials for teachers (“Scootle”), gives Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating 17 hits, virtually all laudatory; Labor PM Gough Whitlam gets 56 hits, none hostile and most laudatory, and the Liberal’s PM John Howard gets more than 20 hits, none laudatory and most hostile.

June 2021: A climate-change manual for 5-14yo’s by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia says,

Chapter 9 is a call for action. Without students taking personal action to mitigate climate change, there is no point to this book.

It urges schools to get kids chanting

an Earth-focused school or class ‘anthem’ at assemblies. (This) is a great way to build emotional attachment to the planet. 

Education Publishing Australia gives the book its “Educational Resource” award for 2021.

September 2021: Cool Australia promotes to kids “Seated protest of national anthem:

1. Strengths — Anyone who witnesses the national anthem can do it; Easy – doesn’t cost money or require organisation; Non-violent 
2. Weaknesses –– May not get a chance to share reasons for sitting down; Doesn’t necessarily change any other people’s behaviour.”

I wrote here about the UK’s 1996 legislation and 9000-word Guidance Notes in February banning teachers from politically-partisan teaching in class. “Political” there refers not merely to political parties but to all politically contentious themes and materials such as Black Lives Matter, #metoo and Britain’s recent imperial history. By law, UK teachers must treat such issues with a “balanced presentation of opposing views”.

In Australia’s state-based education systems, green-Left politics has already bolted through classrooms, partly by government design. The nadir is third-party green/Leftists like Cool Australia’s free prefabricated online lessons used by more than half of Australia’s teachers. So I’ve asked each education department – and NZ’s too – what restrictions it puts on partisan teaching.

Replies came in promptly and courteously, with only Queensland and NT failing to respond. Summaries are below. None have anti-political policies remotely as strong as the UK system. Unlike the UK, no state has an outright ban on school political activity by under-12s – think here of the School Strikes for Climate.

Federal Department of Education: 

It directed my query to the states.

Victoria 

Schools must ensure the teaching and learning resources they use are challenging, engaging and age-appropriate with content that is not offensive to students or the wider school community.

The Department provides guidelines to inform teachers’ and principals’ decisions regarding the selection of teaching and learning resources.

Schools and teachers work hard to develop their students’ knowledge about Australia’s representative democracy and key institutions, processes, and roles in Australia’s political systems, in an apolitical manner.

The Teaching and Learning Resources — Selecting Appropriate Materials policy is available online.

Partisan or party political materials, including materials that advocate for or against a particular political party, candidate or political issue in relation to an election campaign, must not be distributed, promoted or displayed in a school, other than for educational purposes.

The policy on Political activities is available online.

The “Appropriate Materials Policy” says schools shouldn’t offer materials and resources that offend students or the school community because of their “obscene, offensive or controversial nature” or by being age-inappropriate. Principals should alert the school community in advance to use of possible controversial texts, and give students and parents alerts. The principal should provide respectful and conciliatory responses to objections.

The Materials policy links to further “Guidance”. Teachers must anticipate reasonable objections and on request, offer alternative resources to be integrated into the class program, so the students involved are supported and not isolated.

Texts officially recommended for the Victorian Certificate of Education do not need further vetting for VCE students.

Teachers should use movies only in conformity with the movie’s rating, e.g. G, MA 15. Invited audiences for school public events and performances should be age-appropriate.

The Department gives schools a list of sensitive topics. In normal teaching, controversial subjects cannot be avoided. It is concerned about racial or religious themes or satires, sex themes, drug addiction, violence, suicide and “excessively bleak scenarios”. (Do “excessively bleak scenarios” include the imminent collapse of civilisation and even life on the planet based on climate scenarios from unvalidated computer modelling?).

Valid objections should involve the objector believing the student would be harmed in some way.

Objections based solely on the grounds that the teaching and learning resources are alleged to be educationally unsound or aesthetically unsound do not warrant action in relation to these guidelines but should be managed in accordance with the school’s general complaints policy.

This clause is in severe contrast to the UK Act which bans one-sided teaching of contentious matters. For example, I think Victoria permits principals or teachers to brush off any parent complaint about brainwashing, with parents having no legal recourse. To clarify, one would have to drill down into each school’s individual complaints-handling.

New South Wales

I was referred to departmental weblinks. Key extracts:

Schools are neutral places for rational discourse and objective study. Discussion of controversial issues in schools should allow students to explore a range of viewpoints and not advance the interest of any particular group [including green groups?]. Contemporary material of an overtly political nature must not be distributed to students unless the material is for study purposes and is curriculum-relevant. Parents, carers and students may hold different views, to be treated respectfully.

The study of controversial issues provides valuable learning experiences when managed appropriately. Staff and students may advocate for issues or activities that are important to them, consistent with expectations in the department’s Code of Conduct for staff and Behaviour code for students. Principals, teachers, external providers and visitors are in a privileged position to influence students. All staff therefore have a responsibility to address the study of controversial issues in accordance with this policy.

Teachers, other school staff, contractors and volunteers maintain objectivity, avoiding distortion of discussion and acknowledging the rights of students, parents and carers to hold different viewpoints. Where possible, pre-check presentations and materials used by visitors and external providers for appropriateness and advise the principal.

Establishing how parents will be informed about programs and involved in consultation is a school-based decision.

Controversial issues are not static and are impacted by changing attitudes, world events and social values. They may be questions, subjects, topics or problems creating contention and debate. Controversial issues will differ across schools and communities. Teaching approaches to controversial issues need to be sensitive, objective and balanced. They should ensure that a range of views on a subject are taken into account.

Welcome to country and/or the acknowledgement of traditional owners is not considered a controversial issue.

In regard to the last point, why aren’t welcomes to country deemed controversial?

Schools are not places to proselytise, that is, to convert students who are not already members of a particular belief system . Schools should not be used to advance political platforms or for recruiting into partisan groups organised upon restricted party lines. Material inconsistent with the values of public education or the school’s purpose and goals or that advances the interest of any particular group, political or otherwise, must not be distributed.

I hope that includes WWF, Earth Hour, Greenpeace, School Strike for Climate and ACF.

Teachers are in a privileged position to influence students. A teacher’s personal view should not impact on teaching a subject. Sharing their knowledge or view may be necessary to assist students to form their own views or to answer a query. The response should be balanced and presented as one opinion to be considered critically along with any others. Teachers must ensure that all views and evidence are presented impartially in all discussions of controversial issues. Visitors and external providers are not permitted to proselytise.

Local Members, whether in Government or Opposition, should be warmly welcomed at schools within their electorates.

All materials that include controversial issues are to be reviewed and approved by the principal in advance. This responsibility cannot be delegated to people from outside the school, including the publishers of material for use in the school. Distribution of material makes the school a ‘publisher’ and therefore answerable for the views expressed.

South Australia

The department replied: “The Department for Education’s ‘Political matters policy’ is an internal-facing document for departmental employees, but we can share the following excerpts with you.”

Employees must not use their position to advocate for any political party or view. This extends to employees using their position to help or facilitate a political party, lobby group or vested interest in using department facilities and resources, or gaining access to department employees or related persons, for example parents or students.

Discussing political issues with children and students should always be driven by the educational program, not by partisan groups or individuals. A balanced view must always be presented to students.

Department equipment and materials must not be used for the promotion of a political party, candidate or lobby group. The distribution or display by any means, including emailing material for a party, candidate or lobby group, is not permitted.

Members of parliament and candidates are welcome at schools and preschools within their electorates when it will not disrupt normal activities. School and preschool visits must not be for political or campaign purposes.

 Tasmania

Tasmanian teachers are required by the Tasmanian State Service Principles, (State Service Act 2000), to be apolitical and to act in an impartial, ethical and professional manner. In addition, teachers follow the Australian Curriculum, which includes the subject area of Civics and Citizenship.

Western Australia

The stipulates the curriculum and teaching in government schools is not to promote any particular political party . It also stipulates that information intended to generate support for a political party is not to be disseminated on school premises (section 121 on page 100pdf). This is narrowly confined to political parties, rather than sensitive political issues.

ACT

Teachers in ACT public schools are to abide by the Code of Conduct for Teachers, School Leaders and Principals.

Section 17 of the Code says teachers have the same speech rights as everyone else. However, teachers need to ensure that there is no reasonable perception of conflict of interest between their private political opinions or activities and their official responsibilities.

Teachers need to be careful about expressing political opinion in the workplace and sharing their views with students. All ACT public servants, including teachers, are also subject to the ACT Public Service Code of Conduct. This code illustrates by saying that teachers should not wear political slogans and proselytise to kids in class. But they could wear union T-shirts on Fridays to promote the union and invite other teachers to hear about the union in the staff room during breaks.

New Zealand

There are no legal provisions that specifically prohibit the promotion of political materials by teachers in schools. New Zealand operates largely off a system of constitutional convention, which includes the neutrality of the state services, and this is overseen by the Public Service Commission. Teachers are, however, subject to the Code of Professional Conduct as set by the regulatory Teaching Council. It is a set of aspirations for professional behaviour – not a list of punitive rules. It reflects the expectations teachers and society place on the profession. As part of the Education Act, it is binding on all teachers.

I suggest conservative parents hold principals’ feet to the fire over indoctrinations, with the help of these policy extracts.

 Tony Thomas’ latest essay collection “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from publisher ConnorCourt

[2] The WA Education Minister was an independent.

[3] The “sustainability” push in schools dates to a UN conference in Stockholm in 1972, when the scares de jour included future mass starvation, acid rain and (malaria-fighting) DDT. Two UN conferences in Belgrade and Tbilisi, Georgia in 1976 and 1977 reinforced the plan for kids as activists– both venues being on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain with their own environments exploited and trashed. The Rio Earth Summit followed in 1992, launching “Agenda 21” to drench kids globally in environmentalism and use their pester-power to shame parents into green activism.

[4] Sustainability education is futures-oriented, focusing on protecting environments and creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action. Actions that support more sustainable patterns of living require consideration of environmental, social, cultural and economic systems and their interdependence… The third concept is aimed at building capacities for thinking and acting in ways that are necessary to create a more sustainable future. The concept seeks to promote reflective thinking processes in young people and empower them to design action that will lead to a more equitable and sustainable future… Designing action for sustainability requires an evaluation of past practices, the assessment of scientific and technological developments, and balanced judgements based on projected future economic, social and environmental impacts. 

Sounds a tall order for 10 year-olds.

Born Not Yesterday but the Day Before

They say that bad stuff comes in threes. I can vouch for that.

First, our beloved nine-year-old Cavalier Spaniel, Natasha, got the heart/lung problem common to the breed and began gasping for air. Our vet put her down. Second, on the eve of our three-week holiday to Tasmania my wife, Primrose (pseudonym), and I hid our car keys somewhere unobvious but where they would re-surface automatically. When we got back we couldn’t remember who hid them, let alone where. Weeks passed and we steadily lost hope. While using the spare set, I checked the price of new keys: $800!

And third, I advertised my Macbook Air laptop on Facebook for $1250. Our daughters told us Facebook was the best bet with no fee on sale, unlike eBay which charges 13 per cent. But they warned me of Facebook scammers: unlike eBay, Facebook offers no seller protection. “Listen up, Pop! Accept nothing but cash!” said Winsome, my eldest.

I’ll now tell you how I got brilliantly scammed by a master (actually mistress) criminal who walked off with my laptop and never paid me a cent.

The Macbook was slow to sell, so I  cut the price to $1080 and still got few nibbles, let alone customers at our front door. Then my mobile rang with a woman, Sammy, on the line, quite keen. I gave her our address but she was a no-show.

Next morning, a Friday, a different woman, Hermia, rang, ostensibly a friend of yesterday’s caller. She’d be round in 15 minutes. That was great news but just then Primrose  announced she was heading out to Woolies. I said, “No, you mustn’t go yet. This lady might be nervous about entering a house alone with a large virile male. Women have been attacked. You stay here to make her feel safer.”

After some marital back-and-forth she reluctantly laid down her grocery list and we spruced up the dining table. The laptop looked pristine in its original box. Alongside we laid its 2019 purchase receipt for $2135 and Primrose brought out the good teacups and some Florentines on the off-chance of socialising with our lady visitor.

“Get cash,” Primrose warned me, unnecessarily as I wasn’t born yesterday.

The doorbell rang and there was Hermia. She was 5 feet of heftiness, about 40 and well-spoken. Straw-colored hair was cropped half an inch all round for spikiness. She sported a nose ring and had thrown on a none-too-spotless T-shirt. While she did small talk with Primrose, I had time to study her. At the top of her left arm was a tattoo of an attractive female face with red and yellows flowers in lieu of eyes. Next down was a full-frontal lioness face and on her forearm was a mess of symbols surrounding a naked but modest woman in profile clasping her knees. Her shorts were so baggy and loose that, when she turned to sit down, an inch of plumber’s crack came into view. There were leg tattoos which I don’t remember. Old thongs completed the ensemble.

Primrose and I exchanged glances. Far from being put off by this lady’s appearance, we felt an obligation to re-double our friendliness in the inclusive and accepting way expected of enlightened citizens in the 2020s.

She inspected the laptop. I’d reformatted it and it was asking for a new owner’s name, password etc before it did any demo. Embarrassed, I explained that I was a long-retired journalist and she in turn explained her finance and insurance-broking job and its COVID problems. I did wonder about clients’ first impressions, but reasoned she could be running her business online, or maybe dealing direct with like-minded ladies.

She admired the laptop and I began mentally slavering. I steered the conversation lightly towards payment, and mentioned how a friend had been scammed selling a large garden fixture.

Hermia (animated): “Facebook is full of scammers! They’ve tried things on me. People advertise stuff and just want money first and won’t let go of their stuff. Be careful, let me tell you.”

We all nodded knowingly about this naughty world.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll take it. It’s for my partner. She does graphic design. It’s just right.”

I felt a surge of relief after weeks of no-sale frustration. What’s more, she wasn’t haggling me down to sub-$1000.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll give you a receipt for the cash.”

“Oh, I don’t have cash on me. I’ll do a direct bank transfer on my phone. You needn’t worry. Here’s my driver’s licence to photograph, and I’ll screenshot the bank transfer. The funds will be in your account Monday.”

She pulled out her driver’s licence and photographed it for me. This became a distraction as she made sure the text was well-lit. Primrose was uncomfortable but I was familiar with bank transfers and screenshots. Moreover, I was still in mode, “Be inclusive and tolerant of minorities.”

I looked on carefully as Hermia inputted the $1080 transfer and hit the ‘send’ button. Acknowledgement and receipt followed on-screen. OK, I wasn’t getting cash, but the money was in e-transit. I did recall daughter Winsome warning that to be fully safe, accept only transfers between accounts at the same bank, in my case ANZ. Hermia was CBA. But I had her driver’s licence, seen the transfer, so what could go wrong?

Hermia and I now bonded. I went to write a receipt but she waved the idea away.

Jumping ahead, I’d forgotten that Winsome, a veteran travel  consultant, had also warned me to document any transfer of goods.

Hermia departed with the laptop and a wave of her tattooed arm.

Primrose fretted with her female intuition: “Something isn’t right.”

 I assured her Monday would produce my $1080. But Monday came and went.

Oh well, clearance often take two working days.

Tuesday and Wednesday, still no money.

At this point I was convinced the sale had been on Saturday. Primrose said it was on Friday.

“Give me a good look at that transfer,” she said. We pored over it.

“It says the funds are to be transferred on Saturday. Your sale was on Friday. This was a scheduled transfer not a live transfer,” Primrose said.

She was on the ball and I was an idiot.

Hermia had gone straight home, logged onto her bank and cancelled the future transaction, which I now know is a piece of cake. Unlike trying to reverse a live real-time funds transfer.

I began phoning and texting: no response. I finally threatened to report her to her local police at Sunshine, an industrial suburb 12km west of Melbourne. Still no response.

My daughters, both financial experts, were incensed I’d ignored their advice on Facebook salesmanship. Winsome took over proceedings.

“It’s not a police matter,” I told her. “It’s now just an unpaid debt.”

Winsome: It’s Sunday, we’re going to the cop shop right now. We’ll play on their sympathies. You are to be a doddering old coot, which in fact you are, who’s been robbed of $1000 by a vicious young thief. Get your walking stick out of the cupboard. Shut up there and let me do the talking.

She armed us with our documents, and soon we were at the police station (above), behind flagpoles and a high cream-brick façade. It’s in a big complex including a children’s court. Cop cars were ranked alongside. It was my first time in a cop shop since a motorbike speeding incident in 1963. There were no other customers. The place had a hermetically sealed look and security warnings against photographs. Behind one counter slot was a door covered by a disquieting poster of a big police dog, a German shepherd, held in check by a copper’s muscular and hairy arm. On another door was: “Justice of the Peace service here.” Other signage:

“Bail reporting here” (with arrows pointing to the south end).

“Firearm licence applications.”

 “If you are reporting a lost phone you must block the IMEI number first.” (Knowledgeable Winsome muttered that this stops anyone using it).

“If you have been affected by crime, support is available at this station.” That fits us, Winsome said.

A business-like young cop beckoned. “I’m Constable Matijević,” he said.

Winsome told our tale while I looked on piteously, leaning on my stick and twiddling my hearing aid.

“I’ll check if Hermia is known to us,” he said, re-emerging doubly business-like . We knew better than to ask if Hermia was a known local rogue.

“I left her a message to contact us. I suggest you make a report.”

He took us into a small bare room and inputted our story, not encouraging any emotional embellishments.

“What do you want?” he finished pointedly.

Winsome: “Our thousand dollars.”

Matijević: “Or your Macbook?”

Winsome: “Sure. She lives just a few klicks away. When your patrol’s got nothing better to do, why don’t they drop in and get it back?”

Matijević (giving the police version of an eye-roll): “Thanks, we might be in touch. Shame for this to happen to this gentleman.”

Winsome: “We’re very fond of him. You can see he’s quite alert for 81.”

Back in our car, Winsome and I de-briefed excitedly. It all went well, the cops are going to prioritise our case.

But weeks passed. Primrose and I came back from our Tassie holiday, and another week went by.

I got a call with “No Caller ID” and was about to give him a mouthful but just in time heard, “Constable Matijević again. What’s your Macbook’s serial number?”

Luckily it was on a screenshot on my Facebook ad.

 A week later, just before lunch today I got another call.

“Constable Stankić here from Sunshine. The station could be renamed ‘Little Serbia’, I mused. Come and pick up your Macbook. Mention reference 4596B50Y66.”

“Wow! Thanks mate.”

In an hour I was back at Sunshine Copshop, now crowded with five swarthy young men, a sixth wearing a sweater in vivid red yellow and black, two ladies of Chinese appearance and one other Skip. The men seemed all in tan workboots or black leisure boots. Two were talking quietly about a recent fight. I wished I had better hearing. One bloke was directed to the bail reporting section.

Every few minutes pairs of coppers came in and out, bulked with equipment like Ukrainian commandos headed for Russian lines. I wondered how female coppers could ever lug such burdens and if they were good shots.

A bespectacled blond non-Serbian copper emerged and I gave him my code and my ID. He came back with a huge brown security bag, which I signed for.

I had brought along a box of Guylian Sea-shell Belgian chocolates and a gift card reading, “Thanks everyone at Sunshine Copshop!” I became uneasy about regulations on such gifts, so will draw a veil over what happened therewith.

Back in the car I fished out the Macbook from the bag. Its outer box and the Macbook itself had stickers, “Cash Converters, $899”.

Obviously Hermia had gone there with my Macbook, and Cash Converters had reported the serial number. I wondered whether Hermia had made off with, say, $500 cash from Cash Converters, or whether they avoided paying her pending the police check.[1] Also, Cash Converters pricing was reasonable – $899 vs my imagined $1000.

I was within minutes of Hermia’s home and decided to take a squiz. Not a good idea on unfamiliar roads clogged with trucks, and I had two near-misses. My car-navigator took me to a tired 1960s bungalow with white couch, two red chairs and dirty cushions on the verge. But I found Hermia’s unit was actually down a long driveway amid middle-class villas backing onto green sward and a creek. Most had mid-tier cars. Hermia’s unit was tidy too. I wasn’t sure about our line of conversation if she materialised but she didn’t.

To wrap up this drama, I now had to make good on the 20 per cent commission I’d rashly promised daughter Winsome for Macbook recovery and also reimburse Primrose for $500 she’d transferred to cheer me up after Hermia’s malfeasance. Primrose had earlier bought me a cute Tibetan Spaniel pup from a breeder in Cairns, and the car keys did turn up this week – Primrose had wrapped them inside a winter nightie. It was unseasonably warm and she’d continued wearing her summer satin ones, labelled Victoria’s Secret which she told me was a K-Mart house brand. So good things also come in threes.

Meanwhile, anyone want a 2019 Macbook Air, strictly for cash?[2]

 Tony Thomas’ latest essay collection “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from publisher ConnorCourt

 
[1] “Cash Converters stores in most states regularly upload a file to their State police service notifying them of all items bought or borrowed against. The police check these reports against their own databases for any matches. If there is a possible match, the police will contact the appropriate store to determine if it is the same item that has been reported to them as being stolen. All outlets are required to hold second hand goods for a period of time prior to them being offered for sale to enable these checks to be made.” But Cash Converters also advertises:

Get instant cash for quality items. We buy everything from smartphones, tablets and digital cameras, to musical instruments, jewellery and everything in between.

[2] For tech-heads, I’ve just discovered that Hermia or Cash Converters locked my Macbook with their password. This looked grim for me. “Admin”, “Password” and “Macbook” failed  and I was in despair until I tried “1234”. Mirabile dictu, it worked!

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1 comment

• Tony Tea – 12th April 2022I’d always thought you were in Perth. Is there Cashies over there. The kids at school are always going on about the bargains you can get. I think the laws regarding pawn shops in Vic and WA are different. If I remember rightly, the WA system of ID qualification is better.

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