Letters to the Editor

SIR: Colin Pratt’s critical letter (May 2012) concerning my article on the labour market (April 2012) highlights the essence of the problem we face. He wrote, “I have not seen a constructive, cohesive, industrial policy put forward by those who can fill pages with destructive complaint of existing laws.”

What he asks for he simply cannot have. That is the point. A “constructive, cohesive, industrial policy” is a fantasy. Repeated attempts since federation to turn this fantasy into reality remind me of the attempts by Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling to teach ravens to fly underwater. After forty years of fruitless endeavour he admitted his life had been a complete failure.

Every attempt by Common-wealth governments, since the first C&A Act of 1904, to undo the mischief which previous governments had wrought in this vain struggle to turn fantasy into legislation, has only made the problem worse.

The first thing the next Coalition government should do is to admit chronic failure by the Commonwealth in regulating the labour market, and to initiate a national debate during which all of the options that might release us from this debilitating mess can be thoroughly explored.

Ray Evans, Newport, Vic

SIR: Media reports identify Tasmania’s unemployment as 7.2 per cent and predict it is entering a recession. The Premier is complaining about moves from the other state premiers, whose constituents actually pay the GST, for a larger return of this money at the expense of Tasmania. Yet no one identifies the reason.

While premiers like Colin Barnett are staring down wealthy eastern states Green activists who are attempting to prevent the employment and economic benefits to the citizens of Western Australia of an onshore gas hub in the Kimberley, the Tasmanian Labor–Green government is negotiating a one-off payment from the Labor–Green federal government to close down what remains of Tasmania’s once thriving and sustainable forest products industry.

The new leader of the federal Greens is already boasting of her successes over the years in preventing the Wesley Vale pulp mill in Burnie and the construction of the Franklin River dam, which was eventually stopped by the Hawke government over the protests of the then Tasmanian government, which had recognised that hydro was Tasmania’s major economic asset for self-reliance—something which has become even more urgent over time. I remember the words of Labor minister Barry Jones, that there was plenty of cheap coal to meet Tasmania’s future energy needs, and that the tourism value of the river would more than make up for the value of the lost electricity. On a recent visit to the Tasmanian west coast this abundant tourism was not apparent. The Australian taxpayer must still subsidise a ferry service to entice travellers to make the trip. It would help if those pesky Europeans would stop employing Eastern Europeans who are happy to ignore penalty rates to work on river cruise ships on their interesting river systems, which makes such a cruise cheaper for an Australian than a similar period visiting Tasmania. And “don’t mention Bali”.

That media-hungry union leader who now wants to re-regulate and devalue the  dollar recently ran a campaign to re-unionise the Rio Tinto aluminium smelter in Tasmania at a time when international business is looking for opportunity to close older facilities around the world.

Tasmania has become both politically and economically Australia’s token Green State, and most of the blame resides with Tasmanians, many of whom are immigrants from other states who took the opportunity to benefit from the relatively low property values in Tasmania generated by the economic destruction to which they have subsequently contributed.

Returning to GST distribution. When a state administration deliberately quarantines resources that have economic value and if operating would deliver revenue, then that revenue forgone should be taken into account in the same manner as for instance mining royalties received by governments who have a positive approach to development and stare down the activists who claim Australia can live and raise taxes without basic enterprise.

Wilson Tuckey, Ascot, WA

SIR: Tony Thomas (May 2012) is right to emphasise Sir John Houghton’s role in driving IPCC policy during the 1990s.

Some readers may be unaware that Stephen Schneider (1945–2010), had a crucial influence on Houghton. Schneider, a researcher at Stanford University’s Woods Institute, was an author for the IPCC’s four assessment reports and a “core member” for two of them. When the Royal Society published a commemorative volume of essays in 2010, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, it included one by Schneider: “Confidence, Consensus and the Uncertainty Cops: Tackling Risk Management in Climate Change”. At the time, he was struggling (as the IPCC still is) to deal with what he described as the “significant uncertainties” that “bedevil components of the science”, “plague projections of climate change and its consequences”, and to challenge the traditional scientific method of directly testing hypotheses (“normal” science). Schneider’s solution: to change “the culture of science” by developing a language that would convey the gravity of the situation “properly” to policy makers.

As climate uncertainty was (and remains) so intractable—and incomprehensible to the public—Schneider introduced the rhetoric of “risk management”—“framing a judgment about acceptable and unacceptable risks”—and pseudo-probability. While he claimed he was “uncomfortable” with this “value judgment” approach, he was even “more uncomfortable ignoring the problems altogether because they don’t fit neatly into our paradigm of ‘objective’ falsifiable research based on already known empirical data”.

Schneider proposed a new subjective paradigm of “surprises” in global climate scenarios, one with “perhaps extreme outcomes or tipping points which lead to unusually rapid changes of state”; while admitting that, “by definition, very little in climate science is more uncertain than the possibility of ‘surprises’” (my italics).

Houghton, the IPCC Working Group I leader for the first three assessment reports, was “initially very reluctant to get into the surprises tangle”. Schneider recalled a “very clear exchange at a 1993 climate meeting in Oxford … Houghton thought public discussion about ‘surprises’ was too speculative and would be abused [not by climate scientists, but] by the media.”

Houghton: “Aren’t you just a little bit worried that some will take this surprises/abrupt change issue and take it too far?”

Schneider: “I am, John, we have to frame it very carefully. But I am at least equally worried that if we don’t tell the political world the full range of what might happen that could materially affect them, we have not done our jobs fully and are substituting our values on how to take risks for those of society—the right level to decide such questions.”

According to Schneider, “despite the worry that discussions of surprises and non-linearities could be taken out of context by extreme elements in the press and NGOs” (but apparently not by the IPCC), 

we were able to include a small section on the need for both more formal and subjective treatments of uncertainties and outright surprises in the IPCC Second Assessment Report in 1995.

Thus, John did not object to the few sentences on those topics in Chapter 11, Advancing our Understanding. As a result the very last sentence of the IPCC Working Group 1 1995 Summary for Policy Makers addresses the abrupt non-linearity issue. This made much more in-depth assessment in subsequent IPCC reports possible, simply by noting [by assuming, not proving] that: “When rapidly forced, non-linear systems are especially subject to unexpected behaviour.” 

This was a pivotal moment. Schneider and Houghton had brought a Trojan horse into the IPCC, with a contrived “language for risk” inside it. Adopted in subsequent reports, it was a language influenced by Schneider’s “personal value frame”. They now had, he wrote, “licence to pursue risk assessment of uncertain probability but high consequence possibilities in more depth; but how should we go about it?”

It took a long time for him to “negotiate” agreement with climate scientists on precise “numbers and words” in the Third Assessment Report cycle: 

There were some people who still felt they could not apply a quantitative scale to issues that were too speculative or “too subjective” for real scientists to indulge in “speculating on probabilities not directly measured”. One critic said: “Assigning confidence by group discussion, even if informed by the available evidence, was like doing seat-of-the-pants statistics over a good beer.” 

Schneider’s Royal Society essay nevertheless emphatically concluded: “Despite the large uncertainties in many parts of the climate science and policy assessments to date, uncertainty is no longer a responsible justification for delay.” Yet can one seriously argue that the more uncertain a natural phenomenon, the greater the risk to humankind?

The rest, as Thomas reveals, is history: the history of how dodgy “post-normal” science joined up with a pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle” (and increasing government funding) to corrupt the IPCC evaluation process and create a global decarbonising monster.

Michael Kile, Crawley, WA

SIR: As much as Dr Mervyn Bendle (April 2012) should be praised for bringing attention to the coming demographic storm that will fundamentally reshape our world in the twenty-first century, I disagree with his assertion that Australia is uniquely placed to survive the demographic crisis facing the West. 

Bendle cities with optimism figures showing that, unlike the shrinking populations of European countries, Australia’s population is on track to expand to between 31 million and 43 million by mid-century. While he concedes that Australia shares with Europe the spectre of an ageing population due to sub-replacement fertility rates, he claims we are in a much healthier position demographically, large-scale immigration helping to counter the low birth-rate among the native-born population. Bendle argues that Australia should be embracing such mass immigration on the grounds that it not only offsets the effects of an ageing population but also creates “economic dynamism”. The alternative, he warns us, is an Australia “sparsely populated by an aged, enfeebled and increasingly vulnerable population sustained by a failing welfare state, and facing a world in demographic crisis and economic and political turmoil”.

Leaving aside the fact that immigration is not a long-term solution to an ageing population (the huge number of immigrants we would need to keep importing ad infinitum to maintain a stable old-age dependency ratio makes it an unworkable pyramid scheme), and that there is no positive correlation between population size and economic dynamism (many of the world’s most advanced, innovative, prosperous economies have small and stable national populations), Dr Bendle seems to overlook the fact that immigration on such a scale does not replenish a country’s population—it replaces it. By advocating what amounts to a policy of population replacement, Bendle is also supporting, ipso facto, the replacement of the culture, traditions, heritage and values of that population. To quote the late American writer Samuel Francis: 

You cannot expect to switch populations and demographic majorities through massive immigration … and not expect also to switch civilizations and symbols that represent them. You cannot expect millions of aliens from one civilization to enter the country, abandon all loyalties and values of their old civilization and sign up with all of those of the new one they have entered. 

It seems a stretch to assume that a population comprised mainly of peoples from non-European lands will care much for the maintenance of a civilisation built by Europeans.

To doubt the likelihood of Australia replacing its population through mass immigration and remaining the same Western society it has been since the first British settlers brought their way of life to this continent is not to argue that “race determines culture”, nor is it to deny that cultural assimilation can occur on an individual level. It is unrealistic, however, to expect such assimilation to occur when (1) Australia is receiving a never-ending influx of non-Western peoples, leading inexorably to Australians of European descent becoming a minority of the population; (2) an aggressive, state-sanctioned doctrine of multiculturalism is attacking, in almost every field of public life, our Western culture as illegitimate; and (3) Australian society, largely as a result of the multicultural movement, is no longer passing its Western cultural heritage and historical memory on to its youth, let alone to newly-arrived immigrants, and has practically abandoned the assimilationist ideal. 

Far from being a survivor of the demographic winter that is setting over the Western world, Australia, if it continues down its current path, will be one of the first Western nations to voluntarily extinguish itself.

Edward Drabik, (via e-mail)

SIR: I was very interested in Mervyn Bendle’s timely article.

A conservative critic said the following in 1968: in a few years, the Marxists will take care of the culture, while liberals and bourgeois manage the economy. And he was right. Today the culture is controlled by the Marxists. Liberals manage the economy, while nationalists and cultural conservatives have been mostly kept out of power since the Second World War. As a result, Australia, like many European countries, suffers from cultural self-contempt, owing to Marxist doctrines and multicultural ideology.

There are a couple of questions, perhaps the most important of our time, that should be asked of all journalists, politicians and academics: Do you think it is undemocratic that the Australian people have never been asked through a referendum whether they accept that Australia should be transformed into a multi-ethnic and multicultural state? Do you think it is undemocratic that the Australian people have never been asked through a referendum whether they accept that Australia welcomes so many African and Asian immigrants, so that we risk being turned into a minority on our own land? 

So we come to another import-ant Australian problem: namely, Islamisation, which manifests itself in an endless list of demands: for sharia-compliant foods, burial rituals, public swimming pools, banks, credit cards, loan agreements, insurance agencies, courts, schools and kindergartens.

Muslims want autonomy and demand independence for the
regions that they eventually dominate in their host countries. This has happened in India, Lebanon, Israel, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand and western China, and we are going to see it in coming decades in Europe. As the Muslim population increases, it always starts with a requirement for special arrangements, and progresses to more claims and demands.

This information is difficult to comprehend for people have been indoctrinated to believe something else. It is difficult to fight against the current, with all media companies pumping out multicultural propaganda every minute of every hour of every day. But most Australians and most Europeans in the future will understand the truth. Soon it will dawn on everyone that multiculturalism has failed.

Andrew Brown, Sydney

SIR: If a compulsory voting system results in the unwilling casting a donkey vote or an informal vote then the system is not as praiseworthy as James Allan (May 2012) thinks.

In New Zealand, which has voluntary voting, the voter turnout has averaged about 75 per cent over the last four elections. In Australia with compulsory voting the turnout is about 95 per cent. Since New Zealand and Australian societies are similar we can assume the Australian voter turnout would drop by about 20 per cent without compulsory voting.

What is the purpose of compelling this 20 per cent of voters to turn out to vote when they are uninterested, uninformed, or otherwise disinclined to vote? Do many of them vote informal? How many cast a donkey vote? In a tight election, do we benefit from having the government determined by the donkey vote?

The Left of politics agitates to lower the voting age, confident that it will benefit them. Their agitation during the Vietnam War saw it lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. The talk now is of lowering it further, and the automatic addition to the electoral roll of citizens turning eighteen has removed the option of people enrolling when they are motivated to vote.

The Left also strongly resists moves to disenfranchise any but the most serious offenders in the prison system. Is this because of human rights consideration or party self-interest?

Obviously compulsory voting benefits the Left of politics. Of all the changes to the electoral system that they advocate, they never advocate voluntary voting.

Since the overwhelming majority of countries have decided on voluntary voting, would it not mean a more effective democracy for Australia (and Belgium and Greece) to follow the rest of the world and drop compulsory voting?

Brian Doak, Lindfield, NSW