Liberals get a gift opportunity and wreck it

The main conservative party in Australia is fracturing because intimidation and bullying has suppressed real opinions. Nearly 80 per cent of Liberal backbenchers are opposed to negotiating amendments to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) ahead of Copenhagen, yet Turnbull is trying to force them to do it. No wonder revolt is in the air and his leadership is under crisis.

This is what you get when no one is allowed to speak freely without being called names: “Denier!”

Major economic changes are proposed, supposedly based on “science”, yet no one is debating the science. Instead, Rudd bullies the opposition with the threat of an election, and Turnbull responds by … bullying the opposition with the threat of two elections. This is not what democracy was supposed to be.

The fake veneer that Liberal Party sceptics are a "rare minority" has been exposed for all to see thanks to Peter van Onselen’s work where he contacted backbenchers and asked them their opinion, as reported by The Australian.

The crack in the façade matters. Suddenly it's out in the open that most conservative politicians don't think we should launch ourselves onto the path that the UN dictates. Suddenly, sceptical conservative MPs have been shifted from the leper colony to the commons. The critical mass has moved - at least on the opposition side. It would be interesting to see the same survey done for the ruling party.

Faced with such a divide in his party, Turnbull did what any reasonable democratic consensus-loving leader would do: he told his party room what to think. (Thus showing that the consensus of a UN committee matters, but not the consensus of our elected representatives. Why do we bother voting?)

Malcolm Turnbull put it all on the line on Friday, October 2, stating that his leadership depends on the party agreeing with him - and ordering them to be "disciplined".

If only he had asked for disciplined thinking, instead of disciplined obedience.

Rather than taking the longer, harder route, he’s gambling that he can bully them into agreeing.

A true leader would win over his members with reason, not with threats. He would dig into the evidence and convince them, persuade them, and possibly inspire them. Turnbull may be a passionate man standing behind his convictions, but this is an arrogant move that ignores the opinions, experience, and intellect of his team. That said the bullying tactic may work: the front bench have mouthed “support”; and the tactic has a track record of success (witness the UN and the Labor Party).

The follow-on from the news that most Liberals don't want to ratify an early ETS is that the West Australian branch is now demanding Turnbull drop his plan to negotiate. The sceptical Nationals are emboldened. Revolt is in the air. The critical mass is shifting and a tipping point must be close.

Liberals saw the high road and missed it

Malcolm Turnbull has missed an opportunity to trounce the ALP and take the high ground - scientifically, morally, and in popularity. He's missed the chance to learn from the collective smarts of his own party. Had he sat down with his team and asked them without prejudice what they thought, he would have discovered long ago that they had deep reservations. Then, in an ideal democracy, our opposition party would have sought reasons to reconcile their position through open debate. It would have made them so much stronger. Suppression of opinion has weakened and divided the Liberals.

Free speech would have helped them rise above. A real inquiry into the reasons that so many people are unenthused about (or downright suspicious of) the ETS would have eventually turned up the facts that there are thousands of scientists with legitimate concerns about the science; that some key pieces of evidence have dramatically changed in the last ten years; that evangelistic journalists are censoring the news; and that there is a massive, well financed, vested interest in promoting this crisis. Some $79 billion dollars has been poured into climate related events by the US government since 1989, but very little into the alternative causes of warming.

Then there's the kicker that, even using exaggerated IPCC numbers, anything we do to reduce CO2 has an unmeasurably small effect on the climate.

Lurking in the background is the wafting smell of financial smarty-pants types making billions from a trading scheme that will be impossible to unwind. A tax is bad, but at least we can vote those guys out unlike, say, the guys in Goldman Sachs.

Armed with better information the Liberals would not be floundering. They would not be a party without a plan. Instead they would be able to protect the country from radical changes to our economy that are based on out of date science, self serving bureaucrats and recommendations from an unaudited UN committee that we didn’t elect.

The Liberals could demand that Rudd provide the evidence to justify this transformative legislation - and then embarrass the Rudd Government no end, when it fails to turn up anything except UN propaganda, lab tests and unverifiable computer simulations.

Goodbye, gift opportunity: hello, rock and hard place

The liberals missed the chance to put the government on the back foot. Instead the government holds the cards, and threatens a double dissolution. The Minister of Climate Change, Penny Wong, has imposed a deadline of October 20 for the start of negotiations on the ETS.

Will the opposition capitulate? It’s lose-lose either way. If they don't, they risk an early election they would be almost guaranteed to lose, and the possibility they would lose members. If they do cave in to the bullies and endorse an ETS, they send the message that they are so weak and so spineless they would pass major legislation that they don't agree with, but are too disorganised, demoralised or weak to oppose. It's a statement that surely rates as one of the most unprincipled loser-lines of any democracy. Shouldn't their focus be on what's best for The Nation, not what's best for The Party?

Where has Australia's major conservative party gone? Shouldn't it defend free speech, both in the nation's media and in its own party room? Suppression and censorship are not the path to a strong nation or a strong party.

As long as opinions are ignored, the Coalition will remain fractured, indecisive, and weak. The dissent in the party will not be quelled without an open debate on the science. You don’t need to be a scientist to read a graph, but you do need to know that you won’t be mocked for asking a question. Where are the real polite, informed discussions of the evidence?