Liberals get a gift opportunity and wreck it

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 Instead they would be able to protect the country from radical changes to our economy that are based on out of date science, self serving bureaucrats and recommendations from an unaudited UN committee that we didn’t elect.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?