Rural producer Henry Hatchjaw bemoans the new trend of mocking salt-of-the-earth ordinary everyday climate change denying Australians through satire.
It’s all well and good for Frank O’Shea to mock those who deny climate change. At least, I think he was mocking them; his writing is so obscure that it is hard to work out. Why can’t people say what they have to say and stop the smart-Alec stuff?
Nobody wants Ireland to be flooded and his comment about that country is highly profanatory. Although my ancestors were Native Americans, just like Barack Obama, I have some Irish in me too. I am proud of the progress of Ireland since they kicked out the English and I resent people like O’Shea making snide remarks about them. He probably thinks that just because he has an O in his name, he can pick on Ireland — I bet he was never there in his life.
Anyway, he shows ignorance about hydraulics or whatever the name is for the thing that makes water find its own level. The weekend report that Julia Gillard is flogging around the country says that the worst thing that may happen is that the sea would rise 1.1 metres in the next 90 years. That wouldn’t flood Sydney airport as O’Shea asserts and in fact if you go around the coast of Australia, it would clean up a lot of the rubbish on the beaches and get rid of those awful caravan parks which are mostly empty anyway. And if that kept some of the grey nomads off the roads, wouldn’t it be a good thing.
By the way, what about the demonstrations over the weekend in Canberra and a few other places: more proof about how much Canberra is out of touch with the rest of the country. For the past two weeks the Canberra temperatures have been below freezing every night, so how they can say the place is warming is beyond me.
And did you ever see such a crowd of losers with their homemade banners and silly chants? They all came with their babies and prams, because in Canberra that’s about all there is to do on a Sunday. All the men seemed to have beards, mostly grey. Superannuated hippies, the lot of them: if you want to support this climate change racket, you have to have a beard.
Down here in Grong Grong (“so good they named it twice”) our experience is that winters are getting colder not warmer. We keep telling people. But no one listens; the sooner Bob Katter opens a branch of his party down here, the better. He says that politicians have to listen to voters and if he came down here, he would have so much listening to do that he wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
There was a chap on television last week, Andrew somebody, who opened a can of soft drink and took a sip of it to show that carbon dioxide was quite harmless. Now, that’s the kind of experiment that brings home to ordinary people the silliness of the argument that the stuff is bad for us. If it does humans no harm, why should it do the planet any harm? What this country needs is more of that kind of television so that ordinary people can understand the whole business of climate change.
And since, according to Julia Gillard, the changes aren’t going to happen until the year 2100, we have plenty of time to invent other ways of making electricity and of breeding cattle that don’t belch, so what’s the hurry? The suggestion for tapping in to the stomach of cows while they are being milked is the kind of cruelty we might expect from a worker in an Indonesian abattoir.
Now they’re picking on Tony Abbott because he said a few years ago that a carbon tax would be all right if people could claim back the extra expense in their tax at the end of the year. (He didn’t say how people like me who are too poor to pay tax would be recompensed.) And they are using this as an excuse for Julia changing her mind - if he can do it, why can‘t she?
Anyone can see that it’s not the same thing; he wasn’t alternative Prime Minister when he said that and anyway I wouldn’t worry about him because he can always say that he was never against a carbon tax, just this particular one, the same way he says that he was never against plain packaging for cigarettes. That expensive Jesuit education must be worth something.
To come back again then, to Frank O’Shea and his smart arse stuff trying to bamboozle ordinary people with talk about Einstein and Newton to show that the world is warming. That’s not going to impress country people like us who know when it is cold and when it is not. And right now, it is bloody cold.
(Henry Hatchjaw is a farmer in the Riverina region of New South Wales.)
