The Australian’s Resolve Cracks

The Australian last weekend published a lengthy defence of its position on climate change, claiming its editorial policy was never anti-science, with the following rather surprising wording emphasised:

THIS newspaper supports global action on climate change based on the science.

They published a letter from me, cutting much of the substance, so I present it in full here:

I read Graham Lloyd’s lengthy defence of this paper’s coverage of climate science (“Climate debate no place for hotheads” 4/12) with interest.

The Australian may have said all these things but in a context where denialists writing junk were not only given equal time with real scientists, but lauded as in the case of Ian Plimer, who was given an incredible free ride for his book which was torn to shreds once it was in the hands of scientists, rather than the hard right ideologues in your editorial offices. I am also reminded of the embarrassingly incorrect article, "Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh" (23/04/2008) by Phil Chapman, who claimed that a decline in the number of observed sunspots presaged an ice age. Current indications are that 2010 is likely to set a new record for overall annual temperature. So much for that.

This paper has a long history of promoting cranks and contrarians with no standing in the scientific community. If these people were correct of course it would be great that you were giving them space, but they have proved time and time again to be talking rubbish. So how do you consider it acceptable that you are giving them equal time? The argument that a contrarian position is owed equal time no matter how bereft it is of logic or factual support was invented by the tobacco industry in 1954 and is as valid today as it was then. If your editorial staff does not understand the difference between pro-industry propaganda and genuine scientific debate, you cannot claim to be a quality paper. Allowing cranks to present easily debunked pseudo-science ad nauseam is not a freedom of speech issue, it is a quality of journalism issue. In any case you are extremely selective on where this kind of bogus balance applies: you do not for example insist on allowing Trotskyites equal time on the business pages, no doubt on the basis that their theories haven’t worked in practice. Well, guess what. Neither have contrarian theories of climate.

If it is indeed this paper’s position that we should base our actions on the science, how about reporting the science without insisting on bogus balance of at least equal space for anti-science? How about some articles informing the public on exactly how uncertainty is deal with in science, rather than stoking the completely false claim that uncertainty in climate science renders the whole field invalid? There’s a lot you can do to defend your reputation without threatening litigation, and I suggest you start by understanding why many scientists hold you in contempt. A mirror can be a most useful tool.

I strongly recommend to anyone wanting to understand the nature of the propaganda war on science that started with tobacco, took on the ozone hole and is now attacking climate science to read the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Oreskes is an accomplished science historian and her careful scholarship adds to the understanding of this topic I’ve built from my own experience in taking on other bogus anti-science battles in the past, including tobacco and AIDS denial, as well as reading other books like George Monbiot’s Heat.

More interesting to me though is why the paper has suddenly decided to defend its track record, questionable though its defence is: the paper’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, argues that the paper’s own editorials have consistently argued for a science-based approach, while ignoring the fact that allowing so much space for cranks undermines public understanding of the science. But why are they doing this? Do they care about their reputation after all?

Let’s consider one example, the common attack line of the anti-science warrior since the days of tobacco: undermine public confidence in scientific findings by harping on uncertainty, as if this is a sole property of this one area of applied science, and nothing can be done until all uncertainties are resolved. To anyone who does science of the real world, this is a patently absurd line of attack, but it is one that bought the tobacco industry decades, held up action on the ozone hole and caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary HIV deaths in South Africa. No real-world science is devoid of uncertainty; the biggest irony in this line of attack is that industries like oil that pay for anti-science activism deal with enormous uncertainties in their own line of work. It is beggars the imagination that the industry’s own scientists do not know how to manage uncertainty.

One editorial doesn’t do it for me: the paper will have to build a consistent track record of reporting well-founded scientific positions, and refusing to publish polemics disguised as science. Oh yes, and Graham Lloyd: Bjørn Lomborg isn’t an economist. His background is in political science.

Why the Right is Wrong

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. In Australia, we had Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, and it was pretty much the same thing. A general angst was verbalised in populist right wing terms, and swept up a lot of people who didn’t really agree with the sort of extremism that goes with this sort of viewpoint  – and a good number who thought if you prefaced a racist view point with “I’m not a racist but” it was somehow OK.

This sort of rabid populism is usually founded on well-placed fears and concerns, but turns on soft targets: the most disadvantaged sectors of society who can’t fight back. In Australia, it’s asylum seekers. In Europe, it’s immigrants. In the US, it’s loopy theories about who Barack Obama really is.

None of this of course targets the real cause of whatever crisis justifies the underlying fears. In Australia, asylum seekers are a tiny fraction of migrants, and real illegal immigrants like backpackers working without permission are a much bigger factor in “stealing” jobs from low-paid workers. Globalisation, and Australia’s insistence on lifting trade barriers no other developed country lifts, is an even bigger factor. Australia for example has the least protected agriculture outside a country managed by the IMF. In the US, much of the current economic crisis was caused by aggressive deregulation of banking under previous popular presidents, including Regan and Clinton (the latter more a creature of the right than his backers admit).

This kind of emotional populist politics is very easy of course. You find your victims, you point them at someone powerless and let rip with sound bites. It’s tough stuff to combat. When I saw Obama trying to explain that “Yes we can” means “Yes we can but not instantly” it was painful to watch – yet he was right. The damage of decades of economically loopy policies cannot be undone overnight.

Worse still, now the Republicans have a hold on Congress and are running scared of their own extremist right – those that aren’t in that category themselves – they will have the momentum to stop other critical reforms, like cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Visit this site every now and then and check the trend of the oil price in the sidebar if you want comfort in delusion. I just wonder when the right wing think tanks like the Heartland Institute and miscellaneous fossil fuel interests that fund them and some of the uglier right wing politics are going to find that running off a cliff isn’t the best choice, even if it’s your cliff.

But meanwhile politics of the populist right protects the real villains from exposure – and makes innocent victims suffer.

A local by-election in Walter Taylor: should I support the Greens?

On 23 October, residents of the Brisbane city ward of Walter Taylor will be voting for a councillor to replace Jane Prentice, who was elected to the federal parliament.

While thinking through issues for the campaign, I ran into Brisbane city council’s document, Our shared vision Living in Brisbane 2026, which contains this interesting snippet:

Green and active transport
In 2026, Brisbane will have a network of ‘greenways’ – safe laneways, walkways and bikeways for pedestrians, cyclists, wheel chairs, prams and micro-electric vehicles – linking neighbourhoods to key destinations throughout the city. Our public transport will excel in service, amenity, frequency, routing, information, affordability and safety. Our target for 2026 is to complete Brisbane’s estimated 1700-kilometre bikeways network and that 41% of travelling in the morning peak period will be by walking, cycling or using public transport.

Well, I wondered, why should anyone vote for the Greens when the city already has it right?

Then I woke up and realised where I was: a city spending billions on tunnels and bridges to support car-based commuting. Given that we are in a city where nearly 80% of all trips are made using private cars, you can understand the pressures to keep it that way. But if we want to turn that around in a big way in little more than a decade and a half, we need to rethink that mindset.

Nope, still supporting the Greens. Tim Dangerfield has my vote.

Election, the sequel

As the final results of the Australian federal election trickle in, I marvel at how close I came to calling it.

I sent this letter to The Australian the day before the election:

John Howard and Paul Keeting agreed on one thing: change the government, you change the country.

Never has this been more true that this election.

Every scorecard I’ve seen from pro-environment, pro-justice and pro-labour organisations has given top marks to the Greens, placed Labor at a distant second, and rated the Coalition last by a long way. Although this campaign has blurred the differences between the major parties, those differences are very real. The irony is that the Coalition, had it followed Malcolm Turnbull’s lead, could easily have outscored Labor on many issues. The Liberal party room by 1 vote has changed the centre of gravity of Australian politics from a forward-looking discourse to a race to the bottom with no thought for where it takes this country.

Fortunately the preferential voting system allows us to rank the parties on election day, and I hope a lot of people will take the trouble to understand the issues that are not being aired in the sound-bites that pass for campaigning. The best outcome we can hope for is a close result with a big enough swing to the Greens to shake up the major parties.

In the pursuit of brevity, the paper cut it to this:

HAD the Coalition followed Malcolm Turnbull’s lead, it could easily have outscored Labor on many issues.

The Liberals have, by one vote, changed the centre of gravity of politics from a forward-looking discourse to a race to the bottom.

The best we can now hope for is a close result with a big enough swing to the Greens to shake up the majors.

That maintained the essence but stripped the message that voters should be looking beyond the garbage that passed as reporting. The Oz letters page occasionally lets that sort of comment slip through if you hide it well, but not this time.

In truth, the coverage of the election by the mainstream media was abysmal. I was managing the Greens Ryan campaign, and the coverage of Ryan mainly was around the ejection of Michael Johnson from the LNP (an issue, but report it once and move on, not repeatedly) and anything but the Greens campaign. LNP candidate Jane Prentice’s husband’s finances were dragged into the media, with absolutely no relevance to the campaign. The ABC’s election information on the race lifted trivia about the Greens candidate, Dr Sandra Bayley, from the party’s site, while giving the Family First candidate who did not run a campaign of any significance more than twice as much text outlining his background. Another ABC online article had it as a three-way race between Johnson, the ALP’s Steven Miles and the LNP’s Jane Prentice and didn’t even mention the Greens. This is supposed to be our unbiased national broadcaster.

This sort of drivel is absolutely typical of campaign reporting in this country. The media pack follows the party leaders, and ignores all else besides scandal. Voters can be excused for finding it hard to tell the parties apart, or to discern their local candidate as anything but another echo in a bigger echo chamber of spin and negativity.

Let’s look at the provisional results (as at 22 August 2010, the day after the election):

Candidate	Party	Votes	%	Swing (%)
MILES, Steven	Australian Labor Party	18,220	25.06	-13.50
BAYLEY, Sandra	The Greens	13,872	19.08	+9.20
VINCENT, Allan	Family First	1,253	1.72	+0.19
PRENTICE, Jane	Liberal National Party of Queensland	33,018	45.42	-1.47
JOHNSON, Michael	Independent	6,331	8.71	+8.71

Tell me this reflects the general tenor of the reporting on the campaign, that the Greens were insignificant, and Johnson was a real contender. Someone could only have reported that if they were not actually paying attention to events on the ground. It’s not that there was no advance hint of this possibility: WWF did two polls in Ryan in June and July, showing Greens support to be 18% in the first, and 17% in the second. These were reported in the mainstream media, and swiftly forgotten. The Greens vote generally drops off towards election day, so I took these polls as indicating that a 15% result was achievable; we took this as a target, with 20% as an aspirational number. 19% was a very pleasant surprise.

For our vote to increase from these early polls is very unusual; let’s look at a bit more detail of how we did versus the more favoured competition.

The Greens achieved a swing of over 9%, nearly doubling primary vote over last time. Johnson’s result was respectable for an independent without a coherent platform, but nothing spectacular, and the level of media coverage he achieved obviously did not help him much. Nor did Labor gain from being taken more seriously than we were.  In at least one booth, the Greens above the line senate vote hit 30%, and we beat Labor in a few booths on lower house vote. How did we do this with no significant media? We certainly did not match the torrent of paper showered on the electorate by Johnson and the major parties. We sent out two fliers, one delivered as unaddressed mail (a lot cheaper than addressed mail), and the other hand-delivered by volunteers.

Having run for the state seat of Moggill in the last Queensland election, I knew what to expect, and from the start, aimed to make the mainstream media irrelevant. We set up a campaign site long before the official Greens Ryan site was ready, and not only kept it up to date, but made sure the best of it was echoed on the official site after once that was ready, and used personal networks to spread the word. We also participated in every forum that candidates were invited to attend, the only campaign to do so. While some of these may have had small audiences, we counted on those who attended to talk to others.

Beyond the obvious campaign, we also aimed in the inter-election period to offer as much of an incumbent service as we could without holding office. In one example, we had knowledgeable speakers address a protest meeting against a development, with a factual presentation on the community’s rights, and a no-nonsense assessment of their chances of stopping the development. I won’t itemise all such events but each time we did something like that, our presence in the community increased.

Once the election was called, we used various innovations in street signage to get our message out, all only at the cost of cheap materials and a few hours of person time to meet Brisbane regulations for having signs in public places attended. By election day, few voters wouldn’t have seen at least some of our key ideas – and in a context where they were an interesting surprise and therefore memorable.

All in all the main focus of the campaign was to get people talking about us, so they would take a closer look and be impressed when they checked the detail. By contrast, the major parties in Ryan mostly repeated their party’s prepackaged message. The ALP candidate Steven Miles did some of his own messaging on climate change and local issues, but obviously failed to cut through the general swing against Labor. The Johnson factor was a complication in that it’s unclear how much of his vote would have gone straight to the LNP in his absence; we await publication of full distribution of preferences to understand that fully.

To me the main lesson of all this is that a grass-roots campaign can trump professional marketing. In the end, the main thing you are selling to voters is trust. If they get to meet you close up and personal, and you empathise with their problems and offer real solutions, they will stick with you no matter how good the marketing of the other side. The integrity the Greens have established over time paid off in a largely negative campaign by the two major parties: we didn’t have to shout to be heard. Many voters tuned out the major parties and wanted to hear from us. In one example, I had a call from a retied stockman and Vietnam vet who was profoundly impressed with Bob Brown. This from someone who used to live in a community that voted solidly Nationals.

So why did I title this article “Election, the sequel”? Watch this space. We’ve learnt some useful lessons and will do even better next time.