As the M.H.S. Political Interest Group Chief of staff, I alongside its president James Wong made up the reception committee for Andrew Bolt for his visit this year. After the PIG 'inner sanctum' consisting of its four executives, Mr. Pask and a dozen close associates had gathered in the Middleton conference room at ten past twelve, James and I went down to the front steps to wait.
After he'd arrived and we'd greeted him the three of us walked up the three flights of stairs to the conference room where Mr. Pask shook hands with him vigorously, as he was no doubt a veteran of many an Andrew Bolt visit, and we all sat down around the table. Being Chief of Staff, I had a good spot opposite and one seat over from Bolt. After pleasentries had been exchaned and we'd all began to tuck into the sandwiches and fruit catered from the canteen the first topic of conversation was started when Mr. Pask commented that the talk up here in the conference room 'was usually better than the one downstairs, because up here Andrew you're ready and waiting to go.' Bolt agreed and pointed out that looking around all of us looked ready ot start as well, and he pointed to one student who was clutching a newspaper, inviting him to speak first.
"It seems you disagree with the green's policies" the student began, referring to the article we'd been looking over earlier in the Herald Sun he was clutching, where there was a long article by Andrew Bolt telling of the costs to Australia the Greens would cause if elected. He pointed out an error which Bolt conceded was a typo (it said stopping uranium mining would cost our economy $900 billion a year, it was actually $900 million) and stated that it didn't change his overall argument. We discussed the greens for a while and then the conversation went on to climate change, where it remained for a full 20 minutes.
There were a few skeptics sitting around the table (aside from Bolt of course) and the two students which spent this period doing the most talking were myself and a year 10 boy sitting beside me. The debate was quite fast and intelligent overall with quite a few noticable parts. At one point Bolt was describing a survey undertaken a few years ago which found that people who campaigned for global warming strongest (he jokingly described the categories as being from ultra-green, to dark green to...Andrew Bolt) actually lived more eco-unfriendly lifestyles. He even described himself as being 'more green than most people in my street.' I took him up on this overall point and at one stage he talked for a minute or two about Al Gore, Tim Flannery and several other prominent climate change activitsts falling into the polluting ultra-green category, at which point I interjected by saying "I don't know if you know this, but Tim Flannery's actually got solar panels on the roof of his house." A factual point which briefly brought about silence in the room and then a few titters of laughter. Bolt paused and then pointed out that Flannery had himself said his book 'The Weather Makers' had been entirely written when Flannery was travelling on airliners.
As my oppurtunity to start new debate topic opened up at this point, I mentioned a previous example of a successful international agreement that had solved an environmental problem in the Montreal protocol, signed in 1987. Bolt and I each made a few points back and forth. To sum up, I said that that protocol had led to several consequent agreements that together had stopped the production of harmful chlorofluorocarbons in developed countries and that even developing ones had phased it out over the last few years, that the cost of it hadn't turned out to be as much as expected becuase the industries concerned had adapted and found alternative products to use, that it had already halted the decline in the ozone layer and it had begun to recover. I asked why global warming couldn't be solved in the same way.
Bolt made two essential points, one valid and one I thought was nonsense. He pointed out that phasing out chlorofluorocarbons wouldn't have been that expensive and wouldn't have effected that many industries compared to reversing global warming (a valid point) and he also said that the hole in the ozone layer had never been that serious anyway, something I began to point out was dead wrong (ozone had been reduced by 80% over Antarctica in just a few decades, even making scientists measuring it think their equipment was faulty for several years) but someone else asked a question and the conversation moved onto a different topic.
The issue of developing nations such as India and China (which Bolt correctly pointed out was now the world's biggest CO2 emitter) came up. Mr. Pask actually spoke at this point and said that while China's rural poor would certainly have economic growth higher on their priorities list than halting climate change, that many academics in Beijing, who would actually be making decisions on China's future energy policy, saw it as a genuine threat and would push for their nation to take action against it as long as its effect on short-term economic growth was small. Bolt countered by saying that the Chinese government (it being a dictatorship) would be more concerned with its own survival and that that relied on China's continued rapid economic growth. He pointed out that if that slowed then 'tensions between the rural poor and wealthy urban populations of China could cause massive instability' and cited events such as the Taiping rebellion and Communist revolution as examples of previous Chinese regimes falling in such a way. Personally I think both of them made very valid arguments.
The climax of the debate perhaps came when Bolt stated what I came to realise was his main argument. That the merits of taking action on climate change should be judged based purely on a cost/benefit analysis rather than 'as a matter of faith.' He said he thought global warming resembled something like a religion and that 'people seem to need some sort of God in their lives.' His main criticism was that when climate change was thought of as a moral question people would often go slightly mad and declare action had to be taken against it 'no matter what the cost.' Something he said was ridiculous. He mentioned again some of the more unrealistic Greens policies like closing down a coal power plant in Eastern Victoria which provides 20% of the state's electricity straight away and asked the question 'has this been thought through?' Repeatedly he returned to the point that it 'costs jobs, for no real reduction in warming.'
At this point I decided to mention a rather extreme counter-argument to this. 'I heard an example, that while climate change hurts industries that do provide jobs, that so does the kiddie porn industry. Some industries are harmful, doing more harm than good.'
Bolt's argument to that was that kiddie porn 'provides very few jobs, and that by stopping it you're actually saving people.' The debate slowed for a bit and I re-affirmed my position that it was along the same lines as potentially harmful fossil fuel industries while Bolt maintained it wasn't a good example.
From several students further down the table immigration came up as a topic. Andrew's main thoughts on it was that it was being very poorly handled (agreed), that most boat people weren't true refugrees and also that he didn't think much of international treaties dictating how refugees should be processed. He mentioned his own proposal which he claimed had been rejected more for idealogical than logical reasons that 'for every boat person who enters the country, we should send them back to a refugee camp overseas, and take two genuine refugees who have waited for asylum for some time from that camp. I guarantee you that the people smuggling trade would dry up instantly.' It seemed no one had a good counter-argument to this (though I'd love to see a discussion on it, it actually sounds pretty hard to refute, maybe we should try it) so the debate moved on. (Later on I learned that 90% of the boat people the Howard government locked up on Nauru were in fact found to be genuine refugees, neutralising half of Bolt's argument).
At one point, and this was without doubt my favorite part of the whole event. Was when a student at the end of the table changed the vein of topics completely by asking Bolt 'what do you think of the national broadband network?' Andrew slowly replied 'Well I'm no expert on infrastructure matters like this' and was about to continue when I made a sharp interjection.
'So you're a climatologist them?' I asked loudly.
There was complete silence in the room for a full two seconds. 'Oh Shit, Oh Shit' I thought to myself, and then the entire room burst out laughing. Even Andrew Bolt looked slightly shocked, but the laughter told me that what might simply have been seen as a rude and jeering interruption was actually a valid pointing out of irony. Bolt looked around and then said to me something along the lines of 'no, but I can still make intelligent decisions on things I know' and continued with his answer to the student's question. I suppose he had a fair point, though he looked a little flustered for the rest of the time we were in the conference room after that.
At 1 o'clock the bell for lunch ran and we made our way down to T-29 for the larger lecture to take place. James Wong introduced him to the 100+ assembled students as 'Australia's favorite columnist' which sent a ripple of laughter through the room, and Andrew spent some 15 minutes on his opening address.
He talked about an example which in my mind at least, the jury's still out on, where he told us how in Cambodia when he was our age the Khmer Rouge came to power 'based on good intentions, not real action.' He detailed how the leaders of that movement had destroyed Cambodian society and killed a quarter of the country's population through an almost religiously held idea that the intellectuals in the country were holding back its 'progress' and that they, identified often by them simply wearing glasses, had to be removed from Cambodia (i.e. killed) for the good of the country. Bolt compared the misguided and terrible fanaticism by the Khmer Rouge (though as an extreme example he stressed) as being rooted in very poorly thought out policies which were all 'good intentions' and no 'practical action.' He compared the Khmer's style of leadership to some proposals to reverse climate change which he said were also full of good intensions but were impractical, harmful and would be ineffective in reversing climate change at best. (I should stress here that he was not at all comparing Tim Flannery to Pol Pot or anything like that, but simply saying that badly thought-out policies concerning climate change could negatively affect society for no real gain, like the Khmer rouge did).
After his address there was actually little discussion about climate change. The stolen generations was a hot topic for the first half a dozen quesions, especially when one student asked him what he thought about the film 'Rabbit Proof Fence' being taught as factual history in schools. Bolt spent several minutes describing the inaccuracies in the film and took a quick poll of us to see how many of us had actually researched the film to see if it was true. Only four people put their hands up and Bolt said that normally when he asked that question of a group of people absolutely no one did. His criticism of the film, which was often specific and sounded quite reasonable, I'd give high marks for for accuracy, though the whole debate over the existence of the stolen generations in not something I've ever researched much. I was waiting for the conversation in the room to return to climate change, my topic of choice.
The population debate came up briefly, and Andrew stated his position that 'if you're going to increase the population, you've got to prepare for it' and criticized government policies that refused to, for example, build new dams or coal power plants to power our growing cities because of environmental concerns. I'm also of the impression that spending on infrastructure is something state governments around Australia having been neglecting in recent years, though I am basically against building more coal power plants. I'd consider wind, solar, geothermal and perhaps nuclear and natural gas to be far cleaner but not prohibitively expensive options.
With about 20 minutes to go the area of debate changed to something I hadn't thought would ever come up today. Some student asked about Bolt's position on gay marriage, and we didn't get off the topic for about half an hour. Bolt cautiously said that he was against it, though not for religious reasons but because he thought 'we'd pay the price if we weakened the institution of marriage.' He pointed out that 'any teacher will tell you that the most troubled kids in a class are those which haven't grown up in loving families.' This seemed to surprise most of the students in the room, and kids were asking him questions about his position until well after the bell for period 6 rang.
At the end of lunch James stopped the procedings and we gave Andrew the usual guest speaker's gift (I must admit, I still don't know what's in those wrapped up yellow boxes) and I thought things were about to wrap up. I was wrong. Instead Andrew quickly found himself surrounded by a knot of particularly belligerent students who spent the next half hour arguing with him. After a while a class came into T-29 so the knot of 20 or so of us and Andrew migrated up the stairs of T-29 and out into the corridor. There the conversation finally turned back to climate change. Two or three boys who I didn't know were very confrontational (before long I thought quite impolitely so ) and had soon talked themselves into a bit of trouble, with Bolt exploiting several holes in their more poorly spoken statements and arguments.
Believe it or not but after a while I was actually defending some of the things Bolt was saying, and correcting some of the more innacurate things they were saying (you may be wondering why Bolt couldn't just do that himself, but I found they weren't always listening to his explanations reasonably).
Finally at about 2:30 we excited the school and walked down the steps, some students still trying to talk to Bolt. James insisted the photo should be taken now but before we could do so I had an interruption of my own to make. I'd brought along a copy of Tm Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' which had actually been signed by Flannery a few months earlier, and, feeling mischievous, asked Andrew Bolt if he'd make it unique by signing it as well. He laughed and promptly did so, writing in it
'Daniel
Don't believe everything you read
Andrew Bolt'
(My Dad later commented that this was almost he climate change equivalent of getting God and the Devil to both sign the Bible)
The photos were then taken (with the dozen or so random students who remained gatecrashing it, one retarded kid making funny faces right behind Andrew Bolt's head in both of them) and with a few final questions, Mr. Bolt departed, and the rest of us went off to explain to our teachers why we were 40 minutes late to our period 6 classes.
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