News reports in recent days draw our attention to that most ornery of political beasts, the one-inch-wide-and-a-mile-thick.
This term describes a political grouping dedicated to a conviction or cause whose support amongst the general public can be measured in single figure percentages, but whose support for the cause is of such intensity and single-mindedness as to make the one-inch-wide-and-a-mile-thick a serious nuisance in political and policy terms.
Three such nuisances at the present time are the right-to-lifers, the gun lobby and our old friends the greenhouse denialists.
Taking the latter first, like all OIWAAMT factions they are heard from out of all proportion to their actual numbers in any forum which will admit them, and thus able to exert a disproportionate influence in the forums of Australia’s political and intellectual Right, as exemplified by the Quadrant forum to which Catallaxy links, the current muddle of the Coalition on the CPRS and Senator Stephen Fielding’s position on the same question. The fate of the most important public policy issue facing Australia, and the outcomes of the next Federal election, will be influenced profoundly by them.
Their fanatical commitment to their cause is sustained by (a) the apocalyptic terms in which they (mis)frame the issue, namely that greenhouse denialism is today’s front line of the great struggle against Jacobin totalitarianism, and (b) the delusion that their cause is, or could be, popular politics. Exhibit A for the first point is Vaclav Klaus’ statement that:
Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.
Whilst for the second point I give you Miranda Devine’s “Bring it on!” call in the linked SMH column.
The impact of greenhouse denialism on contemporary Australian politics also points up another distinguishing feature of the OIWAAMTs – that they do the most damage to those political parties and movements in which they are ensconced or with which they are aligned, rather than to their enemies. They did their bit to lose the Coalition the 2007 Federal election, and the greenhouse denialists are doing more than a bit to render the Federal Coalition unelectable in 2010 and for quite some time thereafter.
Our next OIWAAMTs are the gun lobby. According to the Labor Right smarty’s Labor Right smarty, Graham Richardson, the harm that the gun lobby did the Unsworth government in the 1988 NSW State election was not due to their level of public support (which he guessed at about 15 per cent) but because this 15 per cent was prepared to shift votes and change governments on this one issue whereas the other 85 per cent of NSW citizens would, at most, have rated this issue as just one in a basket of factors affecting their vote. Richardson’s analysis was somewhat tendentious (as there were a raft of other reasons for NSW citizens to have been seriously pissed off with the State Labor government by 1988) and this kind of thinking had an unfortunate effect on the willingness of other State Labor governments to legislate for gun control before the Howard Coalition government took its courage in both hands after the Port Arthur Massacre, but he was on to something. It could be plausibly argued that one factor in the ability and willingess of ratbag right parties like One Nation, the City-Country Alliance and the like to create grief for the Coalition parties in Queensland from 1998 to 2004 was the gun nuts’ punitive and obsessive response to Howard’s gun laws (in the period in question I spent a day on a polling booth with some of these people – scary!). Today the Shooters Party has a gun to the head of Nathan Rees and his legislative program over its supporters’ God-ordained right to shoot wildlife in national parks.
As with the Greenhouse denialists we see the OIWAAMTs of the pro-gun right knifing (or perhaps shooting) their nearest. We also see the Vaclav Klaus phenomenon of delusional misframing of their cause as being central to the preservation of our freedom against Someone Nasty; for a decade after Port Arthur Queensland and NSW country towns were awash with leaflets, small newspapers and books claiming that Howard’s gun laws were the pointy end of an international conspiracy to destroy Australia’s national sovereignty and its citizens’ freedoms by disarming them.
The Labor Right’s response to the gun lobby’s perceived role in the 1988 election points to another phenomena sometimes associated with OIWAAMTs – the Mouse Deer* Syndrome whereby a hostile intervention by the OIWAAMT against a candidate or party is credited with achieving the defeat of the candidate or party when this actually occurred for other reasons. This, together with the general orneriness and obsessiveness of the OIWAAMT causes mainstream political actors to be reluctant to confront it for much the same reasons that a human of my size might be reluctant to confront a rabid cat – I could subdue the cat if I wanted to but I’d need to be prepared to wear some painful scratches and bites in the process. Of course at the present time Nathan Rees’s government is also cornered by the rabid Shooters Party cat by a combination of Upper House numbers and an unwillingness to deal in good faith with other, more responsible and representative cross-bench forces in the Legislative Council.
The third OIWAAMT to consider is the Right-To-Life lobby, which Queensland Labor governments (which we’ve had for 18 of the past 20 years) have been afraid to offend over the question of removing abortion from the State’s Criminal Code, despite having lopsided Labor majorities, and despite the current Premier being a self-described pro-choice feminist from the ALP Left, and despite the outrageous prosecution of Tegan Leach and Sergie Brennan under the existing law. Why do the Right-To-Lifers still have the capacity to intimidate Labor Governments in some States? Partly the Mouse Deer Syndrome – hostile anti-choice interventions in the 1980s were credited with bringing about the defeat of anti-choice Federal Labor MPs who had not been OIWAAMT on the issue, when those MPs actually lost their seats for other reasons; partly the fact that the Labor anti-choicers actually can knife their nearest (as the Shoppies did to Linda Kirk in South Australia after the Senate RU486 vote); and partly because Anna Bligh, like Peter Beattie before her, apparently lacks the mettle to wear a few scratches and bites in order to subdue a cat driven rabid by its belief that e.g. the use of RU486 is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. And because of Anna Bligh’s unwillingness to put the gloves on to deal with a hydrophobic moggy, Tegan Leach and Sergie Brennan – and potentially many other young women and men in Queensland – stand to have their lives destroyed for the “crime” of exercising what is recognised as a right in more enlightened jurisdictions with less craven politicians.
* The term Mouse Deer Syndrome is inspired by an Indonesian folk tale which was printed in my 4th grade school reader. A mouse deer and a tiger had some kind of disagreement which led the tiger to want to eat the mouse deer. The mouse deer pleaded with the tiger to at least give her a chance to avoid this fate by agreeing to a competition to see which of them could drink the nearby tidal river dry. If the tiger drank the river dry he could eat the mouse deer, but if the mouse deer drank the river dry she could go free. The tiger accepted the challenge, and began drinking. After a while the tiger was replete with river water and keeled over, whilst the river remained full. Then the mouse deer began to drink, having timed the contest so that she would be drinking as the tide went out. As the other animals in the rainforest watched the river empty of water whilst the mouse deer was drining from it, they all agreed that she had drunk the river dry, won the challenge, and was therefore saved from being eaten.
If the tiger really let the deer go, its ethical standards were way ahead of most political interest groups’. They would eat it anyway and justify it by reference to Darwin.
Your perceptive reference to orneriness and obsessiveness is linked to the extent to which people who deliberately step outside the accepted conventions of collective communal living create a serious challenge to the viability of the community. We can criminalise some kinds of behaviour but how do you prevent people abusing their positions of moral or intellectual authority? They should be a total embarrassment to their own internalised standards of professional and personal integrity and that should be sufficient to guide their actions. When it isn’t, society lacks any effective response.
Once upon a time, admission to the professoriate imposed quite rigorous unstated obligations to the community in return for the respect and status that it conveyed. Professors, like judges, accepted that their private lives should voluntarily reflect the disciplines associated with their special social position. In the case of professors, this meant refraining from making arguments that they knew to be unsound or less than balanced.
Sadly this is no longer the case and many professors routinely abuse their academic rank to engage in all kinds of sophistry. Just as is the case when managers abandon ethics for legalism, there is not much anyone can do except deplore another crack in the social fabric.
Interesting that you label the Gun lobby as problematic fortunately we are not living in Stalinist Russsia or Nazi Germany as for Graham Richardson, I am more then familiar with his Mantra.
What good is Democracy if you can not exercise your opinion?
As a member of the ALP and a competitive shooter I take offence to what you have stated, however I can still recall the day that Unsworth lost the election having attempted to reform the State into a queer utopia and safe haven for the peadophiles that lurk in the Parliament.
Then again this is the kind of comment that one would expect from a deluded ‘pink leftist’ the kind that always seem to appear at rallies sporting the Che Guevara T shirt and proclaiming Revolution.
I am more then prepared to vote against the status quo at the next State election on this issue alone and one only need recite the history of gun control and its use as a means of political oppression.
Marcus Aurelius, the third paragraph of your comment gratuitously libels a former NSW Premier who is not likely to have compunctions about suing myself or others connected with this blog, whilst the fourth paragraph is in breach of the LP Comments Policy which prohibits:
If you can do something about these points I’ll let your comment back up.
P.S. For the record I have never worn a Che Guevara t-shirt in my life.
most of this article is utter crap
I was about to warn a mod about that one, Paul, as Franca Arena only got away with the same accusation because she made it under privilege.
I think that’s quite unfair. It takes two to make good faith, and as for representative, the Shooters got into Parliament exactly the same way the Christians and the Greens did.
I’ve just started to read Tony Taylor’s book “Denial – History Betrayed” (Melbourne University Press, 2008) which promises to provide some understanding of the motivations of the opposers and deniers on a whole range of subject matter. It has a really great Bibliography as well.
Sometimes it seems denialists gain traction because they are not confronted quickly enough, or laughed at loudly enough.
The Norton contribution to intelligence contempt is now historical.Why doesn’t he understand those who could read what he says are not blinkered by his outright characterisations of different non-acceptances!? I don’t want the Shooter’s Lobby to be spraying bullets around in National Parks,but, that doesn’t mean they need a dose of Norton shit,to somehow be back on a learning curve!? Surely if they are lobbying government,they can be inspected up close at button hole distance to see if they are decent people with an ability to even cop shit and laugh at their own folly,if it is that when being so public!? I support the character from Port Arthur being released today,which is too late.I haven’t got a problem with say,Police who just don’t think I am right,on that,wether they have explored the matter deeply or not!? There is another fellow who was good with a gun,in a N.S.W.prison,who happened to be highly observant at road making,and responsible at that too.Which suggests some strange inconsistency in a prisoner fully imprisoned for being a multi-killer.I would like him released and put to work,in the public eye,on the roads,as he once was doing.He could stay over night at a Police Station, and be safe for himself and society,I would reckon,in that order.So other issues do not require myself to be dictated by the characterisations of Norton and others like him.
Paul said:
Paul is obviously blissfully unaware of the latest Gallup Poll.
That should be:
Gallup Poll
That makes it… Peter, Paul and Mary!
Anna Bligh is the second most right-wing premier QLD has ever had. Eyes open now.
No kidding.
Philip, I don’t know about you, but the odd occasion I’ve come across a dyed-in-the-wool gun nut I’ve got the distinct impression that they are not the sort of people who would laugh at themselves. But maybe that was your point.
As for letting Ivan Milat or Martin Bryant out… I don’t think that is a good idea. I don’t know too much about them but I thought Bryant had deep psychological problems and Milat seems like the sort of guy who gets kicks out of killing people. He may well be good at what he does, but he is unrepentant and probably completely untrustworthy.
Peter and Mary do you seriously suggest that American polls accurately reflect Australian opinions?
Mind you, this doesn’t exclusively cut one way. I’d suggest that civil liberties and human rights concerns are to some extent minority preoccupations (or, at least, are not something that the wider public pays a heap of attention to most of the time).
A related idea is often brought up in the context of economic reforms like abolishing tariffs and the like (or taking action on climate change, for thttmater). It’s argued that they benefit most people in the long run (and I reckon much of the time this is true). But the short term pain is worn disproportionately by a few.
Ken @ 17
I reckon it’s worldwide. Australia is probably just a bit behind the times – as usual.
Mary #17, your comment and your link epitomise another OIWAAMT trait – a tendency to overestimate your own influence and to justify your overestimates of your own influence by citing your own overestimates as “evidence”.
As for the US poll figures, they are consistent with previous poll findings that a large percentage (possibly a majority) of Americans don’t accept the theory of evolution, and a quite large minority of Americans think that the Sun orbits around the Earth.
Philip Travers #6, insofar as I could understand your comment it saeemed to be making rude remarks about me. COuld I ask you to remind yourself of your obligations under the comments policy?
I can also reveal that Peter and Mary are in fact the same person with the same email address and the same IP. Rather than exercise my reserve power as moderator I will simply let readers draw their own conclusions about how the denialist commentator on this thread has doubled her/his ostensible numbers and whether any similarity to the content of their comments and links is purely coincidental.
My bet is that the said “Mary” and “Peter” are in fact “Merv from Texas” who is even an expert on dangerous British Healthcare and “the evils of socialism, which too many in the Conservative party have embraced”.
Devious plans cooked up even under bowler hats. Where will it stop, brother?
Er Paul,
Great revelation there. You and Joe2 must be the only two people in the world who didn’t get my lame joke.
I think you will also find that it was the french guy who got the bit about the sun and the earth wrong.
And I know it’s kind of fun picking on Americans and their wacky religions but you sound awfully like one of those people standing on the pier watching the Mayflower sail away and saying “God Riddance”
Mary @ 21,
You think the Poms were glad to see the back of the Mayflower?
You should read what rthey said about our European ancestors.
We wuz viscious, diseased, contagious, violent, light-fingered, politically suspect. drunken,immoral, sex-mad, probably queer,unwashed, lice-ridden, poxy, loud-mouthed, intemperate, and IRISH !
C’mon, Mary. You can do better than that. Any article that spruces Steve Fielding as the vanguard of an intellectual movement is utter FAIL.
Gore Vidal (for his sins, an American) wasn’t averse to making a bit of fun of the Mayflower pests.
He said that they went to America not to protect religious freedom but to take religious freedom away from others.
this 15 per cent was prepared to shift votes and change governments on this one issue whereas the other 85 per cent of NSW citizens would, at most, have rated this issue as just one in a basket of factors affecting their vote…
…one factor in the ability and willingess of ratbag right parties like One Nation, the City-Country Alliance and the like to create grief for the Coalition parties in Queensland from 1998 to 2004 was the gun nuts’ punitive and obsessive response to Howard’s gun laws (in the period in question I spent a day on a polling booth with some of these people – scary!).
Oh, I forgot irreligious and blsphemous.
We burnt down the first church in Australia two days after it was built.
W. B. Yeats, it should be noted, was also Irish.
..As for representative the Shooters got into Parliament exactly the same way the Christians and the Greens did.
To equate the Shooters party with the Greens party is… well I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but I thought you were better than that, Liam.
The Greens are representative of a large, and growing larger, constituency of people from all walks of life who feel that more and different policies are needed in order to confront the problems that face us in the C21st, and that both the Labor and Liberal parties are too tightly enmeshed with the fossil fuel and primary industries to address these.
The Shooters party is representative of a few conspiratorial wingnuts.
Peter has managed two breaches of the comments policy in one comment, which is why I’ve removed it.
…Perfectly valid, Helen. Every vote is equal, whether you think it’s owner is deluded or not. Your claims that the Greens “represent” a “larger constituency” than other minor Parties has a simple test, which both the Shooters and the CDP passed on previous polling days.
Claiming that a Party exercises more influence than is shown in its polling result is precisely the underhanded tactic Paul Norton’s condemning in his post.
Down And Out @ 23 said:
Pity you can’t follow a thread D&O. I pointed out a gallup poll @ 8. Ken chimed in @ 13 so I linked to an article that *you* think is all about Steve Fielding and some ‘movement’?
“You and Joe2 must be the only two people in the world who didn’t get my lame joke.”
["lame" a definition.... "3. Weak and ineffectual; unsatisfactory:"]
I would say “lame” sums up your so called “joke” very well. What is strange, even exemplified in this poor attempt at a funny, is how you imagine the rest of the world would “get” it.
Grand delusions about the reach of a weak funny just like the depth of support you imagine for your fringe views, I reckon.
@Liam
I don’t suppose the difference between actual Green policies (and utterances, and the personal sanity and articulate-ness of people like Christine Milne, versus the absence of any sane commentary/policies from the shooters party) makes any difference. OK thought not. Well it does in my opinion, in the context in which Paul is writing. And if the Greens party support is so miniscule, why does Victorian Labor feel the need to actually lie and make shit up in order to win elections in Victoria: viz. Stephen Newnham and his astroturfing “concerned citizen” letters and astroturfing website? Yeah, model of sanity, Victorian Labor. You’d think if Greens support was such a minority Labor would be able to fight an election with some modicum of dignity.
No, I don’t see that it does, frankly. Helen, I think you’re conflating “representativeness” and “responsibility” with “the extent to which I agree with a Party’s policies”.
The Victorian faction system and the many problems of Upper House voting—of and about which, by the way, I think we are as one in despairing—is not particularly relevant here.
Liam, if you’re a Labor person who is committed to making the Labor party increasingly relevant to the challenges Aus faces rather than just trying to get into power on the back of playing up the weaknesses of your opponents both left and right, then I’m definitely on your side.
Sorry for the derail Paul.
Helen, within that statement’s extraordinarily broad bounds, of course I am. Who isn’t?
If it were possible to achieve social change dealing exclusively with people you agree with, hell, it’d be done already, and someone would have taken credit for it.
I mean, we can wish heartily and sincerely for permanent democratically-elected majorities of people we both agree with in every institution of power—I’ll add it to my list, up there with malt whisky and kittens—but until then, what?
Reading Max Weber on political practice, I imagine.
That Liam was not what I was getting at. But I’m not going to address this any longer on this thread. (Please do not do that silence = PWNED thing unless you want to be compared to certain other odious denizens of the OIWAAMTs on other blogs.)
Heh. You know I wouldn’t lower myself to that.
But I’ll never apologise for derailing any given thread into the perpetual Labor-Greens stoush of the inner city! Never! ¡No pasarán! Nev…
[Is dragged off, gagged, to a dungeon somewhere in the electorate of Grayndler]
Liam you make good sense and i agree.
\Perhaps the point Helen is trying to make is that people who strongly agree with the aims of the shooters party may be inclined to preference it above all others, despite the absence of broader policy areas, whereas a good many people who agree with the thrust of the Greens may be inclined NOT to preference them first for that very same reason, that they may not have broader relevance (moot point , but you get the idea) in other important areas of governance. Therefore it is possible that the Greens actually have a broader support base in society with out it being reflected in elected reps, specificially because their consituency ‘may’ have a larger pragmatic, critical thinking base.
?
I mean to say, i think you are both arguing different sides of the same coin.
True, very true, sc.
It’s also possible that a section of the Greens’ vote comes not from people who are committed to environmentalism and to facing the challenges Helen mentioned, but from people who simply do not wish to vote for either of the major Parties; in other words, that their committed support base is actually less than their vote. That’s certainly true of the Labor and Liberal Parties, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be true of the minors.
This was the argument everyone had about One Nation back in the nineties. Were their voters as committed racists-to-the-core as their organisers, or were people simply voting out of an incoherent hostility to Government?
As Paul’s post indicates, we should be wary of any claim to representativeness beyond actual numbers—especially when the claims come from members of the group.
Liam #40, when I looked at the relevant tables from the 2004 Australian Election Study I dound that the percentages of people who claimed, when asked, which party they identified with tended to be only 80% of the actual percentages of the vote which the parties received. The exception was the Greens, where there was an almost perfect fit between the percentage identifying as Green and the percentage voting Green.
That was 2004′s AES. I’ve yet to study the comparable figures from 2007. Also, it’s entirely possible that the close fit was a consequence of the “soft” end of the Green vote being blowtorched by the anti-Green campaigns of the Coalition, Family First and the Murdoch press in 2007.
As for One Nation in the 1990s, I vividly recall conversations I had in Brisbane with people who didn’t agree with a single One Nation policy, and who agreed with me about all the things which were wrong with One Nation, but who still voted for One Nation (especially in the 1998 Queensland State election) because they wanted to rattle the cage at the major parties.
[goes to the wall, reaches for the AES, looks up Variable B.1]
Paul, for 2007, the percentage of people who “usually think of themselves” as Green was 5.6% (Antony Green has the Greens’ national vote in that year at 7.8%) while in 2004 the percentage for the Greens was 4.9% (Antony Green putting the Greens’ vote at 7.2%).
I should note that using this measure of representativeness, the Greens are in fact a great deal more representative than the National Party, who had in 2004 3.1% identification and 5.1% vote, while in 2007 had 3.7% identification and 5.5% vote.
Thanks Liam. I was obviously looking at another variable.
The ‘Government’ gave me a gun – one of the dreaded ‘semi-automatic’ variety, trained me to use it, then sent me to another country – Vietnam – with the express purpose of killing PEOPLE.
Now they (the ‘Government’) tell me that I can not be trusted to own one of the very tools that they trained me to use – even if only for recreational hunting or use on a target shooting range. This is not due to anything I or any other law abiding firearm owner has done, but as a result of an expensive, non-productive, knee jerk reaction to the actions of a lunatic.
Surely the millions wasted on the pointless ‘Buy-Backs’ would have been far better spend on the nations Health System or any number of other worthwile services. There are some good things in the post ’96 gun laws but in the main they are an expensive, inefficient and poorly administered hotch-potch of different laws over seven jurisdictions – there is NO National Gun Law as such.
Next time you see an Anzac Day parade just remember that a good portion of those marching, along with being Veterans of varying conflicts not of their making, are also licenced gun owners, who at Government behest, where prepared to lay their lives on the line to guarantee YOU the freedom to attempt to reduce the freedom of those very marchers you are watching.
The simple fact that you are able to deride gun owners as a group is proof of the freedom you enjoy – strange – attack any other minority group the way you do legal firearms owners you may just fall foul of a whole range on anti-discrimination laws.
mediatracker
what do you think of Tony Taylor’s book? I’ve read some of it too. Interesting, IMO.
Liam @44: “…National Party, who had in 2004 3.1% identification and 5.1% vote, while in 2007 had 3.7% identification and 5.5% vote.”
Fear not, the National Party has a newly-minted Cortes as their leader! Barnaby says that he has burned their boats, Cortes style on invading Mexico.
Presumably the Nationals will now massacre their hosts (Liberals), capture and humiliate the leader (Turnbull) before killing him too, then steal the wealth of the people, and subjugate them cruelly to the will of the conquering tribe?
Has Barnaby lost his marbles, or is he a laugh a minute?