It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.

But there’s a broader point here.

We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Therapeutic cultures, cyber-utopian discourses, marketing moves – all encourage us to tell our stories and rearrange the bits of the world as narratives (if not ones entirely of our own making). There’s something here of what Michel Foucault diagnosed as the diffusion of the practice of confession – and an incitement to tell one’s truth – from the Church outwards into the culture. Now, it would be too simplistic to condemn this (or, for that matter, to offer an enconium to it). Sweeping judgements on social trends tend to say more about those doing the judging than the reality – revealing, all too often, the value judgements they attempt to conceal.

One question, though, could be addressed to Stutchbury – what is, in fact, involved in the demand that policy conform to a narrative?

It’s a demand journos, particularly at The Australian, seem to make very frequently. It obscures a heap of ideological baggage. It can’t be just any narrative. It has to be the preferred ‘reform’ narrative.

Let me get one last thing straight. I’m a fan of story-telling. I like to tell stories myself. But a narrative doesn’t have to be coherent, or sustained by evidence. It’s not the same thing as an argument. It might be a good thing if that were realised – that accountability to reason and truth and evidence can be the price of seeing everything in terms of narrative.

Update: On Paul Kelly.

Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday – that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Not only was the Green Paper based on the work done for the Howard Government by the Shergold Review, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the business position, which is falling on at least some sympathetic ears within the government, is for a very low carbon price and a stack of free permits under the aegis of “adjustment”. In effect, it’s a “waiting on the world” strategy, with the BCA’s president Greig Gailey expected to make the familiar point about Australia only creating 1.5% of the world’s emissions in a speech to the Sydney Institute tonight. Gailey will also be calling for bipartisan support to create “certainty”, and given Kevin Rudd’s previous disdain for negotiating with The Greens, it would appear that there are powerful forces at work to create a policy outcome much more akin to the Malcolm Turnbull/Greg Hunt position than what Labor was actually suggesting might occur prior to the election.

If this is what’s going on, you have to wonder why they’re bothering at all. The outcome would mean that we’d be continuing to increase our emissions, not restraining them, at least in the immediate future.

I haven’t had time to go through the detail, but Bernard Keane from Crikey has. In a nutshell, the report makes three extremely dubious assumptions:

• trade-exposed businesses have no capacity to pass on any increased costs.

• Trade-exposed businesses will not be able to adjust their operations to reduce carbon emissions.
• Trade-exposed industries can seamlessly relocate to other jurisdictions where they don’t have this greenhouse abatement nonsense.

It seems that the BCA (aside from suggesting that targets should be so modest as to be essentially meaningless) is arguing for an emissions trading scheme where emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries don’t have to do anything different, and any changes to their operations they do make come back to them as windfall profits.

Cunning lot, the BCA…

Update [dk.au via comments]: Ross Gittins in SMH:

The media have yet to twig that all modelling is only as good as the assumptions on which it rests. And you can get pretty much any result you want by choosing the right assumptions.

In the Business Council’s case, it seems to have reached its dire conclusions by assuming its businesses have no scope to pass to customers the cost of the emission permits they’ll need to buy, no scope to eliminate wastefulness in their present use of fossil fuels and no scope to reduce the need for permits by improving their technology.

In short, the Business Council seems to assume its members are completely lacking in enterprise…

See also Peter Wood on the Aluminium case