Gerard Henderson, a hapless Brit baroness and a whole bunch of fruit loops ...

It being Tuesday, it must be Gerard Henderson, and him banging the drum of monotony with a slow, steady, rhythmical hand designed to drive away the ghosts and the ghoulies.

In this case, it's also designed to frighten off wayward meddlers in domestic politics, as Henderson gets righteously indignant about foreigners traipsing through the antipodes.

But first to the weekly competition, and in Meddling in our politics not a good look from right or left, the ghost of John Howard seems to be slowly fading from Henderson's memory.

First time John Howard mentioned in column: 8th par

Number of times John Howard mentioned in column: 2

Frankly this is so below par that the stewards have called for a swab and there's a suspicion of some kind of interference in the running which suggests dangerous or careless riding.

To so overlook the wisdom of the past, and the guiding hand of the greatest chief jockey whose ever ridden Australia to glory suggests we're watching a rider gradually drift to the line, taking riders behind off their intended line, and causing them to pull their horses. By golly, you could get a suspension for that kind of behavior when big money's at stake in the betting ring.

Luckily, it's only Gerard Henderson, and most of the punters have snoozed off before the race hits the half way mark.

So what's the latest storm in a tea cup to upset the stately progress of Henderson?

It's all about double standards and fashions. When Tom Schieffer, the former US ambassador to Australia, interfered in the domestic debate by criticising Labor's Mark Latham in 2003, he was rebuked by some commentators for undiplomatic behaviour. Fair enough.

Fair enough? Well I suppose foreigners aren't supposed to interfere in domestic politics, but do we want to cultivate an insular climate where we all stare at our navels, clamp our hands over our ears, and shriek with outrage when any passing foreigner dares to express an opinion contrary to the shrieking of the commentariat columnist brigade? Indeed we do:

Last week Baroness Valerie Amos, who recently became Britain's high commissioner, also intervened in Australian politics. She expressed surprise that there was a debate in Australia about whether humans are the principal cause of climate change and added: "In the UK there is a degree of political consensus about what in broad terms needs to be done … You would certainly not see on a daily basis … the kind of negative reporting that you have here."

Well indeed you wouldn't, and the mildness of the observation - which doesn't mention a politician or a political player, doesn't in fact even mention the most obvious recalcitrants in the Murdoch press by name - is probably unlikely to upset even your maiden aunt as she waves her republican flag in the living room.

But Henderson is made of sterner stuff, perhaps because of his mix of 60% Irish and 40% Scottish genes which have resulted in a true Australian approach. Piss off pommie bastard:

Amos evoked a modern cliche and suggested that it was time, on this matter, that Australia "moved on". Put simply, Amos wants there to be no debate whatsoever about human-induced climate change and, to the extent to which this takes place, she wants the media to refrain from reporting it. It seems that platitudes are handed down in the British high commission in Canberra.

Well that would indeed be putting it simply. The very fact that the baroness's statements might be characterized as cliched and platitudinous suggests their blandness, backed by the safety valve of referring only to negative reporting and negativity in some of the debate without naming names - and so many names that could be named. You can read what the baroness had to say here in Envoy surprised by climate of scepticism.

Well of course this blatant offensive intervention got the nameless going, as you can read, if you dare step into the bottomless pit known as Andrew Bolt, where we rarely go for fear of defilement and loss of precious bodily fluids, as well as sanity and the few remaining brain cells we have. (Dear Baroness: these natives aren't for scaring).

While trawling through the cess pit you find at the bottom of the intertubes sewer, I also managed to find this comment by one Krudd the Dud providing a link to Bolt's fury:

She is a nig nog as well.

Should be in the sugar cane fields in Cairns, cutting the white man's sugar,
instead of giving us gratuitous advice. (here)

Oh yes, so Australian. So off I trotted to Bolt, and strangely found that remark wasn't far removed from a couple of comments on Bolt's blog:

This is what you get when you respond to one of those Nigerian scam emails…

...Send her your bank details and you can have 10% of the $10m left in a trust fund by a Nigerian despot.

Nuthin suss…

.. .When I first read Baroness Valerie’s pronouncements, in the SMH, I was rather miffed that an English aristocrat (snicker) should adopt the superior tone of a previous century to lecture us rude Colonials - or is ‘oiks’ now the preferred term?

But upon reflection, I realised that the Baroness comes from Guyana, where spirit worship is still very much in vogue, and that, given her antecedents, Dai Dai, Makonaima and all the lesser jungle deities would be very much part of the Baroness Valerie’s psyche.

Consequently, the transference of her allegiance from one forest spirit to another (the Great Goddess Gaia, with all the attendant rituals) would have required no great leap of faith. Viewed from this perspective, it seems likely that Sister Valerie sees herself as a missionary, with a holy duty to convert the heathen, rather than as an officer of the Crown bound by starchy conventions.

... I think she needs an African Man to make her ‘happy’

... How quaint - a radical black sociologist with the title “Baroness”.

And so on and so forth as Bolt lectured the baroness about her lecture with his usual splenetic liverish bilious rage.

Well of course Henderson is too sophisticated for the punters at the Bolt blog, where a festering seething rage is always lurking just below the surface.

But he's not averse to the odd hint that perhaps the most fashionable cause of the age is just ... well a fashion ... and just a matter of belief, unlike the serious business of waging a crusade and killing people ... never mind that Blair was helter skelter into the killing fields with Bush ...

How come, then, that Schieffer's comments on Australian politics caused offence whereas those by Liddell and Amos passed virtually without criticism? Well, Schieffer is not only a conservative but a friend of George Bush who supported American policy in Iraq. Liddell was a Labour MP from 1994 to 2005 and became a minister in Tony Blair's government. And Amos was appointed to the House of Lords by Blair in 1997 becoming a minister and, later, leader of the House of Lords. Moreover, both Liddell and Amos believe in the most fashionable cause of the modern age - namely that human behaviour is responsible for global warming.

Yes it's just like dressing up for the Melbourne cup. No need for the hysterics of a Clive Hamilton (Hamilton: Denying the coming climate holocaust).

And the reason for all the fuss about what after all is just the merely fashionable?

So it seems that there is one rule for conservative Americans Down Under who want to talk publicly about Iraq. And quite another rule for social democratic Brits who want to talk publicly about climate change. Last September, shortly before she left Australia, Liddell appeared on the ABC1's Q&A program and used the occasion to lecture the audience about emission trading schemes. It is most unlikely that the Australian high commissioner in London would appear on the BBC Question Time program and lecture the British on, say, how to run an economy.

Social democrats! That's right, they always get the breaks, never get pulled up, while conservatives are always admonished and spanked. It's just not fair! (But I thought conservatives liked a good spanking?)

Those bloody social democrats, always from the inner west except when they're from Britain. The meddling high priests of hysteria, always shooting off their mouths, never acting in a restrained, invisible way. Why then it's only a short hop step and a jump to the logical thinking of Nick Minchin:

''For the extreme left, it provides the opportunity to do what they have always wanted to do, which is to sort of de-industrialise the Western world. The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left and, really, they embraced environment as their new religion.'' (Minchin's climate conspiracy).

Oh yes, they're going to take over the world!

This led one of Minchin's colleagues to storm and rage:

One Liberal frontbencher told The Australian that Senator Minchin came across as a “complete fruit loop”.

“Border control is going along a treat and they come out behaving like total f...wits. They don’t know how crazy they look, because crazy people never do,” the Liberal said. (Minichin faces Liberals backlash over climate change).

You can of course still see the Four Corners show that provoked the storm (start here and follow the links), and that of course is the hapless baroness's real problem. She made a few innocuous comments while the opposition was tearing out its entrails for a ritual examination, and now must pay the price for being an interfering busybody when a scalp must be found. A social democrat scalp from the UK! Hallelujah.

But alas alack I've strayed off course, headed towards the rails, rather than endure the tedium of a Gerard Henderson lecture in history which will somehow make a couple of entirely irrelevant points:

The British high commission's lecture-at-large to the Australian population invariably overlooks two central facts. First, British carbon emissions are low because, when Margaret Thatcher was conservative prime minister in the 1980s, the coalmines were allowed to close down. This policy was not continued when John Major succeeded Thatcher.

This was done in the face of opposition from British Labour, the radical leftist National Union of Mineworkers and assorted Guardian-New Statesman reading inner-city luvvies. Had this lot had their way, the British taxpayer would have been forced to subsidise dirty British coal and Australians would have been spared the subsequent moralising of such former Labour parliamentarians as Liddell and Amos. At the meeting of the United Kingdom-Australia Leadership Forum in Canberra in 2006, John Howard mentioned that on his first flight to Britain as prime minister he had watched the film Brassed Off, which depicted the anger at the wind-up of the British coal industry, and joked that he had been impressed by the impassioned speeches delivered by Thatcher's opponents at the time. Tony Blair joined in the humour, declaring that he might have delivered one of these orations himself. By then, of course, Blair was more interested in the reduction of carbon pollution.

Oh dear, that sweet John, such an omnivore and such a sense of humor. How could we forget him in our times of trouble, mother Mary comfort us.

Never mind. Chortle away at the cheek of Henderson suggesting that it was the baroness who specialized in cliches and platitudes.

Well she's got nothing on a man ready to evoke yet again, in a way that's so tired I had immediately to go out and switch on the coffee machine, the machinations of the clueless inner-city luvvies. No doubt written by man who commutes from his McMansion in Penrith, and resents the easy toll free trip into the city handed down from on high to these indolent inner city wretches.

Well that explains Henderson's anger - road rage in Penrith is extremely high I'm told - but perhaps there's just time to throw in a little trawl about nuclear power?

The second reason why Britain has relatively low carbon emissions turns on the fact that it has a nuclear power industry. As its Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced recently, Gordon Brown's Government intends to begin the construction of up to 10 nuclear power stations.

There is, there is, and then how about a stupefyingly silly observation?

It is true that there is little debate in the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in Britain about the cause of climate change. Perhaps this explains why it is not as high profile an issue as in Australia.

Yes y'all talk about it, so we don't have to bother! It's not a high profile issue in Australia at all. Gee, I wonder why Bolt, Blair, Minchin, Malcolm in the middle and others so regularly get their knickers in a knot about it? But you see, nobody's talking about it, except for the baroness, and therefore with much regret and reluctance, Henderson:

Meanwhile the Americans seemed subsumed in the debates on health insurance and the war in Afghanistan. That's why - contrary to many predictions - President Barack Obama will not take a firm carbon pollution reduction proposal to the Copenhagen conference early next month. Within the OECD, the Australian economy most resembles that of the US and Canada. The US did not ratify the Kyoto Agreement - not even when Al Gore was vice-president in Bill Clinton's administration. Canada signed up to Kyoto - but never got close to meeting its targets. Australia did not ratify Kyoto under Howard, but met its targets.

Oh yes, thank the lord for John Howard. We met the targets for a non issue that no one's worried about. Copenhagen? I believe it's an excellent place for a winter holiday ...

Quite a few members of the European Union have not met their Kyoto targets. Perhaps the likes of Liddell and Amos might have more effect by taking their climate change diplomatic advocacy to Ottawa or Brussels.

Oh well spoken, well played sir. On the front foot and stroked through covers. That should learn them interfering foreigners coming here with their clever dick ways and speaking out of turn as if they could teach the local yokels anything about parochialism, isolationism and ostrich head in sand advanced 101-ism. Go breach diplomatic protocols somewhere else, and take a 'n'yah n'yah you drink your bathwater' with you.

The Rudd Government is attempting to get a carbon pollution reduction scheme through the Senate before Copenhagen. If he does, well and good. If he doesn't, Australia's situation will be no different from that of the US. In his surprisingly strident speech to the Lowy Institute on November 6, the Prime Minister acknowledged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had found that it was "90 per cent probable" that humans were responsible for climate change. While there is a 10 per cent doubt, it is unlikely that this debate will be silenced in Australia - irrespective of the views of British diplomats in the Antipodes.

But but I thought there wasn't a debate here, except it seems there is, and a strident negative one at that, and now it's going to go on, because Mr. ten per cent wants his share of the action, even if everybody else is talking about it, but not Australians, except when we are ... Head dizzy, feeling confused, must lie down soon ...

And there we must leave the pontificating, prattling, portentous Polonius, behind the arras as usual, burbling on in his own inimitable way, talking of surprisingly strident speeches and clutching at the straw of ten per cent doubt as a way of slagging off a British visitor in the hope that no one will notice the strident voices on loon pond or the total disarray of the opposition.

But one last thought about that 90% v. the 10% option.

You know if an event was ninety per cent certain and serious and you did not have a mitigation plan in place, then you would probably be in breach of your duties as a company director in this country, and you'd have to get a risk management plan in place pronto, or contemplate shutting your business down.

Just as well our prattling Polonius has visiting Brits to beat up ... because he sure as hell doesn't have anything useful to offer the debate on climate change. For a start he might have talked about how effective the current scheme might be, and how it might be improved ... but oops, I'm starting to sound like a baroness talking in the cliches and platitudes beloved of risk management teams ...

(Below: a couple of images beloved of risk managers. Hey, do I have a consultancy offer for you ... no risk).