Seventeen years ago, on this day, May 29th, 2007, Prime Minister John Howard uses taxpayers’ money to try to get people to forget his past ten years of climate vandalism/criminality.
Labor turned up the heat over federal government advertising as Prime Minister John Howard conceded a climate change campaign was on the way.
Anon, 2007. Climate change ad battle heating up. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May.
See also
THERE is $52.8 million ready to spend on a climate-change advertising blitz if and when the Government chooses to introduce one, Prime Minister John Howard admitted yesterday.
Doherty, B. 2007. Howard coy on $53m ads. The Age, 30 May.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australian Prime Minister John Howard had spent 10 years doing everything in his power to stop climate action. He had been enormously successful with this. From September 2006, however, the pressure for action became intense, and he needed to pivot. So we had the Shergold report group that was supposed to pronounce on an emissions trading scheme. But Howard had not really convinced anyone about his new green credentials. The ABC’s Tony Jones had trolled him in February of 2007. And he had denounced the Stern Review as “pure speculation.” So it’s kind of unsurprising that all this taxpayer funded Climate Clever advertising bullshit, launched in September 2007, convinced precisely no one.
What we learn is that politicians are used to being able to U-turn, pivot on a dime, to have no convictions, but there is a limit. (See Martin Kettle talking about Francois Mitterrand in The Guardian, December 7 2023, which is the day I’m recording this.) And you can’t easily remake yourself once people have made up their mind about you as much as you would like to think that you can. You’re set in concrete.
What happened next, the Climate Clever nonsense was spoofed by Get Up. Howard couldn’t bring himself to ratify Kyoto, because he knew he looked weak. And he was swept from office by Labor’s Kevin Rudd. But that didn’t mean that the climate policy issue then got dealt with by adults. That would have to wait until Juliet Gillard, in 2011. That is not to say there weren’t adults who didn’t make massive mistakes but still, nonetheless, adults.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
May 29, 1968 – UN body says “let’s have a conference, maybe?”-
May 29, 1969 – “A Chemist Thinks about the Future” #Keeling #KeelingCurve