Thirty five years ago, on this day, March 24th, 1990, on the night of the Federal election, a retiring Labor Minister got stuck in to environmentalists.
“The backlash against environmentalists began very publicly on election night. Peter Walsh launched a bitter attack on them from the tally room, attempting to deny any influence they might have had on the outcome. He was joined in later weeks and months by a number of Cabinet ministers, largely but not exclusively from the economic portfolios, but careful evaluation of that election result makes Walsh’s assertion untenable.
Malcolm Mackerras (The Australian, March 1, 1993) summarises the result well: on the primaries, the Coalition had 43.5 per cent to Labor’s 39.4 per cent, the Democrats 11.3 and others 5.8 per cent.
However, Labor’s environment second-preference strategy was so successful that the two-way party preferred vote became 50.1 per cent for the Coalition and 49.9 per cent for Labor (which just fell over the line to win in seats).”
Toyne, P. 1993. Environment forgotten in the race to the Lodge. Canberra Times, March 8 p. 11.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the Australian Federal election, where the ALP gets a fourth term very narrowly, and crucially, thanks to small g green voters, though Peter Walsh, who was stepping down, didn’t like to be beholden to people he despised (people who believed in, you know, beauty and post-material values and all the rest of it.) Walsh was an old-fashioned Labor right, disdained these people, and must have hated that his party could only get back into power with their help. Thus, of course, vociferous denial and denunciation.
What I think we can learn from this is that people like Walsh, and there are lots of them around, cannot abide fragility, especially their own.
What happened next
Walsh acted out his fury and hate and presumably self-loathing in both his newspaper columns. See here LINK and here, LINK for example, and also as part of the Lavoisier Group. If ever you needed an Australian poster poster boy for anti-reflexivity, (link to video about this here) it’s Peter Walsh
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:
March 24, 1989 – Exxon Valdez vs Alaska. (EV wins)
March 24, 2010 – Scientists explain another bad thing on the horizon, this time on soil