What is this woman doing in Parliament?

Tane
17 years ago
Categories: act, climate change
Tags: act, climate change

Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: if you’re ever worried you’re no good at your job and need some cheering up, you can’t go too far wrong with Heather Roy’s Diary. Of all the dreadful, party-approved pap that streams out of Parliament on a Friday afternoon, Heather’s newsletter is surely the pick of the bunch.

Oh it’s dull, possibly duller than any other, and even on a good day it reads like your average fourth form social studies essay, only lacking the originality and depth of analysis you’d expect from a fourteen year old child.

This week’s effort was no exception. After 965 tortuous words on fart taxes, the family plantation and why her husband tells her not to recycle, Heather finally turned her formidable intellect to the Government’s new emissions trading scheme – and she wasn’t having a bar of it. “Before we commit to the expense and economic disruption of the ‘Cap and Trade’ regime,” she opined, “we should look at the evidence”:

The world hasn’t warmed since 1998 – and 2007 will not break any records. For the US, 1934 was the warmest year in the past 100 years. Since 1900, there has been one 23-year period – 1975-1998 – when a temperature increase was associated with a significant increase in CO2. From 1940-1975, CO2 went up and temperatures went down. There is increasing evidence that the sun and cosmic rays control our climate, not CO2. If this correct, then we’re entering another little ice age. The rate of sea level rise is small and is not increasing. The Arctic had less ice in the 1930s and in the Medieval Warm Period.

Of course, to anyone with even a passing interest in climate change, Heather’s ‘evidence’ is laughable. These denialist myths have been doing the rounds for years now and have been thoroughly discredited elsewhere.

But a bit of climate change denial is nothing new to ACT. Or National, it would appear. See, if the passage above seems a little familiar it’s probably because Heather Roy plagiarised the entire thing, word-for-word, from National MP Richard Worth’s newsletter of the very same day. That would be the same newsletter that had been publicly debunked by No Right Turn before Heather had even clicked the send button.

It’s all just a little tragic. I mean, if you’re going to take the risk of plagiarising someone, why not make it anyone other than Richard Worth?

To put an end to this whole sad, sorry debacle, Heather sought refuge in the last hiding place of the climate change denier: the conspiracy theory. “We must study the evidence, not believe people with hidden agendas”, she pleaded. “We urgently need an independent, objective scrutiny of the evidence.”

Heather, we already have that. It’s called the IPCC, and it’s been around for some time. Seriously, what is this woman doing in Parliament? And why isn’t she wearing her tinfoil hat?