Scorcher or chiller?

There was one thing about Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher that, as a postgraduate student, I found- well, quite chilling.  The opening chapter drew very heavily- to the point of precis- on a Ph.D. presented by one of Clive Hamilton’s students, Guy Pearse.  Certainly, it was all acknowledged and cited correctly, but the chapter owed a very heavy debt to Pearse’s work.  Then, lo and behold, in 2007 Pearse himself released a book High and Dry, also based on his Ph.D. work.

I don’t know the politics of the supervisor/student relationship here.  Clive Hamilton, from the little I know about him, seems an honourable man.  There is certainly no issue of plagiarism- everything has been cited and footnoted meticulously.  Perhaps it is a case of a more prominent researcher and academic championing his student’s work, and putting it into the public arena through his own work. But you do find yourself wondering.

I looked through Pearse’s book to see if he acknowledges Hamilton in any way.  In his introduction, Pearse writes:

As I put together my thesis for final submission in 2005, I confronted a real fork in the road.  I could write a nice, innocuous, self-censored PhD focussing narrowly…and ignoring the elephant in the room…I weighed it up and did what I still consider to be the right thing…Having decided not to censor the PhD, I knew there was no turning back.  After all, I’d chosen as one of my supervisors Clive Hamilton, a strident critic of the Howard government.  I chose him because  I had a feeling he was on to something with his critique of Australia’s response to climate change. That said, he was a widely despised figure within the Liberal party.  So, Clive and I had a very guarded relationship- him suspicious but curious about a former Liberal staffer, me cautious about sharing information that might come back to bite me politically.  I withheld all interview material from Clive until the final drafts of the thesis were ready and I’d made my decision…. (p. 29, 30)

So, an acknowledgement, but not thanks as such. I wonder what went on at their supervision meetings?  Pearse might talk about caution and suspicion, but there’s an element of trust on Hamilton’s side at least if the interview data- from Hamilton’s chapter, the fundamental evidence- was withheld until the final drafts were written.  In fact, I wonder how as a candidate you could write a draft omitting evidence, and how as a supervisor and reader, you could comment on it.

On a related, but possibly dissimilar tack, I was struck by a section in Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, where he picks up on the mystery of why England decided to send many of its convicts to the opposite side of the world.  Here he cites Mr K. M. Dallas who “brilliantly probed” the question “in a lecture to a small, sceptical audience in Hobart in 1952.”  He footnotes this comment with a reference to an article ‘The First Settlement in Australia; considered in relation to sea-power in world politics’ from T.H.R.A. (Tasmanian Historical Research Association) 1952 and five short articles in T.H.R.A. later that year.  Four years later there was  a further discussion by M.Roe in Historical Studies. Blainey says further in his footnotes:

I have taken the liberty, in summarising Mr Dallas’s theory, of eliminating some points which seem dubious, adding others which tend to strengthen the broad sweep of his theory, and rearranging the sequence.  This seemed justifiable because his theory seemed to have more merit than was conceded by most critics. (p. 378 21st century edition)

I hadn’t heard of K.M.Dallas.  He seems to have written one other paper for the Tasmanian Historical Research Association in 1968,  two books- one on horsepower and the other on water power- and in 1969 published a 132 page book Trading Posts or Penal Colonies: the commercial significance of Cook’s New Holland route to the Pacific that seems related to that lecture given in Hobart over fifty years ago.

Meanwhile, Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance has gone through three editions and thirteen reprints, and I assume that Mr K.M. Dallas has undertaken the whole journey with him.  How far that sparsely attended lecture decades ago has spread!

I’m not suggesting anything improper in either example, but it does raise issues about dissemination, championing, mentoring and attribution.  And me? I’m going to read Guy Pearse’s book too.

‘Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change” by Clive Hamilton

2007, 230p.

This book exposes the names and organisations behind the Greenhouse Mafia- the group of Australian energy and resource producers who lobby the government ( in particular the Howard Government, but given the uneasy shuffling of feet I suspect the Rudd government ministers too) to act in a way that privileges their own interests over all.  He gives this shadowy group definite names and identities: the climate change skeptics (William Kininmonth, John Zillman), the industrialists (Hugh Morgan), the lobbyists  (the Lower Emissions Technology Advisory Group) and the press (the Australian, Michael Duffy etc).  For this alone, I’m glad I read this book. Sometimes, when I read the newspaper I feel as if it’s nothing but an arena for lobbyists and PR consultants to buy space for whatever they are pushing; the mantra over “balance” means that undue exposure can be given to minority views, and the anodyne, deceptive and largely interchangeable names given to “groups” and “bodies” with widely varying agendas become almost meaningless.

But he also exposes the duplicity and paradox in the Howard government’s position on Kyoto. He argues that the Howard government, as the ‘cover’ for the Greenhouse Mafia, consciously sabotaged Kyoto because it didn’t want China- a major energy export market- to limit its emissions while at the same time arguing that Kyoto is unworkable and unfair because they are not limiting their emissions.

At times, and as the book progresses, he becomes increasingly shrill, particularly against Murdoch’s Australian , which detracts from his argument.  The book highlights that ordinary Australian’s concern about climate change stretches back deades, and that at the time of writing (2007), this commitment looked as if it were about to be activitated.

But I very much doubt that the Greenhouse Mafia has disappeared.  I fear that the fine-tuning of the response to the Garnaut report in response to “business export fears” is evidence of the Greenhouse Mafia flexing its muscle against the Rudd government as well.