Hardline conservative Christians helped orchestrate the flood of correspondence that convinced Liberal MPs to ditch support for Malcolm Turnbull and the emissions trading scheme.
One site that published repeated calls for direct lobbying of politicians was Catch the Fire Ministries, a church whose pastor earlier this year said the Black Saturday bushfires were divine vengeance for liberal abortion laws.
It has also emerged that Cory Bernardi, one of the Liberal senators who led the revolt against Turnbull, called on supporters in late November to wage an email campaign to persuade his colleagues in the Senate that the public was outraged at the ETS. His email was published and endorsed by a website popular with fringe conspiracy theorists.
When Tony Abbott resigned from Turnbull’s front bench on November 26 he cited an “absolute deluge” of emails from the public expressing outrage at the partyroom’s decision that week to back the emissions trading scheme.
Some reports say Liberal MPs each got hundreds of emails from the public. One backbencher reported getting an email every 30 seconds at the height of the leadership tensions – and one generous estimate put the number of messages in the hundreds of thousands.
There’s no doubt the Liberals’ boilover on emissions trading reflected genuine anxiety in the community – on whether climate change is real in the first place, and then if it is, whether emissions trading is the best way to solve it. Talk to anyone in the street and you’re likely to hear some concern about either of those two points. They’re real, and Kevin Rudd will need to treat them seriously if he wants to keep public opinion on his side as he tries for the third time next year to get the ETS through Parliament.
But the direct lobbying of MPs was in part driven by fringe conservative and hardline Christian websites where influential members urged others to call directly on politicians to oppose the ETS.
One was Catch The Fire Ministries, whose pastor Danny Nalliah claimed he had a dream that foretold the Black Saturday bushfires and they were the result of God removing his protection from the nation because of abortions.
The CTFM website, which claims to have 3000 visitors a month, published a series of posts calling for direct political lobbying on the ETS.
The posts were, in turn, republications of messages from another activist Christian group, the Salt Shakers, and conservative lobby group the National Civic Council, which also publishes the Christian journal AD2000.
One of the messages from the NCC on November 30th – the day before Malcolm Turnbull was ousted – said urgent action was required that day and instructed readers:
Urgently call your Federal Coalition MP and Senators MONDAY and tell them to:
(a) replace Malcolm Turnbull as leader: and (b) vote down the ETS.
The message from Salt Shakers, which styles itself as a Christian Ethics group and offers “help” to gay people who want to “leave the homosexual lifestyle”, was dated November 19. Providing names and some contact details for senators, it said:
The most important thing you can do is write to the Coalition senators in YOUR STATE and ask them NOT to support the government’s proposed emission trading legislation because it will cost families a great deal of money with no real advantages for the ‘climate’.
Salt Shakers published a journal article outlining a Christian view on climate change in 2007 in an article titled “Climate Change? Global Warming? And GOD” (there’s a link to it on this page). It draws together some detailed analysis of global climate trends and tries to extract an ethical Christian position on the challenge. Christians the world over have differing views on the need for action on climate change and this is, genuinely, a useful paper if you are looking for an informed Christian perspective. It’s clear where the Salt Shakers stand politically, though, from the paper’s concluding paragraphs:
Australia must evaluate how it can act responsibly in reducing emissions and developing alternative energy sources. We must not let this issue undermine our national sovereignty…
We cannot ‘save’ the planet. Only God can. This world will not be wiped out until Christ returns.
Another website that gave the Liberal agitation an airing was Truth Movement Australia, which devotes itself to discussing popular conspiracy theories such as chemtrails, streaks in the sky accepted by most people as jet contrails but believed by some to be government biowarfare experiments and suchlike. One influential member of the TMA community posted an email from Cory Bernardi to supporters which said in part:
I ask you to contact the Liberal Senators in your state that are planning to vote in favour of this legislation. As their constituents, you have both the right and the responsibility to contact them and ask them to vote against the CPRS.
A couple of respondents promise to act on the call and a third quotes a supportive speech from the Citizens Electoral Council, a conservative political lobby group that last year described the ETS as “genocidal”.
It’s worth pointing out this is just the stuff that left evidence. There’s no way of telling how many others decided to act on that call or where else these emails ended up.
Bernardi, along with his Senate colleague Nick Minchin and WA MPs Dennis Jensen and Wilson Tuckey, had been openly defiant of Turnbull’s position on the ETS. The day Turnbull was dumped, Bernardi wrote on his blog that he and his colleagues had been “bombarded with more emails, phone calls and letters than we have ever seen”. The authenticity of the emails, he said, was “in marked contrast to the automated spam campaign run by the environmental movement… It also demonstrates that much in the extreme green movement is not all that it appears to be.”
Despicable spam campaigns by lefties aside, it’s clear Bernardi - whose office confirmed yesterday the email posted on TMA was genuine - had a hand in calling on the emails to Liberal MPs that helped sway opinion against Turnbull in the partyroom. And it’s likely not all the correspondence from people you’d describe as being Coalition heartland.
Some of it, though, most certainly was. Dig down into Google Groups and you can find senators’ email addresses posted by general punters who simply seem uneasy about either the science or the ETS itself.
The way this loose coalition of anti-ETS activists was knitted together on the web is clear from this post by science writer and climate change sceptic Joanne Nova:
Thanks to John W and to the Climate Sceptics Party, I have received two lists of Senators email addresses. See below.
A mass of emails will dent the belief of someone who is convinced, and increase the confidence of those who understand the situation but face a wall of intimidation to point it out. Please support the brave Senators and members who have stood up to the bullies.
It goes on to provide suggested wording for a protest email and there are plenty of enthusiastic and coherent responses from readers. Now say two dozen readers sign up and each agrees to email two dozen politicians. That’s 576 emails - with each senator getting 24 emails, in a short space of time, calling for the ETS to be dropped. It’s a powerful message. Maybe those 24 people tell a few friends or link to the post from their own blog. The numbers get into the thousands very quickly.
Just to repeat: the agonising in the Liberal partyroom over this reflected a real shift in community sentiment on climate change and the ETS. And it’s healthy that there’s now a vigorous public debate about it. So the email campaign can’t be entirely dismissed as a vast outpouring of rage from fringe groups.
And they might be, as Bernardi said, unique, direct and personal. But it seems clear not all of the correspondence was necessarily from Liberal grassroots - at least some of it was from a wider group that included the hard Christian right, conspiracy theorists, and others swept along in the heated online debates of their chosen forums.
There’s at least one group that’ll be familiar, perhaps even known, to some Coalition MPs, though. The Agmates community - a blistering forum that crackles with debate on current events - ran a long campaign supporting Barnaby Joyce’s vehement opposition to the ETS. This built to fever pitch as the vote in the Senate on the bill approached and as the Liberal party threatened to rip itself apart. When it looked likely that Joe Hockey would become Liberal leader, they rallied emails to him. The following day they discuss tactics for getting their message through to TV stations by a variety of means. It was relentless.
And in an terrifically heart-warming post on the day Abbott became leader, one of the senior community members posted the lyrics to John Farnham’s You’re the Voice with a video to remind the Agmates community of what they had achieved with their messages. You can see the post here.
They’re not resting, though. The Agmates lobbyists next move is flagged here, with a call to now target Labor politicians and convince them to drop support for the ETS. I recommend a look at this post, and its comments:
The ETS may have been delayed , but be under NO illusions it will be back and most likely the next election will be fought over this issue. NOW is the time to sow the seeds of doubt in the ears of the LABOR pollies.
There’s a lot of talk about it being a long summer for the Liberals. Some on the government side might be facing the same.
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