Having been flamed in the past by climate change deniers, and more recently by fundamentalist christians (no, these people don’t deserve a capital “c”) and, having seen what can happen put the loony left, the lunar right and a bunch of Jesus freaks in a blender, I approach the subject of Senator Fielding with not a little trepidation.

But Intrepid (along with Hawtness) is my middle name. Baby….. So it’s time to have a Shout about why Steve Fielding is not fit to be a senator.

We’ll get the easy target stuff over and done with first: Senators really should be able to master basic reading and writing. Yes, I’m talking about the “physical, I mean fiscal, spelt F-I-S-K-A-L” palaver. I know lots of people who read and spell badly, they’re not disabled in any way, they’re just people who read and spell badly (many of them have degrees, by the way). Fielding, after being caught out on the most basic of economic terms  , claimed to have a “specific learning disability”, which he refuses to specify. Such bullshit! Fielding is not disabled; he’s just a walking demonstration of what happens when an ego runs wild, mates with a lazy intellect and gives birth in a pool of self pity.

This is idiot stuff, but Fielding’s position on Climate Change is not. Particularly when you consider that one of the big election winners for the current government was the climate change platform.

Fielding wrote a piece on The Punch a while back, trying to explain why he doesn’t accept that human activities have an influence on climate change (segue – check out The Punch, it’s Crikey, edited by Andrew Bolt and Piers Ackerman).

His argument can be summed up in a couple of quick points, which I will demolish as we go…

He had a couple of specific questions about Climate Change, and, because nobody can show him iron-clad empirical evidence of every single step in every single calculation and prediction, he’s decided that it hasn’t been proven beyond a reasonable doubt; therefore it’s “only a theory”.

This is what Creationists do: point to a few minutiae in, say, the fossil record, and then clap their hands in glee, shouting “you can’t show me a fossil between this one and that one, therefore it’s only a theory!!! Yippee”, when what they’re really saying is “I do not have the intellectual capacity to understand the vast numbers and passage of time involved in all this, so I need a simple way out.”

Then he started whining about how when he went to the US (with a couple CC deniers in tow) Al Gore refused to speak to him.

So? I’m tipping Al Gore is kind of busy, and an Australian happy-clapper Senator, known to be a climate change denier, elected by less than 50,000 people (and a venal preference deal done by the ALP) would not be much higher on his To Do List than, say, Put The Bins Out And Then Scratch My Arse For A Bit.

Fielding also loves the “a carbon pollution reduction scheme/emissions trading scheme would cost jobs” mantra. This is what we keep being told by Big Business, in particular by the AIG, but their modelling and analysis is virtually non-existent; certainly there’s far less research gone into that than has gone into human influenced Climate Change. Yet Senator Fielding is perfectly happy to accept the AIG’s word without question or empirical evidence, proving again that he only wants to question the things he doesn’t want to believe.

So, he’s a bit of a knob. Big deal. There are plenty of knobs in parliaments around the country.

True, but the problem with Fielding is that he’s a special kind of knob. The current make up of the senate gives the balance of power to the independent senators, which means he’s in an extremely powerful position, he making decisions that affect the whole country and it’s future and he’s totally out of his depth.

When you are the balance of power in the senate, you need to be intelligent, or at the least, smart. Fielding is neither. You need to be able to deal, negotiate, and compromise. Fielding has consistently shown that he can do none of these things effectively. You need to be able to take in vast amounts of information and make decisions, or take positions, based on the information that you have read and understood. Fielding has shown no ability to take in information, let alone understand it. He has also demonstrated time and time again that he has a firm position on several issue (climate change, jobs, censorship, gay marriage, the list goes on) that will not be swayed, regardless of the all the evidence and information presented to him.

An independent senator also needs to understand that an accident of democracy gave him his power in the senate; he does NOT have a mandate from the Australian people. He does NOT speak for all of us, he does NOT represent all of us and he does NOT have the right to impose his agenda on us. He has an obligation to the Australian people to NOT stand in the way of their elected government – the ones who DO have a mandate. This is something else that appears to be too complex for Fielding to understand.

He has come to the Senate with a small, closed mind, and is doing the nation a grave disservice. He must go.

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