The politics of climate change: In the course of his PhD research into the politics of climate change, Pearse interviewed scores of key players in the greenhouse policy debate. Most enlightening and, ultimately the most politically damaging, was the information he gleaned from members of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network. "The AIGN is a highly influential collection of Australia’s biggest greenhouse polluters, consisting of a dozen industry associations and a similar number of individual companies that represent Australia’s largest fossil fuel producers and consumers.", Pearse wrote.
The `greenhouse mafia’: Almost all, he discovered, were former federal bureaucrats and/or ministerial staffers from the industry portfolio. They openly called themselves "the greenhouse mafia and made it clear their effect on government policy was far reaching and profound." One even told him: “We know where every skeleton in the closet is. Most of them we buried."
Fallout was swift and final: Even though he was on a fast track to Liberal party pre-selection, Pearse decided the dangers of climate change were too urgent to wait the 20 years it wjould take before he might be able to directly affect policy himself. In February 2006, he made his `greenhouse mafia’ allegations on the ABC’s Four Corners program. The fallout was swift and final. "The government just dismissed the claims the very next day," Pearse said. "I was told to forget about running for office, a couple of MPs who wanted to speak in my defence were told to shut up. The doors just slammed.
"The whistle didn’t work," he said of his Four Corners interview, "so I had to get out my trumpet."
Guy Pearse spoke at the Art Gallery auditorium on 6 July at 11.15am, http://www.festivalofideas.com.au
The Advertiser, 6/7/2007, p. 27
Source: Erisk Net