Rudd facing naked truth

Andrew Bolt
Columnist for the Herald Sun

November 2009

JUST look at this astonishing farce in Canberra, is what I should have said

You see, I was talking to a class of year 11 students this week and found - to my horror - that few of that Harry Potter generation had even heard of the children's story that best explains this madness.

You know, the madness of Kevin Rudd's colossal tax on everything, which couldn't stop global warming even if that warming were real.

I mean, too, the madness of the Liberals' collapse under Malcolm Turnbull, and the startling rise of Kevin Andrews, the man they said was crazy.

Anyway, there I was in this classroom, talking of daring to speak the truth. Who, I asked, knew Hans Christian Andersen's tale of The Emperor's New Clothes?

Not one hand went up. How we've failed today's children.

Older readers will know this story and its terrible relevance.

An emperor as vain as, well, our Prime Minister, hires two weavers who promise to make him the best clothes from the best cloth. This fabric, the weavers say, is so fine that only the wise and moral can see it.

In fact, if you were shamefully stupid - like a Holocaust denier or climate sceptic - you'd swear it was invisible.

So when the weavers return with armfuls of nothing and tell the emperor they're holding his new suit, the dill doesn't dare say he can't see it.

His ministers and subjects are just as scared to seem sinfully stupid, so when the emperor parades stark naked they tell him his new clothes look fabulous.

It finally takes some guileless boy to sing out, "but he's naked!", for the crowd to dare to see so, too.

I'm sorry to take so much space to explain what many readers already know, but we can no longer assume the old moral lessons have been learned.

Still, I should have told the students this tale in a modern way to explain Rudd's tax, Turnbull's crash and Andrews' rise.

Take Rudd. Our vain emperor was told by activists the world was warming, thanks to man's gases, and they could make for him a cause so fine that he would seem the saviour of the world.

They gave him graphs they said showed this heating, and warned that only stupid "deniers" would see in them a cooling trend since 2001.

Rudd was too afraid to admit he actually saw that cooling in the satellite data and so dressed himself instead in the holy robes of a planet saviour - robes he'll now pay for with a new emissions tax even he says will raise at least $114 billion by 2020.

His ministers, equally scared to seem stupid or bad, agreed his robes were fantastic. And journalists cheered.

Oh, there were doubts, but who in that crowd dared speak? Yet in emails leaked last weekend we find that even the men who'd sold our emperor his new threads fretted that we'd find out they'd sold Rudd a dud.

Kevin Trenberth, who co-wrote two United Nations IPCC reports in which Rudd had found his cause, admitted: "The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment."

What? The boy had spoken. The spell was broken. Only there's a problem with this retelling. Our emperor Rudd is still strutting starkers, crying that this cooling world is warming, and he, first among all leaders, must save it.

Or I could have told this tale with Malcolm Turnbull as the emperor, since he bought this same cause from the same shysters, and never once checked why his bared backside felt so windy.

"No, no," cried the journalists, "you're dressed beautifully for these modern times." And for a while it seemed perhaps he was, because who in his party dared say out loud that he had not a conservative suit in his closet?

Sure, half of Turnbull's Liberals have now found the courage to say their emperor indeed has no clothes: his warming theory is shot, and cutting our tiny emissions first is insane.

But too late. If the Liberals had had the discipline to check such facts a year ago and the courage to speak them, they'd never have made Turnbull their emperor. Such a glazed-eye believer could only lead them into error.

What pain they could have avoided if they'd heeded the tale of the emperor's new clothes, too, and dared to say what so many Australians now do: that these warming robes are a fraud.

But I could even have told this fable with Kevin Andrews as the star.

Not that Andrews is an emperor, or even naked. Rather the reverse.

Once there was a former Immigration Minister whom "everyone" said was a joke. Journalists in particular agreed they'd made him look an idiot over the Haneef case, in which he'd booted out an Indian doctor after getting dodgy advice from the Federal Police about his alleged connections to terrorists.

What a hiding he'd got in those last days of the Howard Government, when blood was in the water and Liberal ministers lacked even the fight any more to pull out one of their own.

But this week Andrews, a warming sceptic, declared Turnbull was too autocratic and had not told the truth when he claimed the party had agreed with his call to pass Rudd's colossal tax.

Andrews would challenge his leader.

How the journalists laughed - again. Andrews had no clothes, they snorted.

Yet with just one day to convince his party he was serious and could lead, Andrews won 35 votes to 48 against a motion for a leadership ballot.

Mark Davis in The Age was typical of most in the astonished media: "The stark reality of today's vote is that 35 Liberal MPs were so angry at Turnbull they stood ready today to install a plainly politically unviable candidate in Kevin Andrews."

HIS colleague Michelle Grattan echoed every word: "It was, as one Liberal put it, Malcolm versus no one." Laurie Oakes agreed on Channel 9.

You may wonder how so many Canberra journalists came to agree with each other that Andrews was naked.

Well, read Tony Wright, also in The Age, for a clue, as he mocks Andrews' defeat: "Ah, but what stories we would have been able to write about Kevin of the south, part-time marriage counsellor (seriously) and full-time scourge of wrong-headed ideas emanating from anyone to the Left of Genghis Khan. It would have been wonderful," one of the scions of the press gallery muttered. "He would have been stuck into that old communist Bob Menzies within two days."

Aah, witness the media pack again consulting over a group line. Note the old Leftist groupthink, again deriding a conservative and a Catholic.

So what a surprise my wife got when she turned on the ABC's 7.30 Report on Wednesday to see Andrews interviewed, and found not some drooling bigot but a sane, measured and polished man, speaking in clear, spin-free sentences.

"I wasn't told Andrews would be like this," she said, and I had to agree.

Andrews had announced himself. It wasn't a boy who'd spoken, but a man of gravity, and perceptions of him won't be the same.

And did you see his new clothes? Very nice.