Thursday
Sep192013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Flannery flung out
Sep 19, 2013 Bureaucrats Climate: Parliament Foreign Greens New Australian PM Tony Abbott has got straight down to the job of cleaning the Augean stables of public sector sinecures. Top of the list seems to have been Tim Flannery, the head of the Climate Commission.
PROFESSOR Tim Flannery has been sacked by the Abbott Government from his $180,000-a-year part-time Chief Climate Commissioner position, with the agency he runs to be dismantled immediately.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt called Prof Flannery this morning to tell him a letter formally ending his employment was in the mail.
Good things happen when conservatives are in power.
Reader Comments (57)
Excellent news. But will the conservatives in this country have the guts to do similar by getting rid of DECC and the Climate Change Act?
NeilC,
No, they don't even have the balls to amend it, which they could easily do as it is within the act.
Not in this country.
(I am in the land of Debin and Yeo and our fellow Tory rulers).
I dunno.
He was our asset and the warmers liability. Saves money though.
I hope our own politicians are watching these developments and noting how well they are playing with the average voter. It has been hard work trying to teach our politicians about the uncertainty of the "science" of AGW alarmist, but they need no schooling in the dark arts of vote-gathering and out-and-out popularism.
I shall enjoy the wailing and gnashing of teeth at Guardian Environment.
"Nay," responded the Kahn, "to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet -- to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best."
The holders of "climate change" sinecures all over the planet will tremble at this news. I chortle!
It will only be cause for celebration if he is flung out with the statutory minimum redundancy and finds more suitable employment, stacking shelves perhaps.
History would suggest he'll get a massive public sector bung and then find himself in a similar job provided by "friends" he has previously showered with public money.
Are there any instances of these serial failures falling back to the level of the common man? Look at Ehrlich for example.
I'll believe they're serious about reform when they throw out the 'plain packs' and re-allow bands on cigars!
This bloke has a nice little table of Flannery quotes coupled with rather droll comments.
http://phenell.wordpress.com/other-stuff/the-best-of-tim-flannery/
No worries Timbo, you can come over here and the DECC will give you a job, they love climate change
liarspedlars.Brillliant!
But let us hope that Australia's "loss" is not our "gain".
Remember Lewandowsky's bung from the Royal Society.
Evelyn Waugh pointed out years ago that (UK) Conservatives never turn the clock back. Look at the rubbish enacted under the Blair-Brown regime, Climate Change Act included. Has any of it been repealed?
Tim continued the hilarity with this comment today.
"However, Professor Flannery says he is not aware of any organisation that can do the same job - not even the CSIRO or universities.
"It's increasingly difficult for those groups to fill the role, partly because of the depth of capacity," he said."
I think he's overpraising CSIRO and the Universities, but there is no doubt he was not hamstrung by 'depth of capacity'.
Like SimonW I wonder what the contractual arrangements are in what appears to be a clear cut redundancy situation. It may be of course that he was employed on a consultancy type contract in which case the tap may turn off immediately, We can hope. There were other six 'commissioners' that have been given marching orders.
I note our host differentiates between 'conservatives' and 'Conservatives'. It's been a while since there've been any of the latter in power in the UK.
Great news. But remember, these people have endless access to lawyers, and the sympathy of the mainstream media. Expect this to become a cause célèbre demonstrating the ‘heartless ignorance’ of the new Australian government.
I preferred how they did it in Queensland: the climate big cheese had to stay on for a few months to sack all his staff and other humiliating tasks. I think he resigned after a few weeks, sparing any pay-offs.
Flannel face may well be doomed to clean the stables but Augeas ordered both his own son and Hercules to leave his kingdom at once after he bolloxed yet another job. I thought I saw him pumping gas, or was it serving fries......
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/18/climateer-tim-flannery-sacked-in-oz/#comment-1420993
'Philip Bradley says:
September 19, 2013 at 2:03 am
Flannery, or as I like to call him Flummery, was an embarassment. Graduated in English Literature. Some how got a tax payer funded gig digging up Kangaroo bones, which resulted in him getting a PhD in paleontology, and then went on to be a museum bureaucrat.
He knows bugger all about the climate, and bugger all about basic science and the scientific method.'
I take it most people who comment on here are retired? Or getting close to that age?
I take it most people who comment on here are retired? Or getting close to that age?
With age comes wisdom and a decline in gullibility ;-)
Not here they don't. I am now convinced that we have to endure a labour led coalition (by voting UKIP) in order to bring about a credible conservative opposition and, hopefully, a future government of proper conservatives and put an end to this soggy grey middle-of-the-road mis-management of our future.
I'm impressed as to how swiftly the new Oz government is being as good as its word..!
Shame the same can't be said about the UK - what with 'Dr No' (his own admission) and Mr Potato Head firmly in place on 'green' issues...
Flannery's past tense now.
Fling, flang, flung, Flannery
Flannery is the man who advised the Government that south-east Australia would be in permanent drought due to AGW, so no new catchment dams should be built, and the money spent on desalination plants instead.
Outcome: South-East Australia awash with water, billions of dollars wasted on (mothballed) desalination plants, not enough catchment to prevent the kind of flooding which killed 38 people in Queensland, while Flannery pocketed a fortune.
He’s getting off lightly, IMO.
Please DNFTT
@ Sep 19, 2013 at 9:50 AM | Unregistered CommenterGeoff Cruickshank
Must be the time of night, but your "depth of capacity" quote reminded me of the time a French intellectual was quizzed (by an Anglophone) over the context sensitivities of the French language.
He was asked, for example, whether one of his political enemies could fairly be termed a 'con'.
The intellectual pondered. "Non" he declared at last, "He has neither the depth nor capacity to please, therefore he cannot be a con."
Sorry.
Flannery is a man who raised a major scare over catastrophic AGW-driven sea level rises, and then bought himself a luxury house at high-tide level on the Hawkesbury River.
There is hardly a single Australian family who has not been damaged by the activities of this narcissistic rent-seeking hypocrite.
I repeat -- he is getting off lightly.
James P, your comment would seem to imply that there really is a connection between climate denialism and tobacco.
I wonder if Lewandowsky was right ;)
"Sep 19, 2013 at 2:07 PM | Phil D"
I had an overwhelming urge to FTT but could not decide what, from the ever expanding cornucopia, would be most appropriate.
I therefore contented myself with a deep and satisfying chuckle, which is however repeating on me.
Would drinking from the opposite side of an overfull glass help? Oh no............ that has set me off again!
Flim-flam Flummery has been sacked?!
This is great news, although he will surely get a cushy academic or consulting gig to help him drown his sorrows.
Or he can retire to his seaside home to watch the scary ocean tides......
Kudos to Abbott for not only making hollow pre-electoral promises but for actually following through with actions.
Kudos to Abbott for not only making hollow pre-electoral promises but for actually following through with actions.
There was something mad about having a state-appointed doomsayer at the first place. Sanity prevails again. With the zest he is purging the members of the climate doomsday cult from levers of power, Tony Abbott will soon make me regret not voting for him.
Can I add that Flannery used to be very popular with me in the 1990s, whereas now I hate his guts. I regret not saluting him with a dozen eggs on his face during one of his doom-mongering excursions in Sydney.
I really can't see any harm in Tim Flannery getting a real job, producing something of real value ...
It is on the far left that some argue people should be provided indefintely with money if they were once ... regardless of value and reality.
Flannery's books on studying kangaroos ("Country") and the search for PNG tree kangaroos ("Throwim Way Leg") are excellent reading, as is his collection of writings of early Australian explorers ("The Explorers") and introduction to the John Morgan memoir of escaped convict William Buckley who spent 30+ years with aborigines from 1803.
If only he'd stuck to that and eschewed climate policy power-seeking, his reputation and credibility would be intact.
John Cook was on TV tonight during the reporting of this on the ABC.
"It's in the ocean"
"Good things happen when conservatives are in power."
Only when the conservatives are real, Bishop.
Cameron hasn't got the balls to tackle these parasites in the UK, even if he did he'd have to ask Clegg. Since both have family making money from wind turbines there's no hope.
I wonder how long it'll be before UN sanctions are proposed - against countries that won't comply
He should be pay the money back too as he was clearly grossly negligent. Charges of corporate manslaughter seem in order.
It is ironic that the Climate Commission is closed a few months after the hottest Australian Summer on record.
Tony Abbott has very quickly learned the old lesson. A good way to pretend that bad news does not exist is to shoot the messenger.
James P, your comment would seem to imply that there really is a connection between climate denialism and tobacco
Sep 19, 2013 at 2:41 PM | steveta_uk
And so there is. Visit the Heartland Institute and read almost identical propoganda on the denial of climate change and denial of smoking related diseases.
http://heartland.org/
@ EM
And what should one do to the messenger if he's a delusional rent-seeking morally incompetent blood-stained parasite?
"hottest Australian Summer on record"
that tends to happen during an interglacial period, it's quite natural, there's no need to panic
jaffa: the BOM is fiddling data to pretend that the Aus summer was hot. The satellite record proves otherwise.
In case anyone should think that being happy that a certain Climate Change Commisioner has been sacked shows bad taste, remember that this person was on a 180,000AUD annual salary for a part-time position while he retained his tenure at an Australian university.
People are losing their jobs because of the kind of rubbish Tim Flannery has been spouting. I don't know the actual number of coal jobs lost in Australia, but in the US another 4,000 coal miners lost their jobs this week as another coal mine closed in Virginia in the war on coal being waged by the Obama administration (something which he planned as a campaign pledge). I don't suppose any of these have the sinecure of a tenured position to fall back on so forgive me if I feel no remorse for a bit of gloating!
entropic >> "...almost identical propoganda on the denial of climate change and denial of smoking related diseases."
And the almost identical propaganda on the denial of the deleterious effect of windmills on health, known by Big Wind since 1989? Et tu brute.
The luvvies at the ABC and in the Fairfax press are spluttering with rage about this. Heh, heh.
No such sympathy has been forthcoming for those who lost their jobs, or didn't get new jobs in energy intensive projects, because of Flim-Flam and his pals' scaremongering. No, their sympathies are for this overpaid parasite and his ilk.
Such is the sorry state of the so-called Left today. They really don't give a damn about working people.
Bad thing happen, too, Your Grace, as one might expect from a bunch of tub-thumping, rednecks. Still, a crumb of amusement can be had from this particular forced departure.
One thing that puzzles me is the crowing from the AGWistas that temperatures are “the hottest on record!” As the records began during the little ice age, and no-one denies that it has warmed since then, why is anyone surprised that “highest records” are being reached? Someone on another site proudly triumphed that last century was “the hottest on record!” Well, yes… but, it was also the coldest on record, the driest on record and the wettest on record, there being no other century with the level of recording that the 20th century has given us.
EM, will you eat your words should Australia have the coldest summer on record next year? BTW, my understanding is that the hottest temperature recorded in Australia so far was in the 18th century. What really made the news earlier this year was the forest fires – which, curiously, are an essential part of the eco-system of the eucalyptus forests.
bosch, what "tub-thumping rednecks" are you referring to?
PM Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was formerly managing partner of a large law firm. Treasurer Joe Hockey has two degrees and was formerly employed in banking and finance. I could go on, but you get the drift. It is true that there are also a few people from rural backgrounds in the Ministry, but I do not regard farmers as a lesser form of life (pax Charlie Flindt). On the contrary, they tend to be practical and sensible, and bring a bit of balance into the mostly city-based political process.
There is an un-written rule of government which is that you NEVER repeal any of the previous government's legislation because if you do, they will do the same for you next time they are in power.
A few cycles of this, and the polulation may well decide that they need much less government, because all it does is get in the way.