At a dinner last night I found myself sitting next to a gentleman who was previously prominent in local politics and we had a very interesting chat. He was disparaging about environmentalists, saying that they were the same people that the Labour party had struggled to remove thirty years ago - the Trotskyists, the Militant Tendency and the like.
This makes a great deal of sense when you look at the modus operandi of many greens - the smears, the whispering campaigns, the ad-hominems and, as an excellent op-ed in Spiked describes, the rampant authoritarianism, opposition to free speech and crushing of dissent.
The outrage prompted by someone daring to suggest that debate over climate change might be a good thing, the shock that a politician might think that, yes, free and open political debate of an issue that could shape how society produces and consumes is important, the venom and ad hominems that have come the way of someone defending a principle - free speech - that anyone who cares about democracy ought to defend… it all goes to make Brandis’s point about ‘a new authoritarianism’ emerging, an attempt ‘to control the commanding heights of opinion’, ‘where rather than winning the argument [the new authoritarians] exclude their antagonists from the argument’.’ As Andrew Bolt put it in the Herald Sun, it amounts to something approaching a ‘dictatorship of the mind’.