Finally Free From Family First's Fraudulent Fuckwit Fielding Festival Flops
The warmists less public defeat was the failure of what had become known as the F9 event: the Finally Free From Family First's Fraudulent Fuckwit Fielding Festival. July 1 marked the arrival of the newly elected senators and the departure of those elected in 2004, including Steven Fielding of the Family First party.
Steve Fielding owed his election to the peculiar voting system for the Australian Senate. Votes are transferred from candidates who have more than needed to be elected or and from whoever is last after each transfer. Thus the strategy for parties to avoid giving votes to their real rivals is to recommend transfer (or set as default transfer) of the surplus votes to some unelectable non-entity. Normally this strategy works because there are plenty of unelectable non-entities to go round, and so it was in 2004. However Steve Fielding's stand-out qualities as a unelectable non-entity attracted the attention of so many other parties, that he collected their transferred votes and was duly elected to the Senate.
Senator Fielding achieved prominence in non core climate science, travelling to the USA to learn climate science from the Heartland Institute. Back in Australia his climate advisors were Bob Carter, David Evans, Bill Kininmonth and Stewart Franks. Professor Franks became famous for his analysis that would have the Murray Darling basin move 2.79 degrees north in 58 years
Senator Fielding quickly adopted the Friends of Science carbon dioxide/temperature graph, even going to the extent of having it on a sandwich board that he wore whenever near television cameras.
An early slip by Senator Fielding was to confuse the words "physical" and "fiscal". This is a perfectly natural slip for a Hayekist who defines the natural world in terms of the economic principle that "any science that implies the need for government regulation must be wrong". However this link was hastily suppressed with the cover story that Senator Fielding was just stupid. The revised version was that the senator was dyslexic so that the final consensus that Senator Fielding was stupid and dyslexic successfully covered his Hayekist bent.
In the lead-up to the second Gulf War, George W. Bush had praised John Howard as a strong leader (who did what the US wanted) compared to weak leaders like Gerhard Schroeder (who did what his countrymen wanted). Opposition leader Tony Abbott proposed to emulate this strength by (a) calling for a plebiscite on the carbon tax, and (b) announcing that if elected he would ignore the result. This planned show of strength was scuppered by Senator Fielding voting against the plebiscite in a final burst of
The Finally Free From Family First's Fraudulent Fuckwit Fielding Festival had been in serious trouble long before it was upstaged by Monckton's pre-emptive self-destruction. A proposed highlight of the event had been to have Steve Fielding receive the inaugural Richard Dawkins Award for the Person Who Has Done Most To Discredit Christianity From Within (Australian Protestant division). However, these plans came unstuck when it was realised that Fielding's dyslexia meant that he might be disqualified if it turned out that his imaginary friend was a dog rather than a god.
Prof Dr Moritz Lorenz. Sarah Palin School of Geography, Economics and Quantum Computing, University of Narbethong, West Island Campus, NZ
