Spectator Australia diary

After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator:

I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian food is as fine as anywhere in the world: fresher than American, more orientally influenced than France and more imaginative than Britain. That was certainly not true the first time I visited Australia 37 years ago, when I slept in youth hostels and Ansett Pioneer buses, and ate rib-eye steaks for breakfast. I still remember with horror the moment I realized I had left my wallet on a park bench in Alice Springs, dazed after 31 hours on a bus. I went back and it was still there, wet from a lawn sprinkler.

Like Britain, Australia’s been confronting the costs of climate policies. The Abbott government has begun to deal with them robustly, whereas in Britain we are still in denial. Our opposition leader Ed Miliband has promised to “freeze” energy bills for two years if he gets into power – a threat that probably caused companies to push them up now -- even though it was he as Energy and Climate Change secretary who did most to load green levies on to consumers. Conservatively it looks like his Climate Act of 2008, with its targets for carbon emission cuts, will cost us £300 billion by 2030 in subsidies to renewable energy, in the cost of connecting wind farms to the grid, in VAT, in costs of insulation and new domestic appliances, and in the effect of all this on prices of goods in the shops. If people are upset about the cost of energy now, they will be furious by the election in 2015. I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but I did, in my maiden speech in the House of Lords in May: “One reason why we in this country are falling behind the growth of the rest of the world is that in recent years we have had a policy of deliberately driving up the price of energy.” David Cameron should take note that Tony Abbott is the first world leader elected by a landslide after expressing open skepticism about the exaggerated claims of imminent and dangerous climate change. Nor can greens argue that the issue was peripheral. The carbon tax was what won Mr Abbott his party’s leadership, and it was front and central in the election campaign. More and more politicians will be finding out that defending green levies on energy bills is more of an electoral liability than doubting dangerous climate change.

One of the more incoherent arguments for green energy policies, repeated unthinkingly by Mr Cameron recently, is that they are an “insurance policy” against future typhoons like the one that devastated the Philippines. Since there has been no increase in either frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones during the period of global warming since 1980 – if anything the reverse – and since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks “the global frequency of occurrence of
tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged”, this makes no sense. There are going to be typhoons in the Pacific whether it warms or not. What sort of insurance policy is it that costs you a fortune, does nothing to reduce the risk and does not pay out? The way to save lives from typhoons is to equip people with better shelter, communications, transport and rescue services – in short to make them richer. That’s what we have been doing, thanks to fossil fuels, which is why global death rates from storms are down by 55% since the 1970s.

Another issue that has parallels in Britain and Australia is freedom of speech. Julia Gillard’s government tried in its dying days to use the excuse of the phone hacking scandal in Britain bring in a clumsy form of press censorship. Did embarrassing revelations about a union slush fund have anything to do with it? Says Hedley Thomas of The Australian: “we may never know for certain, but the attempted regulation reeked of payback.” Thanks partly to a vigorous campaign by the Institute of Public Affairs, a free-market think-tank in Melbourne, she failed.

Payback is exactly how most British parliamentarians apparently see the issue of press regulation. Almost every MP and lord seems to have a sore memory of being viciously and inaccurately traduced by a British newspaper (I know I do: the Guardian regularly publishes hilariously nasty and misleading pieces about me). There is no doubt that if they could, politicians would use the threat of the expensive arbitration proposed by a new Royal Charter to intimidate journalists into self-censorship. It’s a very dangerous mood. Even lip service to freedom of the press is in pretty short supply in the House of Lords.

Hyde Park in Sydney is full of white ibises – though many are a dirty grey. Big birds with bare black heads and ludicrously long, curved beaks, they scavenge litter. A colony of them nesting in a palm tree made jabberwocky squawks as I walked beneath. This is new: white ibises colonized the city in the last two decades. It is a worldwide phenomenon – local wildlife becoming urbanized. Time was, only rats, sparrows, starlings and rock doves (town pigeons) lived in city centres. Increasingly, these face competition from more species that used to be too shy to come near human beings. London is now full of wood pigeons, not to mention foxes, sparrow hawks, ring-necked parakeets (from India) and even peregrine falcons. Because urban human beings – unlike rural ones – never kill wildlife, urban life is safer and more reliable.