Copenhagen? Nero rules

If no one else will say it, I will: Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, as wimpy and/or reactionary a pack as the coalition parties have ever fielded, is now run by a mixture of fundamentalists and zealous bigots.

That the pugnacious Tony Abott has put Philip Ruddock into his leadership team is symptomatic of the tragic return of the parties to everything I believe to have been distasteful about the Howard years, an era I saw as pockmarked by war crimes, child abuse, human rights violations, environmental degradation, the humiliation of the nation’s original owners . . . Mind you, “the economy” didn’t do too badly!

That’s not to say a lot of the above is not still going on under the supervision of the Rudd team. Rather, it is to say that, at last, voters will get clear and real choices come next year’s poll.

Now they will be able to give their tick to:

— A bunch of hicks who will drag us back into John Howard’s deceitful feudalism (remember Work Choices?)

— The funny sort of trying-to-please-everyone-but-not-getting-anywhere-very-much governance that has become the hallmark of the prissy Kevin Rudd and his eager beavers

— A Greens team that, despite the largely constructive policies it offers, is starting to look more and more like the kind of philosophically expedient mob that political parties tend to become when they sense that, fortuitously, a large slice of votes might be up for grabs.

None of these options gives cause for hope.

Which brings me to Copenhagen. There the auguries suggest the talkfest will produce a resolution that will protect the environment without preventing “the economy” from allowing big business to continue coining billions in return for just enough bread and circuses to maintain hoi polloi apathy. (It’s confusing following the media these days: all that angst about our catastrophically threatened planet; and all that relief and joy that “the economy” is roaring back to its old carbon-polluting best.)

Just as bigots and zealots on one side and Greens on the other breathed sighs of relief when Abbott torpedoed Penny Wong’s emissions trading scheme (one side because it was too tough, the other because it was piss-weak), the two ends of the global-warming debate will find cause to celebrate if Copenhagen doesn’t come up with anything better than a carbon reduction target of, say, 4% (on 2005 levels) by 2020.

Those on the “right” (it’s still a good word to describe the totally deranged) will feel that their salaries and super will be safe (because the “economy” will have been saved) and, in their ignorance, they will be able to charge happily ever onwards enjoying their high-life indulgences. Bugger the kids, bugger the grandkids . . .

And those who believe it is more important to save the planet — rather than humanity — will celebrate at knowing that Earth will be able to start healing itself as soon as the teeming billions that have brought their environment to its present sorry, disfigured state — having finally signed off on their mass-suicide strategy — will soon be gone.

Lunacy, which seems to have driven humanity since it chose to see itself as an observer rather than part of biodiversity, may well be a characteristic that Gaia (for want of a better name) cunningly granted our life form alone, just in case our excesses became, well, too excessive for the good of the biosphere. I’m with the scientists who believe humanity has passed its point of no return. So, to my kids and grandkids, I say: “Sorry, we simply knew not what we were doing. What’s more, we never really cared.”