Ignorance is Bliss
Watching Trump addressing world leaders last week at the United Nations, attacking and dismissing climate science as coming from ‘stupid people’ and decrying it as ‘the greatest con-job’, prompts an irresistible micro-parallel with the ignorance, denials and blatant falsehoods being perpetrated by proponents of the Macquarie Point stadium.
Short of calling them ‘stupid people’, the five, highly qualified delegates of the Tasmanian Planning Commission, selected and remunerated over the course of a year by the state government for this specific purpose (along with all previous government commissioned independent studies), have been summarily ignored by a Premier and by a treacherous opposition willing to shoot each and every recalcitrant messenger.
But herein lies the critical difference.
Unlike the predictable contrarianism of Trump – who can wilfully disparage independent studies he had nothing to do with – our small-pond Premier adopts the same disregard for planning experts chosen, hired and reimbursed in the veiled pretence of public scrutiny for the taxpayer who will also fund an uncosted project rebuffed at every planning and investment level. The TPC report was so conclusively damning that it provoked exquisite comic relief to hear our hand-clasping Premier’s rehearsed response later that same day – “There is nothing in the report that says it CAN’T be built!”