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'Age of reason' threatened: Anderson

FORMER deputy prime minister John Anderson has lamented what he says is the hypocrisy and blatant disregard of evidence-based decision making in public and political debate on issues like energy resources and agricultural biotechnology.

“It’s hard to know where to start and it’s hard to not become cynical and even depressed about it,” he told Fairfax Media.

“I say that because the debate has become so stymied, it’s so irrational and it’s so hard to get people’s focus away from themselves and their perceived needs and onto the really big issues of a fair go for everyone on the planet.

“Frankly, you only see indefensibly selfish debates around a range of topics which have to be explored and dealt with much more honestly, if we’re to meet the challenge in front of us.

“Whether it’s land availability, whether it’s water availability, whether it’s energy, everyone forgets the only reason that we’ve got to a population of 7.3 billion from the one billion or so before we started using fossil fuels, is because of cheap and accessible fossil fuels and that age is not over.

“And we will not lift countless hundreds of millions of people out of poverty into a decent life standard without fossil fuels being used, for the foreseeable future.

“The shocking thing to me is the western world, which prides itself on being more rational than ever, is now in fact becoming less rational and even superstitious.”

Mr Anderson spoke at the Crawford Fund annual conference in Canberra last week.

Mr Anderson - a co-patron of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council of Australia - said opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops could be “lumped” together with the emotive, dumbed-down public debate around resource projects.

“You’re seeing irrationalism everywhere and you’re not seeing people committed to evidence based, fact derived decision making processes at all,” he said.

“I am staggered at the number of experts we now have in just about every field but when you actually look at their qualifications, they don’t have any.

“It seems that if you can breathe you have an equally valid opinion on every subject, regardless of whether up you’re up against a Nobel Prize winning scientist or somebody who would know absolutely nothing about the subject.

“This is very, very dangerous indeed and if we’re not careful the biggest losers will be the world’s poor but we’ll be losers as well.”

Mr Anderson said people living in the western world needed to display stronger commitment to evidence based rationale decision-making and be more aware of the different needs of people living in the world’s developing countries.

“If we can’t find that rationality again, we have to ask ourselves, is the age of reason over?” he said.

“Are we now going to return to a new intellectual dark age and what will be the economic and social price of it?”

Mr Anderson said disregard for science and proven fact was illustrated during public debate on mining and resource projects “all over the place”, not just the recently approved Shenhua Australia $1 billion Watermark Project open cut coal mine, on the Liverpool Plains.

Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt approved the mine subject to stringent controls under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999 following five years of unprecedented scientific scrutiny during state and federal assessment processes but protests have continued, including from leading farm groups.

Mr Anderson said the problem was if resource opponents can’t win the public argument on the facts of the project “they will try and win on emotion and attacking other people”.

“As I say, is this the end of the age of reason; are we going to return to a new intellectual dark-age and what will be the economic and social price of doing so?" he said.

“It’s a western disease.

“I’ve been talking to people from Holland about how it’s also starting to inflict their society now and they’ve been using high tech in just about every field you can imagine to become the world’s second largest exporter by value of processed and value added foods.

“One of the most interesting hypocrisies we’re seeing at the moment is for US President Obama who is being praised for getting American green-house gas emissions down.

“But how has he done it?

“The answer is fracking - but in Australia we’re all pariahs, according to our own green activists, because we can’t get emissions down but who’s stopping fracking?

“We need to remember that many of these people are not actually so much environmentalists as they are anti-capitalists.

“That’s ok – they can do that in a free society – but let’s have a bit of integrity about their real motives.

“Is this the end of the age of reason; that is the question before us?”

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