Bridget McKenzie (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Doin’ what comes Nat-urally Oh the joys of Australia’s climate change debate, where the government is by turns feted and condemned for a meaningless and far-too-late commitment it’s still yet to actually make. So today Bridget McKenzie has called Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s support for a carbon neutral economy by 2050 the “worst kind of vacuousness over values”. She adds, magnificently, that too many federal MPs are worried about being “cool” rather than “the consequences of their decisions” (“Now, Josh, if you have to vaguely allude to action on climate change to impress them, then those kids aren’t really your friends”).

The Nationals have always had an interesting take on the concept of a Coalition. In 2018 Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce called then-PM Malcolm Turnbull “inept” when the pair were at war over Joyce’s affair with a staffer. Until he resigned in March 2017, George Christensen’s role as chief whip didn’t stop him threatening to cross the floor roughly every 18 seconds. New South Wales Nationals leader John Barilaro attempted to bring down his Coalition partners late last year, back when NSW was one of the most successful states in managing COVID.

So why should McKenzie (who, let’s not forget, recently got her job back after sports rorts made her one of the few people to breach the Morrison’s government’s standards) expect any pushback on this latest outburst?

Blanched The following passage in last week’s Washington Post has curiously escaped much notice over here. Burning, an Amazon-funded doco made by Oscar-winning filmmaker Eva Orner about Australia’s devastating 2019-20 fire season, was to have Cate Blanchett onboard as an executive producer, until:

… Shortly after being shown a cut of the movie that offered pointed criticism of Australia’s centre-right Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Blanchett asked that her name be removed from the project … Blanchett’s company is still listed in a producing role, but her name is no longer in the credits. She also has not engaged in any publicity efforts for the film and is not currently scheduled to appear on its behalf at any upcoming public screenings. Orner was taken aback by the sudden about-face from someone she believed to be a staunch ally …

If true — Blanchett’s people declined to comment — the obvious question is why? Unless she intends to run the Sydney Theatre Company again what could the long-term advocate for action on climate change have to lose by endorsing a piece critical of our prime minister?

Colonialism 101 While the AFR has run some bizarre op-eds in its time — usually missives from extremist neoliberals demanding Hobbesian capitalism — one ideology we didn’t expect to see defended in its pages was colonialism. But yesterday it ran a piece from the UK’s Telegraph by Cambridge don and right-wing historian David Abulafia. Abulafia isn’t well known in these parts, but those who followed Brexit some years back might recall him as one of the relatively small group of public intellectuals who tried to lend Brexit some sort of philosophical coherence and legitimacy.

Abulafia was moved by the plight of a Tory politician to lament “the woke view is that anything that can be labelled as ‘colonialism’ is inherently bad”, before going on to suggest that things weren’t all terrible under the British empire, that there was plenty of imperialism outside Western countries as well, that critics of colonialism didn’t define it well (when in doubt, throw in a definitional query to look like you’ve fundamentally undermined your opponent) and even that the British empire was a kind of accident.

Empires were not all created as the result of a grand masterplan organised by white male Europeans. The historian Sir John Seeley opined that the British empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Cromwell never intended to capture Spanish Jamaica. The East India Company, not the British government, laid the higgledy-piggledy foundations of British India.

We actually found this argument convincing. Who among us hasn’t got up in the morning and established a global empire based on slavery, exploitation and military dominance without meaning to? Who can honestly say they’ve never accidentally occupied entire continents, engaged in mass extermination of the inhabitants, incorporated them into an exploitive economic system to serve the interests of the imperial country, and used the citizens of their imperial dominions as cannon fodder against other imperial powers? Let he who is without colonies cast the first stone.

What we can’t understand is why the Fin is running this neo-colonialist drivel. It’s one thing to publish it in the ruins of an imperial power. Quite another to publish it in a country where First Peoples are still living with the impacts of occupation and colonisation every day of their lives.