Phillip Adams (30 page)

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How to elect a president
: If the Australian Government asked the people whether they wanted the government or the people to choose a president, they would want to do it themselves, but Adams has no confidence in that model. The 1999 republic referendum failed because the question was poorly phrased. Asked whether voters wanted to alter the constitution to replace the Queen and the governor-general with a president chosen by a two-thirds majority of federal MPs, only 45.13 per cent of voters (and a minority in all states) said yes. Adams told me: ‘People don't realise that they don't elect the prime minister. The Labor Party or Liberal MPs do. And if the voters elected a president, this figure would have a bigger mandate that the prime minister, which would put a big strain on the system. The kind of people I would like to see as president would never put up their hands for a popular vote. You would never get someone like Sir William Deane (governor-general from 1996 to 2001) to run for president although he would have been terrific in the job. Perhaps the best way would be a halfway house: Parliament prepares a short list and the voters choose the person they want from that.'

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Why electorate is conservative
: Adams pointed out to me that, as the pace of change accelerates, people become frightened and discomforted. So they turn back and look for simpler answers or they become angry and can then be attracted to groups such as One Nation.

Some become Islamic fundamentalists. In a world where everything changes by the hour, they look for people with simple answers. And because they become angry about the pace of change, they listen to shock jocks who yell, and they buy strident tabloids.

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Community groups grow:
Many pent-up progressive attitudes are being expressed not by political parties but by community groups. Australians act together and decisively in a crisis such as the 2004 Asian tsunami or the 2009 Victorian bushfires. (Also the floods in January 2011 — author.) Adams said in
The Weekend Australian
Magazine
on February 28, 2009: ‘The worst brings out the best. The bushfires were beyond belief, beyond description, beyond bearing. Yet a sense of community was created even as communities were being destroyed. That's the great paradox of such havoc. Suddenly, sometimes too late, people know and care about their neighbours. The Victorian fires were Australia's 9/11.

‘Australians have always worried about national identity. We quarrel over it, we fret about it. The bushfires ended the argument. But will it last? When the smoke has cleared, when the ashes are cold, will the sense of identity, of community, endure? The communal energies released by the fires, and the sense of mutual responsibility they intensified, came at a time when we need to rethink just about everything — from capitalism to the climate.'

Adams has his doubts about a rising tide of community spirit although the social researcher Hugh Mackay says there has been a profound change. Adams told me, ‘Hugh talks about a future when forty per cent of Australians live alone because they choose not to get married or not to have children, causing a new real-estate phenomenon. They live in alienating cities but they join up and form alliances. They don't join political parties because they are bitter about party politics but they throng to non-government organisations and community and pressure groups. More people are engaged in politics outside the parties than probably ever before.'

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The biggest concern:
‘The ongoing crisis of climate change is the biggest community concern,' Adams told me. ‘Everything is over-heated — the planet, the economy, the population and industry. The world has to turn temperatures down, to stop over-using resources and having so many babies, and the only hope that this will happen is through community pressure.' In The Weekend Australian Magazine on March 24, 2007, Adams wrote: ‘While we squander trillions in wars — wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars on drugs and terror — the most important war, on carbon dioxide, gets small change, tokenism and political grandstanding. Yet this is our first truly world war. The last time I counted the dead from decades of terrorism, it was about thirty thousand and most were victims of internal conflict in places like Sri Lanka, not of the transnational bin Laden brand. Yet climate change is affecting all of us and it won't stop after a few years. Already it is too late to stop it; the best we can hope is to take the foot off the accelerator and it will linger. Or failing an effective response, it will intensify for centuries.

‘This is the biggest war in human history,' Adams continued, warming to one of his favourite campaigns. ‘The weather threatens to impact on health, security and food, with even the optimists agreeing that millions will be fighting for food and water — or for land to stand on. Those disposed from Bangladesh to the Pacific islands will create wave after wave of boat people, many of whom will head our way. Yet it seems that the greatest concern of NSW and federal politicians is voter volatility in mining areas.' There are 1,600 applications to open or extend coal mines in NSW and no coal application in the state has ever been rejected. The Commission for the Future began agitating about climate change from its formation in 1985. (Adams was its foundation chairman; its aim was social and economic research but its federal government budget was progressively reduced and it was closed in 1998.) It had the climate-change data, the information and the knowledge but the wisdom to deal with it was in short supply.

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The climate change fiasco:
After Adams was made the first chairman of the Commission for the Future in 1985, it met with Australia's top scientists and decided to make climate change (then called the less-palatable global warming) its top priority. Barry Jones, as Prime Minister Bob Hawke's minister for science, had come up with the idea of the commission so the government could look beyond the election cycle to see what long-term problems should be tackled. He particularly wanted to get a dialogue going between the public and scientists who talked in their own language. The commission, with Adams as chairman, arranged for climate-change scientists to address public meetings in town halls all over Australia by satellite, the first time this had been done.

Adams told me that the more the scientists predicted a catastrophe, the more the audiences seemed to like it. ‘It was a religious event,' he said. ‘People were not concerned about greenhouse gases coming from rice paddies or cattle; they wanted to hear about the evil automobile and the evil power factory. It was the start of a new religion. The scientific basis of climate change is rock solid. Idiots still deny it. It is a scientific fact but has been made a political issue. The world has to act on it or the world will be uninhabitable and we will die.'

So it is now 25 years since the commission and a whole range of scientists started agitating for action on climate-change — and successive Australian governments have done little about it except talk and worry about losing votes in industrial and mining seats.

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The answer is solar:
John Gorton had just retired as prime minister in 1971 when Adams sat at a dinner next to the scientist Sir Macfarlane Burnet and his wife, who was dying of leukemia. The scientist attacked Gorton's idea of a nuclear Australia not just because of the threat of leukemia but also because nuclear power stations are an invitation to terrorists. And you can't get rid of the n-waste. Adams told me the simple answer was solar power. Australia should make solar energy its next Snowy Mountains Scheme. He claimed that if Australia built a solar reflector 165km by 160km in the middle of the Nullabor Plain, it could create enough power for the whole world. That was in the 1970s. Nothing much has happened with solar power in Australia since then. And the coal industry had continued to make fortunes by digging more coal, exporting it and using it to fire power stations that fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

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The system is broken:
Phillip Adams told me: ‘My concern is that the last time we had a severe recession, it led to Hitler, World War 11 and 55 million people being killed. So if you add climate change and population pressure, no-one — least of all me — can predict what will happen. The system is broken. You can't fiddle with bits of it. The whole situation has to be dealt with, because as the Indians and Chinese buy cars and live like us, the planet will boil. You and I are sitting here today,' Adams told me. ‘It looks like an ordinary day. The sun is shining; there is milk in the fridge and petrol in the car. But we don't know what will happen. All we know is that the world is a total mess. Everything needs to change, personal behaviour, communal behaviour and all tiers of government have to be brought into play if we are to get through this crisis. We have the data, the information and the knowledge, but where is the wisdom? We have taken centuries to get where we are and we've mucked it up. And we didn't have the brains to head-off AIDS, which is caused by poverty intensified by over-population.'

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Rome and the condom:
On no subject is Adams more aggressive than Rome's prohibition of artificial contraception. In The Australian on July 15, 2008, he wrote: ‘Vast numbers of people have died, are dying and will die because of this insane and utterly reprehensible prohibition. The Vatican's prohibition of the condom is on the short list of the cruellest, most appalling pieces of public policy in human history. It is a death sentence passed on to millions, including millions as yet unborn. The two greatest crises on earth are both condom-related: AIDS and over-population. Climate change will continue to accelerate while we continue to crowd the planet with ever-more climate-changers, seven billion and counting. With Catholicism fast losing ground to the fast-faith franchises, the future of the Catholic religion lies in Africa. There, at least, its market share is booming. The condemnation of the condom guarantees life to millions of surplus human beings while condemning millions to death. The fact that this cheap, simple and ancient device can prevent HIV as well as pregnancy will not be admitted by Rome.'

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Cheer yourself up again:
Never in human history, wrote Adams in The Weekend Australian Magazine on June 20, 2009, have so many people lived in what might be described as freedom, actual or comparative. The religious and political monoliths have been crumbling. If you're not in a war zone or dying from malnutrition or a pandemic, there's a good chance that your life expectancy has vastly increased. Previously fatal diseases can be cured and it doesn't hurt so much to go to the dentist. Education and literacy, once the province of the aristocracy and their priesthoods, are now, like travel, democratised. And we know thousands of times more than our ancestors did.'

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Saving families in distress:
In The Weekend Australian Magazine on June 21, 2007, Adams wrote: ‘A 13-year-old girl dies in wretched motel where her teenage pimp has forced her to service one more of many clients, a man in his fifties. She dies in agony after injecting herself with heroin laced with battery acid. A few miles away a 14-year-old girl is hanging out with her friends. To deal with their anger and boredom, they start “bashing a derro”. Screaming in terror, he falls to the ground, where she joins in kicking him. Until she recognises his face. It's her father. These scenes did not take place in remote Aboriginal communities but in inner Melbourne suburbs. This column has reported many similar stories concerning kids known to John Embling and Heather Pilcher in the Families in Distress Foundation, which was funded by readers for decades. Horrors like these, plus worsening health, forced my heroic friends to retire. Like the thousands of children they helped, John and Heather were old beyond their years.' Adams told me that although the foundation has been closed, he still receives letters and emails asking how John and Heather are and wanting to donate.

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Cruel and stupid drug laws:
Adams clearly remembers when, 28 years ago, Barry Jones phoned to say John Button's son David had been found dead from a drug overdose. Earlier, Adams had briefly seen Button (minister for industry and commerce in the Hawke and Keating governments) at Sydney Airport and Button had told him, ‘David's a junkie. You've got kids.' Adams had thought his own children were safe from drugs, but if David Button was addicted, the intelligent son of gifted and privileged parents, anyone's children were at risk. Just after Button himself died, aged 74, from pancreatic cancer in April 2008, Adams wrote in The Weekend Australian Magazine: ‘John argued against our cruel and stupid drug laws.' Adams says addictive drugs should be legalised.

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‘The pornography of violence':
This is a phrase Adams remembers using in the censorship wars of the late 1960s. The church and state were determined to maintain sexual taboos but were turning blind eyes to films of people killing each other. In The Weekend Australian Magazine on May 17, 2008, Adams wrote: ‘These days, actors are shot, knifed, minced and torn apart with much more skill. Prosthetic wounds and burns are much more convincing and digital destruction blows the mind as well as the heads off the extras. Yet the churches are still obsessed with sex. Though the pornographic violence in video games encourages our kids to butcher human beings on a Rwandan scale, religious leaders sit beneath their phallic spires and mammiferous domes bleating about bonking. Censorship is dead. Everyone's got a camera or a phone with a prying eye and do-it-yourself porn is a bigger hobby than stamp collecting. For generations movies have taught us what to eat, wear and drive. As sure as Microsoft programs our computers, Hollywood programs our minds. Porn has profoundly changed teenage sexual behaviour. Anal, oral and other sexual variations are now as familiar as Tupperware — and it's not just porn downloads that are responsible. What kids are seeing on free television, from Big Brother turkey slaps to the blow-by-blow depictions of blowjobs on Underbelly, are even more educational. Hence my incredulity when researchers tell me that the pornography of violence doesn't make crims more violent or our kids more predisposed. We live in a culture of what A Clockwork Orange called “ultraviolence”.'