It's a sign of the times when actors push PM's buttons

Keisha Castle-Hughes and Lucy Lawless.

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IF COPENHAGEN 2009 was any indication, we will be bequeathing a rather wild planet to our grandkids. Global warming may no longer be credible, but climate change is, and there can be little doubt that we are living in interesting times.

I am not a sceptic on such matters. There is sufficient empirical proof to concede that the Earth is warming up and the weather, more unstable. The only debate is around the effect of human activity upon that effect. Again, I'm sure that humankind must play some role.

But that's the point I part company with the environmental doomsayers. The planet has been hotter – much, much hotter – on many past occasions and it has not signalled the end of humankind. The animal kingdom, including us, has adapted and the winners were those who adapted best.

As it stands, New Zealand will do exceptionally well out of a warmer world. We will be growing food in beneficent climes. It makes one want to dash out and buy a Hummer, put in a coal burner and upgrade the whiteware. Or get a cow.

Apparently our ruminant friends – literally the stomach and udder of our current economy – are responsible for a fair few greenhouse gases. So vile is their flatulent influence that the Greens would prefer that we treat them as the new possum. Which, ironically, is half the reason that we 1080 poison possums anyhow – as TB vectors that may infect our dairy herds.

Certainly John Key's initial instincts were right and that was to avoid last year's Scandinavian circus. His trade minister, Tim Groser, had opined as early as February 2009 that nothing could be achieved. He was right.

But the combined entreaties of brainless actors and over-exposed comedians finally did for him. They gained sufficient publicity from gullible media outlets to embarrass the prime minister into "doing something". Which consisted of wasting taxpayer dosh by milling around Denmark.

Besides, if actors were innovative thinkers then they wouldn't be actors.

They'd be driving down the ratings of some breakfast TV show somewhere. Or getting a real job that allowed them to actually have a personality instead of the Sybil-like charms they appreciate for their roles. Quite why Key considered the views of Lucy Lawless, Keisha Castle-Hughes and the like to be more important than his foreign ministry is beyond me.

Not that Copenhagen wasn't illustrative. It confirmed the impotence of the United Nations, the intractability of China and the impossibility of reconciling the diametric views of the developing and the developed world. None of these truths will be changing soon.

Which leaves us all where we started. With emissions trading legislation that won't make a blind bit of difference to climate change and the continued nonsense that is gesture politics.

This was best encapsulated last week by former prime minister and now United Nations apologist Helen Clark. Clark wants us to all get involved in the jolly hockey sticks that is Earth Hour. It's a specious bit of nonsense where we turn off the electric lights at 8.30pm one Saturday night and invite burglars to work through the shadow.

Apparently this is meant to prove that we love our planet. Bollocks. It is yet another useless gesture in place of real action. Like White Ribbon Day. When men who don't beat up their partners tell the world that they've had enough of domestic violence.

Forgetting that women are often as likely to be the abusers, and that the men who most require the message won't be affected.

But that is the nature of 21st-century politics. Never address the real problem: go for the feel-good gesture. For example, we won't remove kids from the environment that abuses them – we'll just transfer them to the wider whanau. Where they can abuse them.

Similarly, we won't worry about the madness that is the Middle East. Instead we'll pick on a lone Israeli tennis player and chant repeatedly that she has blood on her hands. And that the staple diet of rocket attacks, tank incursions and suicide bombers is, really, all her fault.

Of course, the worst problem with gesture politics is that sometimes they work. The boycott of apartheid South African sports teams being a case in point. Now we have a South Africa that is actually worse under the mad Jacob Zuma than it ever was under the racist regimes of Verwoerd or Vorster.

Similarly, if the Greens and their activist allies ever got their way on climate change then we'd be converted to a hunter-gatherer society that froze in the winter and rarely washed. A bit like your average South African slum.

But no. Gesture politics remains with us. We will be celebrating all manner of special days this year to remind us that we don't really give a stuff about the stated object for the other 364 days of the year. There will be the Day of the Elderly, Earth Day, White Ribbon Day, Deaf Day, Blind Day, Dog Day, Dyslexic Ayd and a Day for those who were cruelly circumcised in a previous generation.

Best to ignore the lot of them. Especially those promoted by prominent actors and former prime ministers seeking to substitute insult for insight.

michael.laws@wanganui.govt.nz