Greens co-founder Drew Hutton's gender ideology awakening does not excuse his ignorant anti-gas, anti-fracking campaign that has made us all poorer

Sky News AU

2 days ago

All credit to Drew Hutton, a transgender ideology refusenik expelled from the Greens Party for defending the truth.
Hutton says the Greens Party he was instrumental in creating has been hijacked by 'a transgender and queer cult that has come to control key decision-making positions'.
Yet spare us the misplaced nostalgia for a sane and sensible Green Party that has supposedly been stolen.
The modus operandi of cults has defined the Greens from the beginning.
The demand for adherence to a sacred doctrine, the creation of a moral hierarchy, the demand for ritual affirmation, and the shaming of heretics have always been the Greens' standard operating procedure. Greens members have always been distinguished by their sanctimony and an absolute mindset.
So what's changed?
Some of us find it hard to draw a moral distinction between the imposition of genderist ideology based on lies and mistruths and many other examples of deceptive conduct the Greens have engaged in over the years.
We may agree with Hutton that transgender ideology is built on the monstrous lie that a transgender biological male is an actual woman.
We may decide that the consequences for women and girls are intolerable.
Yet we should not overlook the considerable damage caused by false panic about catastrophic global warming, bleached coral, the demonisation of coal, the fabrication of Aboriginal history, the scapegoating of Australian farmers and countless other examples of evil clown-like behaviour over the last half a century.
The cumulative harm is incalculable.
Humans have been denied the benefits of advanced technology, such as nuclear power, and have been punished with inflated energy prices, while bearing the brunt of reduced prosperity and opportunities.
Billions of dollars of scarce capital that could have been invested productively have been misallocated to unproven technologies, such as green hydrogen and wind turbines.
Rural communities have watched their landscapes transformed by land-hungry renewable energy generators and high voltage power lines.
The green movement has turned a blind eye to the loss of native fauna and swathes of natural vegetation, just as ideologues dismissed the damage they caused as the unavoidable consequences of the class struggle.
So, with great respect to Hutton, what exactly has changed?
The presumption of superior wisdom, a priori reasoning, moral panic and an intolerance of dissent has been the modus operandi of social justice crusades from eugenics to Black Lives Matter and Palestine.
The assertion that the scientific evidence is settled isn't new, nor is the outrage towards any proposal to conduct independent studies.
Those who advocate for an alternative approach are branded as saboteurs.
Racists, climate change deniers, homophobes and transphobes are simply different words for anyone who has the temerity to disagree.
Like medieval witch hunts, the forcefulness of public condemnation serves to silence others.
Hence, the ideologues insulate themselves from the feedback of reality, protected in a concrete casing of groupthink.
Thus, they remain mentally and physically isolated from the consequences of their action, unaware that their solution to an imagined crisis frequently creates a real one.
The chronic shortage of gas on Australia's East Coast, which is driving up fuel prices, weakening reliability, and jeopardising business, is the direct result of a crusade against a fake problem in which Hutton was intimately involved.
In the early 2010s, Hutton harnessed the legitimate concerns of Queensland farmers in the Surat Basin to campaign against the development of coal-seam gas.
The Lock the Gate movement, which he helped to establish, contrived to create moral panic against fracking, spreading fear that it would contaminate the water supply, cause the uncontrolled escape of flammable gas and cause seismic underground reactions.1
Never mind that the practice of hydraulic fracturing is a well-established, safe technology that has been in use for more than 50 years.
An extensive CSIRO report in 2020 found the risks from fracking could be managed with proper regulation and good site management.
Never mind that the Surat Basin coal seams have high natural permeability and gas content, which means that there was very little in need of fracking if at all.
Yet Lock the Gate played the Armageddon card for all it was worth, taking their disinformation campaign national.
In 2015, Hutton declared the imposition of a moratorium on gas extraction in Victoria to be 'a historic moment'.
He boasted that Lock the Gate had forced coal seam gas development to a standstill in NSW.
A decade later, the cost of Lock the Gate's campaign against a safe, cheap and efficient way of producing gas is incalculable.
Victoria has been importing every megajoule of gas it can beg, borrow or steal from the coal seam gas wells in Queensland.
The gas is pumped on a constrained and inadequate network of pipes, starved of capital investment and political support.
Now Victoria is considering importing liquid natural gas from overseas, an expensive and energy-intensive solution to the gas crisis created not by the fecklessness of the free market or President Putin but by an ignorant and disingenuous campaign by the Greens.
So, before we start getting misty-eyed about olden-day greenies like Bob Brown and Hutton wrapping their arms around trees and chaining themselves to bulldozers to save Mother Nature, we would do well to imagine how different Australia might now be if it wasn't for the cult they led.
We might ponder how much richer it would be if public debate hadn't been infected by a reality-defying, quasi-religious ideology that has been trying to reverse industrial and economic progress for the best part of half a century.
Our best hope is that gender ideology represents peak irrationality—beyond which common sense may finally prevail.
We live in hope that the patent absurdity of the Greens' latest obsession may be the straw that brings the edifice crashing down under the weight of its foolishness.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a regular contributor to Sky News Australia