It has been as hot as hell here in little Radelaide…the nick name comes from a typically Australian dig at the fact that there is nothing at all radical about Adelaide these days …but they are wrong.

In the last two weeks of Spring here we had temperatures of 40C at 8pm.  It was above 37C for four days over that period and the air hovered around 40C  for  a further three days – that is radical heat.  It is the hottest Spring heat wave in the more than 120 years they have been taking records.

The sky is like a blue-eyed blank stare. The beach is crowded on weekends even at 8.30 am – I joined the crowds just to cool down my core body temperature. But I won’t be going out too deep this summer because we had our first shark attack the other day at a beach about 30 km south of here.

We had our first bushfires in South Australia last week – some 700 km of farming country and scrub has been burnt through, as a hot northerly winds nurtured the spark from a lightning strike into a full-on  blaze.

I know I have been banging on about global warming over the year but it is hard to escape the fear that this might actually be the start of it. We have had three very dry years, our seasons have shifted so that they kind of blur between cold and dry to hot and dry. And the 24-7 news cycle that informs of fires, floods, tsunami, tornados, droughts, quakes and all other natural disasters around the globe, is having the same impact as brainwashing sessions – it is the seedbed in which our fears take root – founded or unfounded.

So while our politicians line up as believers or non believers in the global warming hypothesis, fighting tooth and nail for air time – is it because of post industrialized man-made carbon emissions or just one bad seasonal phase in the many million year weather history of the planet –– I want them to know one thing.

We don’t actually care who or what caused global warming, we want to know what we can do about it.  A friend believes we will do nothing until it is an unstoppable phenomenon – until countries go under the lapping seas and we are dealing with whole nations of boat people.

Now the issue has revealed a deep ideological fault line in the conservative ranks here between a wild and militant conservative core and the seemingly more balanced liberals in the Opposition. Despite being Liberal in name, the party is showing that what lies beneath is a highly rebellious, intransigent group of naysayers – I am not sure there are not some among them who think Darwin’s theory of evolution is left wing hooey.

Their stand against the Government’s proposed Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme has white anted the leader, the urbane, successful, former businessman Malcolm Turnbull, and is proving an international embarrassment to our PM.  Any dreams he had of attending Copenhagen with a policy in place in Australia are fast retreating as the Liberal/National party coalition bites ferociously at its own tail over the Bill.

Amendments agreed to by the Liberals in lengthy talks with the government, had received tacit acceptance, deals were made, gentlemen’s words were given, and then it all broke open.

Since then every eccentric, extreme dissenter in the Liberal ranks has been vox-popped on the steps of parliament house saying they will not pass the Bill. Out of the woodwork have come elected Liberal and National party politicians that are actually a bit scary. Usually rarely seen or heard beyond their regional radio and TV stations, many of them are the sorts you would move seats to avoid in a bar or a train.

Some of them are so bizarre you can make up a quick psychological stereotypes for them, “Crazy Aunt Sadie”, “Uncle Bob who never gets invited to Christmas dinner”, “pretentious Pete the pompous office geek”, “Bob the bully who’s wife always says very little”, “steely Sam the manipulative bastard”, “very serious Teetotal Tim, who found Jesus and lost his sense of perspective”.  These are elected members of our Government…what were people thinking?

And in our wonderful democracy this is the character of the people who will be allowed to make decisions on our behalf on an issue of difficult science and complex economics.

It makes me wonder why we don’t have a political house of review that requires people to have the brains and skill to really assess issues. I will answer my own question …because intellect is no guarantee of intelligence and intelligence is no guarantee of altruism and knowledge is no guarantee of ethics or honour. 

But in political circles, power and control seem to be the greatest prize, an aphrodisiac, an elixir, a golden grail, so desired that nothing else seems to matter. Nothing…not the voters, not the climate, not humanity, not the planet.

Ok, ok a tad extreme and gloomy, but that is what it feels like…like being a child again where everything seems to be done  around you and for your own good without anyone asking you what you think.

I am sure government is not meant to be like that..is it?  It might account for the growing numbers in the population who have political ADHD.