It did not take long for the new government to show how it will centralise the control of information. Even the CSIRO and the Australian Research Council must have its media releases vetted by the government, with important ones going to the PM.

Philip Coorey reveals in today’s Herald that this censorship, never before known in peacetime, is to ensure these media releases hence forth reflect Labor’s “key messages”.

So anything on climate change, industrial relations, education and science reform, tax policy, national security and health must be submitted for rewriting by the nomenklatura.

The Howard government did not require statutory agencies to do this, but the Rudd government does. What was that about increased freedom of information?

Most of the media decided to give Kevin Rudd a dream run well before the election; I suppose they will be silent about this. Just as the defenders of terrorist supporter David Hicks have now gone silent about the prospect of a control order.

The censorship on anything to do with climate change should be of particular concern.

Little is published which does not conform to the current ideology; most of the media have decided to revive the “D” notice and voluntarily to use the censors’ scissors themselves. A notable exception is that bastion of free speech, commercial talk-back.

An exception was Barry Maley’s recent piece in The Australian, a succinct demonstration of the reasons to be sceptical not, I must stress, of climate change but of the official reason for such change, that it is all caused by man-made emissions.

It was of course overshadowed by the fictitious story that the prime minister had himself “nailed” the Bali decision, even if that decision was to do nothing – other than to organise similar emitting extravaganzas.

I have yet to see any explanation of what the official reason for climate change means in relation to the other causes which have been in evidence for millions of years. Climate change has always been with us. Did these other influences stop in the middle of the twentieth century?

Despite the rhetoric, the government knows that if we closed down our economy, or shackled it, the major emitters won’t, and many of the ones agreeing to shackle theirs, will cheat.

But even if everyone conformed, there is no guarantee that the influences on climate change which have operated for millions of years will be neutralised.

Now when I write something for Crikey, I would like to see genuine debate, including reasoned rebuttal. Tediously personal attacks only indicate that the writer has nothing of substance to say. As I dip my madeleine in my coffee, I can only smile.

But one response to my last piece should concern everyone interested in free speech and the search for the truth. Richard McGuire wrote:

David Flint has certainly copped some bagging for his demolition attempt on the Bali climate change conference… Bagging Flint is the easy bit. More difficult is taking on the recalcitrant rump of contrarian scientists, some of whom tried to gate crash the Bali meeting. A letter signed by 103 of them addressed to the UN Secretary General, raised the following points, “the climate change occurring is natural and we must adapt to it”, “CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change”, “there has been no net global warming since 1998”, and “it is irrational to apply the precautionary principle”.

Believe it or not, many of the scientists who put their name to this letter hold prestigious positions in areas like earth sciences and physics, in universities around the world. Which raises the question, what duty of care do these people have to the rest of humanity? What professional code of ethics do they operate under? The denial industry would not survive, but for these people. None of the universities these people work at would tolerate having a Holocaust Denier working in their History Department. Why do they tolerate climate change sceptics working in their Science Faculties?

The writer equates dissenters with Holocaust deniers. The Holocaust is an established fact. In the light of overwhelming evidence most deniers have been reduced to pointlessly cruel and and demeaning arguments about the numbers involved.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming is no more than that, a theory. A number of leading scientists, on examining that theory, say it is wrong, or not the principal cause. Some of the latter say that the solutions proposed will be ineffective or are disproportionate.

That they should be removed or silenced goes against the very bases of a democratic society, and the Western concept of the university.

Merry Christmas.