So, I am writing an article; a proper academic article. Got me a journal in mind and everything. It’s on incumbent strategies versus challenge(r)s, and uses multiple streams approach and defensive institutional work. Gonna have the sucker done (first draft) by the close of play on the 27th December if it kills me.
Reading some fascinating stuff, but also writing as I go along – it’s the only way, after all.
Anyway, I stumbled on a very useful article from the defunct Business Review Weekly.
Hooper, N. and Way, N. 1995. Canberra’s Green Berets. BRW, 20 February, p.36.
They (approvingly) quote the late Peter Walsh (climate denialist and “failed” (his words) Finance Minister complaining that
“The Environment Department should no longer be regarded as a component of the Commonwealth bureaucracy, but as a fully taxpayer-funded extension of the partially taxpayer-funded Australian Conservation Foundation propaganda machine.”
All because some of the bureaucrats thought that cutting down and digging up everything in sight and in site was short-termist.
Never mind that the Treasury, Energy Department, Resources, DPIE etc had been busy scuppering anything environmental for, well, decades.
What happened next? The Greenhouse Mafia ran the show for another 12 years. Then the fight broke out into the open, and the opponents of action won. And now we are totally stuffed. Oh well, so it goes.
marchudson.net 
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