No Experts Thanks; We're Australian

As the Carbon Tax 'debate' slowly drowns us in the aural quicksand of repeated one liners and 2 second clips of irate tax-rage munters, it has become almost impossible to comment on it. I mean, how can you really? There is no change, no development, there are no new arguments, it is simply a contest of campaign media strategies: the bout to knock the other guy out, the search for a line that will resonate with a group of people unwilling to consider the detail, trialled by endless repetition on Channel 7.

How many times has Tony Abbott said 'this toxic tax', or Julia Gillard uttered the phrase 'our plan to tax polluters'? Barnaby Joyce has run out of fingers and toes to work it out. If they have said anything else, we haven't heard it, because the media would not dare play a grab longer than five seconds lest we fall asleep accidentally.

This has led to a situation where two thirds of the electorate claim to be against the Carbon Tax at the same time that 80% admit they can't describe what it is. It's not about the detail; it's about the media war. It's about who the public want to tell them what the carbon tax is. Shades of grey are not allowed and experts can get fucked.

I don't know what it is about Australia these days. I can say, on a personal level, there is nothing more engaging than listening to someone who really knows what they are talking about speak at length about an issue. All the nerds who watch 'Big Ideas' on a Saturday morning know what I'm talking about. Experts are useful; they know things about stuff. It's impossible for someone to know everything about all things, so why not specialise and share it around? That sounds perfectly reasonable, which it is, but yeah…no…fuck that.

The hatred of experts in this country is completely unbelievable. Not only do we refuse to listen to them, we actively resent them for having the audacity to claim that they know more than us about something. "If you're so smart then why can't you stop my shoes from hurting?" Next comes the accusations that such individuals 'live in ivory towers' (which any expert in engineering will tell you aren't really built anymore), and are not part of 'the real world', like all academics are millionaires and have their bills paid by some cashed-up intellectual deity.

I've got news for you, if you work on a mine; you earn more than they do. Calm down, it doesn't make you better than them but at the moment, you are the one who does not live in 'the real world', whatever the hell that is. The new 'ivory tower', if there must be such a thing, is the desert donga.

So yeah, sit on that.