Posted by Janet Albrechtsen (writing in The Australian, of course) is asked a question by her teenage daughters:
Emails started arriving telling me about a speech given by Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, at Bethel University in St Paul, Minnesota, on October 14. Monckton talked about something that no one has talked about in the lead-up to Copenhagen: the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty.
You can read a transcript of Monckton’s claims here. Monckton reckons that the environmentalists “are about to impose a communist world government on the world”. (As opposed to imposing a communist world government on just one country, I suppose.)
Even after Monckton’s speech, most of the media has duly ignored the substance of what he said. You don’t need me to find his St Paul address on YouTube. Interviewed on Monday morning by Alan Jones on Sydney radio station 2GB, Monckton warned that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty was to set up a transnational government on a scale the world has never before seen. Listening to the interview, my teenage daughters asked me whether this was true.
So naturally Albrechtsen did some research and discovered that the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter judged Monckton’s claims to be “pants on fire” dishonest and that Monckton’s conspiracy-finding skills are better than his reading skills. Alex Koppelman writes:
Problem is, Monckton’s reading of the proposed framework for negotiation — hardly a completed treaty — was woefully inaccurate. And that’s a nice way of putting it. The document clearly does nothing whatsoever to promote any sort of world government, and indeed, it refers to the efforts of national governments repeatedly.
Here’s the sole evidence in the framework for Monckton’s claim:
The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.
(The COP to which that language refers is the Conference of the Parties, which the official UN Web site explains as, “the ‘supreme body’ of the Convention, that is, its highest decision-making authority. It is an association of all the countries that are Parties to the Convention … [and] is responsible for keeping international efforts to address climate change on track.”)
Unfortunately for Monckton and those who’ve fallen for what he said without doing some rudimentary checking of the document’s language, there’s more than one meaning of the word “government.” There’s the conventional definition, the one he used, and then there’s this one, which is very clearly the one intended in this case: “direction; control; management; rule: the government of one’s conduct.”
Albrechtsen reassured her daughters and wrote a column debunking Monckton’s nutty conspiracy theories. Ha ha, just kidding. Albrechtsen decided to check it out herself. She has, after all, a doctorate in law from Sydney University.
So I read the draft treaty. The word government appears on page 18.
And that, for Albrechtsen, settled it. The rest of her column is devoted to reporting Monckton’s conspiracy theories.
Monckton says the drafters want this new world government to have control over once free markets: the financial and trading markets of nation-states. “The sheer ambition of this new world government is enormous right from the start; that’s even before it starts accreting powers to itself in the way that these entities inevitably always do,” he says. …
Monckton’s warning to Americans that “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your President will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever” is colourful. But no more colourful than the language used by those who preach about the perils of climate change and the virtues of a hard-hitting Copenhagen treaty. …
why has our government failed to explain the possible text of a treaty it wants Australia to sign? … So why the silence? Are they hiding the details of this deal from us because most of the polls now suggest that action on climate change is becoming politically unpalatable? … And what explains the media’s failure to report and analyse the only source document that offers any idea of what may happen in Copenhagen? Ignorance? Laziness?
The UN’s black helicopters, I would think. If we don’t hear from Albrechtsen again, you’ll know why.
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