The Australian Human Rights Commission has come out saying that we need to outlaw misinformation and disinformation around climate change.

Now, this was particularly interesting to me. This is a topic I’ve been talking about for a very long time. But also, there are some incredibly well-credentialed, very experienced, very serious-minded scientists who are the very people that the Australian Human Rights Commission and others would like to silence. These are the people who are questioning the climate change orthodoxy. Someone who got named in various submissions to a recent Senate hearing was professor or former professor Peter Ridd. You might know him as the man who was fired, lost his job because he told the truth about the Great Barrier Reef and he joins me now on the Topher project. Peter, thank you so much for coming on.

[From video] Thank you very much. [End video]

Now, your response to being named was quite interesting. I’ve got a video here. I’m going to play part of it in the background in a minute, but you were actually quite, dare I say, almost excited. You were a bit chipper about not just the fact that you’d been singled out for criticism and for, by implication, for future silencing, but also you read something into the tone of a lot of the submissions into the inquiry. Tell me, what is this inquiry? What’s it about? And why are you so happy to see what you’ve seen?

[From video]

The inquiry is essentially to stop people like me talking about climate or the Great Barrier Reef because we’re supposedly spreading misinformation. And actually, what’s happened here is that they are terrified. That they’re realizing now that all the pylon over decades, all the indoctrination of the children, it’s not working. [End video]

I’m sorry to interrupt this interview with Professor Peter Ridd, but my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and this is what I do. I bring you stories that you probably won’t find in the mainstream media, things that help you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I’m 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate what I do here at the Topher Project, please support me by buying me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net. Or if you appreciate my videos, then you’ll probably love my books, which are Good People Break Bad Laws and Good Christians Break Bad Laws. Both about civil disobedience in the modern age. This is about the civics of civil disobedience. And this is about the theology of civil disobedience from a Christian perspective. And you’ll also find my multi-award-winning DVD, Battleground Melbourne, as well as my t-shirts and hoodies in a range of designs. All of that you will find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy is going to help me to keep bringing you stories like this one. So, without further ado, let’s get back to this interview with I’m going to call him Professor even though he’s been fired Professor Peter Ridd.

[From video]

And the only way that they can essentially try to get what they want is to completely silence us by either making Google cancel us or, you know, at the extreme end, you could just imagine that people like I could almost end up getting some sort of charge against us. Which, by the way, a lot of academics there’s lots, there’s hundreds of papers where academics talk about locking people like me up, you know, whether I should be locked up or not. [End video]

It’s quite extraordinary. And over my time, 16 years now as a political commentator, I’ve seen a number of attempts to silence dissent come and go. I’m mindful of Julia Gillard’s news media council that came out of the Finkelstein report. That’s got to be 12 or 13 years ago now. More recently, we had the proposed misinformation/disinformation legislation that came out of the COVID era where of course they were cracking down on alleged misinformation, most of which did turn out to be actually true. I have to say I was a little bit surprised to see the Human Rights Commissioner himself get involved in this. This seems like a pretty serious and very, very specific, a very, very focused effort. This is not general legislation against alleged misinformation. This is really targeting the climate change issue specifically. Why do you think that is?

[From video]

Well, as I said, they’re scared. But the, you know, the Human Rights Commission, they should just be saying, look, one of the fundamental human rights is freedom of speech. And by the way, that means you have a right to be wrong. Because after all, in any argument, one side’s going to be right and one side’s going to be wrong. Actually, they’re probably both a little bit wrong. So, you just can’t do that. But when you actually look into what some of the other submissions are from universities, you actually see the fear. So, for example, McGill University in Canada for some reason wrote a submission to this Senate inquiry. And one of the reasons they said that this is necessary to clamp down on this misinformation is because they gave a whole lot of information of opinion polling of what people think about climate change and it scares them. For example, one thing says that 67% of the population think that climate change is pushed by the elites and it’s hypocritical. Now, fancy that that people would think that. And of course these universities who are elites and hypocritical think, well we can’t have this so the only way that we can stop this is to clamp down. But of course it’s not going to work right. I mean I only became well known and people started listening to me once I’d been cancelled. Before that I was just an unknown professor somewhere up in the sticks in North Queensland. So this trying to cancel us will actually it’ll actually backfire on them. [End video]

It is truly an extraordinary time. This video that I’m playing here is one that you published to your Reef Rebels YouTube channel. I highly recommend people look you up on YouTube and subscribe. You put out excellent material and you are across obviously the reef is your primary focus but you’re across so many different issues and you bring to light so many different facts that we wouldn’t otherwise know because sadly there aren’t enough people that are discussing these sorts of issues and these sorts of things. Tell us a little bit about what is the reality going on in the reef for those that have missed your previous reporting and my previous reporting oftentimes which is about your own work. What is the real situation there on the reef?

[From video]

Well, the Australian Institute of Marine Science measures the amount of coral on the reef every year. And for the last five years, every single one of the last five years, the amount of coral on the reef has been more than any of the previous 35 years. We’ve got twice as much coral now as we had in 2012. Because what happens is that if you have a big cyclone, you can actually lose literally 90% of the coral on a single reef. And you could lose, you know, 25% of the coral on the whole Great Barrier. And so it goes through these swings and at the moment we haven’t had many big cyclones. We haven’t had much in the way of the natural crown-of-thorns starfish predation. And the reef happens to be in there it is. It’s in really good shape. That’s basically what it shows, right? So, I thought when eventually we reached record high in 2022 that that would be the end. You know, the wheels would fall off. But of course the other side say, oh yeah but it’s now the wrong type of coral. And this is the incredible thing. The type of coral that’s bounced back is actually the type that is most susceptible to hot water bleaching. So, we’ve had five devastating events which have killed this coral and then we’ve ended up with record amounts of it. So, go figure that one. But sorry that’s misinformation. It has to be stopped. [End video]

No, that’s right. This video is going to get taken down now because you’re dead to say that. It does seem quite an extraordinary thing. We don’t have to look very far back into history to discover that it is usually the people that everyone else believes are wrong that actually give us advancements in science. I’ve spoken at length about Ignaz Semmelweis who was the very first person to begin to connect bacteria. Not that he knew that that’s what it was, but he began to connect dirty hands essentially from people doing autopsies with puerperal fever where mothers were dying after giving birth because doctors weren’t washing their hands. He couldn’t explain the mechanism by which he believed that worked, but he came up with a concoction for washing hands. And even though he got amazing results, he was rejected by the establishment. The establishment throughout history and this the establishment today has an enormous amount of power. I’ve been doing interviews with people like yourself as well as Anthony Watts over in the US and many others, Joanne over in West Australia, and I regularly ask, “How much longer can this go on? How much longer before this whole thing the wheels fall off,” as you said the expression a moment ago? Do you dare to attempt another prediction or at this point is it just too hard to tell?

[From video]

I think it’s got no more than a few years left in it. Not in Australia, but we will just follow what’s going to happen in America. The wheels have pretty well already fallen off in America. The new people that’s in you know like Jay Bhattacharya, the guys who are, you know, Spencer and those guys who have gone through the climate stuff the whole scientific establishment now is right at the top are dissident, right? So, Jay Bhattacharya was a classic dissident. Now these guys they know, they understand that one of our problems is groupthink and they’re going to weed out that group think.

So, they’re going to put the argument back into science. Now look, not all dissidents are right. In fact, most dissidents are wrong. But if only one in a thousand is right, then you get an Albert Einstein, you know, this was the biggest dissident of all time. But so you’ve got to make sure so those guys realize that we’ve got to stamp out the group think. And of course the whole net zero thing is just, it just has died in the US. It’s dying in the UK. It’s dying in Europe. And it will die here too. It just takes a little bit longer. That’s all. [End video]

I do get a sense, Peter, that we’re in a moment of kind of an escalated conflict, a collision where previously people, these elites, as you mentioned, these university types, who complain that everyone thinks it’s only the elites that are pushing climate change, but they are the elites, of course, that we’re talking about. They’ve had their own way for so long, and I believe that they believed that they would continue to have their own way. They thought that this wasn’t going to change. The future was golden for them. Now, all of a sudden they’re meeting a bit of a brick wall in the US in the form of Donald Trump as you rightly say. I note that the EPA, for example, are looking at reversing their endangerment finding. I’m not sure if that’s happened yet or not, but that would undo so much of the damage done through regulation in the US. And there’s so many other things happening. This collision that’s now happening, this rise in the US, it’s at the top, but in Australia, it’s people who don’t hold the positions of power. It’s people like yourself who deserve an enormous amount more respect than you get, quite frankly. But you’re not in a position of power. How does that dynamic play out? How does this pushback actually get through and change something in Australia when the dissidents aren’t at the top? The dissidents are still very much at the bottom.

[From video]

Well, because people would look at what’s happening in Europe and America. I mean, the German energy and car industry are saying we can’t go on like this. The British are on their knees. You know, they can’t afford to heat their homes and they’re importing gas despite having so it’s just a question of looking towards what’s going over there and eventually we will come across. But there is no doubt that the elites know that they’re on borrowed time. I mean, the Institute of Public Affairs has published this research where they show that the average person is only prepared to pay $2 a week on climate change. And they don’t realize that they’re already paying probably between $1,000 and $1,500 per family. As soon as that family find out, actually guys, you’re already paying $1,200, they’re going to say, uh, excuse me, and the Chinese are not doing anything. Why are we doing this? So, all that needs to happen and this is a big all is that our supposedly right-wing and center-right parties need to grow a set and fight on this. You will win as soon as the people know what they’re paying, which they have no idea about at the moment. Then they will say I don’t know why we’re doing this. So, it’s just a question of time and then we win. [End video]

Well, I think you’re right, and I was recently at the CPAC conference in Brisbane, and we saw a number of prominent and fairly influential Liberal Party and National Party senators and MPs pushing very hard for the abandonment of net zero. Of course, that hasn’t happened in the Liberal Party yet. But I do get the sense that it’s probably a matter of time. And I’m of the view that if the Liberal Party were really to actually offer an alternative on net zero as compared to the Labour Party at the next election, I’m of the view that they would probably romp it in. But of course, we won’t know until they have the guts or grow a pair, as you said, and have the guts to try. Well, I’m still going to call you Professor Peter Ridd because you’ll always be a professor in my view whether you’re at a university or not. But Peter, I thank you so much for coming on the Topher project and please keep up the outstanding work.

[From video] My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. [End video]

That was Professor Peter Ridd and I really encourage you to go and find his YouTube channel Reef Rebels on YouTube and make sure you’ve subscribed because he does put out excellent work and he’s gone into so much detail into this Senate inquiry looking at various submissions showing you various data and he does it just such a fantastic job and he deserves your support and your follow. My name is Topher Field. This is the Topher project and this is what I do bringing you stories and interviews like this. You can support me and help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net or you can check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching all the way to the end. The algorithm loves you and so do I. Please like, comment what you think about all of this and when do you think this whole climate change scare is going to finally come crashing down.

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