'I looked up what Wikipedia said'
Environment Minister Greg Hunt admits to using Wikipedia to dispute links drawn between bushfires and climate change.
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Anyone with an internet connection can look up Greg Hunt on Wikipedia.
The entry for a few delicious minutes on Thursday included the following pearl: "Since the 2013 election, Hunt has become the Minister for the Environment. He has already proven to be terrible at his job, to no surprise".
![Wikipedia users have poked fun at Environment Minister Greg Hunt.](http://web.archive.org./web/20131025004012im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/10/24/4856292/dn-hunt-wide-20131024125424736156-620x349.jpg)
Wikipedia users have poked fun at Environment Minister Greg Hunt. Photo: Andrew Meares
We can't be entirely sure whether this is accurate. Just about anyone with an opinion, wicked or otherwise, can edit Wikipedia.
Indeed, if you'd clicked on Mr Hunt's entry a bit earlier, you might have come across the following:
"He [Hunt] is notorious for using Wikipedia to conduct research on environmental issues on Wikipedia despite having access to a vast bureaucracy staffed by some of the finest and most dedicated minds in the nation, like some total turd. Critics concede that his 1990 Honours thesis on the necessity of a carbon tax was probably more academically rigorous than the manner in which he comports himself as one of the most powerful people in the country, but others defend their characterisation of the Environment Minister as an utter weiner."
This no longer appears on the site, having been excised with some haste. Mr Hunt or his staff and supporters, as anyone who searches the Wikipedia site can discover, appear to spend inordinate amounts of time frantically revising and removing unhelpful, uncomplimentary and occasionally defamatory insertions of material concerning the Minister's alleged life and times. Wikipedia has now disabled editing of Hunt's page by unregistered users.
The reference to Mr Hunt consulting Wikipedia on matters environmental, however, is accurate, more or less.
We know this because Mr Hunt has told a fair slice of the world that he puts his faith in Wikipedia.
"I looked up what Wikipedia said just to see what the rest of the world thought," he advised the BBC on Wednesday when put on the spot about whether there might be a link between Australia's latest bushfires and climate change.
"It opened up with the fact that, 'bushfires in Australia are frequently occurring events during the hotter months of the year due to Australia's mostly hot, dry, climate'."
That settles that, then. Ground-breaking research. Who would ever have imagined?
Research, even on a hackable site such as Wikipedia, can prove a little selective, of course.
If Mr Hunt had scrolled down a bit he'd have discovered a list of some of the most severe Australian bushfires, in chronological order, beginning with the Black Thursday fires of February, 1851, which are recorded as having burned 5 million hectares.
The thing about chronological order is that the current argument about a whether or not there might be a link between bushfires and climate change revolves around the unseasonal nature of the fires in the Blue Mountains and elsewhere in NSW.
According to Wikipedia's list (and it may be correct), they're the first major conflagrations over more than a century that have occurred as early as October. With the exception of a couple in November, all the rest - and there are about 40 of them - have been in December, January, February, March, and once, in April.
None of which, of course, proves anything.
Research is a contestable field, as Mr Hunt's own career, both academic and political, attests.
Why, in 1990 he won a university prize for his own thesis entitled "a tax to make polluters pay".
It argued that "a pollution tax is both desirable and, in some form, is inevitable" and noted that "even if some Liberal's [sic] constituents do respond negatively, a pollution tax does need to be introduced to properly serve the public interest".
That old treatise has been replaced by his professed faith that a carbon tax is a dreadful Labor-Greens plot, and that Tony Abbott's "direct action" plan is altogether superior.
A Wikipedia search for direct action on climate change, alas, offers no result. Which may be merciful, for who knows what mischief non-believers might wreak upon it?
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