Extract from The Guardian
Liberal MP may face challenge as angry residents from his electorate mobilise to run independent candidate
Residents in Craig Kelly’s Sydney electorate of Hughes have reacted angrily to their MP accusing Facebook of censorship, saying he regularly blocks constituents from his page when they disagree with his climate change denialism and advocacy of unproven treatments for Covid-19.
A group called We are Hughes has formed to run an independent against Kelly at the next federal election, saying his views, particularly on climate change, do not represent those of his constituents.
One organiser of the group, Linda Seymour, said she was blocked after she questioned whether he really believed some of the views he was posting.
A poll by another anti-Kelly page, Kick Kelly Out, recently received responses from 23 Hughes constituents when it asked if anyone had been blocked from Kelly’s site.
“It was OK while I took part in the argy bargy,” Seymour said. But I was blocked in a heartbeat after I tried to question whether he really believed the things he was posting or was simply trying to create a controversy.”
Another former constituent, Josh McConnell, said he was blocked a few years ago for “barely daring” to contradict Kelly’s opinions on climate change.
“I have a double degree in microbiology and biotechnology, and honours in biotechnology. I feel I have a bit of a basis for finding the insanity in the open source journal articles that he often quotes,” he said.
Kelly regularly posts studies that he claims reinforce his view that global warming is not happening and is not manmade, and more recently has championed the use of the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19.
NSW Health has said there is insufficient data to support ivermectin’s use to prevent or treat Covid, with the evidence “mixed”. In December, it warned “the necessary concentrations for in vivo effect are unlikely to be attainable in humans”. On Wednesday the chief health officer, Paul Kelly (no relation), said there was “no evidence at the moment that it has any benefit or use in the prevention or treatment of Covid-19”.
The largest trial of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 found in June that it did not work. “This is an incredibly important result, because worldwide we can stop using a drug that is useless,” said the leader of the study, Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University.
Craig Kelly, who was a furniture salesman before entering parliament, has no medical qualifications.
Kelly revealed on Sunday he had “received a call from a representative of Facebook ‘requesting’ that I remove a post that contained comments … made by Australia’s Prof Tom Borody commenting about Ivermectin as a treatment [for] Covid – otherwise my Facebook would have ‘restrictions’ placed upon it”.
He said he had removed the post under protest.
“We have entered a very dark time in human history when scientific debate and freedom of speech is being suppressed,” Kelly said.
But Seymour said Kelly regularly blocked constituents who disagreed with him. She said typically people had not used intemperate language, but had disputed his posts.
“He’s blocked doctors and professors,” she said.
“He blocked a professor of bushfire dynamics who disputed posts about bushfires on his site.”
When Nicola Maher, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado, objected to Kelly’s use of her paper as “evidence” that the world was cooling, he responded with ridicule.
Her paper, which is about the impact of temperature variability on climate models, did not support his claim that the world was cooling, she said in a reply to his post.
“We find that while we are much more likely to observe warming, each individual location on the globe could experience cooling over the next 15 years because of internal variability. This does not mean that global warming is not happening, it just means that what we observe over short timescales is not just global warming, but global warming combined with internal variability.” she wrote.
Kelly replied: “Talk about a bet each way. You write, it may warm, but it may cool – and what will happen depends on natural variability. The average punter is laughing at such conclusions.”
Maher told the Guardian Kelly had refused to apologise and that in her view Kelly had “wilfully misrepresented science for his own personal agenda”.
“In my interaction with him, he refused to acknowledge my expertise, even though he was quoting my own words, and tried to spin everything I said back against me.”
She has since spoken at an online gathering of the We are Hughes group about climate change and the dangers of politicians such as Kelly.
Another Hughes resident, Jonathan Prendergast, said he had been blocked after criticising Kelly’s posts on renewable energy and his take on climate change.
In 2016 Kelly told parliament that renewable energy policies would drive up the cost of electricity, which meant public pools would raise the prices of swimming lessons and therefore fewer children would be taught to swim, causing more drownings.
Prendergast, who has worked in the clean energy sector for 14 years, told the Guardian that he considered he had a firm grip on the economics of renewables and the science of climate change and had taken issue only with Kelly’s “facts”.
Anneliese Alexander, who has lived in Hughes for eight years and describes herself as a passionate environmentalist, said she also was blocked last year.
She began commenting on Kelly’s Facebook site after he described the British TV presenter Laura Tobin as an “ignorant Pommy weather girl”.
The spat with Tobin developed after Kelly did an interview on Good Morning Britain during the bushfires last January and Tobin labelled him a climate denier.
Tobin, who is 39, holds degrees in physics and meteorology, and was a former aviation forecaster for the Royal Air Force.
Alexander said she then began commenting on Kelly’s page.
But she was blocked when she asked him if he would be OK with millions of people dying, after he compared Covid-19 to the seasonal flu.
A few weeks later, she said, she met Kelly at a local shopping centre and politely asked him to unblock her. He agreed, but she remains blocked.
Seymour said the latest controversy about Kelly had driven a surge in people to the We are Hughes page, with nearly 100 new people signing up in 24 hours.
She said they now had more than 400 people willing to don T-shirts and actively help in the campaign to run an independent against Kelly, as well as many more who had voiced support.
“Do we have a candidate? Yes we do [have several], we just don’t who it will be yet,” she said.
Comment has been sought from Kelly.
No comments:
Post a Comment