Firstly, I must admit that the headline for this week’s column is not of my making – it came from my grandfather many years ago.
My grandfather called an expert a “drip under pressure.” He was right. It’s absurdly easy to find an expert on anything – net zero, climate models, even how to boil an egg – but governments treat them like prophets.
Ministers at both State and Federal level hide behind lab coats and charts, nodding politely while passing off responsibility.
In the race to net zero, this worship of expertise has become an epidemic of political cowardice.
Households are told to retrofit, businesses to decarbonise, and anyone asking “how?” is branded a heretic. Ministers quote “the science” like it’s a magic spell, conveniently ignoring that models cannot replace judgment. Experts predict, politicians pontificate, and the public pays.
Here’s the bitter truth: experts are not oracles. They do not govern, they do not weigh competing priorities, and they cannot take the heat when policy hits reality.
Yet governments act as if quoting a model absolves them of thinking. The result is a series of clever-sounding policies that collapse under practical scrutiny, leaving citizens frustrated and sceptical.
Take what’s happened this week: the Liberal Party majority formally decided to abandon its long-standing commitment to a 2050 net-zero emissions target, a decision made after weeks of internal debate and a five-hour party room meeting.
What does this reveal? It reveals that even at the highest levels of politics, the architecture of “expert-advice turned policy” rests on shaky foundations. If a major party can so formally dismantle a target that experts say was built on models, projections and commitments, what does that say about the pillars we’re expected to trust?
This isn’t just about one political party shifting stance. It’s about the broader mechanism of governance. When ministers lean on experts’ models as shields — but those commitments can be predictably reversed or abandoned — the public begins to realise: the experts were convenient, not commanding. Ministers were hiding, not leading.
Climate action demands urgency. Yes. But it also demands leadership, real leadership that asks hard questions, balances competing needs, admits uncertainty. Blind obedience to experts is safe; governing is not. Elevating technical advice to untouchable doctrine is not courage, it’s a drip under pressure masquerading as wisdom.
And at the end of the day, when the public suffers the consequences, whether through higher costs, unreliable energy, or policy whiplash, these “experts” will shrug, and the politicians will still be hiding behind them, many as clueless as ever.
But then that’s just my (non-expert) opinion.