Over the weekend past was a quaint little global event known as The March for Science. It was about, well, something or other. Some claim it was an important event drawing attention to the vital need to support science in the fight against actually having to get off the public teat and work for a living. Some claim is it just another excuse for Bolshies to rub up against each other for Lenin’s birthday. Others claim it is just a re-badging of the increasingly uninteresting Earth Day, while the organisers themselves suggested, among other things, that it might be a grand day out for retired sex workers who like to dabble in fire prevention.
Regardless of what the event was claimed to be, there is one hard truth about the event.
An utter failure.
What? It was all over the Love Media! How can it be a failure?
Well, let us take the Melbourne march as our test piece and look at the actual numbers. The ABC declined to give any practical estimate, possibly because no-one at the public broadcaster could be bothered actually working properly on a weekend, but The Age offered up 3000 people. Sounds useful, but remember this was the march held in Melbourne.
Melbourne, slightly unsurprisingly, is within the District of Melbourne, where during the last Federal Election some 41,377 voters took their pencils and declared to the AEC that Adam Bandt and his Greens friends was their first choice to go to Canberra. This, for those playing at home, worked out to a casual 43.75% of the primary vote and after preferences Bandt ended up with a respectable 68.48% slice of the pie.
With that in mind, it is a reasonably safe assumption that people who live within this electoral district would be reasonably supportive towards the entire concept of The March for Science and all the planet-saving Global Warming research that it was promoting.
Yup. You would think that, wouldn’t you?
As mentioned in The Age, the crowd size was about 3000, and going by the supporting photos, a reasonable percentage were below the legal voting age. Now it would be also foolish to suggest that each and every one of these attending people came from within the same electoral area, but for the purpose of this example let us ignore that for a moment.
So what do we have? A nice day. A free event. An important cause nominally deep to their core values and yet at least 38,000 Green voters decided to NOT attend a rally that many of them could have easily and safely walked to.
This gaggle of 38,000 Greens is from the local area, and of course ignores everyone who lived in other suburbs. Going by the senate results, some 380,000 Victorians vote Greens, and even if we casually suggest that half of them lived too far away to easily attend that still means some 187,000 Green voters in Victoria had better things to do last weekend.
That is just picking on Greens voters, dismissing the casual three million plus Victorians who identify with other parties, and ignoring all those too young to be on the 2016 electoral roll. What shall we say?
Four million people?
Out of all those people, only 3000 could be bothered to make the effort to attend a free event.
The so-called scientific elite, despite everything in their favour, managed to fail science.
No wonder no-one outside the ABC trusts them.
Photo by Vixie Rayna 