By Giles Parksinon

June 22, 2017 - In Australia, the Coalition government’s new citizenship test appears to include talking points that might have been prepared by the coal industry in defending their role in climate change.

Details of the extraordinarily complex reading material that new citizens are being asked to comprehend, in preparation for their citizenship tests, have been revealed in The Australian newspaper, which was concerned by the level of complexity in the language.

What struck us at RenewEconomy from the examples used by The Australian was the nature of the content. It looked like marketing spiel from the coal industry, so we checked it out further.

Take this, for example:

“The worldwide coal industry allocates extensive resources to researching and developing new technologies and ways of capturing greenhouse gases. Efficiencies are likely to be improved dramatically, and hence CO2 emissions reduced, through combustion and gasification techniques which are now at pilot and demonstration stages.”

And then there is this:

“Clean coal is another avenue for improving fuel conversion efficiency. Investigations are under way into super-clean coal (35 per cent ash) and ultraclean coal (less than 1 per cent ash). Super-clean coal has the potential to enhance the combustion efficiency of conventional pulverised fuel power plants.”

But having absorbed this, the hopeful new citizen is then given some practice multiple choice questions. Such as:

And then:

Now, we wouldn’t want any new citizens to get any fancy ideas about wind and solar, would we? But would anyone care to hazard a guess as to what the correct answers are? The truth or the marketing?

It makes us think if there was a real test about climate change and coal, some of the Coalition’s most prominent climate deniers, as well as the likes of One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts, should be thankful that they are already citizens.

In fact, we suspect that Dutton himself might struggle to pass the test. Someone alert passport control!