Many South Australians are understandably aggrieved by last week’s statewide blackout, particularly those who went for days without power, affecting their livelihoods, damaging their homes. Major industries have suffered multi-million-dollar blows.

But we should also be aggrieved by the performance of our political establishment – state and federal – in its depressing response to the unprecedented event.

It’s been an exemplar of the worst of Australia’s modern body politic, and I include much of the media in the mix (with some notable exceptions, including in the local media).

Modern political discourse in Australia is at risk of being swamped by a tide of stupid partisanship. Some might say we’ve already been drowned by the deluge.

Politics has become so ideologically-hidebound, so combative, that our political leadership seems to have lost the capacity to think clearly, to formulate practical solutions, gain public support, and implement them.

It’s difficult to ignore a conclusion that members of our political class no longer pay heed to facts – rather, they prefer to cherrypick fact-like pieces of information to suit their particular ideology or political purpose.

Let’s take, as example number one, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s brief interview on ABC 891 yesterday.

Among the deluge of classic political attack-dog rhetoric came these extraordinary statements:

“They talk about two tornadoes. Where exactly were they? Were they anywhere near the power lines or was that just that you had, what, two tornadoes out in the scrub?

“If you had had proper base-load power requirements throughout the state, you would have certainly had blackouts but not across the whole state. If you just think of the lunacy of it… go to Murray Bridge, you go to the edge of the South Australian border and the light’s out, go across the border a few kilometres and the lights are back on again. Work it out for yourself.”

So there you go. He seems to be casting doubt both on two indisputable facts: the role of high winds in knocking out three transmission lines, and the geographical location of Murray Bridge. It could just be his inelegant form of expression, or he could be using rapid-fire rhetoric to muddy the waters. You choose.

His political fellow travellers, including in the media, have no doubt about the cause of the statewide blackout, despite the fact we do not yet have all the information.

There are a lot of amateur electrical engineers finding their voices this week.

Ambiguity and shades of grey are enemies of both the modern political gladiator and a mainstream media which increasingly sees ideological positioning as a way to attract and keep an audience.

On the other side of the political divide, clean energy advocates and our Premier are equally adamant that the state’s wind farms per se were not the key cause of the statewide blackout (yes, yes, the storm was the initial cause, but you know what I mean).

That may be true. It may well be false. The reality may well be somewhere in the middle – a shade of grey. We don’t know yet.

None of this ambiguity has stopped swathes of the media and political class from treating our disaster as an ideological “gotcha” moment.

And then there’s our Premier, Jay Weatherill.

He’s clearly taken a political decision to defend renewables, no matter what.

And in the biggest picture – the future health of the planet– it’s not an unprincipled position.

But right now, in the wake of the blackout which was disastrous for many and brought some major industrial players to the point of collapse, his primary concern shouldn’t be defending Labor’s record on energy security or the concept of renewable energy, or sandbagging his political future. His role, as the state’s leader, should be to keep an open mind, gather the facts, digest them, and attempt to produce policy and practices which make our energy system more reliable, robust, cheaper and cleaner.

There appears to be little evidence – at least in his public statements – that these goals are uppermost in his mind, despite yesterday’s hastily convened “renewables summit” (he claimed soon after the blackout that the system operated as it should – a claim that can’t be backed with certainty given the information we have so far).

Yet, the question I ask myself is whether it is even possible to have a sensible debate in Australia about renewable energy, particularly windfarms, given years of blunt, and bluntly stupid, political campaigning, and the resulting stark divide between climate change believers and skeptics?

The political rhetoric has sunk to the point that we’re talking about whether or not windfarms are “to blame” for the blackout, as if they’re either goodies or baddies, as if they aren’t simply pieces of utilitarian technology, but rather embody malevolent or blithe spirits in their slow-turning blades.

The anti-wind-power mob – cheered on by many conservative politicians – has long had an oblique relationship with science and evidence. Some of them simply prefer dirty, but cheap, coal, because they believe climate change to be a nonsense.

In the good old days of windfarm scaremongering, very few people talked about their potential risk to the electricity grid. Back then, it was all about visual pollution and health effects – from insomnia, to spontaneously aborting cows, to yolk-less eggs.

There was very little – or no – real evidence of any of this, but the long-running debate has had the unhappy consequence of successfully poisoning what should have been an evidence-based renewable energy discussion. Instead, we are left with anti-scientific ‘feelpinions’, dog whistling, political doggerel and articles of faith.

Goodies and baddies.

Which brings us to the sorry position we find ourselves in today.

Instead of a sensible and sober discussion about what went wrong, why, and how we can avoid it happening again, we are seeing a political death match, the likes of which we have seen many times before on many issues, with unhappy results.

(I’m waiting for the political slogan: “We’ll break the wind”.)

Is it naive of me to hope that politicians might seek to create consensus on our energy future (or anything at all, for that matter)? Is it too much to ask for some careful, thoughtful public statements aimed at creating solutions? It’s not as if anyone needs to ramp up public concern about the situation: we all know that what happened last week caused serious problems, and no-one wants it to happen again. If Labor’s policy settings are found to be part of the problem, they will rightly suffer political consequences, as will those people who rushed to slam renewables if they are found to be wrong.

The problem for all of us is this: when our politicians frame policy based mostly on blind ideology, or in response to dumb media campaigns, or by sniffing a political opportunity, it’s almost always sub-optimal – myopic, one-dimensional, replete with unintended consequences.

Back in 2013, after Kevin Rudd slugged it out with Tony Abbott in a merciless and depressing federal election campaign, brilliant former Hawke minister Barry Jones described it as the worst policy vacuum he had ever seen.

In despair, he wrote: “In a rational debate, there might have been some dispassionate examination of evidence to get some sense of proportion…. But evidence did not feature in the election campaign – it was swamped by opinion, however misinformed.”

That sounds a bit like what we’re seeing this week, although it’s potentially more insidious and damaging when people on both sides of the debate create what look like detailed and serious analyses of the same data, only to reach opposite conclusions.

There are a lot of amateur electrical engineers finding their voices this week.

It seems highly likely that the reality of the blackout disaster will be complicated – a patchwork of intersecting problems of engineering, policy and practice. And that will mean that the political players will continue to paint this event in their own ideological colours, which raises doubts about their collective capacity to come up with a cooperative solution.

With state energy ministers meeting today to discuss our energy future, for the sake of our state’s economy let’s hope for an outbreak of intelligent reasoning, rather than a continuation of demoralising, partisan, and ultimately useless politics.

David Washington is editor of InDaily.