While this is understandable to a degree, the fact remains that Australia is not in financial dire peril right at this moment.
However the Murray-Darling Basin is in dire peril and its crisis directly affects the cost of meat, dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables for us all and its long-term prognosis will have a direct effect on the national economy.
So it was more than disappointing to see this Media Monitors break down of the media-led focus on issues last week:
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Media Monitors has also looked at the media response to climate change in Making Sense of the Climate Change Debate 2008 report and found that less than a third of Australian media reports over the period assessed are solution focused (including blogs of which only about 6% mention solutions), with a small 7.25% of all media reports mentioning reducing oil and coal consumption.
What was apparent though is that overall (when compared to the rest of the world) the Australian debate was very focused on what to do, how to do it and when to do it.
That was then and this is now.
With governments across this country having the attention span of gnats and seemingly glued to populist politics garnered by daily perusal of the media, there is a danger that the plight of the Murray-Darling Basin, greenhouse emission reduction plans and climate change solutions generally will slip further to the edge of political radars.
The real crisis is current and looming climate change impacts as well as ongoing water sustainability.
It is time to remind domestic media of this fact and insist that a brief journalistic flurry in response to yesterday's release of Treasury modelling of the proposed national carbon pollution reduction scheme does not mitigate the need to keep global warming high on the national issues list and so reflect ongoing national concern.
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