TheGuardian, 16 November 2019:
The history of climate policy in Australia is a history of self-interest, posturing and shameful inaction. Photograph: Sam Mooy/Getty Images
In
a dispiriting political week like the one we’ve just had, it helps
to keep things simple. Let’s begin with the organising idea of the
week, where various politicians asserted, both in measured ways and
unhinged ways, that it was inappropriate to talk about climate change
while bushfires ravaged the country.
Let’s
be clear about what this line of argument is.
It’s
self-serving crap.
It
is entirely possible to have a sensible discussion about climate
change and the risks it poses, including the risks of longer and more
intense fire seasons, and still do all the things that need to be
done to protect lives and property.
We
have that bandwidth. In fact Australia demonstrated amply over the
course of the past few days our collective capacity to walk and chew
gum at the same time.
Despite
all the finger waggling from politicians, or perhaps because of it,
the climate conversation happened in tandem with heroic efforts by
emergency services workers to save lives and contain the damage. In
fact, the most compelling part of the conversation about bushfires
being a symptom of climate change was led by emergency service
workers: a coalition of former fire chiefs, who point blank refused
various invitations from politicians to shut up.
Given
there is no law that says bushfires preclude sensible, evidence-based
policy conversations, it’s reasonable to ask why this particular
prohibition was asserted.
The
answer to that is simple. The Coalition does not want its record
raked over at a time when Australians are deeply anxious, because
it’s hard to control the narrative in those conditions. The
government does not want people who are not particularly engaged in
politics, and who make a point of not following Canberra’s
periodically rancid policy debates (and climate is the most toxic of
the lot), switching on to this issue at a time where they have a
personal stake in the conversation.
While
Scott Morrison has acknowledged there is a link between climate
change and natural disasters, and in attitudinal terms that
acknowledgement is a positive development, it’s not really in the
prime minister’s interests for anyone to press very assertively on
that pressure point, particularly not at a time when the prolonged
drought (another symptom of climate change) is already making the
Coalition’s supporters restive.
Morrison
doesn’t invite the climate action interrogation, because the
government’s record is abysmal, and I don’t invoke that word
lightly. The Liberal and National parties have done everything within
their collective power to frustrate climate action in Australia for
more than a decade. The Coalition repealed the carbon price. They
attempted to gut the renewable energy target. They imposed fig-leaf
policies costing taxpayers billions that have failed to stop
emissions rising every quarter.
Lest
this wrecking, self-interested, destructive behaviour seem a quirk of
history – a quaint vestige of the Abbott era curtailed by the
sensible man in the Lodge – be reminded that the Liberals blasted
Malcolm Turnbull out of the prime ministership only last August in
part for the thought crime of trying to impose a policy mechanism
that would have reduced emissions in the electricity sector.
Reflections
on a catastrophic week of bushfires
Not
content with that, the Coalition, Morrison and his ministers, also
claimed during the May election that an emissions reduction target
broadly consistent with climate science would be a wrecking ball in
the Australian economy. Not content with that, Morrison and his
ministers characterised a sensible policy by Labor to try and
encourage the electrification of the car fleet to reduce emissions in
transport as a “war on the weekend”.
What
Australian voters needed after the election in May was a government
of whatever stripe prepared to put the country on an orderly path
towards decarbonisation.
But
what the Coalition needed was different. It wanted to remain in
power, and one of the principle means to power it deemed necessary
proved to be convincing voters in the outer suburbs and regions that
Bill Shorten was crazy and shifty about climate change and would
confiscate your ute.
To
put this point very starkly, there was a climate election in May, and
the climate lost.
I
hope it’s clear by now, as a consequence of this heart-warming romp
through recent political history, that the arbitrary prohibition of
the week – we can’t talk about climate because the country is
burning – is about politics, and about self-interest, and not about
anything else.
And
rather than applying false balance and blaming everyone and declaring
the whole business of politics and democracy a debacle, let’s also
acknowledge that everyone has certainly stuffed up at one point or
another, but one political movement more than any other bears the
responsibility for Australia’s failure to get on with the necessary
transition to low emissions.
That’s
the Liberal and National parties.
Read
the full article here.
The
dead to date in the 2019 NSW bushfire season
77
year-old man
& 68
year-old woman
burnt inside their home on Deadman Creek Road in Coongbar, Upper
Clarence Valley
in
October
53
year-old woman
burnt in her home at Johns River, north
of Taree in
November
elderly
man
found in a burnt out car
at Wytaliba,
east of Glen Innes
in
November
68
year-old woman
burnt on her property at Wytaliba in
November
58
year-old man
burnt at
the southern end of the Kyuna Track at Willawarrin, 34km
west of Kempsey in
November
