How change happens: Lessons from Australia’s bombshell election
After nine long years of an increasingly far-right, climate change denying Liberal National Party coalition (LNP) government, the citizens of Australia voted for change.
After nine long years of an increasingly far-right, climate change denying Liberal National Party coalition (LNP) government, the citizens of Australia voted for change.
In Australia, climate policy is a major problem, despite the fact that we are extremely vulnerable to the climate’s impacts. We face severe disruption with worsening droughts, floods, bushfires, heatwaves, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and cyclones.
The Australian Government is dangerously out-of-touch as climate change accelerates and a cascade of tipping points risks unstoppable global warming.
So the risk managers of last resort will not be governments, but the community, acting in concert with the non-fossil fuel businesses, finance and investment sectors who now stand to be destroyed if the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry is not rapidly broken.
The agency in charge of leading the recovery in bushfire-affected areas must begin respectfully and appropriately. And they must be equipped with the basic knowledge of our peoples’ different circumstances.
It’s important to note this isn’t “special treatment.” Instead, it recognizes that policy and practice must be fit-for-purpose and, at the very least, not do further harm.
What we are seeing now is – in part – the result of wilful negligence, wilful blindness and casual greed. A total failure of leadership by political leaders from the major parties that stretches back not three weeks, or three months, but three decades, when Australians were first warned of the dangers in what was then known as ‘the Greenhouse Effect’.*
Littleproud arguably has the most crucial and important role in cabinet. How to convince his colleagues of the real climate disasters which now confront this country, and particularly the agricultural sector, unless we rapidly move away from our fossil fuel past.
The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing. The ability to do so is increasingly threatened by human-induced climate change, the accelerating impacts of which are driving political instability and conflict globally. Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity which, unless addressed as an emergency, will have catastrophic consequences.
It’s easy to understand why there’s widespread support for politicians and others who argue we shouldn’t talk about climate change in the middle of a bushfire emergency.
A sustainable future remains within our grasp but – thanks to the way human brains work – only governments can implement many of the necessary strategies.