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.
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.
The only way the Coalition can make this right is if Morrison uses the coming parliamentary term to execute a significant pivot on climate change. I think he’s capable of it, and there are some nascent signs that a pivot of some kind is in progress, but I don’t know if Morrison will do it, because unfortunately for all of us, he’s worked out you can win an election by not doing it, and right now he’s flirting with division as a management strategy.
A couple more things need to be said about the dumpster fire of the week. The first is the Nationals leader Michael McCormack needs to reflect on whether the most productive approach to leading his sulking, riven, party room is to try and out-Barnaby-Joyce Barnaby Joyce.
It is possible that McCormack’s “raving lunatics” intervention on Monday did help the government turn the negative media narrative away from itself and back towards the Greens. It is possible this was less bumbling word salad from a bloke who can’t quite nail his job and more a tactical contribution to the outrage economy.
Stoking the outrage economy, inviting people to substitute tribalism for reason, is, after all, powerful in the current political age. You’ve probably noticed that a lot of mainstream media business models are now rooted in tribalism, and tribalism is most of what you get on social media.
So I’m happy to acknowledge that McCormack may be a brilliant political operative cunningly disguised as a leader struggling to keep his head above water, but at what price? How long will the primary constituents of the National party, the people on the frontline of the drought, people battling fires, put up with being treated like numpties by the party that is supposed to represent their material interests?
I also need to touch down on the Greens, and their positioning this week. Do we think anything that the Greens said this week shifted one vote, or changed one mind?
It’s kind of silly to eviscerate the Greens for doing what Greens do, and that’s argue a forceful case for saving the planet. That’s what they are in parliament to do. The big hint is in the name of their political party.
But it’s not silly to ask whether their interventions are helping their avowed cause. I think we’ve reached a point after 10 years of wreckage and failure where the Greens need to ask themselves much more often than they do whether their current approach to prosecuting climate action is bringing Australia any closer to progress.
I don’t intend to revisit the poor decision a decade ago to vote down Labor’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, at least not in this outing, given that all that prompts is a screaming match. There’s a new question I want to pose, very directly and specifically: did the Greens’ campaigning in the May election ultimately advance the cause of climate action, or did it set back the cause of climate action?
One concrete example might assist. Did the anti-Adani convoy that Bob Brown’s foundation sent into Queensland help or hurt Labor’s chances of winning government in May? The Greens will argue that Labor’s climate policy offering in 2019 was deficient, so it’s all fair game, but the fact of the matter is there are currently two parties of government in Australia, and one of them had a much better platform for climate action that the other one.
The party of government with the better climate policy lost the election, and Labor’s campaign review pointed to the negative impact of the Adani convoy as one of many reasons for the defeat. It was clear the Greens campaign reflected an assumption that Labor was already across the line, so the principle play was influencing the Labor prime minister in waiting – an assumption that events subsequently proved incorrect.
Greens supporters seem comforted by the fact their parliamentary representatives have the best climate policy on offer.
This level of comfort never ceases to confuse me as a citizen who accepts the science of climate change, not as a point of devotion, or religious belief, or shots fired in a culture war, or as a manifestation of my fandom of any political movement – but as a rational, evidence-based fact.
Let’s end on this note of clarity: best policies, declarative statements, well meaning motions in the Senate, are all terrific.
But they mean nothing at all, change nothing at all, advance nothing at all, if they can’t be translated into practical action.
