It’s time, again

The Australian crisis is not only from fires and a largely missing Federal leadership, dazzled by events beyond their comprehension. The vacuum that Scott Morrison, Sussan Ley and others have left has been partially filled by fire chiefs, the Australian Defence Force, state premiers, mayors and progressive and courageous media, including the ABC. The crisis has been fuelled by a relentless decline in reliable rain over previously productive farmland, amplified by increasingly savage heatwaves that repeatedly assault our nation in summer and “warmwaves” that now occur in autumn, spring and even what used to be called winter. Australian climate change is also on display through intense floods, including last summer when hundreds of thousands of cattle drowned in northern Queensland, along with uncounted wildlife. Our drought, dust storms, fish kills and water wars are now in overdrive, wrought through the terror, pain and unbearable suffering (including to native animals) of fire and smoke. A former Australian National University (ANU) colleague, Gemma Carey, reflecting on the smoke in Canberra that she and others have endured for weeks, recently wrote “locked in my house, waiting for a high-grade pollution mask to arrive by post, I press my nose up against the glass doors, looking at where my front fence should be. “So this is what it’s like to have a baby at the end of the world.” The smoke in Canberra is now so bad that it is hindering the function of some of its MRI machines. Due to the smoke, and calling conditions "unprecedented", the ANU has extended its summer break, at least until January 7.

The ideological wars so obvious in the US risk further combustion here. Our conservative press and politicians, as yet, show few signs of contrition. Instead of fessing up, Michael McCormack equated manure self-combustion with climate change as a fire risk multiplier, in so doing revealing scientific illiteracy. Unlike extreme weather events, there is no evidence suggesting that the risk of manure self-combustion is changing. But under pressure in his brief role as acting prime minister McCormack did concede the need for more action by the Australian government on climate change, a position not yet endorsed by Scott Morrison, or even, in a meaningful way, by Anthony Albanese. However, in NSW the Young Liberals and environment minister Matt Kean have shown signs of awakening, as did the Narrabri council, who last week, pulled their support for an expansion of the Whitehaven coal mine, recognising that the company had exaggerated its job creation potential.

The Labor party vigorously supports fossil fuel exports, even the insane Adani coal mine, which not only fuels more global heating but adds to the crisis by its use and contamination of an estimated 270 billion litres of precious groundwater, over its lifetime. On return from Hawaii, Scott Morrison, increasingly lampooned for his parliamentary adoration of coal (in 2017), backpeddled on McCormack’s tentative challenge to Murdocracy, the real opposition to a progressive Australia. (Even though Murdoch is reported as claiming that “there are no climate change deniers around News Corp”). Morrison is increasingly recognised as out of his depth as our national captain, struggling to comprehend that this is a crisis, not an encore of a vague memory of a smoky sky once seen from a southern Sydney beach. 

The need for a Bob Hawke inspired "Accord" on environmental management, including climate change

It would be unreasonable to expect Morrison could connect with us in the way of a Bob Hawke, but all Australian politicians (and thinktanks) would benefit by inhaling sufficient of Hawke’s genius to promote a new Accord. This could develop a multi-partisan approach that improves Australia’s prevention of a growing civilizational crisis, hinted at by Angela Merkel in her 2020 New Year speech and clearly recognised by David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg.

If that barrier is too hard, could we invoke Gough Whitlam’s slogan of “It’s Time” to win landslide Australian support for civilisation-progressing policies, and thus amend for our wrecking behaviour at a series of climate change meetings? Might Malcolm Turnbull, increasingly showing his true climate colours, form his own party and return to power, this time liberated from those who cling to the myths of the 20^th century, including of endless economic growth?

In 2010 I met a newly appointed lecturer in psychology at the ANU, in which I mentioned my concerns about climate change. She called it “existential angst”. When I asked "would you respond similarly to a Jew experiencing Kristallnacht?" she walked away.

I don’t know if climate change deniers are starting to consider their position; there seem very few repenters who are or were prominent (globally as well as in Australia). At least one Liberal voter has changed course - are there millions more? 

In Europe, the influence of climate change deniers and procrastinators, from Lord Monkton to Bjorn Lomborg, has faded. The current Australian crisis is likely to reduce the number of Australian climate change agnostics, and this will further weaken the power of home-grown denialists of the phenomenon my late boss, Tony McMichael, called “planetary overload”. There may even soon be sufficient support among Australians for a Hawke-like Accord, from which a job-enhancing, climate change-slowing Australian consensus will emerge. That will require brilliant leadership, but we may be on the cusp.

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Professor Colin Butler was the first, and so far the only, Australian IPCC contributor to have been arrested for civil disobedience, seeking to draw attention to the immorality of Australian fossil fuel exports. This was at the Maules Creek coal mine, NSW, in 2014.