Australian politics and the climate blindspot
Famously, it was the effects of extreme weather that triggered the French Revolution. The “causes” were many – gross inequality, urbanisation, weak and oligarchic governance, the circulation of shocking new ideas and pornographic scuttlebutt via populist DIY media – but a decade of failed harvests, bitterly cold winters and widespread hunger brought the country to the boil.
Australians depend on many more physical processes for our wellbeing than local harvests. And yet, Australian politics has an enduring blindspot for the natural world in general and the irreversible systemic change that rising global temperatures are bringing to food systems, economic systems and the political landscape in particular. Public discussion acknowledges that we are living in times of perpetual crisis, but seems oblivious that climate change is already and will continue to radically alter Australian society and politics. Most recently, this blindspot is leading people to misread the One Nation surge in popularity and where it the wave will break.
The blindspot endures even after publication last year of detailed analysis commissioned by the government outlining some of what climate breakdown will mean. Drought, storms and heat all affect how much staple food can be grown. Extreme weather cuts supply chains. This is already happening and affecting the price and availability of food, including in Australia.
Analysis undertaken for the body that regulates banks and insurers has found that if global average temperatures keep rising the trouble never ceases: interest rates keep going up, growth in the size of the economy and in household incomes plummets. We will have to spend so much public money patching up damage that we start to go backwards.
More than one in five Australian households are already experiencing severe food insecurity. Extreme weather is already making home insurance unaffordable in high risk areas. This will cascade, since you need insurance to get a mortgage and since banks are already modelling the risk of default when lending to high risk areas. Homes will lose value. Homes will be unable to be rebuilt. This, too, is already happening. Researchers at the University of Sydney think homelessness may quadruple. Since banks use the value of their mortgage portfolio to sell other financial products, there will be wider cascades. What most ordinary Australians intuit without articulating is that the People In Charge, that is, banks, senior politicians and senior public servants, know all of this and are not acting to protect them. If the political and economic system that is creating these injustices are on one side, and the people, wildlife and community are on the other, which side are climate advocates on?
The escalation of stress, damage and isolation brought by climate change is much worse in the regions. It’s estimated that one in four people in regional Australia will be living in a “high risk” place in the next twenty-five years. The Australian Climate Service created an index of exposure to climate risk and social vulnerability for localities nationwide. It combines exposure to hazards like floods, heat and fire, with existing socio-economic disadvantage and remoteness from services. In the top 10% of the most climate vulnerable places in the country, people are already copping severe repeated harm from climate change and it will keep worsening. These include communities in the electorates of Lyne and Page in NSW, to choose two obvious examples – places like Tea Gardens and Hawks Nest, Gloucester, Tuncurry and Taree in Lyne, and Grafton, Kyogle and Casino in Page.
Look at the list of the most vulnerable places and you will also see almost every place where polling predicts One Nation might win seats, mostly from the National Party at a Federal election in two year’s time.
The National Climate Risk Assessment also sounded a warning about more complex social and political impacts of climate change, the signs of which are already emerging:
Adaptation that does not keep pace with escalating climate change or that generates significant, undesirable outcomes exacerbates the risk of society reaching negative social tipping points. There are signs that some tipping elements such as social cohesion are already under strain.
Karen Middleton’s excellent essay “Worrying Tides” in The Monthly about the One Nation surge opened with a reflection on the waves of crises, without mentioning the role of climate change:
People have endured wave after wave of stress from fires and floods, a pandemic, conflicts abroad, rising inflation at home, a terrorist attack and now a fuel crisis. Australians’ anxiety and exhaustion have progressed to frustration, disillusionment and rage, as people become less willing to accept orthodoxies – political, corporate, legal – and more inclined to revolt.
This is important. Australians in regional areas will be stuck in the gap between a finance industry protecting itself from the shocks and cascades of climate damage and a political establishment that refuses to hold anyone to account for it. The reason it is important to name the role of climate change in all this is that climate change is not a short-term cataclysm like war: it is going to intensify and it will shape Australia in the process. This is where the One Nation wave will break. Climate advocates have a real choice as to whether they spend their time and resources sandbagging the political, corporate and legal orthodoxies of the system, or revolting with the people.
In Middleton's essay, Rebecca Huntley reflects on the hot-temper and despair she is witnessing in focus groups in Australia: “I’ve seen two things in the focus groups that I’ve never seen before – people completely and utterly shut down and overwhelmed and incapable of saying anything, and people ringing alarm bells.” There is an unarticulated political movement among these overwhelmed people – the ones who at the moment feel incapable of giving voice to their experience. One Nation and the Liberal and National Parties are so deep in their denial of reality that it appears likely they are going try and tell people in regional Australia that they are imagining the spiking food prices, the heat that kills, the floods that take everything. Such an approach cannot be sustained. It seems very unlikely that these parties will ensure that there is community-owned insurance and disaster response, networks of local food production and care. Will another party or political movement do so? Engaging with this constituency and supporting them to find their voice would transform climate politics in this country.
