Even by the standards of Australian climate denialism, Tuesday was especially surreal. Scott Morrison made his way through the thick smoke choking Sydney that day to conduct a media conference — not on the bushfire catastrophe that has been unfolding for weeks now, nor on addressing the climate change has caused it.
Rather, Morrison unveiled a new draft religious discrimination bill.
Instead of addressing the catastrophe literally outside, with Comical Ali-like denial, Morrison was pursuing a culture war in which, somehow, he has managed to find himself in the middle of the battlefield getting shot at by both sides, as he tries to find ways to enable religious organisations and health professionals to discriminate against people based on their religion, their lack thereof or their personal morality.
Morrison then tried to leave the building but the smoke was so thick it triggered fire alarms that left occupants trapped. Political metaphors rarely get more blunt than a climate denialist politician trapped in a building by smoke caused by climate change-generated fires.
The NSW government had a different reaction. Despite some denialists still lurking in government ranks, NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean was given licence to respond, linking the fires to the need for climate action, publishing an op-ed that argued “extreme weather events are exactly what scientists have warned us about for decades … Climate change is no longer just a forecast”.
He wants Australia to “put ourselves at the centre of a new global order on energy”. Overnight, he flagged a new emissions abatement target for NSW of 35% by 2030. The Berejiklian government had not so much sniffed the breeze as inhaled the acrid smoke and dramatically shifted its climate rhetoric. Whether that translates into real action remains to be seen, by there was strong endorsement of Kean’s proposed target from environmental groups.
The contrast with Morrison is stark. He continues to lie about meeting our grossly insufficient Paris targets, while climate denialist Angus “pick one of several scandals to use as a nickname” Taylor is in Spain trying to use accounting trickery and policies inherited from Labor as an excuse for inaction.
Morrison and his colleagues would have been cheered by an attack on Kean by The Australian, with its unsubtle message of what will happen to any Liberal politician who deviates from Murdoch’s climate denialism.
If Morrison’s refusal to act — bought and paid-for by the Liberal Party’s extensive roster of fossil fuel and energy companies and propped up by a rabid fringe group of extremists in his own ranks — can’t be shifted by what happened to Sydney on Tuesday, what will do it? What could be Scott Morrison’s bushfire moment, when even his home city choking on smoke doesn’t work?
After all, during the last term of parliament, the Liberals partially reversed more than a decade of staunch defence of banking misconduct to deliver a royal commission, a banking tax and a new banking remuneration regulatory framework, despite the sector’s millions in donations.
Perhaps international sanctions will accomplish the task. The Macron government has already signalled that any EU-Australia free trade agreement must be “highly ambitious in terms of sustainable development”, including climate change. Some European businesses — no doubt reflecting their own interests as much as, or more than, any concern about climate change — want to go further with a carbon border tax aimed at imports from countries that fail to take action on climate, and to “bring exporting nations to the negotiating table on climate issues”.
A major European business lobby group backs the idea of using trade agreements to compel compliance with Paris targets and is open to the idea of a carbon border tax. The idea is discussed in terms of the US and China; a minor economy like Australia might be a useful warm-up for the main act of a European carbon tax on countries that refuse to address climate change.
Such a tax would be simple protectionism. Only, the problem is that Australia is currently engaging in its own form of protectionism by refusing to address the costs of its addiction to carbon emissions and expecting the world to give us a free ride on those costs, especially given our status as a key coal exporter.
Australia exports $30 billion worth of goods and service to the EU (including, ironically, coal). A proper carbon border tax on our exports might help Morrison see through the smoky haze of fossil fuel donations to a path forward on climate action.
The absence of leadership through this bushfire crisis is glaring. How many more weeks of this until the federal government deems it something worthy of our nation’s focus?
What about our own extraordinary passivity and cowardice? One minute we’re praising ourselves up as the hero Aussie battler, the just-do-it hero independent, heir of the Anzac Spirit, next minute we’re trying to avoid challenging a psychopathic bully cheerfully watching Sydney burn.
FYI all, morrison has a majority of one. Work on it.
Do not confuse media adulation of scummo, nor even his ruthlessness and cunning, as guaranteeing permanency. morrison’s very very deliberate offensive condescension simply continues the years of domineering aggression to which our media has grovelled – but now we are all very openly seeing the real him, including his utter refusal to do anything good for us. But how hard we are trying not to!
Slomo’s denialism survived the experience of Sydney on Tuesday. Nothing will change it.
However hopefully that day will come to be remembered as Slomo’s Prince Phillip moment, when realisation spread that we had elected another religious nutter consumed by a weird set of obsessions. Political survival eventually forced a backflip on banking. It is our only hope on climate.
I reckon a Tory victory in the Old Dart tomorrow will inspire Scumbag to even greater heights of pure bastardry – proof that lies and treachery carry no electoral penalty as long as Murdoch and people like Sir Lynton Crosby are on your side.
Maybe the bubble that Scotty lives and works in is so opaque that he can’t see through it?
Matt Kean’s political courage and strategic policy focus should be warmly applauded. There’s nothing tougher in the world today that stepping up and having a crack at the political ‘art of the possible’. As much as we sneer and mock and moan about our democracy – our elected representatives + our fantastically capable and committed public services – they are ultimately ‘our people’. After thirty years of belting them about, subjugating our own democratic agency and ambition to the sucker-punch of unsustainable ideological deracination, all of us need to keep in mind that leadership from the people we vote for (and those they then employ on our behalf)…remains our least-worst, thrillingly-best option for navigating our way through this latest existential crisis. The private sector has a huge and brilliantly creative, influential role to play in getting us through CC, but in the end, it’s the Keans of Australia we want steering the ship. Not because they’re flawless. Not because they’re ‘this’ or ‘that’ political persuasion.
Simply because…we can vote them in. And we can vote them out if they f**k it up! Yay, Team Democracy.
Climate Change is a series of practical problems to be solved, revolving around the way we provide ourselves with our basic utilities: our food and water, our shelter and sanitation, our energy and communications. We’ve solved such problems before, and we’ll solve these latest ones, too. Don’t panic, don’t despair, don’t lose focus and don’t think we can’t work our way through the coming decades successfully. But we do have to listen to our kids, our sublimely idealistic kids: and re-embrace our democratic agency, and our self-confidence in controlling our own destiny.
Our hope, and our belief in the worth of being hopeful.
At the risk of being narcissistic, here are some (NSW/Western Sydney-centric, soz all, that’s the gig) ideas for immediate policy choices/approaches that are both practical and symbolic, immediate and strategic. There are vast numbers of us doing fantastic things on climate change, at both policy and personal level. The key will be to shift the debate beyond the ideological divisions and reframe our response to CC as a collective, whole-of-community project, to shift ourselves to a more sustainable footing.
Hoping Crikey might post a link, which I submit purely as a private citizen/subscriber, ie not in any professional capacity. It’s now a public document in any case. Cheers all.
Western Sydney’s Hot Issue Discussion Paper.
https://westernsydney.org.au/policy-papers
Cheers, Crikey. Thanks a bundle as ever for indulging me – really appreciated. Have a great Xmas break.
And double your subs in the new year, FFS! You’re ridiculously underpriced, still…
If not tariffs perhaps a credible threat of BDS might do it. It worked on apartheid, the Bibi regime’s increasingly panicky campaign against it suggests it’s starting to work on the Palestinian captivity, perhaps it might work on climate denialism.
Simple answer to the question really. ScoMo will have his climate change moment when Shark Park comes under ember attack, and the grandstand bursts into flames. Or at the next election, which ever comes first. If we get a nice strong El Nino in the next two years things will go from bad to much much worse and that may just do the trick.