Australian Attitudes To Climate Change As Captured In The Lead Up To The 2016 Federal Election

The Climate Institute

Concern about climate change among Australians has surged since the lows of 2012 and the last Federal election.
Australian business and the voting public have tapped into international trends about the economic and environmental benefits of climate action.
Now our main political parties urgently need to catch up.
The 2016 Federal Election, and its immediate aftermath, presents opportunities for political parties to work with community and business.

The Climate Institute pre-election polling was conducted on 2-6 June 2016. It shows that concern about climate change, its impacts and the politics around it have been rising and are high across all party lines. This is particularly the case among the 35 per cent of voters who were uncertain regarding their vote.
It also indicates that Australians overwhelmingly wish to see our country take an international leadership role in tackling climate change. This sentiment has continued to rebound since 2012 and has almost returned to the 2008 peak level (see Figure 1).
Australians clearly agree that there is economic opportunity in tackling climate change policies, a view shared by over two thirds of Coalition and 81 per cent of Labor voters.

Concern about climate change has surged
Concern about climate change is significantly higher than in 2013 at 72 per cent (27 per cent very concerned, 45 per cent fairly concerned and just 7 per cent not concerned at all). In 2013, just 53 per cent were concerned (15 per cent very concerned, 38 per cent fairly concerned). Concern from Coalition, Green and Labor supporters was, respectively: In 2016, 62, 96 and 79 per cent; and in 2013: 41, 84 and 63 per cent (see Figure 2). The Coalition jump is notable.

Uncommitted voters have strongest views
Throughout the polling, responses from uncommitted voters were more strongly aligned with positive action on climate change than those who were 'certain' or 'quite certain' about whom they would vote for. For example 76 per cent of those who were 'not certain at all' were concerned about climate change (30 per cent very concerned and 46 per cent fairly concerned).

Is climate change occurring and why?
Three quarters of Australians now think climate change is taking place, up from 70 per cent last year, 66 per cent in 2013 and 64 per cent in 2012. This view is held equally across age groups, gender and location (highest at 80 per cent of people in Victoria, 75 per cent in Queensland and lowest in NSW on 70 per cent). This view is held by Coalition, Green and Labor supporters at 67, 97 and 79 per cent respectively.
Further, when those who think climate change is taking place consider the main cause of climate change, 91 per cent think humans are a cause: 50 per cent, attribute climate change to a mixture of human causes and natural cycles, while 41 per cent think human activity is the main cause.

Leadership, action and the economy
Two thirds (65 per cent) of Australians think that Australia should be a world leader in finding solutions to climate change. This is up from 59 per cent in 2015 and has been on an upward trajectory from a low of 52 per cent in 2012, just before the start of the carbon pricing mechanism. In 2008, the figure was 76 per cent. Uncommitted voters again are more likely to agree with 67 per cent support (see Figure 1).
More than three quarters of Australians (76 per cent) think ignoring climate change is not an answer for our country – up from 69 per cent last year. This sentiment is strongest among millennials (ages 18-34), 80 per cent of whom hold this view. Only 8 per cent of Australians think we should do nothing.
At the same time, 74 per cent of Australians think that tackling climate change will create opportunities for new jobs and investment, up from 71 per cent both last year and in 2013, and from 62 per cent in 2012. This view is held across the political spectrum: Coalition supporters 67 per cent, Greens 87 per cent and Labor 81 per cent.
60 per cent of Australians think that delaying, or implementing half measures, on climate action will increase the likelihood of future shocks to jobs, electricity prices and energy supplies. And more than two thirds (68 per cent) think that extreme weather events will cause cost of living increases – a view held strongly across party lines (60 per cent of Coalition supporters, Greens 79 per cent, Labor 76 per cent and uncommitted 71 per cent).

Figure 1: Australians who want their nation to be a world leader in finding solutions to climate change.

Political solutions in Australia
60 per cent of Australians think the Turnbull government should take climate change more seriously, a slight "improvement" over the 63 per cent who thought this about the Abbott government a year ago but more than the 57 per cent in 2014. Half (49 per cent) of Coalition supporters think this, along with 83 and 75 per cent of green and Labor supporters.
Only 17 per cent of Australians think the Coalition has an effective plan to tackle climate change. This view is held across gender, age groups and location, as well as party lines – Coalition supporters 31 per cent, Greens 6 per cent and Labor 13 per cent, uncommitted on 5 per cent.
The situation is not much different for Labor with only 20 per cent of Australians thinking the party have an effective plan, again consistently reflected across gender, age group and location, but slightly less so among party supporters – Coalition supporters 9 per cent, Greens 25 per cent, Labor 40 per cent and uncommitted 9 per cent.

Labor policy and the "carbon tax"
Much is made of the "carbon tax" as a negative factor in voter decision-making. Our 2013 election exit polling revealed that just 3 per cent of voters saw repealing the carbon tax as the most important reason voters supported the Coalition. In a head to head question, 40 per cent supported emissions reduction versus 28 per cent supporting repeal. In an indicator of diluted effectiveness of the ongoing scare campaign around the carbon tax, only 28 per cent of Australians say they would not vote for Labor because they would reimplement the carbon tax – down from 36 per cent in 2015. Older Australians (38 per cent) and Coalition supporters (48 per cent) are more likely to have this view as opposed to 9, 14 and 17 per cent of Green, Labor and uncommitted voters.
While still significant, our results show that only 42 per cent of Australians hold the view that Labor's carbon policies will only result in increased electricity prices while doing little about pollution – down from 47 per cent in 2015. Two thirds (64 per cent) of Coalition voters hold this view – substantially higher than the 26 per cent of Greens, 29 per cent of Labor supporters and just 32 per cent of uncommitted voters.

Figure 2: Australians concern about climate change.

Should Australia wait for other countries before it takes stronger action?
Only 23 per cent of Australians think we should wait for other countries before we strengthen our post-2020 emissions reduction target, with 55 per cent disagreeing with the notion. 40 per cent Coalition supporters disagree (37 per cent agree), along with 85 per cent of Green, 61 per cent Labor and 63 per cent of uncommitted voters. 18 per cent were neutral and just 13 per cent agree.
63 per cent of Western Australians don't think we should wait compared to 60 per cent of Victorians, 55 per cent in Queensland and 47 per cent in NSW.
Only 24 per cent of Australians think we should wait for China and the USA to act on climate change before we do, with 57 per cent disagreeing. 64 per cent of uncommitted voters disagree with this statement. In 2013, 49 per cent disagreed and 28 per cent agreed.

Political spread of sample
Respondents to this survey identified themselves as 38 per cent supporting the Coalition (35 per cent Liberal, 3 per cent Nationals), 32 per cent Labor, 9 per cent Green, 6 per cent another party and 16 per cent said they did not know. This primary vote break-up was reflective of a federal poll conducted on the same weekend.
Despite their stated voting alignment, 35 per cent of people surveyed said they were uncertain who they would vote for in the election on 2 July 2016. Among these uncommitted voters 27 per cent were current Coalition supporters, 24 per cent were Labor supporters and 12 per cent current Greens supporters.

Methodology
Research underpinning this Factsheet was conducted online by Galaxy Research from 2-6 June with 1,100 Australians nationally, aged 18 years and over. The dataset was weighted and projected to the population based on the latest ABS population estimates.

Links

• The Coalition Climate Policy Credibility Assessment
• Labor Climate Policy Credibility Assessment
• The Greens Climate Policy Credibility Assessment
• Nick Xenophon Team Climate Policy Credibility Assessment
• Glenn Lazarus Team Climate Policy Credibility Assessment
• Jacqui Lambie Network Climate Policy Credibility Assessment

Our Political Parties Have A Climate Policy Credibility Gap

Renew Economy - John Connor*

While the Coalition, Labor, Greens and Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) now support emissions trading and renewable energy, albeit to varying degrees, a gap is opening between their policies and the views held by the Australian community and business.
Both major parties have committed to significant post-election policy reviews. Such a review will be crucial, both to avoid the social and economic instability of this gap, and if our country is to begin to take credible climate action.
The reality is that all the policies of each of the federal parties need work to become credible, scalable and durable. Policies are “Credible” if they explicitly link to shared, meaningful, climate outcomes with transparent review processes. “Scalable” means they address large parts of the economy and can be ramped up, or down, as needed. “Durable” means they are informed by principles that maintain Australia’s economic competitiveness and enhance equity – that is, they are capable of maintaining political support and investor confidence over coming decades.
Both major parties have supported the Paris climate agreement’s goals of keeping global warming “well below” 2°C and to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. With massive reef bleaching, severe storms and unprecedented bushfire weather, it is abundantly clear that Australia is already experiencing significant human, economic and environmental costs …and we only have approximately 1°C of warming already recorded.
It is sobering to realise that if other nations were to have similar emission reduction targets to those that the Coalition currently has, the result would be 3-4°C of global warming, with devastating impacts for Australia. If countries had similar targets to those currently supported by Labor, the world would warm by 2-3°C, also with huge threats for Australians, our economy and environment. Only the Greens and the Glenn Lazarus Team (GLT) have targets aligned to the 1.5-2°C goal, which itself still carries predictable and dangerous impacts. Initial commitments made by countries before Paris would lead to around 3°C of warming. It is clear that Australia and other countries need to do more.
The Paris agreement also includes the goal of attaining net zero emissions. Both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader have acknowledged this goal. They join investors, central bankers, and global and Australian businesses in doing so. Even multinational oil company, Shell, acknowledges that the 1.5°C goal requires the achievement of net zero emissions by 2050. We are now seeing more and more companies, states and nations setting similar or stronger goals. The carbon emissions intensity of an economy has become a key competitiveness test in the 21st century.
Yet the Coalition’s current 2030 emission reduction targets would put Australia’s per person pollution at 18th among G20 nations, ahead only of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Labor’s current targets would place Australia 15th, and NXT 10th. The Greens and GLT targets would place us 8th.
In addition to these indicators, The Climate Institute tested current policies against three key policy tests: Can they help limit dangerous global warming? Can they help build a modern and net zero emissions economy? Do they integrate assessment of climate risks and opportunities into decision-making?
The Climate Institute engaged with the parties about its policy priorities. In doing so, we found the largest climate policy credibility gaps are with the Jacqui Lambie Network and the Coalition. The Greens, the GLT and Labor respectively have stronger policies. The Nick Xenophon Team has strengths, but requires more detail.
Despite the growing human, economic and environmental costs of climate change to Australia, no party has sufficient policy detail about building greater resilience. Labor and the Greens have agreed to integrate climate risk assessments into core decision-making, and the Greens have led resilience policy development, but all need to improve or follow through with urgency.
Today, we released our Climate Policy Credibility Assessment which recommends three critical steps that all parties should pursue in order for Australia to achieve credible climate policies that are also durable and scalable:

1. Set pre-2050 net zero emission objectives, credible emission reduction pathways and regular independent processes of review 
2. Implement economic and community strategies to manage the transition to decarbonisation, and 
3. Integrate assessments of climate risks and opportunities into core decision making.

As part of this research, we also conducted national polling which has shown that the concern Australians have about climate change has surged since the lows of 2012 and the last election. Support for Australian climate leadership is returning to 2008 levels and an overwhelming majority see the economic opportunities in taking action. Mainstream business and investor groups are also increasingly frustrated by ongoing policy disputes and are calling for the integration of climate and energy policies.
Australia has some big choices to make, both at this election and in the policy reviews that the Coalition or Labor will run over the next 12 months. We can continue to back inadequate emission reduction targets and policy uncertainty that leave us at the back of the pack of comparable countries. This will simply intensify employment and economic risks alongside an increasingly disruptive catch-up job that becomes more and more unavoidable as time and inaction pass.
Or we can integrate comprehensive climate action into plans to build a modern, innovative, safer and net emissions free economy before 2050. Only this approach will allow us to work with other nations that are leading in providing climate change solutions. Only this approach will also help us prevent current climate risks from becoming significantly more dangerous and costly.

*John Conner is head of The Climate Institute

Links

• The anti-wind and anti-solar garbage fit to print in Murdoch media
• Australia's big energy switch: from coal and gas to wind and solar
• The RET is a high cost way to procure renewable energy
• Barnaby Joyce sitting uncomfortably on renewable energy boom
• The cost issue this election ignored: the doubling of electricity prices

Naomi Klein On The Racism That Underlies Climate Change Inaction

The Saturday Paper - Naomi Klein

Author and social activist Naomi Klein.

In recent months, the world's gaze has landed again and again on a hellish Australian terrain of climate-related disaster. Bushfires ravage some of the planet's oldest trees in Tasmania. Catastrophic coral bleaching leaves much of the Great Barrier Reef a ghostly white. The first known mammal to be wiped out by global warming was recently identified there.
And yet, there is little to no discussion of climate change in your federal election campaign, which is why many Australian groups are forcefully calling for "Pollution Free Politics": as in North America, the fossil fuel industry has managed to capture not only the debate and key levers of policy, but also huge government subsidies that help to lock in their civilisation-threatening business model, even as renewables surge around the world.

The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.

But responding to the climate crisis is not just a matter of closing coal plants and building more solar arrays. A rapid transition to green energy is also an opportunity to remake our world for the better – to lower emissions in ways that also address historical injustice and inequality, bolster democracy, and prevent the kind of brutal, inhumane future that we are already catching far too many glimpses of, from the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru to the devastating tragedy in Orlando.
In March, two major peer-reviewed studies warned that sea-level rise could happen significantly faster than previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen, perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that, on our current emissions trajectory, we face the "loss of all coastal cities, most of the world's large cities and all their history" – and not in thousands of years, but as soon as this century.
If we don't demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists. In countries such as the Marshall Islands and Fiji and Tuvalu, they know that so much sea-level rise is inevitable that their countries likely have no future. But they refuse just to concern themselves with the logistics of relocation, and wouldn't even if there were safer countries willing to open their borders – a very big if, since climate refugees aren't currently recognised under international law.
Instead they are actively resisting: blockading Australian coal ships with traditional outrigger canoes, disrupting international climate negotiations with their inconvenient presence, demanding far more aggressive climate action. If there is anything worth celebrating in the Paris agreement signed in April – and sadly, there isn't enough – it has come about because of this kind of principled action.
For the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, the refusal of our governments to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without orientalism – what Edward Said described in his landmark book of the same name as "disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region". It would have been impossible without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.
Why? Because the thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coalmines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the United States government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated "national sacrifice areas". Think of the mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coalmining – because so-called "mountain-top removal" coalmining is cheaper than digging holes underground. There were theories of othering used to justify the sacrificing of an entire geography: after all, if you are a backwards "hillbilly", who cares about your hills?
Turning all that coal into electricity required another layer of othering, too: this time for the urban neighbourhoods next door to the power plants and refineries. In North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of colour, black and Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers. It was in fights against this kind of "environmental racism" that the climate justice movement was born.
Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe. Take the Niger Delta, poisoned with an Exxon Valdez-worth of spilled oil every year, a process Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called "ecological genocide". The executions of community leaders, he said, were "all for Shell".
Fossil fuels require sacrifice zones: they always have. And you can't have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from manifest destiny to terra nullius to orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians.
Some people insist that it doesn't have to be this bad. We can clean up resource extraction; we don't need to do it the way it's been done in Appalachia or in the Niger Delta. Except that we are running out of cheap and easy ways to get at fossil fuels. This, in turn, is starting to challenge the original Faustian pact of the industrial age: that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other – the periphery abroad and inside our own nations. From fracking the picturesque countryside to oil trains barrelling through major cities, that outsourcing is becoming less and less possible.
There is also an avalanche of evidence that there is no peaceful way to run an economy powered by coal, oil and gas. The trouble is structural. Fossil fuels, unlike renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, are not widely distributed but highly concentrated in very specific locations, and those locations have a bad habit of being in other people's countries. Particularly that most potent and precious of fossil fuels: oil. This is why the project of orientalism, of othering Arab and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from the start – and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback that is climate change. If nations and peoples are regarded as other – exotic, primitive, bloodthirsty, as Said documented in the 1970s – it is far easier to wage wars and stage coups when they get the crazy idea that they should control their own oil in their own interests. The reverberations from such interventions continue to jolt our world, as do the reverberations from the successful burning of all that oil. The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.
In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting. The main way we've understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called "aridity line", areas where there is on average 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which has been considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation. He documents that all along the aridity line, you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict – from Libya to Palestine to Syria, to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Weizman also discovered what he calls an "astounding coincidence". When you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that "many of these attacks – from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya – are directly on or close to the 200mm aridity line".
Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants.
Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that in April an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world's attention. Another migrant – a 21-year-old woman from Somalia – set herself on fire a few days later. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull warns that Australians "cannot be misty-eyed about this" and "have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose".
I thought about Nauru when I read a columnist in a London-based Murdoch paper declaring that it's time for Britain "to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats." In another bit of symbolism, Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves.
We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst.
The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often resistance to them is highly compartmentalised. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation.
Overcoming these disconnections – strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements – is the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.

Links

• Naomi Klein's Edward W. Said London Lecture 2016
• The links between big polluters and politicians
• Trans-Pacific Partnership to stall climate change action