What Happened To The Climate Change Election?

Fairfax - Waleed Aly

Perhaps we'll be surprised. Perhaps calls from Liberals like Arthur Sinodinos and Simon Birmingham to embrace renewables in its energy policy and dissolve the false binary between the environment and the economy will be heard within the party.
Perhaps Scott Morrison, a rare unifying figure in a party still enduring a civil war, will choose to make this shift. Perhaps the presence of independents like Zali Stegall in Warringah and Helen Haines in Indi will inspire Liberal moderates into action.
But let's be honest: as we sit here right now, the next parliament looks profoundly unlikely to generate any meaningful action on climate change.

The greatest predictor of a voter's attitude to climate action is their economic exposure to it. Credit: Jonathan Carroll

So much for the climate election, you say. And on one level, that's right. The swing away from Labor in the outer suburbs – especially pronounced in those seats experiencing heavy mortgage stress – seems emphatically economic. That's not the same as climate scepticism. It's to say it ranks as a third or fourth order issue behind things like the taxes and property prices. Climate change simply doesn't drive suburban votes.
But it's simply not true that climate change wasn't a major factor. It was. And it played out in wildly contradictory ways that reveal exactly where it sits in the Australian imagination.
Let's start with a significantly overlooked fact from Saturday. The Greens had a good night. This is obscured by the large swings against them in the seats in which they had hopes, like Wills and Cooper.
But look at the Senate. It's an important place to look because it is a house of proportional representation, unlike the lower house, where votes can be wasted in safe seats or on lost causes. Here, the Greens gained the largest swing of any party in the country: up around 2.6 per cent, taking its vote to near 13 per cent.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale had a good day in the end. Credit: AAP

That swing was almost double in Queensland, where it quietly outpolled One Nation. In South Australia the swing was 11.8 per cent. As a result, all Greens senators will likely be returned: a big result given most of their senators were up for election this year. It's fair to assume this was largely a climate change vote. No party was as exclusively focused on the issue as the Greens, and no other party's policy was remotely as ambitious
Far better publicised were the significant swings against the Coalition in wealthy, inner-city seats. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the wealthiest seats in the country – most of them Liberal seats – swung progressive. The ones that didn't, barely swung at all. The one exception is Solomon in the Northern Territory, which is a volatile seat.
The most spectacular victim of this was Tony Abbott in Warringah, whose independent vanquisher Zali Stegall unabashedly emphasised climate change. But Wentworth came remarkably close to staying out of Liberal hands on similar grounds.
Elsewhere, it is hard to see what else could have inspired these swings, given Labor's platform was specifically designed to attack the economic interests of wealthy voters.
But then came mining. Almost every community that relies on resources smashed Labor. That is where Queensland came into its own, dishing out double digit anti-Labor swings with relish in places like Capricornia (centred on Rockhampton) and Dawson (which includes Mackay and parts of Townsville). But all the talk of the Coalition's domination of Queensland has missed that it only got 0.25 per cent of the swing. Overwhelmingly these votes flowed to One Nation and Clive Palmer, who then sent them the Coalition's way by preferences.
Perhaps the most pronounced example of this was in the NSW coal mining seat of Hunter, where Labor lost over 14 per cent of its primary vote. The Nationals lost 2.5 per cent of theirs. One Nation, meanwhile, clocked up its highest vote in the whole country: nearly 22 per cent. A couple of thousand more votes and it probably wins the seat.
This was very likely a pro-coal, pro-Adani vote. These are communities where opposition to coal on climate grounds sounds very much like a heartless desire to see them unemployed and impoverished. That's why there was so much rage when Bob Brown took his anti-Adani convoy into town, and so much delight on the faces of Nationals MPs. This, it seems, was not a time for nuance. No one much cared that Labor had no plans to phase out coal, or that it had still left the door open to Adani. Its climate change rhetoric made it sound coal-sceptical, driving these voters to the most anti-climate party they could find. That's my preliminary suspicion, anyway.
"When climate change is a moral issue we do quite badly. When it's an economic issue, we do very well." So said Tony Abbott in his concession speech on Saturday in perhaps the most succinct, piercingly insightful political analysis of the issue offered all night. What this patchwork of climate votes reveals is just how deeply, primarily economic this issue has become. The greatest predictor of your attitude to climate action is your economic exposure to it. Voting for climate change policies is now a luxury item.
The only people who frame it as a "moral issue" and vote accordingly are those who can afford to. If you think your job is on the line, you'll oppose it viscerally. If your job isn't directly affected but you're financially stretched, you'll either have no interest in it or fear the costs of action more than the consequences of inaction. And as long as that's the case, climate action is doomed to the margins because only a small minority will ever be able to afford it.


The Prime Minister says the Coalition's win is a miracle and a victory for the quiet Australians.

Perhaps that might have been different if, instead of hedging on Adani and coal, Labor had spent years talking directly to coal miners about what an economic transition would look like. By this, I don't mean broad strokes about how a switch to renewables will create new jobs, or slogans like "no jobs on a dead planet".
That sort of thing probably seems very abstract and distant if you think you're staring unemployment in the face here and now. No, I mean really specific detail about what jobs will exist for the very same people whose livelihoods are currently bound up in the coal industry, in the very same places they currently live.
This might be the most ignored aspect of our major parties' climate change discourse.
Or maybe I'm wrong. But if it's not that, it has to be something else that makes emissions reduction seem affordable to those who fear it isn't, because it's clear that climate change as a moral issue is dead, and will be for years to come.
The alternative is to expect communities to vote for what they fear will be their own death.

Links

• 'Everyone's had a gutful': Queensland Premier wants time frame on Adani
• A lesson for all sides from campaign Zali: keep it clear and simple
• The Message Morrison Shouldn't Take Away From The Election
• It Was Supposed To Be Australia’s Climate Change Election. What Happened?
• Election 2019: What Happened To The Climate Change Vote We Heard About?
• Labor Lost The Unlosable Election – Now It's Up To Morrison To Tell Australia His Plan
• Australians Disagree On How Important Climate Change Is: Poll
• Stark Climate Policies On Offer At This Election But Will Voters Bite?
• 62 Experts Urge Next Parliament to Make Climate Action a Top Priority
• Climate Change Election: Where Do Parties Stand And What Can We Expect After Saturday?