The Guardian - Richard Flanagan
Australians everywhere are ready to get on with the job of dealing with the climate crisis. We just need a prime minister to lead us
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| Scott Morrison comforts 85-year-old Owen Whalan, who was evacuated from his home to the Taree evacuation centre on the NSW north coast. Photograph: Darren Pateman/EPA |
Of
all the horrors that might befall the burnt out, the flooded, the
cyclone ravaged and the drought stricken Australian this summer, perhaps
none could be viewed with more dread than turning from their devastated
home to see advancing on them a bubble of media in which enwombed is
our prime minister,
Scott Morrison, arriving, as ever, too late with a cuddle.
It’s fair to say that Morrison has pulled off other roles with more
conviction – the shouty Commandant of the Pacific camps perhaps his most
heartfelt to date, the Gaslighter-in-Chief his most audacious, his
Mini-Me to Donald Trump’s Dr Evil not without tragicomic charge – but
sorrowful Father of the Nation has begun to feel a firebreak too far.
In Australia we are all now being treated as children, quietened
Australians, most especially on the climate crisis. While the climate
crisis has become Australians’ number one concern, both major parties
play determinedly deaf and dumb on the issue while action and protest
about the climate crisis is increasingly subject to prosecution and
heavy sentencing.
In Tasmania, the Liberal government intends to legislate sentences of
up to 21 years – more than many get for murder – for environmental
protest, legislation typical of the new climate of authoritarianism that
has flourished under Morrison. As Australia burns, what we are
witnessing nationally is no more or less than the criminalisation of
democracy in defence of the coal and gas industries.
In this regard, the climate crisis is a war between the voice of coal
and the voice of the people. And that war is in Australia being won
hands down by the fossil fuel industry.
Which brings us back to that industry’s number one salesman, the
prime minister, standing there in the ash in the manner of Humphrey B.
Bear on MDMA, as, mollied up, he pulls another victim in the early
stages of PTSD into his shirt, his odour, his aura – such as it is – and
holds them there perhaps just a little too long. Sometimes, at his most
perplexing, he lets that overly large head loll on the victim’s
shoulder and leaves it there. Prayers and thoughts naturally follow.
Perhaps
it is just his way. Certainly, the prime minister is an unusual issue
of two stock types frequently derided in broader Australian culture: the
marketing man and the happy-clappy. But in fairness to both tribes, he
seems to draw on the worst in both traditions and make of them something
at once insincere, sinister and vaguely threatening.
Perhaps it’s the slightly up and down smile, the uneven mouth and
crooked teeth, a lack of symmetry that can be attractive in some here
seems to suggest nothing more than an untrustworthy menace. After all
Elvis made of his sneer an alluring smile. Scott, with his reverse
magic, makes of his every smile a sneer. Still, his wisdom would seem to
be that if he is seen to be very good at feeling our pain we won’t ask
him what caused the wound.
The prime minister must accept that public men are judged by public
acts. Real empathy would mean speaking honestly to our nation about what
the climate catastrophe means for our economy, our environment, our
society, and each of us and for each of us personally.
All this theatre hides a deeply cynical calculation: that Australians
will keep on buying the big lie, a lie given historic expression last
Thursday morning when on national radio
the prime minister declared that Australia’s unprecedented bushfires were unconnected to climate change.
The same day the New South Wales government announced that Sydney
dams had in the last 12 months received just 10% of the normal water
inflows and declared Stage 2 Water Restrictions as numerous country
towns face the prospect of no water.
And
on this day, when Sydney was blanketed in bushfire smoke, when much of
Victoria was declared Code Red, fires were burning out of control in
South Australia, and climate emergency was declared word of the year by
Oxford Dictionaries, Morrison said that “to suggest that at just 1.3% of
emissions, that Australia doing something more or less would change the
fire outcome this season – I don’t think that stands up to any credible
scientific evidence at all.”
This is an argument entirely in bad faith.
Two days before saw the release of a major UN report that forecast
Australia to be the sixth largest producer of fossil fuels by 2030.
Between 2005 and 2030 Australia’s extraction-based emissions from fossil
fuel production will have increased by 95%.
By 2040,
according to the report, on current projections the world’s annual
carbon emissions will be 41 gigatonnes, four times more than the maximum
amount of 10 gigatonnes required to keep global heating below 1.5 C.
According to the Economist: “The report lays much blame on governments’ generosity to fossil-fuel industries.” The report details at length how
Australia supports its fossil fuel industries.
Actively working through legislation, subsidy, and criminalisation of
opposition to enable Australia to become one of the world’s seven major
producers of fossil fuels makes Australia’s actions directly and
heavily responsible for the growing climate catastrophe we are now
witnessing in Australia. It gives the lie to the nonsense that we will
make our Paris commitments “in a canter”.
It cannot be explained away. It cannot be excused. Australia is
actively working hard to become a major driver of the global climate
crisis. That is what we have become.
The
same day Morrison went to the Gabba, got photographed with cricketers
and tweeted: “Going to be a great summer of cricket, and for our
firefighters and fire-impacted communities, I’m sure our boys will give
them something to cheer for.”
To the question does he think we are
that stupid, the answer
was implicit in an interview the same day when the prime minister
justified not meeting with 23 former fire chiefs and emergency services
leaders calling for a climate emergency declaration in April, claiming
the government had the advice it needed. He went on to say that: “We’re
getting on with the job, preparing for what has already been a very
devastating fire season.”
Only he’s not.
Getting on with the job would be calling a moratorium on new thermal
coalmines and gas fracking. Getting on with the job would be announcing a
subsidised transition to electric vehicles by 2030. Getting on with the
job would be working to close down all coal-fired powered stations as a
matter of urgency. Getting on with the job would be calling a summit of
the renewable energy industry and asking how the government can help
make the transition one that happens now and one that creates jobs in
the old fossil fuel energy communities.
And
getting on with the job would be going to the world with these
initiatives and arguing powerfully, strongly, courageously for other
countries to follow as we once led the way on the secret ballot, women’s
suffrage, Antarctic protection, the charter of human rights.
We are not a superpower, but nor are we a micronation. We have an
economy the size of Russia’s. Our stand on issues whether good or bad is
noted and quoted and used as an example. And one only has to look at
the global standing of New Zealand to see the power of setting a moral
and practical example, and the good that flows from it for a nation and
its people. Australians everywhere are ready to get on with the job of
dealing with climate change. We just need a prime minister to lead us.
In the meantime though we are left with a mollied-up Humphrey B. Bear.
That same day, news broke of a panicked attempt by the federal
government to administer some desperate triage over the growing costs to
ordinary Australians of climate change in the form of perhaps the most
ill-considered piece of policy in recent political history: to
underwrite insurance premiums in north Queensland where premiums on
homes in cyclone-affected areas are becoming unaffordable.
Major insurers have been warning for years that many homes will no
longer be insurable as the consequences of climate change are felt and
have been demanding action on climate change. The government has done
nothing and now wishes to use taxpayers’ money to hide the growing costs
to individual Australians of climate change. If the government does go
ahead with this panicked response the precedent established is pregnant
with catastrophe for the public purse.
According to a
detailed report by SGS Economics and Planning released at the beginning of this year
more than 1.6 million Sydneysiders are at high risk of flooding or
bushfires, about 2 million Brisbane residents face extreme risks from
cyclones, and more than 4.4 million people in NSW and Queensland live in
areas with extreme or high risk of cyclones. It will be impossible for
any government to subsidise the premiums of Townsville residents with
cyclone risk and not offer it to those in Huonville whose fire risk also
increases yearly.
And yet the government will not act on the fundamental problem that
leads to those risks, choosing instead to use the public purse to hide
the growing evidence of its failure.
The man who brandished a lump of coal and told us not to be scared,
the man who last October told farmers to pray for rain, the man who says
there is no link between the climate emergency and bushfires, the man
whose party has for 30 years consistently and effectively sought to
prevent any action on carbon emissions nationally and internationally
will finally have to answer for the growing gap between his party’s
ideological rhetoric and the reality of a dried out, heating, burning
Australia. And as the climate heats up ever quicker, and as the immense
costs to us all become daily more apparent, that day draws ever closer.
Many
political commentators tend to view Morrison as some political genius,
the winner of the unwinnable election. But history may judge him
differently: a Brezhnevian figure; the last of the dinosaurs, presiding
over an era of stagnation at the head of a dying political class
imprisoned within and believing its own vast raft of lies as the world
lived a fundamentally different reality of economic decay, environmental
pillage and social breakdown.
A corrupted, sclerotic system incapable of the change needed,
surviving only by and through a dull repression of dissent and
dissenters can, nevertheless, seem eternal – until the hour it crumbles.
At some point something gives. Something always gives. The longer the
impasse, the more denied the common voice, the greater and more terrible
that future moment.
We still have other, better choices. We need leaders who will enable us to make them.
Morrison’s Pentecostal religion places great emphasis on the idea of
the Rapture. When the Rapture arrives, the Chosen – that is, those
Pentecostalists with whom the prime minister worships and their
controversial pastor – will ascend to Heaven while the rest of us are
condemned to the Tribulation – a world of fires, famine and floods in
which we all are to suffer and the majority of us to die wretchedly,
while waiting for the Second Coming and Scott and co wait it out in the
Chairman’s Lounge above. Could it be that the prime minister in his
heart is – unlike the overwhelming majority of Australians – not
concerned with the prospect of a coming catastrophe when his own
salvation is assured?
In any case, as a Christian whose faith is built on a direct reading
of the gospels, the prime minister would know the most compelling and
convincing form of betrayal has always been the embrace and kiss.
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