The last time ‘climate change’ factored heavily into Australian elections was 2012, when the ruling party in Queensland was annihilated by the voters for actually putting ‘climate change’ policies into action. The Labor party was beaten so badly they didn’t have enough seats to be a recognized party. Doing Something is popular in theory, not practice, and most politicians stay away now
Australian election: Where is climate change on the agenda?
climate change joke
As southern Australia continues to recover from the destruction of the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, towns in Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) have just experienced devastating floods.
Some towns have even seen ‘once in 100 year’ floods occur twice in several weeks. In Lismore, an NSW town of nearly 30,000 people, the river rose more than 14 metres in late February, breaching the town’s levees and inundating people’s homes and businesses. Thousands of residents were forced to take refuge on their roofs.
Weather happens, and it’s ironic that this piece is from Al Jazeera, a news outlet backed by a country who’s primary product is oil
“Despite decades of warnings from scientists about climate change, Australia is unprepared for the supercharged weather that it is now driving,” said Hilary Bambrick, co-author of Australia’s annual assessment of progress on climate adaptation.
“Australia is at the forefront of severe climate change … Climate change means that Australia’s extreme weather – heat, drought, bushfires and floods – will continue to get much, much worse if we don’t act now.”
Despite this and voters’ desire for action, climate change has barely been a talking point in campaigning for the country’s federal election, which will take place in less than a week on May 21.
“Australians are hyper concerned about climate change,” University of Tasmania political scientist Kate Crowley told Al Jazeera. ”But the major parties, especially the [ruling] Coalition, don’t want to talk about climate change. For them, it’s done and dusted.
Yes, because they know it is a losing topic, especially post-COVID, with high inflation and low goods.
Climate writer Ketan Joshi has been tracking politicians’ social media mentions of climate change.
He found that just four percent of tweets from senators and three percent of tweets from members of parliament mentioned climate in the first week of the campaign. Most did not tweet about climate change at all.
“Tweets are a proxy for discourse,” Joshi explained. “It’s a really simple read on [the issue’s] prominence, and it turns out that even when climate is mentioned in bad faith, it’s still only a tiny, tiny proportion of the discussion.”
These climate cultists do know that they can actually practice what they preach, instead of trying to get Government to force Other People, right?
Poll after poll has found that the majority of Australians want to see the government take serious action on combating climate change.
National broadcaster ABC runs Vote Compass, the country’s largest survey of voter attitudes. In this year’s poll, 29 percent of those surveyed ranked climate change as the issue most important to them. This was higher than any other single issue, even in the face of the increasing cost of living, which 13 percent rated as the biggest issue.
But, when that action happens these same people will be like “wait, I didn’t think the bad parts would apply to me!”
