And how soon till they regret it?
Australians voted for stronger action on climate change. Will they get it?
On his first full day on the job, Australia’s new prime minister mentioned the words “climate change” four times within two minutes of his maiden international speech.
Fresh from election victory, Anthony Albanese sought to present a new Australia to the world, one that takes climate change as seriously as defense, after decades of inaction.
At the Quad meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday, Albanese told his counterparts from the United States, India and Japan that climate and the security of the region were among the biggest challenges of their time.
“The new Australian government’s priorities align with the Quad agenda, taking action on climate change and building a stronger and more resilient Indo-Pacific,” Albanese said, in words broadcast around the world.
But experts say it won’t be easy to turn around a coal-powered ship that has for years been chugging in the wrong direction, partly fueled by a government earning billions of dollars in export revenue.
The powerful fossil fuel lobby could fan headwinds, as could those aligned with the former Liberal-National government — a center-right-conservative coalition — though after years dominating the Australian parliament, their voices are likely to be drowned out by a cohort of Greens and climate-motivated independents who made big gains in the weekend vote.
See, Warmists like to cast blame elsewhere, but, in reality, we’ll see if Aussie are in favor of Doing Something in practice, vs in theory. Back in 2012, the party of Doing Something about Hotcoldwetdry, which did try and Do Something, putting theory into action, lost so bad at the ballot box for the Queensland elections that they didn’t have enough members to be a recognized official party. I keep saying, it might be popular in theory, but, when the action negatively effect citizens lives they do not like that.
Change appears to be coming in Australia, but the new government needs to convince the nation that the climate crisis presents an opportunity, not a threat to jobs, said Frank Jotzo, director of the Center for Climate and Energy Policy at the Australian National University (ANU).
“What the government should do is to talk deeply about climate change as an opportunity to help create better economic opportunities for the younger generation,” Jotzo said. “A government that wants to change things needs to establish a narrative that is overwhelmingly strong against the inevitable lobbying by powerful vested interests.”
Aussies should remember what happened during all the COVID lockdowns, where Government dictated how people could live their lives, and sent in the cops to enforce it. That’s basically a test drive for what climate action would look like.
Anyhow, we need experimental groups for every experiment. Let’s see how well Aussies react.
