Local government can (& should) lead climate action
My friend Bill is standing for election in this year’s NSW local
government elections. Bill is a teacher, musician and wildlife hero who runs,
alongside his long-suffering wife Lesley, a wombat refuge. Bill is on call 24/7
for injured wildlife. He and Les typically care for dozens of wombats on their
refuge, ranging from tiny pinkies rescued from the pouches of road-killed mothers,
through to adults being treated and rehabilitated prior to release back to the
bush. We’re talking a lot of wombats here. Bill also has a weekly radio program
on the local FM station where he interviews a local person on various topical
issues. Apparently all these commitments aren’t enough because now Bill wants
to be a councillor.
Is Bill bonkers? Probably, but that’s not the point.
The point is climate change. Does local government have a role in taking climate action and how can one elected council representative make a difference?
Let’s go back a few decades …
From the second half of the 1990s, the Australian government ceased to acknowledge climate change as an environmental issue based on decades of scientific research and turned it into a political ideology. It was a clever political move, but a disaster for climate action.
It worked like this: the Howard government, aided and abetted (if not outright instructed) by the Murdoch media empire, began a propaganda campaign linking climate science directly to green politics*. The more they did this, the more entrenched public opinion became that the issue of climate change was being promulgated by the Greens and other left-wing parties as a political tactic. It became a “green thing” rather than an environmental, humanitarian and global problem. Clever, eh?
The government then started to discredit the science behind climate change, calling on a very narrow range of scientists, none of whom were climate experts, but who were prepared to voice dissent to mainstream scientific thought. We don’t hear much from those scientists any more.
The government persisted in referring to a “climate debate” even though the debate was well and truly over by the late 1990s, while the Murdochracy continued to squawk that they needed to present a “balance” of views. That balance entailed giving 50% of media space and air time to about 2% of the speakers.
It’s now 2024, there is no longer any climate debate. The effects of climate change are visible and accelerating. Super-storms, disrupted weather patterns, mega-fires, unprecedented heatwaves, disappearing island nations – we’re seeing it all.
Having fart-arsed their way through over three decades of
scientific warnings, governments are now wringing their hands and saying that all we can do is adapt
to the changes. It’s too late to stop climate change. How do they propose we
adapt? By applying the same thinking that got us into this situation in the
first place.
This brings us back to Bill and his council election campaign. If Bill is elected in September, he will be one of 11 councillors in this region. The elected members will cover the full spectrum of political views. They will come from a range of professional and educational backgrounds and will all have a different idea of what they want to achieve during their term of office. One thing they will lack, however, is a collective imagination.
Local government can no longer simply restrict itself to the three Rs (roads, rates and rubbish). Because it is the level of government most closely associated with grassroots community, it has a responsibility to take positive action on climate change. Every local government area in Australia is different: different environments, climates, populations, problems. But a local government with a collective imagination will be able to visualise outcomes for its region and devise policy for working towards those outcomes.
Every councillor has a responsibility to discard partisan affiliations and ideological leanings and to bring his or her imagination to the table. This is big picture stuff and will require a level of cooperation not always seen in a council chamber. But at a time when federal and state governments are still trying to apply 20th Century thinking to 21st Century problems, our futures may well depend on local action.
I’ll be Bill’s guest on his radio program next Monday evening (27 May) talking local government, climate change and possibly wombats. If you feel inclined, tune in to 88.9fm or live stream from 7.00-9.00pm.
* For more on this, see Global Warming and Climate Change: What Australia knew and buried...then framed a new reality for the public by Maria Taylor, ANU ePress 2014
Comments
Post a Comment