The election is called, ‘peak crazy’ is on, and cynicism reigns at a time we can’t afford it

By David Salt

Australia has entered an election period (described as ‘peak crazy’ by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull) and chickens everywhere are running around claiming the sky is falling.

Right-wing politicians are describing animal-rights activists as equivalent to terrorists and calling for them to be thrown in jail.

Our Prime Minister has accused the opposition Labor Party of attempting to steal our weekends because they announced a policy of 50% electric cars by 2030.

Carbon emissions are rising but our Government leaders are telling us we’ll make our targets at a canter (and their policy to date has actually seen emissions on average rise).

Adani’s new coal mine proposal in outback Queensland is being lauded in the regions as a source of jobs while simultaneously being condemned in the cities as an environmental horror.

It’s all so shrill, so hysterical, that large slabs of the electorate have simply switched off. No-one believes anyone and everyone seems to stop caring.

The same but different

On the one hand it was ever thus. Every election period is shrill and hysterical, every candidate smeared and compromised by the time it’s over. Then the government is returned (or changed) and life goes on. Normalcy returns.

On the other hand, things are different and we won’t be bouncing back to ‘normal’ no matter who wins.

We look around us and the evidence of climate change is real and present be it in the bleached degrading skeleton of the Great Barrier Reef or the millions of stinking fish corpses clogging the Murray Darling. Species are going extinct, droughts and floods are becoming more punishing.

We’ve just survived the most brutal summer on record but no-one believes there isn’t worse down the line.

The world is burning, figuratively and literally, but the chorus from leaders standing for election is that ‘she’ll be right’, and ‘trust us’. Such platitudes simply don’t cut it anymore, and voters are retreating into a bleak cynicism.

Rome is burning

Sometimes, however, a plaintive cry cuts through the crap.

Just prior to the commencement of the official election period I heard a former head fire fighter say on public radio that he was scared. The bushfires he was seeing in the last couple of years were unlike anything he had had to confront throughout his career. The fire seasons were longer, the burns more intense and covered a greater area. Our available resources weren’t coping.

He, along with former fire chiefs from every state and territory, were making a plea for government to acknowledge and act on the escalating risks associated with climate change. But as the country descends into a frenzy of election madness their hopes of being heard are dashed.

Your house is burning

So, our dedicated expert emergency managers are scared.

Well, I’m scared too. I’m scared of what’s coming at us; and I’m scared that our democratic process is not up to the challenge of engaging with the problems growing from the global changes we are creating.

I’m scared because our political leaders are presenting simplistic solutions to complex problems.

They tell us we can meet the challenge of sustainability and we don’t even have to sacrifice anything to achieve it. We can have our economic development and rest assured that it isn’t going to cost us the environmental capital upon which it’s based. We can have our cake and eat it.

And their assertions are so demonstrably wrong, with the evidence of this mounting around us all the time.

Yes, this is a rant*. It’s a release of the frustration that I (and many other voters) feel towards this election period that reduces important issues to sound bites, slogans and attack dogs.

The Earth is boiling and our polity is increasingly febrile.

If only our political leaders could show they care in a way I believe. Exhibit a little humility instead of hubris; acknowledge uncertainty instead of parading simplistic absolutism; and demonstrate that they too are a little scared of an increasingly frightening future.

“I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And act as if your house is on fire. Because it is.”

Those aren’t my words. They were uttered by a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg back in January when she admonished the planet’s economic leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos for not acknowledging the growing catastrophe of climate change.

I feel that fear. I wish my elected representatives might too.

*I commit to be less ranty and more constructive in future posts. And I would point out that much of the angst the electorate feels during election periods (that I am ranting about here) results from our political parties pandering to vested interests, whipping up tribalism and focussing on the short term – three problems my colleague Peter Burnett focussed on in an earlier Sustainability Bite (in which he proposed several constructive solutions).