To those looking from outside at Australia’s response to climate change, we Aussies must seem to be a nation of idiots. Catastrophic weather events are destroying homes, livelihoods and biodiversity at unprecedented rates, yet Australia has the least ambitious climate plans of any developed nation.
With an election coming on Saturday (21 May) Scott Morrison, the prime minister, spruiks “the Australian Way”, which relies on technology to solve the problem “over time”. This absolves the government from doing anything and “back ends” our efforts so that most of them will be happening close to 2050. The Australian Way is in fact an Australian Crawl (as a rather comical swimming style is known). For a country recently devastated by the worst fires on record, and then by unprecedented floods, the Australian Way smacks of too little, far too late. The truth is that most Australians are acutely aware of the dangers of climate change and want swift action to combat it. Yet at the last election the conservative Liberal-National coalition government, which is committed to the Australian Way, was returned to power.
Content from our partners
