South Wind

Among the different ways humans respond to trauma, specialists tell us, is to go into denial. Our senses register a threat, but our conscious minds continue as if nothing is amiss. Such is the present state of Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberal government.

It would be a relief to discover that leaving climate change off his list of ministerial responsibilities was the premier’s way of signalling that he grasped fully the dimensions of the climate crisis and wanted to make it everyone’s concern. 

Alas, no. Not only was climate change excluded; so was science. To abolish or downgrade ministerial responsibility for either of these critical elements in our future is like smashing the car headlights ahead of a long night-time road trip.

This is a government in denial about a well-documented threat to our future. In the world’s poorest, most exposed nations, this threat is playing out in the form of lost livelihoods, broken communities and sometimes death. Only good fortune and our relative wealth shields us for now from a similar fate. 

Sadly, Tasmania’s state of denial is not unique. Australia’s federal and state governments – and governments throughout the developed world – are all in denial about their carbon emissions and humanity’s imminent climate peril.

While claiming to understand this peril, the federal government says little to its people about the gravity of the situation. It continues to treat the burning of fossil fuels or their export for burning in another country as legitimate, respectable behaviour. In addition, it is approving new mines and massively expanded processing capacity for fossil fuels, helping to lock in their continued use for many decades.

When you think about it, this is astonishing. Since the middle of last century science has been warning with increasing urgency and backed by an ever-growing mountain of evidence that our fossil fuel use is destabilising the climate. Governments acknowledged the legitimacy of that warning at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. 

Yet here we are, 32 years later, careening down a steepening slope that we know will end in a cliff, behaving as if nothing has changed. I personally still drive a petrol-fuelled car and burn gas for cooking, so yes, I’m also responsible in my small way. But we elect leaders to lead, and they’re patently not doing it.

It is not good enough that we no longer have a designated climate change or science minister, or a clear, scheduled, funded pathway to eliminating fossil fuels from our lives, or that the major alternative party has said nothing about this gross failure. Somehow, we have to start knocking some sense into those who seek to govern.

Tasmanians have limited capacity to influence the national government and even less what happens outside our borders. But here on this island, our home, we can really make things happen – especially when the most recent election has forced the Liberal government to negotiate with others in order to survive. A door is now open for ordinary people to make their political leaders behave responsibly. 

If it wanted to the new parliament could force the government to agree to a new cross-party standing committee, drawn from both chambers, to gather the best available climate policy advice and facilitate its rollout. Being called to account for failing to act may be enough to persuade the government to adopt a proactive attitude.

Continued inaction is threatening our health. The Dutch-American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in exploring the impact on people of denying that something is amiss, notes in his book “The Body Keeps the Score” that while the mind may learn to ignore external warning signs, the alarm signals don’t stop. He continues:

“The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep the score.”

While government fiddles, the body – the global system – is keeping the score. We can hide symptoms of our world’s global warming affliction but it is taking its toll on our wellbeing. That trauma will overwhelm us if we are unable or unwilling to recognise it and the imminent danger it poses.

The denial of climate reality by Jeremy Rockliff and his ministers is helping to make us all sicker. It may also have an adverse impact on an already-fragile coalition. But the future of this government is the least of our concerns.

Passing the supermarket checkout is just one reminder that living carries a cost, and that cost is now rising across many economic sectors. In these circumstances we lean heavily on the ability of authorities to limit the damage until things settle down again.

It’s widely assumed that those authorities can fix things by pulling financial levers like interest rates, taxation and commercial regulation. But the underlying drivers of this instability are not financial at all. 

War is one of these non-financial drivers, but the biggest of all is a destabilised climate caused by the very thing that underpins our economic prosperity, energy from fossil fuels. Tasmania and all other jurisdictions face the daunting challenge of shifting from a fossil-fuelled economy to a wholly new, carbon-free one.

For a decade or so I have been a member of Climate Tasmania. With diverse backgrounds and expertise, the people in this voluntary group have one important thing in common: a deep concern about the climate.

The use of fossil fuels in industry and transport – our state’s biggest source of carbon emissions – also contributes massively to our cost of living. Relying on imported petrol and diesel, transport costs the state’s economy well over $1 billion a year. The question is, faced with a rising urgency to end use of fossil fuels, how can Tasmanians do that without sinking into penury?

Three years ago, when the government finally got around to amending the state’s 2008 Climate Change Act, Climate Tasmania submitted a detailed plan it had developed over years to phase out fossil fuel use by transport and industry.

The plan was the brainchild of Climate Tasmania member David Hamilton, now retired and living near Launceston, whose career in applied physics spanned nuclear, oil and gas and biofuels. He envisaged a two-pronged approach, requiring major users and public authorities to report publicly on how much fossil fuel they used, and creating a temporary Energy Transition Authority to manage the shift to clean energy.

The proposal got no government response at the time, and the Act that passed 18 months ago ignored all our ideas except a watered-down form of climate change risk assessment. Now, when the election showed public opinion moving in the opposite direction, premier Jeremy Rockliff has inexplicably decided that climate change does not warrant a portfolio in its own right. 

Climate Tasmania is proposing to galvanise strong community concern in the form of a realistic framework for phasing out fossil fuel. “What gets measured gets managed” is the premise on which in which business people are being asked to pledge to phase out their use of fossil fuels and to make their progress visible to all.

Under this plan, each participating business will pledge to reduce its fossil fuel usage, while publicly reporting at a suitably frequent interval, say every six months, on the amount of fossil fuels they have bought in the course of their trade. 

Official emissions reporting is complex, covering direct fuel use (called “Scope 1”), emissions from electricity use (Scope 2), and emissions from customer and supply chain use (Scope 3). David Hamilton’s “Fuel Reduce Pledge” has the great virtue of simplicity, focusing on the most critical element, Scope 1.

While government involvement would strengthen the scheme, it can work without it. The University of Tasmania has already agreed to anchor the scheme by publicly announcing its own pledge. Climate Tasmania is working with others on a media launch later this year. 

By making promises without actual, physical outcomes, the world’s governments have kept delaying effective action to cut carbon emissions from fossil fuel emissions, which are still climbing while the world is warming at an alarming rate.

For all its official boasts about climate leadership, Tasmania is actually a laggard. Todd Houstein, engineer and consultant for Sustainable Living Tasmania, has done the sums to show our per capita emissions are consistently and significantly above the globally-agreed safe limit.

A Climate Tasmania submission last November on a Tasmanian government transport plan, prepared by Rachel Hay, pointed out that only 0.4 per cent of cars registered in the state are electric, and showed that Tasmania is falling behind other states in decarbonising the transport sector.

It’s past time we stopped waffling and got down to tin tacks. We need to understand that the real cost of living comes from continuing to use fossil fuels, and the only way to beat inflation is to get them out of our lives. People power can make this happen. If the Liberal-Lambie coalition is to be a real government it will have to get on board.

By definition, the world’s truest, most representative electoral system is also the world’s most accurate opinion poll. That poll has now revealed Tasmanians’ deep sense of unease at the state of the world they live in. And neither of the major parties has a clue what to do about it.

When issues like stadiums grab and hold public attention it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking no-one cares. That was my mindset a couple of weeks ago when I wrote that in this year’s election “the Greens aside, no party or individual candidate across the spectrum took on climate change as a major issue of concern.”

I was too hasty. Last week I got an email from Bob Elliston, who got 169 votes as a candidate for Franklin in the March election. Elliston’s campaign leaflet described government’s “worst crime” as “not doing nearly enough about climate change” and featured a serious-looking headshot captioned, “There’s no smile because there’s not much to smile about.”

It’s hard for independents to do what the Greens keep doing – encompass broad environmental concerns in a convincing campaign package. But in 2022 major-party candidates were beaten by the Teal Independents’ environment platforms. Anti-salmon campaigner Craig Garland has now done the same here in Braddon. 

Premier Jeremy Rockliff called an early poll to eliminate party rebels and win an outright majority. On election night, with the rebels headed for the exit and supporters chanting “four more years”, he boldly declared he’d won. With his party’s primary vote down by 12 per cent that was a brave call. Now it looks plain foolhardy.

With just 14 seats, the Liberals are still four short of an outright majority. And as political scientist Richard Herr said at the weekend, without the Greens – nearly half of Tasmania’s biggest-ever crossbench of 11 – there will be no parliamentary stability. 

Yet both Rockliff and Labor leader Rebecca White were united in their refusal to deal with the Greens, presumably hoping that the party would somehow go away. Of course it didn’t, and both major parties are now stuck with their foolish promises.

Labor won only 10 seats, but as things turned out it could have formed government in alliance with the Greens and other crossbenchers. The politics of the Jacqui Lambie Network is a work in progress, but it’s feasible and even likely that independents Kristie Johnston, David O’Byrne and Craig Garland would have supported a Labor-Green coalition.

That was the intention signalled by White’s defiant election-night speech, but we’ll never know. The next day the party that once never missed a chance to form government was cast adrift by backroom administrators who decided they weren’t even going to try.

This has history. The first Labor-Green deal way back in 1989 ended in angry finger-pointing and a disastrous election loss in 1992. The boot was on the other foot in 1998 when Tony Rundle’s Liberal government made a pact with the Greens and then collapsed in a heap. The major parties colluded to exclude Greens, cutting parliament to 25 seats, but it didn’t work. The Greens kept coming back.

Labor tried one more time to live with the Greens. After the 2010 election Liberal Opposition Leader Will Hodgman refused to deal with them, but Labor leader David Bartlett negotiated with Nick McKim, who with Cassy O’Connor joined the Bartlett-Giddings government. 

In a government that chalked up numerous legislative successes, the deal seemed to work well. Then just before the 2014 election Lara Giddings abruptly terminated it, a stand-off with the Greens that holds to this day. This year both major parties, while admitting they might enter coalitions with people outside their party, kept hammering the message that the Greens were off-limits.

Having demonstrably failed to secure the backing of Tasmanian voters, the major parties continue to show their ignorance – wilful or otherwise – of the underlying reason for their community’s dissatisfaction with them: a deep and abiding anxiety over what the natural world has in store for us. 

This is a pretty pass. No party can currently win power without forming a coalition, and lasting coalitions require agreements between parties. Past difficulties notwithstanding, the Greens are the most stable third-party bloc in the Tasmanian parliament, and have been for decades. As the only party committed to addressing pressing environmental issues, they have retained voter support. 

Contrast that with the positions of Jeremy Rockliff and Labor leader-in-waiting Dean Winter, who continue pointedly to ignore the environment while banging on incessantly about jobs and growth. 

Other important issues need attention, notably in health and education, but all depend on a stable, reliable natural environment. When that is lost everything else is lost too. The electorate understands this important truth. It’s tragic that our leaders have still not caught on.