How our political system fails us

Watching the cool, detached Penny Wong evade questions on climate change is a perfect example of what has gone wrong. Wong, trained in the dog-eat-dog world of industrial law, sees climate change in quintessentially political terms, as a zero sum game, being played with the Coalition. The choice of her as minister over a man who actually knew something about climate change, Peter Garrett, but who was not as slick a political operator, told us much about how the Rudd Government works.

Such people in such a political system cannot generate the comprehensive policies we need to get through the multi-dimensioned global crisis now underway. Our politicians lack the ability and resolve to formulate meaningful policies and our political system is too prone to manipulation by the mass media. The way the minimalist Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that has been the Rudd Government’s meagre response to climate change has been undermined shows this clearly.

Our best hope is that some kind of critical mass of debate and concern coalesces online. There is an increasingly well-informed debate occurring on websites and in blogs and discussion boards that needs to be translated into a wider context. If the ideas in and proponents of this debate can be recognised and supported by the sort of fundraising that helped Obama get elected they may be able to generate a new kind of politics. This new politics may transform or take over existing political arrangements, and finally get on with the job of responding to the global crisis.

And the fact that everything online is inherently global in scope only helps. From now on all political issues will have a global dimension since all energy use and carbon pollution now influence climate change, and virtually everything we do involves these things.

Our political system originated in the 19th century and has changed remarkably little since that time. We now need politics and government that is globally oriented , information-rich and open to input by relevant expertise. We now have the incentive and the basic means to create such a system, and whether we do so or not will largely determine how well we deal with the emerging threats.