The politics of climate change in Australia

The circuit breaker

The Club of Rome has said that the 20th century will be known as the “century of the economy” because it was in that century humankind worked out how to achieve economic growth. The 21st century will be called the “century of the environment” because environmental problems will be so big they will force themselves upon humankind.

The climate change issue will not therefore go away. No matter what happens with the Kyoto/Copenhagen process, environmental problems will remain.

Australian public and political opinion is very volatile, with a short concentration span. (A good example of short-term memory loss is the introduction a decade ago of the Australian Goods and Services Tax (GST)/ Value Added Tax (VAT). It had long been Australian Treasury policy to have one - it was necessary to get the politicians to understand this. The introduction had been attempted in the early 1980s by the then Labor Government’s Treasurer Paul Keating and it had been defeated by public opinion within his own Labor Party. He dropped the idea. The GST idea was revived in 1993 by a short-lived Leader of the Liberal Opposition (John Hewson). But he was soundly defeated in an “un-losable” election by the then Prime Minister Paul Keating who shamelessly argued against it! He (successfully) counted on Australians forgetting that he had previously advocated one. When John Howard then became the new Leader of the Opposition he promised not to revive the GST proposal. He said it was a dead issue. But he then introduced it when he became Prime Minister after defeating Paul Keating in 1996 and it became his most notable domestic policy change.)

A fresh round of natural disasters would force politicians once again to be more active on this subject. The disasters will be the circuit breaker. Politicians will again be scrambling to find some “solutions”.

The Australian climate change debate is not over.