The Albanese government has created a climate vacuum, and we will pay the price

First published at Pearls&Irritations

Whilst the global impact of climate disruption is rapidly accelerating, and the last, record-breaking year has been extraordinary, public concern in Australia about it is waning, and the government bears much of the responsibility.

Just two years ago, the Climate 200-sponsored Teals helped sweep a climate-denialist government from power, and the Greens had their best result ever. It was the climate election, but it doesn’t feel like that now.

Since coming to power, the Albanese Labor government has been working hard not to talk about climate warming impacts, not to lead the nation in a public conversation about how to face the greatest threat to our future, and it shows in recent public opinion research.

On 24 June, the Guardian reported on polling conducted for Veolia by the French research company Elabe across 26 countries representing 67% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It found that:

• Just 60% of Australians accept that climate disruption is human-caused, which was a fall of six percent compared to a poll 18 months earlier. This was 13% lower than the global average of 73%.
• Australia was the fifth lowest, behind the USA (66%), the UK (72%), China (82%) and India (86%).
• Only half (52%) of Australians thought “the costs caused by the damage linked to climate disruption and pollution are going to be greater than the investments needed for the ecological transition of our societies”. This was the lowest percentage of the 26 countries surveyed.

Polling by Lowy has shown a small fall since 2022. Concern was highest when Lowy started polling on the issue in 2006 (with 68% agreeing that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”). That figure fell sharply to 36% when Tony Abbott as opposition leader was in full cry, and peaked at 61% in 2019 (at the end of a multi-year El Nino) and in 2024 was at 57%.

The Elabe results are depressing, but there are material reasons. The standout is the unwillingness of the Albanese government to give any public focus to climate impacts. It is clear the Prime Minister’s Office decided that the way to handle the politics of climate was to talk a lot about wind and solar, hydrogen, batteries and Australia as an “energy superpower” and talk as little possible about the impacts — now and in the future — of a hotter and more disrupted world.

In the global arena, the government’s intent is clear: to justify AUKUS and comply with pressure from the US military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, China must always be presented as the big threat, despite climate change being a far greater, genuinely existential threat to all nations. In contrast, the World Economic Forum’s 2023 survey of global leaders found that the biggest three risks in the coming decade were all climate-related, whilst “geo-economic confrontation” (read China) came in ninth. Domestically, it is about renewable energy and jobs, along with the “strategic” importance of gas expansion to maintain fossil fuel donations.

The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s Too hot to handle report showed that (to March this year) Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has referred to renewable energy on 373 occasions, with big numbers for battery (133), storage (165), hydrogen (143), coal (172), pumped hydro (32) and renewable energy superpower (105). The climate emergency rated 32 mentions and extreme weather or heat 15. On specific climate impacts there was little: sea levels got nine mentions, Antarctica rated four mentions, and the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) just one. Words relating to key climate systems — tipping points, permafrost, the slowing Atlantic circulation, the Amazon and extinction — score zero mentions.

Likewise for Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek. In February and March 2024, as large sections of the GBR bleached and died due to unprecedented hot ocean temperatures, the responsible minister said not a word. Her ministerial website records just three mentions of the reef over those two months — all in the first half of February — and they related to the appointment of a “New Chair for Reef 2050 Independent Expert Panel” (sic), the delivery of a progress report on the Reef to UNESCO, and Great Barrier Reef Wetlands Strategy; all of which are part of ongoing political contortions to avoid the reef being placed on the UNESCO “endangered” list, when in reality it is in a death spiral.

Most blatant of all was the government’s decision to hide in the bottom drawer, marked never to be released, an assessment of security-related climate risks, delivered to the government in December 2023 by the Office of National Intelligence. And the reason? This startling analysis of the climate impacts on Australia’s future was something the government did not want the public to understand.

The government does not want to talk about future climate risks because it is conspiring with the fossil fuel industry to make the problem worse. Since the 2022 election, the Albanese has approved four new coal projects, approved the drilling of 116 new coal seam gas wells, defended in court the right of the coal industry not to consider the climate impact of opening new fossil fuel projects, and passed legislation designed to expedite the expansion of the gas industry, according to the Australia Institute.

And now the federal government has approved new gas exploration permits in waters off South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, along with carbon export permits to encourage CCS, a technology not proven at scale.

The Prime Minister and various ministers have flown to India, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam to lock in customers for our gas and coal. One single gas export hub is getting half of what Australia has committed to global climate finance over five years. And government subsidies to fossil fuel producers  jumped by 31% to $14.5 billion over the last year. Ludicrously, Japan in turn re-exports our gas which is surplus to their requirements whilst our fossil fuel industry demands further expansion.

It is unsurprising that the 2024 Sustainable Development Report gave Australia one of the lowest scores for ‘climate action’ – ranking fourth-last out of the 168 countries, only ahead of Qatar, Brunei and the United Arab Emirates.

This climate vacuum has consequences. Richard Kirkman, the chief executive of Veolia in Australia, saidthe survey results suggested “we need to do more work in telling the stories about the facts… We don’t have the full support of the people and we don’t have the political support.”

And Tony Barry of Redbridge has warned that support for renewable energy is falling. Two weeks ago, he told the Clean Energy Council’s annual summit that since the 2022 election, “there’s been a failure to continue prosecuting the case for renewable energy, including providing further definition around the rewards… In politics, if you allow a message vacuum to occur, your opponents will fill it for you. Which is exactly what is happening.”

This in part explains why Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy push (in reality a climate denial and anti-renewables dog-whistle) is doing OK in the polls, with 48% saying the plan “is serious, and should be considered as a part of the nation’s energy future”, not understanding the dire implications of further emission increases.

In all of this, there are signs of a repeating pattern in which both Labor governments and the big, professional climate advocacy not-for-profits act in the belief that you can sell big-picture climate action without first convincing people of the need for that action — the prospect of an unliveable planet — and without being frank that this path will require big, necessary and disruptive economic change.

This belief that it’s all a big, positive story that does not need “doom and gloom” — that is, a broad understanding that the risks are existential — runs contrary to the evidence about what works: whether it be quit smoking campaigns, the Grim Reaper AIDS advertising, or the brutal honesty about Covid and the need for immunisation. The 2011 carbon tax debate in Australia at the time of the Gillard Labor government is a salutary example.

Back then, the Labor government and the big climate groups tried to convince people of the worth of the planned carbon tax by completely forgetting the health promotion lesson. The impacts of climate change on people’s lives now and in the future didn’t get a mention. Instead they ran campaigns about “clean energy futures” and “saying yes”. It was all happy-clappy, win-win; all about selling “good news” and not mentioning “bad news”.

This brightsiding approach, based on positive psychology, is the stuff of motivational speakers, of many personal development courses, of personality and religious cults, and of most politics today. It is an unrelenting false positiveness disconnected from reality. And what happened in 2011 with the happy-clappy “Clean energy futures” campaign? Public support fell, because the government tried to sell the answer without elaborating the problem.

Now another Labor government is going down the same path.