Shameful political response to climate policy

Two of Australia’s most shameful political failures – asylum and climate policy – are back in the news.

The Climate Institute is critical
of government inaction on
climate change.

Labor has had another stab at a climate policy – half brave, half cautious and vague, but certainly more credible than the current government’s fig leaf of a “plan”. And the PNG government has called time on the festering human rights catastrophe that is Manus Island, a development that left both parties gawpingly devoid of answers.

Each of these failures has been driven by politics.

Australian climate policy is at near crisis point because it can be solved only with a degree of bipartisanship, absent in the past seven years of brain-dead fact-free sense-paralysing conflict. Asylum policy is already at crisis point because the leading parties are in a bipartisan death lock that refuses to acknowledge the human and moral cost of achieving the stop-every-single-boat objective.

Read Lenore Taylor’s story on The Guardian - “Asylum and climate change are back in the news – and the response has been pathetic.”