The people of Wagga Wagga are famously stubborn. On the north side of the Murrumbidgee river is a low-lying village of homes that once flooded five times a year. The signpost at North Wagga Wagga has for decades served as a warning to town planners: “We shall not be moved.”
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| The signpost at North Wagga Wagga has for decades served as a warning to town planners. |
“We are a very conservative city,” says the local mayor, Greg Conkey. “A lot of people do not accept climate change.”
Last week, the Wagga Wagga city council voted to declare a climate emergency. In sum, 28 local government areas have made a similar declaration – but never before in a place such as Wagga, where they prayed for rain at the scorching height of the last major drought, and where the local MP is the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, who recently told a constituent he disputed evidence of global heating.
Conkey, a former journalist who ran the Riverina Leader community newspaper for 25 years, rejects the suggestion that his support for the emergency declaration might be brave or naive, even as local political attacks are being amped up.
Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Brave or naive? Conservative Wagga surprises with climate emergency declaration.”
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