The Guardian view on the Australian election: vote on the climate emergency

The privilege of governing Australia obliges a political party, whatever its ideological leanings, to offer voters two things – coherent policies to deal with the biggest issues confronting the nation and a competent and prepared team to implement them.

Going into the Australian federal election, Bill Shorten’s
Labor party has a coherent policy program compared
with the thin offering from Scott Morrison’s Liberals. 

The climate emergency is the most pressing issue of our time. For decades, Australia has seen this existential crisis looming and has failed to act on it.

With just 12 years to limit the global climate catastrophe, citizens here and around the world are demanding governments stand up to vested interests and act. The UK parliament has declared a climate emergency, the idea of a Green New Deal is gaining traction in the US and beyond, and students around the world are engaging in spontaneous activism to force change.

But in Australia the Coalition appears deaf to the rising clamour from the electorate. After tearing itself apart and dumping a prime minister to avoid implementing a functional climate plan, it clings to an obviously deficient emissions reduction target and has been forced back to Tony Abbott’s discredited climate policy because the hard right will countenance nothing else. That’s a policy that has seen Australia’s greenhouse emissions continue to rise for the past five years and that would put no constraint on continuing increases in the future.

Read the opinion from The Guardian - “The Guardian view on the Australian election: vote on the climate emergency.”

Opinion: As climate changes, we need the arts more than ever

In the 1997 film “Titanic,” Wallace Hartley, the violinist and leader of the band on the ill-fated ship, turns to his bandmates as the water rises around him and says: “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.” Is the only contribution musicians and other artists can make at this moment in history to bravely go down with the ship, lifting the spirits of fellow passengers? On its own terms that’s an honourable contribution, but surely we can do more.

We now need arts more than ever.

It’s often said that a novel, a painting, a song or a motion picture changed the world. What that really means is, it changed how a lot of people thought or felt about the world.

Anthropologists and historians rightly argue that society’s major transformations have emerged not from the arts, but from our relationship to our environment — for example, our shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from using firewood as our main energy source to using fossil fuels.

Read Richard Heinberg’s Ensia piece - “Opinion: As climate changes, we need the arts more than ever.”