South Wind

Early in the vote count on election night, ABC host David Speers asked Queensland Liberal-National senator James McGrath for his take on the Greens’ campaign in Brisbane. The response was like an exclamation mark in an otherwise routine discussion.

“The Greens are horrible,” said McGrath. “A nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party and when you deal with them on pre-poll they are just horrible people… I will happily take the Labor Party and, with respect, union thugs any day of the week compared to the Greens.”

The “antisemitic” slur arose out of Green opposition to Israeli bombing in Gaza. More on that later, but the vehemence of McGrath’s outburst indicates a deep-seated antipathy towards the Greens, sometimes expressed in Labor ranks too, that goes far beyond idealistic young Greens being rude to poll workers.

Bandt put that aside in conceding defeat to Labor’s Sarah Witty on Friday. He spoke at length on the climate crisis – “the reason I got into politics”, rightly identifying the 2011 carbon price as “the only thing that really cut climate pollution in this country.” That moment of sanity lasted just two years, ending with the repeal of those laws by the Abbott government.

Bandt ended with a plea to journalists to stop reporting climate as a political issue and start thinking about it “as if there’s a war on”. Carbon emissions, he pointed out, were actually higher under the Albanese government than under the previous Coalition government.

In the 2025 campaign, he said, the Greens tried to draw attention to the threat posed by over 30 new coal and gas projects, but news media treated it as a political point. “Please start taking the climate crisis seriously… The climate crisis is only going to get worse unless we tackle it. And this movement of ours… is only going to get bigger and bigger.”

Like all politicians Bandt is pushing his own barrow, but he has never exaggerated our climate predicament. As he says, it will only worsen while politicians and the media continue to treat it as just another political issue while ignoring the impact of new extraction and processing projects.

As it unfolds over years and decades, this great climate crisis is moving at a pace too slow to feel in our day to day lives, and is expressed in a piecemeal manner, one weather event at a time. Between events, public attention turns to other things, overlooking the massive scale of change around us.

In federal parliament most independents, many in Labor and perhaps a handful in the Coalition are aware of this. But no-one has pursued the climate change issue so fiercely and persistently as the Greens. In doing so, the party has made enemies across the political spectrum, but especially among MPs of major parties.

The Greens can be exasperating when they hold up promising initiatives on pressing issues, but that is more than offset by the effort they have put in to give the climate crisis the public attention it deserves. Adam Bandt led that effort in the lower house where for over a decade he was the Greens’ sole voice.

The parliament is being bombarded daily by industry propaganda aimed at diverting attention from the massive climate threat presented by new extraction and processing projects. Those vested interests have used “net zero” policies to conceal the straightforward link between atmospheric heat and our use of petrol, diesel and gas.

At the same time they are seeking to exploit new carbon deposits far into the future. In Perth last week Woodside Energy’s annual general meeting was repeatedly disrupted by protesters determined to see an end to Woodside’s plans for a massive offshore gas scheme.

Adam Bandt “lost his way” during the last parliamentary term, prime minister Anthony Albanese told Sky News. He would have done better to apply his remark to himself. At the time he was ruminating on portfolios in a ministry without science minister Ed Husic and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus.

Those two ousted members of his former cabinet had been prominent in the public debate on the Gaza conflict. Drefus, who is Jewish, sided with Israel along with most of the parliament and virtually all the Coalition, but Husic put himself on the same side as the Greens by speaking out against the bombing of Gaza. That doesn’t make him (or Bandt) antisemitic.

Following a precedent set by former PM Kevin Rudd, Albanese could have made a captain’s pick and reinstalled the pair in his new cabinet. The departure of Husic, a practising Moslem, is especially troubling in light of the strong push from right-wing Israelis to end self-determination for the people of Gaza.

Saturday’s election outcome might have been just another story – an old order whose time had come given its marching orders – but the rare rise in a first-term government’s vote and the unprecedented loss of an Opposition leader’s seat are signs something bigger is in play.

The parallels between the two national elections held last week are stark. In Canada on Tuesday, the Conservatives’ “unbeatable” 20-point opinion poll lead over the governing Liberals evaporated in a couple of months. Here, the Coalition began the year favourites to win but ended up with its worst-ever result.

When Donald Trump first talked about making Canada the 51st US state most Americans laughed it off as too improbable to be true, like the US annexing Greenland. So did some Canadians. But the trade war set off by his global tariffs left no doubt that Canada was in his sights – seriously. So is Greenland and its 56,000 residents, by the way.

Canada’s election saw the Conservatives beaten by Mark Carney’s Liberals and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, ousted from parliament. Days later in Australia, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government crushed the Coalition. And just like Poilievre, Opposition leader Peter Dutton lost his seat.

In both cases the link to Trump is undeniable. Both men talked up his strongman approach to government while their campaigns borrowed heavily from Trump tropes around migrants, “wokeness” and big government. When Trump’s tariffs threw global markets into chaos both men back-pedalled frantically, but in both cases it was too little too late.

Since World War II Canada, Australia and other democracies came to depend heavily on the shield of US economic and military might. But Trump couldn’t care less about defending democracy. His tariff moves and his clear preference for dictators over democratic leaders have exposed glaring vulnerabilities in the Western alliance.

“Today the Australian people have voted for Australian values…. We do not need to beg, borrow or copy from anywhere else,” said Albanese on election night. “We do not seek inspiration overseas. We find it right here, in our values and in our people.… [and] we treat people with respect.”

Carney, whose country shares nearly 9000 km of border with the US, was more direct: “Our old relationship with the US … based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade … that Canada has relied on since the Second World War… is over.”

“These are tragedies,” he continued, “but it’s also the new reality. We are over the shock of the American betrayal. We should not forget the lessons. We have to look our for ourselves, and above all we have to take care of each other.” Echoing that sentiment, Albanese told Peter Dutton in one of their debates, “kindness is not weakness.”

Those words go to the heart of our choices. In uncertain times it’s too easy to succumb to the strongman leader demonising outsiders. A truly strong society under mature, confident leadership doesn’t scapegoat minorities but values each person’s unique qualities and treats them with kindness and respect.

Unlike Canadians Australian voters are separated from the US by the vast Pacific, yet our “special relationship” with the US has been fundamental to our world outlook. Now, along with Canada and many nations, the America we thought we knew, that big friendly teddy bear, is being turned into a grizzly. Its leader is now operating outside laws that once constrained errant presidents.

If Australians don’t know this they sense it, recognising the bully that is Trump. Last week James Campbell (Herald-Sun) and The Australian’s Joe Hildebrand identified plenty of mistakes in Peter Dutton’s campaign, but they left out the biggest one of all: finding common cause with America’s autocrat.

It takes real strength – clear vision and more than a little courage – to stand up to bullies. Many US institutions have succumbed to Trump, but some media organisations, law firms, universities, unions, professional bodies and many individuals have not.

This includes federal employees shown the door, people branded by Trumpians as wastrels and time servers, who do things the public needs but the private sector can’t do: lifesaving work like managing epidemics, rescuing people, ensuring air safety, and the likes of social and health security and maintaining national parks. Everyone knows this, but some have chosen not to.

A couple of further points: Labor’s election win was not a blanket endorsement of its policies everywhere, something Tasmanian Labor would do well to remember. Related to that, of the many loose ends remaining, the most glaring is major parties’ inability to reckon with environmental degradation and climate change. Those threats make Donald Trump seem insignificant.

While some Green seats were lost, the overall vote for that party and for climate-conscious independents held up well, a telling reminder that for Australian voters, whatever the Liberal and Labor parties might say, this is very much unfinished business.

HOBART’S MOUNTAIN is the subject of a free event for people seeking to preserve the Mountain’s natural qualities, at Fern Tree Community Centre next Saturday from 1pm.

It wasn’t a brilliant year, and it wasn’t a bad one. But for climate tragics like me, in the broader scheme of things 2015 was a good year. It gave you a sense that we were moving in the right direction.

It was the year Australia’s leading climate denier, prime minister Tony Abbott, lost his job to Malcolm Turnbull, who at least took climate change seriously. It was the year of the Paris Agreement, under which the world’s governments committed to set and act on targets to cut carbon emissions. And it was the year a pope spoke for the climate – the year of Laudato Si.

Hundreds of papal encyclicals, or formal letters by popes to the bishops of their church, mostly about how to be a good Catholic, have been issued at the rate of about one every year since the 1700s. As a heathen I’m no judge of their worth to the faithful, but I can judge the worth of Laudato Si (roughly translating as “Praise God”) because it’s addressed to all of us.

To this outsider, two Catholic popes stand apart from all others. In my youth there was John 23rd, best known for modernising his faith and as the author of a landmark 1963 encyclical on world peace and the arms race, addressed to “all men and women of good will”.

The second of those, having adopted the name of nature-loving St Francis of Assisi, in death will be known as Nature’s pope. Like John in his peace encyclical, Francis addressed Laudato Si to all people, but focusing not on what people do to each other but what we’re all doing to the planet.

Our common home, wrote Francis, “is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us” – analogies reminiscent of what the British physicist James Lovelock called Gaia, or Earth’s biosphere, the vast array of interconnected ecosystems which Lovelock saw as a kind of self-regulating, life-sustaining organism. Mother Earth, if you like.

We, the billions of humans living on this planet, are part of the biosphere. Yet many of us, especially in rich countries, act as if we’re not, as if Earth’s natural systems will always be there for us. The idea that we’re separate from the natural environment, says Francis, is based on a false doctrine circulating in Christianity. We were never meant to dominate the rest of God’s creation.

The most telling of many insights in Laudato Si is the concept of “integral ecology”. Humans are part of the wider world, it says; we can’t understand one without understanding the other, so studying each in isolation is pointless.

Integral ecology as envisaged by Francis expands the science of ecology, the study of ecosystems, to take in how humans relate to each other and to the natural world. It draws on human culture and belief, on community and family, on virtue and respect for the common good.

Laudato Si was published late in the prime ministership of Tony Abbott, who with fellow-Catholic and confidant, the late Cardinal George Pell, preached that climate science had it all wrong. It must have irked them no end to read Francis’s call to arms against those with resources and political power “concerned with masking the problems [of climate change] or concealing their symptoms”.

Francis was a humble man who disliked pomp. As a bishop he used public transport, as a pope he avoided the papal palace. And he was practical, teaching that the church “is not a museum of faith but a field hospital for everyone”. On climate change he spelled out the threat and ways to respond – a shift to wind and solar power, energy-efficient industry and transport, better forest protection.

Francis’s ringing defence of the natural world was heard in places not otherwise exposed to such information, in pews and pulpits, schools and seminaries throughout the far-flung Catholic faith. And that made a difference.

The penetration of that message more broadly – the fact that ordinary people living ordinary lives around the world now know about climate change and want something done about it – is underlined in a German-led study published in February in the leading science journal Nature Climate Change.

Looking at people’s willingness to combat climate change, the study recorded the views of 129,902 people in an unprecedented world-wide survey. It found that 89 per cent of people globally wanted strong government action, and that a clear majority – 69 per cent – would be willing to contribute one per cent of their personal income to the fight.

For Catholics – for everyone – there can be no going back. That’s the legacy of Francis.