South Wind

It began as a routine campaign stop by prime minister Anthony Albanese in Sydney last week to announce a billion-dollar mental health package. But it was vision of an agitated climate protester being hustled off the scene by security guards that dominated the evening news cycle.

News media focused on the security breach, but the real questions are why the youthful intruder felt the need to barge into the event, what she said and why she was so agitated.

It’s always tempting to dismiss actions like this as having little relevance to mainstream life. This wasn’t 21-year-old Alexa Stuart’s first protest with the climate action group Rising Tide, and it will likely not be her last. But the passion in her voice in last week’s incident signalled growing concern among young people about a political class chronically unresponsive to climate change.

The resurrection as US president of climate denier-in-chief Donald Trump was a stamp of approval for politicians already subject to relentless fossil fuel industry propaganda to allow the issue of climate change to slip completely from the radar.

Unprecedented rivers of rain last month left an area of Queensland twice the size of Victoria under water, yet the 2025 campaign continued as if nothing had happened. Neither party wants to discuss our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Labor talks only of targets and energy, while in the Coalition’s manifesto climate change scored just one sentence about supporting community action.

As more and more weather calamities continue to afflict every continent, young people see a world behaving as if that doesn’t matter, and their anxiety goes through the roof. As Stuart told the PM, “You’re condemning young people like me to a life of climate disasters. Of course we have poor mental health issues! When will you listen?” When, indeed.

Major parties’ failure to address climate change head-on is just as real in Tasmania. Premiers and ministers who describe us as climate action leaders are deceiving themselves and the rest of us. They base their claim not on any deliberate action but on an accident of history – our long-standing hydro-electric system – and recent low levels of forest harvesting.

In 2008 under Paul Lennon’s Labor government, Tasmania’s first climate change Act established a “Tasmanian Climate Action Council” to give independent advice on targets and strategies. Months after winning office in 2014 Will Hodgman’s Liberals rushed a bill through parliament to abolish the TCAC on the basis of saving money. (It cost a lot less than the salary of just one top adviser.)

We still have a Climate Change Office under ministerial control, but there’s no longer a statutory body of outside advisers able to keep ministers abreast of the accelerating impact of a changing climate on lives and the environment. This aversion to independent expertise is now playing out in the government’s refusal to accept planning scrutiny of the proposed Macquarie Point stadium.

Climate policy has been in the too-hard basket for years, reflected in the fact that it is no longer a named portfolio responsibility. Few would know that we had three different ministers in 2024 with responsibility for climate change. Climate knowledge is expanding and the rate of change is rising, yet the subject gets little or no ministerial attention even when there is a climate-related emergency.

This indifference is reflected in public consultations ahead of the latest amendment to the Act in 2022. Lengthy submissions by advisory group Climate Tasmania made detailed, well-considered proposals about improving the Act. (I am a member but had no part in preparing these submissions.)

Climate Tasmania’s proposals gave special attention to Tasmania’s unique energy profile. Because most of our electricity is hydro-generated, most fossil fuel emissions are from transport. These will remain unchanged unless Tasmania reduces the number of vehicles powered by petrol or diesel.

Weaning ourselves off petrol, diesel and gas has an economic and social cost which was addressed in our submission, proposing that the government build into the Act various measures to smooth the necessary transition process.

None of our proposals got any traction and we received no advice as to why. But we can hazard a guess. Turning us away from our present dangerous path would require a government bold enough to lead major social change.

A new review cycle of the Tasmanian Climate Change Act is now getting under way. This is an opportunity for the government to show it cares about the concerns of young people like Alexa Stuart. So can it grasp the depth of this concern, and does it have enough character to act on it?

The political scientists say that there are three branches of democratic government: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Historians add other essential elements: the news media, the satirists, and of course the voters.

All these ingredients are now coming into play in what used to be a paragon of democracy. The US is in full-blown crisis, thanks to a regime (“administration” is too civil a term for Donald Trump’s presidency) prepared to break what we imagined were unbreakable rules.

Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs on over 200 jurisdictions, announced in the White House Rose Garden a week ago, are a market shock like no other. Normally in times of uncertainty the US dollar rises in value because it’s considered a safe-haven currency, but on the first trading day after the decision, it fell. Not so safe, it seems. A market loss of $6 trillion was bandied about; a US-based Australian economist, Justin Wolfers, put it at $9 trillion.

“Dumb” was a popular media epithet, and considering its implications the tariff plan had very little expert input. Principal authors were Trump and trade adviser Peter Navarro. External experts cited by the White House to justify the decision were contacted by Yahoo Finance, which found they wanted nothing to do with it.

Coinciding with Trump’s Rose Garden event was a rare positive moment for an almost forgotten Congress. Cory Booker, a black senator from New Jersey, completed a marathon run-down of the misdeeds of Trump 2.0 in a speech lasting over 25 hours, breaking an endurance record set by a segregationist 68 years ago.

Booker’s speech was everything Trump’s was not. Where Trump complained about foreign cheaters and scavengers getting rich at America’s expense, Booker called on people’s better nature regardless of party or belief, to stand up in defence of the hard-won civil rights that underpin US democracy. “This is a moral moment, he said. “It’s not left or right; it’s right or wrong.”

Civil rights and our better nature were nowhere to be seen in the indiscriminate arrest and deportation of immigrants deemed illegal aliens – a nod to white supremacists – or in the frantic effort to destroy or emasculate federal agencies led by Trump’s self-styled action man Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

By the end of March, by Forbes’s reckoning, about 280,000 workers had been laid off, although some tens of thousands were being rehired due to “administrative errors”. Those fired include experts responsible for hard-won data on health, climate, the environment, migration, welfare, law enforcement and a host of other matters. In some cases that information is being replaced by demonstrably false conspiracy theories.

In last year’s campaign Trump promised he would rid America of the “Deep State”, represented as a shadowy body made up of unelected officials and Left-leaning billionaires aiming – you guessed it – to take over the world. The Deep State, the conspiracy theory goes, is everywhere, with the United Nations at its epicentre.

In my 15 years in the federal public service, the only people I remember that might have fitted that conspiracy stereotype were the expanding numbers of political operatives – the types making up Trump’s Rose Garden audience last week. It takes one to know one.

Meanwhile, Trump is abusing judges who rule against him (clearly “Deep State”) and demanding that law firms provide free legal aid for the president or lose their security clearances. Some have buckled under the blackmail, but many more remain steadfast in defence of the rule of law, including a judge who ordered the repatriation of an illegally-deported citizen.

We have grown used to legal safeguards, expert advice and reliable government information, all necessary components of a democratic system. Putting them to the sword seems as dumb as starting a trade war.

But this is to assume that Trump and his co-conspirators want social stability and a rational order when their actions – ignoring economic norms, democratic principles and legal constraints – show contempt for such concepts and pleasure in disruption. It may or may not be dumb or deranged; it’s certainly sinister.

With his country in turmoil Trump went on leave. He was filmed parading around one of his golf courses at the head of a cavalcade of buggies, waving regally to onlookers. Rich pickings for the comics, but they’ll be well aware that Trump is big on retribution.

The future of US democracy now rests with members of Congress, judges, lawyers, economists, scientists, educational leaders, business leaders, military leaders, religious elders, journalists, entertainers, workers and every last voter in the land.

If they turn their backs on Trump’s grab for absolute power, history will not be kind to them. That’s if there’s still such a thing as history.

“There was no apocalypse, no singular cataclysmic event… just the passing of each day under the accumulating weight of evidence….” That’s how a new, landmark Tasmanian novel set a few decades into the future describes the changing climate just before it began really hurting.

Climate change and its inseparable companion, environmental destruction, should get all the attention in this election campaign, but elections are ruled by one thing: money or its absence. This is a plea to pause before you vote, switch off the party noise and read a good book. And think.

Our noise drowns out the rest of Creation. Again and again, humans have shown that they can cause great damage to Earth’s life systems without noticing a thing. If only we could stop and listen, we might hear the plaintive call of the currawong.

The Clinking, Susie Greenhill’s remarkable debut novel (it takes its name from the currrawong call), is about suffering: the suffering of the nature we are steadily destroying, and the suffering of people. It is a voice that Earth’s life systems – notably but not only those here on our southern island – desperately need.

Daughter of Hobart biologist Julia Greenhill and her late husband John, an astronomer, Greenhill grew up in a household that encouraged an open mind and a deep respect for nature. Her own intellectual journey won her a PhD in a non-science field, along with the award that kick-started her career as a novelist, the 2016 Richell Prize for emerging writers.

In the story Elena, a climate refugee from Colombia, tries to engage her husband Tom in their shared responsibility for their daughter Orla. But Tom, a specialist in the impact of climate change on species and habitats, becomes consumed with grief over continuing extinctions. One winter’s night he disappears.

Weeks later, a terrifying storm hits southern Australia, destroying their Hobart home. In the wake of the storm Kit, a climate activist who brought Tom and Elena together, meets up with Elena and Orla, and together they decide to search for the man they love. Following a hunch, they undertake an arduous journey into the island’s wild south-west.

Our natural future – the fate of coasts, valleys and flood plains, of forests and savannahs and peatlands ravaged by drought and fire, storm and flood, and of the myriad species that inhabit them – is vividly and convincingly imagined by the author.

Greenhill now lives with her son on a Huon Valley coast facing Bruny Island and the Southern Ocean. Most of the time it’s an idyllic part of Tasmania, but recently aquaculture workers had to remove from Greenhill’s beloved beach odorous fatty globules that had drifted out of salmon pens where tens of thousands of fish had expired in warming waters. Climate change at work.

You can find any amount of vision and words recording what climate change does to nature, and it’s all deeply disturbing. But Greenhill’s most telling future insight is about us, the social element. About people and how they relate to each other.

While Tom is grieving for his beloved natural world, Elena is justifiably angry over his apparent abandonment of her and their daughter, who has developed a close attachment to her father that complicates his bleak outlook on the future of humanity.

“There aren’t many more effective ways to shape the future than planting a seed,” a family friend says early in the narrative, talking about tree plantings by the Food Resilience Network. “A child is a seed,” says Elena a few pages on. “I can think of no way of honouring life more, than by creating it.”

It seems Elena knows something Tom doesn’t: that when push comes to shove, when all else seems lost, connecting and staying connected with others is what truly counts. While understanding and valuing our absolute dependence on the natural world, we must also stay in touch with humanity.

That conundrum has been present in Greenhill’s life, which was turned upside down in the buildup to the 2019-20 Black Summer fires when her son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. His condition requires a daily injection of insulin, a life-long dependence that makes him especially vulnerable to supply chain fluctuations.

There is an edge about this book, likely reinforced by that searing personal experience, which sets it apart from everything else I’ve read about a future that is not somewhere out there but here, now. The Clinking is a beautiful, important story for our own time and place.

GREENHILL is one of 50 Tasmanian writers represented in Voices of the Southern Ocean, a UNESCO City of Literature anthology launched in Hobart last week.